Texas nursing home, The Resort, generated all manner of concern-troll headlines and scare-mongering articles almost a month ago by treating its patients with the hydroxychloroquine cocktail. Good news was reported last week. Where are the follow-up articles?
Let’s start with the good news via one local Austin station.
When Armstrong began administering Hydroxychloroquine to it was controversial but appeared promising.
“If we didn’t make the decision quickly then we could potentially lose 15 to 20% of the residents which was not an option,” said the Doctor.
Armstrong’s approach was to begin administering Hydroxychloroquine a Zpac and Zinc just as soon as a resident first started showing symptoms.
Dr. Armstrong probably underestimated the percentage of residents he could have lost. We are seeing now that close to 50% of the deaths from the Wuhan Bat Lab Virus have come from nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, close to 40% in Texas alone.
However, because of Dr. Armstrong’s decision to put his residents health ahead of political considerations, and taking care to carefully monitor his residents reaction to the drug cocktail, including administering EKGs, only one resident died out of the 56 residents who tested positive. As tragic as that one death, it could have easily been 22.
Anecdotal! The scare-mongers will shout. Of course it is. When faced with the prospect of losing 30-40% of the people entrusted into his care, would anyone accept it if the residents were randomized so half got placebos and likely have 8 to 11 of them died instead of one?
Yet it is precisely anecdotal observations, especially the boots-on-the-ground work that nurses and doctors do, that trigger wider study. Let’s all remember the Aussie internist Barry Marshall who tried to get the attention of mainstream gastroenterologists about his observation linking bacteria to ulcers and gastritis. He was repeatedly dismissed until he took matters into his own hands.
For their work on H. pylori, Marshall and Warren shared a 2005 Nobel Prize. Today the standard of care for an ulcer is treatment with an antibiotic. And stomach cancer — once one of the most common forms of malignancy — is almost gone from the Western world.
How many people would be dead today from bleeding ulcers or stomach cancer without Dr. Marshall’s anecdotal evidence?
Let’s review some of the media malfeasance on this issue.
AP April 6, 2020.
Galveston County health officials announced last week that more than 80 residents and staff members at The Resort at Texas City tested positive for COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus. Abbott said many of the patients given hydroxychloroquine were in their second day of treatment.
President Donald Trump has promoted the drug as he grasps for ways to sound hopeful in the face of a mounting death toll and with the worst weeks yet to come for the U.S. But medical officials warn that it’s dangerous to be hawking unproven remedies, and even Trump’s own experts have cautioned against it.
Writer Paul J. Weber should be demoted off the news beat and his editor held accountable. The first paragraph is reporting, the second is pure editorializing and has no place there as written. It’s not there to inform readers but to manipulate them. As of today, I see no update on this article or a link to an update.
NPR April 10, 2020.
“Unproven” “Disconcerting” How precious.
But scientists argue that relying on observational, uncontrolled evidence can be misleading and that the only way to truly prove a drug is working is through carefully controlled clinical trials. And, contrary to Armstrong’s assertion that hydroxychloroquine “has virtually no side effects,” it is known to have serious negative health impacts. That is why so many in the medical community worry about prescribing it without such proof.
As of today, there is no update or link to a follow-up on this article.
April 8, 2020. Yes, I know, this is the Daily Mail, a UK tabloid mostly devoted to celebrity scandals and if-it-bleeds-it-leads sensationalism. Editorializing takes place not just in this snort-worthy headline but in the article.
It should also come as no surprise that this, too, has no update or follow-up.
As I’ve said before, our media doesn’t even pretend anymore to give you actual news. By choice, they give you what they want in order to manipulate you. It’s up to you to engage your brain and read, research, rinse and repeat.
Don’t ever forget it.
UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers!
GWB says: the residents were randomized
Here’s the thing: it’s not just randomization. It’s also making sure that you’ve isolated the illness (so, you have to make sure they don’t have some other illness, and you have to make sure they don’t have an additional illness) and you have to isolate the cure (are they taking other medications? In a nursing home?!?). Really, randomization is often a lazy way to scramble those other considerations, hopefully in a way that makes them meaningless. (BTW, you need a really large sample size for that to work – or a very skewed sample set.)
What this means is that you’ll never get a good control group in a nursing home. But, IF Armstrong carefully recorded their vitals and their other medications and illnesses, he probably has a really good data set that can be parsed by researchers to gain valuable insight. If he did that, it’s NOT “anecdotal”. (Some people think that knowing sciency words means they know actual science.)
unproven virus drug
Unproven Drug
experimental coronavirus treatment
Again, this is simply not true. The drug IS proven. It is used in other antiviral treatments (off-label). It was proven effective in a lab against another coronavirus. It is considered safe by the FDA.
Hmmmm, I wonder…. Will they say the same thing about the flu vaccine that gets pushed this coming fall/winter? Because, honestly, those are a lot less proven than HCQ+Z-pak+Zinc.
