Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/04/21/study-finds-chloroquine-useles.html
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Trump: “Try it. What do you have to lose?”
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It was clear from the start that the answer to Trump’s question, “What have you got to lose?” was, in fact, one’s life.
The early evidence, weak though it was, only indicated patients improving more quickly from mild cases. This shouldn’t have been surprising.
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Trump said he was thinking about using it himself as a preventative. Wonder what happened with that plan.
Yesterday something somewhere said he pretty much stopped talking about hydroxychloroquine just over a week ago. It’s as if something changed his mind about it, like possibly early access to this VA study…
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Now let’s count up the number of excess deaths that will eventually be attributed to patients who were taking chloroquine for things that it’s well known to actually treat or mitigate symptoms, but lost access to their medication because the supply was all bought up for this fool’s errand.
Those people’s involuntary sacrifices will have been in vain.
Edited for clarity.
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Could these findings be used to sue the US government? I mean the president publicly stated that the two drugs were an effective treatment and that he’d make sure the US had plenty on hand to treat people. If those unproven drugs ended up harming or killing people that seems to me like a gigantic liability that officials need to be held accountable for.
Do i expect anything to actually happen? No. but i’m legitimately curious to see if any action will be taken against our government.
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Under normal circumstances I might assume that the people promoting this don’t want to kill 17% of study participants.
Now, I’m not so sure about that; unless by “don’t” you mean “have an underclass in mind that’s at least 25%, and expect thoroughness”.
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It was so fucking crazy when he said, “Try it. what do you have to lose?” At the very least it seems like an FCC violation, if not FDA.
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Apparently having “a feeling for” immunology and medical research is not a substitute for education and methodical scientific inquiry.
Next up on Obvious News of the World: Why Big Cats Don’t Make Good Au Pairs.
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Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are two different things. The latter has worse side effects when used to treat malaria.
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One of the things about medicine of all types is that it may in fact work, but unless you test it thoroughly, there’s no guarantee that it won’t result in more deaths than the disease it’s treating.
Let’s even say that chloroquine is a perfect cure for COVID-19. You’ll have zero deaths out of 100 rather than 3. But if 4 patients have a heart attack 6 months later, this treatment is a bad fit for the disease.
Similarly, if there’s a 2% reduction in COVID-19 deaths on chloroquine but a 3% increase in heart disease deaths, it’s a bad fit.
Or, actually, maybe not.
If you run large enough studies, you might find out that chloroquine will cause a 1% reduction in ICU cases of COVID-19 for people who have normal cardiac output & no significant change in heart complications in that cohort. If that’s the case, you might give it to that group & they’ll free up ICU beds for the cohort that might be unable to take the drug.
Studies are required. Real studies, not platitudes from Donnie.
tl;dr Science haaaard. Interpreting science really haaard.
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His mind is not changed by research or data. Must be something else.
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the post’s title says chloroquine, but the linked article says the study was of hydroxychloroquine. so the study was about the same drug 45 has been touting
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Look, Trump never said anything about chloroquinine, OK? Fake news.
/s
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“We can’t let the cure be worse than the problem itself.”
—Trump, discussing social distancing to prevent disease transmission during a pandemic
“What do you have to lose?”
—Trump, discussing an unproven ‘cure’ that actually kills people
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I couldn’t find an example of the FDA citing a shareholder for promoting an off-label use of drug or device, but they sure have gone after plenty of employees and officers of companies, as well as physician consultants. If they can’t go after shareholders who promote unapproved uses, then that seems like a big statutory hole.
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I’m just waiting for him to latch on to remdesivir. At some point he’s going to get it right, snd then the line will be that he had it right all along (even if it is 2 years later).
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A week:
“I haven’t heard a bad story. It’s pretty amazing, actually,” Trump said. “The word is out.”
That was a lie then, and it keeps getting worse.
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Mis-interpreting science easy and fun and profitable
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PLEASE stop capitalizing chloroquine.
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