Beware of Fake COVID Research
Searching for information about COVID-19 on the Internet means wandering through the wild swamps of truth, speculation and outright lies. It’s important to start with reliable sources and see what they have to say , rather than assume that whatever you come across is legal. Some of what is in the world is disinformation promoted by conspiracy theorists or people driven by political agendas rather than science. And sometimes they are very good at making a low-quality argument, like an authoritative study.
We saw something similar with Plandemic : a mindless collection of untruths shrouded in high production values and all the superficial designations of a serious documentary. People who shared this probably will not bother to check whether it was legitimate, because it looked fine.
Something similar is now happening with other fake “studies,” including the hydroxychloroquine study that surfaced on social media and even appeared on Fox News. This is hcqtrial.com and this is not a study, but it is definitely written to look the same.
It is actually an anonymous website, with many sources also referring to anonymous Twitter accounts. But it has a scientific look: the charts reflect the style of the other epidemiological charts that go around; The typography gives off the style of some scientific journals.
But what’s even more dodgy is the way he uses scientific language and deliberately misuses words. The wording changed after criticism, but at one point the site claimed to be describing a “randomized country study” of literally billions of people.
Randomized trials are good, and generally the more the better. If someone did, as the website says, “a large trial involving 2.0 billion people in the treatment group and 663 million people in the control group,” it would be a terrific and incredibly expensive endeavor.
But, of course, nobody did it.
So what is this research?
As many current epidemiologists have noted, all of these people simply looked at mortality rates from COVID-19 in several selected countries and concluded that countries that made a “firm decision” in favor of hydroxychloroquine had lower death rates. …
This is not a randomized trial of billions of people; this is a retrospective look at several dozen data points (each country in the analysis has a mortality rate and a yes / no for hydroxychloroquine).
On the other hand, a randomized trial is when the people conducting the study randomly assign subjects to one group or another. That is, by not allowing them to choose and not allowing other factors, such as demographics, to skew the decision about which group they belong to.
People in these countries could choose whether they wanted to take the drug or not. The governments of these countries could choose whether they wanted to establish a policy or make a recommendation for the drug. This is not accidental. Hence the research problems, and you can read lengthy criticism from epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz and biologist Karl Bergstrom, the latter of whom literally wrote a book on how to call bullshit. (This research is bullshit.)
Why waste so much energy rigging hydroxychloroquine research?
The website does its best to disguise itself as a scientific publication, except for a few important points:
- Publishing to a place that scholars publish (even on a preprint server that exists to offer early research for discussion)
- Authors’ names
The website simply directs people to a Twitter account. The site claims that the authors include scientists, but without names or other information, it is impossible to verify who is behind it. Names are not required to judge a publication on the merits, but accountability is important. Who posted this study and why?
Remember, hydroxychloroquine has become radically politicized. Hundreds of drugs have been tested in COVID-19 patients this year, and as anyone familiar with drug development would have guessed, most of them don’t work . There are a few exceptions : Remdesivir may slow the virus’s ability to replicate, and dexamethasone appears to increase survival in very sick patients. This is great news!
But ever since the president approved the use of hydroxychloroquine, rumors about the drug’s efficacy have taken on a life of their own. The physician who preached passionately on hydroxychloroquine on the steps of the Supreme Court (yes, demonic sex ) was part of a group reportedly funded by the “rediscovered” PACs . QAnon supporters have created entire stories of how the FDA is trying to hide the drug’s alleged efficacy. One meme I saw on a conspiracy theory group on Facebook reads, “I have an idea! Trump Supporters Get Hydroxychloroquine, Democrats Get Bill Gates Vaccine! “(They think Bill Gates is using the vaccine as a way to microchip the world’s population. Don’t ask.)
It wouldn’t be so strange to collect information on hydroxychloroquine if the drug didn’t keep failing in well-designed trials that are being conducted to see if it works. Is it possible that this medicine will help in the fight against COVID-19? Of course, but such a possibility is very small and every day it becomes less and less. As Meyerowitz-Katz writes :
Hydroxychloroquine probably doesn’t help with coronavirus. Doesn’t help people with serious illnesses. It does not prevent disease in high-risk groups. There is no evidence that it benefits people with mild illness, even when combined with azithromycin . The question still remains whether HCQ can reduce the risk of disease for low-risk people, but initial results don’t look good .
You can take these results however you want, but it’s worth noting that these are truly impressive tests. Doing a properly controlled, randomized trial of over a thousand people in less than six months is incredibly impressive work, and the results are both obvious and uncompromising: HCQ probably doesn’t benefit from COVID-19 and can be harmful.
The people behind the site, whoever they are, are not acting like scientists who need to discuss analysis. They pester people on Twitter like bots and have attached a shiny red “under attack” ribbon in the upper left corner of the homepage as if it were some sort of reward. Telling the story of how you were silenced is a classic way to get the attention of conspiracy theorists; we saw this with the Plandemic deplatform and we will see it again.
If you are not a scientist, you do not need to pore over a fake scientific article in search of logical and scientific inaccuracies. Instead, be suspicious of anonymous work, be suspicious of anyone who argues too hard with their favorite theory, and above all, double-check trusted sources to see what they have to say instead of assuming that anything with neat typography and pretty diagrams, it’s scientific in nature.