As to the attempt to lay these deaths at Trump’s feet, I only have this to say: 0bama killed over 19 million people!* After all, more people died every year as his administration advanced its agenda, so he’s responsible for the “mounting death toll”, right?
(That’s the total mortality from all post-birth causes during 0bama’s administration, 2009 through 2016, in the United States. According to Statista.)
scientists argue that … the only way
And this is why I keep beating the drum about “experts”. These folks are the same ones who yelled about the sun going around the earth – because that’s what they were taught. These are the same people that believe the only possible way to be “vaccinated” is by being given a shot of something grown in a lab.
it is known to have serious negative health impacts
This is not true. It has potentially serious side effects. Technically speaking, so does aspirin. So does viagra. If you avoid the situations that trigger those side effects, the chances of anything really bad happening are very, very low. Armstrong’s statement isn’t really accurate, either, but it’s closer to the actual observed results.
It’s up to you to engage your brain and read, research, rinse and repeat.
Amen to this!
I don’t know whether they say this at the beginning of pharmacology school, but they should: “Every drug is a poison.”
They attack your “normal” body chemistry in one way or another. The secret is that an effective drug attacks it far less than it attacks a parasite like malaria, a bacterium like streptococcus, or a virus like novel coronavirus 2019. (Or, it attacks some part of your body that is misbehaving, like the immune system that causes the cytokine “storm” which actually kills the victim of “flu-like illnesses.”)
The main and immediate nasty side effect of hydroxychloroquine is, in some people, cardiac arrhythmias. This doctor knew that, which is why he was running frequent EKGs. (These patients don’t have to worry about the other known nasty, which is possible vision loss – after taking it every day for five or more years.)
I learned it as “the poison is only in the dose”. You can get poisoned by dihydrogen monoxide (that’s water, any DNCmedia derpseals reading this) if you drink enough of it.
askeptic says: “The poison is the dosage.”
aelfheld says: “Sola dosis facit venenum”
Hugh Mannity says: So totally unproven that the CDC were recommending Chloroquine (the less-safe cousin of Hydroxychloroquine) for treatment of SARS-cov in 2005.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1232869/
Money quote:
Chloroquine is effective in preventing the spread of SARS CoV in cell culture. Favorable inhibition of virus spread was observed when the cells were either treated with chloroquine prior to or after SARS CoV infection. In addition, the indirect immunofluorescence assay described herein represents a simple and rapid method for screening SARS-CoV antiviral compounds.
Hamilton Snark says: What I wonder is: do these reporters ever WATCH TV? If they do, they can’t avoid seeing the drug ads that list HORRENDOUS side effects on drugs that doctors give patients every day. They used to hand out hydroxychloroquine like candy to anyone who traveled to a region where malaria is endemic. Malaria is a REALLY NASTY disease so you don’t want to get it. But, if you are 80 and in a nursing home, you REALLY don’t want to get Covid 19 either!
Graywolf12 says: Correct. If I remember correctly I read through 12 pages of the package insert before I took the Hep B immunizations. By law if 1 person in 10,000,000 complains that the drug gave them a pain in their little toe on their left foot it must be included in the adverse reactions list.
Rick Caird says: There was a study out yesterday mentioned by CNN and MSNBC which showed no benefit for hydroxychloroquine, but as this report shows it is a cocktail that provides the benefit. Hydroxychloroquine alone does little, but add the Z-pac and the zinc and good things happen. But CNN, MSNBC, and the look no further. They stop as soon as the have a story which makes Trump look bad. But actually the cocktail has been successful in many places.
A couple of months ago when Trump first started talking about Hydroxychloroquine I read an article by a microbiologist. The article was lucid enough that I could follow it. The takeaway is Hydroxychloroquine opens a path into the cell where the Wuhan virus is hiding and that allows allows the antibiotic and the zinc to get in and that is what attacks the virus. It takes all three together to treat the virus.
suburbanbanshee says: If you are a leftist, your first priority is to absorb the new message and pass it to others.
So if you have thoughts and knowledge that go against the new message, you are trained to shy away from those. If someone tells you different information that makes the new message wrong, you are supposed to brush it off as irrelevant.
Often the new message includes some ways to brush off every piece of conflicting evidence, without listening or thinking. So of course the reporters cannot think about acceptable drug side effects not being a bar to lifesaving medicines. They have been trained not to think.
Graywolf12 says: “But scientists argue that relying on observational, uncontrolled evidence can be misleading and that the only way to truly prove a drug is working is through carefully controlled clinical trials”… The lethal drug used to administer the death penalty was never tested in double blind studies. It was Proven to be effective because all that was given the drug died. Was it safe, hell no. It killed everyone that it was given to.
Laura McCament says: PLEASE PRESS for a follow up on this story!! How are the patients doing now?? Any more cases of covid 19? How about the staff that had it? Did they stay at home and take it??? Very interested in an update!
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