PILOT SPIN
Spin Zone => Spin Zone => Topic started by: Lucifer on June 04, 2020, 05:41:37 AM
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https://spectator.org/lancetgate-pulling-a-fast-one-on-proponents-of-hydroxychloroquine-and-chloroquine/
Nevertheless, despite all of the above, after publishing the contrary study by Drs. Mehra and Desai, the Lancet successfully lobbied the World Health Organization to suspend all clinical trials of HCQ. And, for added measure, France has banned its use.
So, how was it that the the Lancet article wound up contradicting the findings of HCQ’s many advocates? Was it because the study pertained to the treatment of hospitalized patients whose COVID-19 had progressed to the point where HCQ would no longer be effective? In other words, to paraphrase Dr. Risch’s abstract in the American Journal of Epidemiology, was the Mehra–Desai study based on “irrelevant evidence” about the use of HCQ to treat “inpatients” whose COVID-19 had reached the point where it was “very different” from the “early outpatient” phase of the disease?
Well, it turns out that the answers to those questions can’t be found in the study. As a matter of fact, the data on which the study is purportedly based are being seriously questioned by the scientific community.
On May 28, 2020, dozens of eminent “clinicians, medical researchers, statisticians and ethicists from [universities and medical centers] across the world” addressed an open letter to the study’s authors and the editor of the Lancet in which they raised “both methodological and data integrity concerns.” Here are some of the highlights:
The study’s authors did not indicate the “severity” of the disease being treated. Was it early on in the COVID-19 progression or late in the process? Similarly, they did not indicate the dosages of HCQ or CQ used.
The authors have not adhered to “standard practices in the machine learning and statistics community. They have not released their code or data. There is no data/code sharing and availability statement in the paper.”
There was no mention of the countries or hospitals from which the data were purportedly obtained, and the authors have denied requests for that information.
The numbers of cases and deaths as well as the detailed data collection from Surgisphere-associated hospitals in Africa “seem unlikely.”
Reported ratios of HCQ to CQ are “implausible.”
The open letter then states that “it is imperative” that “Surgisphere provides details on data provenance” and that there be “independent validation” and “additional analyses” by “at least one other independent and respected institution” to “assess the validity of the [study’s] conclusions.”
And it concluded with this: “In the interests of transparency, we also ask The Lancet to make openly available the peer review comments that led to this manuscript to be [sic] accepted for publication.”
There’s much more, but you get the idea. The letter writers smell a rat. As does Dr. Didier Raoult who, on May 29, 2020, tweeted (as translated) the following:
We are wondering about the existence of the company Surgisphere, in charge of collecting Lancet data. To our knowledge, many denials but not a single testimony, neither from a partner hospital, nor from a doctor who provided data on the study.
On the same date, FranceSoir published its investigative report on Surgisphere with the stinging subhead (as translated), “LancetGate: is Surgisphere the company which provided the study data serious?”
Noting that (as translated) “several companies with the same name were successively registered in various [American] states, then liquidated or suspended,” the article observed that, “for a study the size of that of The Lancet (96,000 participants), this company, which claims to be specialized in big data and artificial intelligence, to date does not really provide factual support of its existence or ability to do so.” Instead, citing information from LinkedIn, the article states that “the company reports 5 people working there, 4 of whom arrived either in March or April 2020. We did Google searches on each of them without much success (very few mentions or publications) and the profile of [Surgisphere employee] Stacy Prigmore caught our attention because we cannot find any information on him [sic].… The company’s website gives the impression of only existing or having activity since March 2020 and nothing between 2013 and 2020.”
In addition, many other scientists and researchers have raised their concerns about the impact of this evolving scandal. According to the New York Times, some have posted their concerns online using hashtags like #Lancetgate and #whats_with_hcq_lancet_paper, even as Agence France-Presse has quoted Professor Gilbert Deray of Pitie-Salpetriere University Hospital stating, “If the Lancet article is a fraud, it will shatter trust in scientists in a lasting way. I await with concern the results of the investigation.”