When The Media Says "Experts" They Mean Paid Corporate Shills (Part 25)
Despite prior evidence from the last SARS coronavirus outbreak, Facui went on CNN to take a jab at Trump and dismiss HCQ as a coronavirus prophylaxis falsely asserting that it had never been tested on a coronavirus. As I pointed out in my previous post, HCQ and Chloroquine vs. SARS Coronaviruses, Chloroquine had in fact been studied on a coronavirus after the SARS-COV-1 outbreak in 2003.
CNN took their own jab at Trump by boasting about the results of one large multinational retrospective study (n = 96,032) published in the highly reputable Lancet Journal that claimed that HCQ provided no measurable clinical benefit to hospitalized COVID patients across the world but that patients treated with the medicine had a higher risk of in hospital death. The study had immediate and widespread repercussions across the world prompting several countries to suspend HCQ treatment of hospitalized COVID patients (likely resulting in more death), but if you read the study on The Lancet server today you’ll see that it’s been retracted because the data turned out to be fraudulent and not independently verifiable by peer reviewers. While the study's primary author was Dr. Mandeep Mehra, who is affiliated with Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, the data and analysis for the study was provided by an obscure hospital database company called Surgisphere run by a physician named Sapan Desai who was listed as a co-author of the study despite, as a Guardian Expose revealed, having no personnel, aside from himself, with any scientific or statistical background and not nearly enough personnel to collect electronic health record data from the 1,200 hospitals they claimed to have collected data from across the world. However, aggregating anonymized electronic health records from hospitals across the world is not a simple matter of calling them up or shooting them an email requesting it because like any other bureaucratic heavy operation, Surgisphere would’ve needed to establish data sharing agreements with all 1,200 hospitals and do so while reconciling different languages and coding systems with their own as well as navigating the medical health record and data sharing regulations of each country. Such a feat would have been entirely infeasible for the 11 people Desai claimed to employ, 2 months prior to launch, almost all of whom professed to have no medical or scientific background on LinkedIn. In a desperate attempt to regain credibility, Desai instead claimed hospitals did all this work for him and his company simply aggregated and analyzed the data. Peter Ellis, who has extensive experience in data science, found that claim even more incredulous.
Peter Ellis, the chief data scientist of Nous Group, an international management consultancy that does data integration projects for government departments, expressed concern that Surgisphere database was “almost certainly a scam”.
“It is not something that any hospital could realistically do,” he said. “De-identifying (anonymizing) is not just a matter of knocking off the patients’ names, it is a big and difficult process. I doubt hospitals even have capability to do it appropriately. It is the sort of thing national statistics agencies have whole teams working on, for years.”
“There’s no evidence online of [Surgisphere] having any analytical software earlier than a year ago. It takes months to get people to even look into joining these databases, it involves network review boards, security people, and management. It just doesn’t happen with a sign-up form and a conversation.”
The obvious incredulity of Desai’s claims is what prompted the other three authors of the study to request The Lancet retract the study and write an editorial explaining why the study had been retracted. It turns out that not only were Desai’s claims incredulous he also wouldn’t turnover the full data set, client contracts (with the hospitals) and audit reports to independent peer reviewers, i.e. he did not provide evidence that his data sources were valid.
While the three authors not affiliated with Surgisphere claimed to have collaborated on the research in good faith, the lead author’s, Dr. Mandeep R Mehra, affiliation with Brigham and Women’s Hospital suggest he may have had bias against HCQ from the outset because at the same time that they had conducted this fake negative study on HCQ, supposedly unaware of Desai’s fraudulent database, Brigham and Women’s Hospital had partnered with Gilead Sciences to enroll their patients in clinical trials for Remdesivir (pronounced ‘run death is near’) which would become the first FDA approved antiviral drug for COVID19. Furthermore, both Mehra and Desai had accepted thousands in consulting fees from industry in early 2020. One $10,500 consulting fee to Dr. Mehra, in February 2020, came from Janssen Research and Development which is a subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson. HCQ use as a coronavirus prophylaxis would not only be unprofitable to Gilead and Pfizer (Paxlovid) but to industry as a whole since the patent on it has long since expired. Direct payments from Gilead aren’t necessary to engender attitudes deferential to industry and deferential attitudes could lead otherwise honest physicians to overlook obvious red flags in research partners that confirm their bias.