Rebuke of the AP pseudo-study used by the MSM to discredit HCQ, by team of Pr. Raoult
In response to the bad Magagnoli 'scientific article' put forward by AP, and subsequently used by the MSM as a basis for the recent 4AM talking point campaign to discredit the efficacy of HCQ and make it sound dangerous, the team of Professor Raoult published the following short letter:
https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Response-to-Magagnoli-FINAL-WITH-YANIS.pdf
They go as far as calling the Magagnoli paper a case of scientific misconduct, forgoing rigorous and balanced scientific analysis to push erroneous negative claims.
The letter was probably written in a hurry, by people that are not fluent in English. But after reading the references, what they mean becomes clear.
I provide below a clearer restatement of their argument. Please share their letter, with or without this analysis (no attribution required if you choose to add it), if you want to help counter the current MSM disinformation wave about HCQ.
They point out the following three major flaws in the Magagnoli paper:
1) Lymphophenia occurs twice as much in all the HCQ groups than in the 'control' group, and it is known there is a direct correlation between lymphophenia and the risk of dying from COVID-19.
Magagnoli and al. acknowledged themselves in their paper that this disparity is present.
That did not prevent them from concluding the way they did anyway.
2) They present 2 distinct tables:
A) A first one, where there seem to be no difference in outcome between HCQ groups and the 'control' group, with poor statistical significance (for instance, p=0.79).
But see the point 3) to understand why that has occurred.
Furthermore, in this table, the time at which the treatments started before intubation is provided (while being excluded from table B).
B) A second one, where they omitted to provide information about when the treatment began.
To Raoult's team, the combination of:
-this omission,
-the fact that the time before intubation was provided in table A),
-and the values of the medical indicators reported, congruent with that of patients treated after intubation
indicates that the data for that second table comes from patients that were intubated for some time before receiving an HCQ treatment, in desperation.
However it is known that at that stage, cytokine storm is occurring, and that HCQ alone cannot help patients anymore.
3) 30% of the 'control' group, astonishingly, actually received Azithromycin, even though Azithromycin alone can be a treatment (Gautret, 2020), and has been show to work in vitro (Andreani, 2020).
[It has been shown that Azithromycin has an HCQ-like effect for SARS-CoV-19, i.e. that it acts both as an antibiotic staving off secondary pulmonary infections and as a booster of the HCQ mechanism of action, which is the reason why the HCQ+AZ combination is so effective.]
-For Raoult and al., this is close to being scientific fraud.
To Raoult and al., Magagnoli and al. use these 3 scientifically dishonest 'results' to push forward the idea that HCQ is dangerous, even though it has been reported to be one of the safest drugs available based on data from over 1 million patients (Lane, 2020).
In conclusion, Raoult and al. state that this is a good example of how, in these times, some are ready to publish results that do not stand up to any methodological analysis, in order to 'prove' a given set of predetermined desired claims.