[conspire] When to get a covid test, brains, and a weird case, and a cardiology vs. immunology joke

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

[Ruben, I trimmed the cc to docs, but feel free to forward my reply there.]

> On Aug 6, 2020, at 07:20, Ruben Safir <ruben at mrbrklyn.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> _The Lancet_ and others were caught up in outright data fraud trying to sell snake oil in the form of chloroquine / hydroxychloroquine (which, to be clear, do work for some autoimmune diseases and malaria, and some side effects in some viruses) earlier this year:
>> 
>> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/mysterious-company-s-coronavirus-papers-top-medical-journals-may-be-unraveling
>> 
>> The peer review process is not designed to catch data fraud that deep.

> 
> It is catching it.  BTW  that article SUPPORTS the case for the use of
> the snake oil (as you put it).

No. What came out was the foundation (meaning the data underneath) those studies was fraudulent, saying nothing about the quality of the med per se (because…they couldn’t). There have been hundreds of studies on it *not* using that data that show no benefit. Here’s a list of just the preprints that are on medxriv or biorxiv and hence freely available (not yet peer reviewed, but easy to search because they’re not in 1000 journals all over the world):

https://www.medrxiv.org/search/sars-cov-2%252Bhydroxychloroquine (185 results)

https://www.biorxiv.org/search/sars-cov-2%252Bhydroxychloroquine (78 results)

Anyhow, The Guardian had a pretty good article on what happened.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/covid-19-surgisphere-who-world-health-organization-hydroxychloroquine

I missed the part where one of the Surgisphere employees turned out to be a science fiction author.

I will say that there is one study I noticed (first currently listed on bioxriv) that suggests benefit in vitro (meaning in the lab), but as any bench chemist/animal researcher will tell you, in vitro and in vivo are completely different things. Many processes that happen in vitro will never work in vivo. (My first husband did both, though he was primarily a bench chemist. His least favorite thing was working on animal research in a biohazard level 3 lab.)

Deirdre
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