Politico: Drug pushed by Rich McCormick “failed in several recent clinical trials and doctors say they can cause serious heart problems.”
It hasn’t been an easy go of it for Rich McCormick.
The GA-07 Republican nominee has spent weeks on the defensive after he repeatedly downplayed coronavirus, used the racist “Chinese Virus” term, consistently praised Gov. Kemp’s hasty reopening of Georgia and hawked the dangerous FDA-revoked hydroxychloroquine drug – and then doubled down on it, declaring his medical advice should not be questioned.
Last week, McCormick once again promoted hydroxychloroquine in an ill-advised attempt to tweet at the DCCC and own the libs. Or something.
One problem? The study itself is under heavy dispute. Another problem? The article McCormick linked to was heavily edited to reflect the medical community’s skepticism.
Key points from the article that Rich McCormick would like you to see:
CNN: Study finds hydroxychloroquine may have boosted survival, but other researchers have doubts
By Maggie Fox, Andrea Kane and Elizabeth Cohen
July 3, 2020
- “Researchers not involved in the Henry Ford study pointed out it wasn’t of the same quality of the studies showing hydroxychloroquine did not help patients, and said other treatments, such as the use of the steroid dexamethasone, might have accounted for the better survival of some patients.”
- Researchers not involved with the study were critical. They noted that the Henry Ford team did not randomly treat patients but selected them for various treatments based on certain criteria.
- “As the Henry Ford Health System became more experienced in treating patients with COVID-19, survival may have improved, regardless of the use of specific therapies,” Dr. Todd Lee of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, Canada, and colleagues wrote in a commentary in the same journal.
- Rosenberg also pointed out that the Detroit paper excluded 267 patients — nearly 10% of the study population — who had not yet been discharged from the hospital.
- He said this might have skewed the results to make hydroxychloroquine look better than it really was. Those patients might have still been in the hospital because they were very sick, and if they died, excluding them from the study made hydroxychloroquine look like more of a lifesaver than it really was.
- “There’s a little bit of loosey-goosiness here in all this,” he told CNN.
- While helpful, observational studies are not as valuable as controlled clinical trials. Considered the gold standard in medicine, patients in a clinical trial are randomly assigned to take either the drug or a placebo, which is a treatment that does nothing. Doctors then follow the patients to see how they fare.
###