Politico reports on a new European study of the efficacy of hydroxycholoroquine, a drug recommended to the public by President Trump at the height of the pandemic. Note: Neither he nor his family took that drug. Instead they received FDA-approved vaccinations. .
Politico EU reports:
Nearly 17,000 people may have died after taking hydroxycholoroquine during the first wave of Covid-19, according to a study by French researchers.
The anti-malaria drug was prescribed to some patients hospitalized with Covid-19 during the first wave of the pandemic, “despite the absence of evidence documenting its clinical benefits,” the researchers point out in their paper, published in the February issue of Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy.
Now, researchers have estimated that some 16,990 people in six countries — France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the U.S. — may have died as a result.
That figure stems from a study published in the Nature scientific journal in 2021 which reported an 11 percent increase in the mortality rate, linked to its prescription against Covid-19, because of the potential adverse effects like heart rhythm disorders, and its use instead of other effective treatments.
Researchers from universities in Lyon, France, and Québec, Canada, used that figure to analyze hospitalization data for Covid in each of the six countries, exposure to hydroxychloroquine and the increase in the relative risk of death linked to the drug.
As President, Trump recommended the drug and said, “What do you have to lose? Take it.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The first bullet point in this “study” states: Hydroxychloroquine was prescribed in hospitalised patients with Covid-19 despite of the low-level evidence.
They can’t even get their grammar right…
Using an “s” where Americans use a “z” instead is a common feature of spelling in British English. There are other spelling differences as well such as the spelling of labour versus the American spelling for labor.
I think that he was referring to the phrase “despite the low-level evidence.” What was intended was “despite the paucity of evidence” rather than despite there being on a low level some evidence, whatever that might mean. Somewhat awkward but better usage would be “a low level of evidence.”
Jim Walters, I fear it is you who can’t even get your facts right…..
Jim Waters says “the first bullet point in this “study” states:…..”
But there are no bullet points IN the study. If you had clicked on the “view PDF” in the top left corner, you would see what the 9 published pages of the study look like. There is an abstract, the article itself – which includes charts and Tables and 100 footnotes so that readers can evaluate where the study’s information comes from. There are NO BULLET POINTS. Yet you ASSUMED that the on-line bullet points that are not IN the study were also written by the researchers who conducted the study and “they” (as you call the researchers) “can’t even get their grammar right”. You know what they say about “ASSUME”, right?
You could not even get your criticism right, Jim. Criticizing bullet points that are not IN the study — which you would know if you actually clicked on the 9 pages that had the study to read them – seems like desperation by someone looking to discredit a study when they don’t have the facts to do so.
But maybe you can find some grammatical errors in the study itself, Jim, if you try hard enough. You seem more interested in finding them than weighing into the content of the study.
The Highlights above the abstract have bullet points.
NYC, why are you attacking this poor man over something so trivial and at such length? His general point, that the article about the study couldn’t even get the usage right, is correct.
Bob,
You don’t want to know why, and if I bother to try to explain you will just tell me to shut up anyway.
“His general point, that the article about the study couldn’t even get the usage right, is correct.”
Nope, he did not say “the article about the study”. He said “the study”.
The study didn’t get the usage wrong.
The study was quite important that would have been worthy of a discussion.
But I apologize for interrupting the far more important about whether an article about the study (which linked to a pdf of the published study) that was on-line had bullet points added to it that were grammatically incorrect.
I agree, the added bullet points in the online link had grammatically errors. That seems to be more important than the content of this study — which does NOT have bad grammar — but I still don’t know why.
Nor do I care why. You all should keep discussing this important issue just as much as you want.
Next you might think about discussing what it means when someone says “they can’t EVEN get the grammar right”, which most people understand to mean that the study is full of errors and flaws, and “they can’t even get the grammar right.”
Imagine Diane posting a link to a Bernie Sanders essay about something very important that is worth discussing. Bernie Sanders “can’t even get the grammar right” in that essay, is the first reply. Sorry if I question the wisdom of not calling out that the reference the person had made was not a grammatical mistake in Bernie’s essay, but in some bullet points about his essay. I’m sorry if I question the wisdom of hijacking discussing the important content, to having a discussion that implies that Bernie could NOT EVEN get the grammar right (which implies that was the least of what was wrong in the entire speech.)
Really? The grammar in a bullet point that is not part of the published study? That’s a discussion?
I think he was referring to, “…despite of the low-level evidence” (emphasis added); should have been, “despite the low [no hyphen required] of evidence,” or, “in spite of the low level of evidence.” Looks like an editing/proofreading (assuming it was proofread) error where it may have started out as “in spite of” & then been changed to “despite,” & they neglected to move the “of.”
Oops! My own proofing (or lack thereof) error: left out “level” after “low” in my suggestion. OTOH, I wasn’t submitting that comment as a formal study,
I knew what you meant. We are all engaged in online comments. Errors occur, and WordPress has no correction feature for those writing comments to a blog post.
Could well be that.
I attribute the fact that neither my wife nor I caught covid19, not to the multiple shots we received, not to masking in public places, not to selectively wearing rubber gloves, not to periodic testing, and certainly not to keeping as much distance as possible from people with symptoms or positive tests. No, we remained safe thanks to the hydroxychloroquine we took in 2007 when we traveled to an active malaria zone. Enough of the drug must have remained in our bloodstream after 13 years to protect us.
No, I don’t believe one single syllable of that. I just wanted to have it in writing in order to see just how utterly nuts are the claims of the anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and other such lunatics.
William, we have had many comments from anti-vaxers that are similar to your parody.
Bravo, William! We have a place for you on the Trump team!
“What do you have to lose?” Just your life, so no skin off of my butt.
What possible motivation could Trump have (outside of sowing chaos)? He was already claiming that China was the source, not the Democrats. He had already dumped all of the masks needed. Was he trying to prove . . . what? I assume he didn’t take Clorox, either, but some of the more gullible did.
Despicable.
Inject it. He told people to try freaking injecting disinfectants. What an utter moron.
He literally didn’t tell people to inject it, but facts never have mattered on this blog. What he actually said: “And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful.” (Emphasis added to note that IT WAS A QUESTION and that he specifically said DOCTORS.)
https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/07/13/fact-check-did-trump-tell-people-to-drink-bleach-to-kill-coronavirus/113754708/
I’m not defending what he said (I know you’re going to ignore that), but he was just musing about the possibility of somehow introducing disinfectants into the system to kill the virus. He did not tell people to drink it, inject or any other sort of DIY treatment. It sounds pretty crazy to even suggest as much as he did, but then again, flooding the body with deadly chemicals and radiation seems like a stupid way to treat cancer, yet that’s what we do.
Dienne, this is the last time I will allow you to insult me and the blog and its readers. Our sources of facts differ. For sure. If you do it again, you are not welcome here.
What sort of uneducated moron would say something like that, Dienne? Seriously, you are going to defend that? He suggested that doctors look into injecting people with disinfectant. And ofc, there were people who went right out and injected themselves with disinfectant, just as there were people who took freaking horse tranquilizer to cure Covid because Dr. Trump the bacteriologist and epidemiologist that it was a swell idea.
You are self parodying, Dienne.
And yes, I should have said that he said that doctors should look into injecting people with disinfectant. My bad. But the implication was that injecting people with disinfectant is a good idea, and that’s just what a lot of Donnie’s idiot followers concluded. What a complete moron. How utterly ignorant do you have to be to think that one might want to look into injecting disinfectant or sending astronauts to the sun or nuking hurricanes or ending forest fires by sweeping forests. This is the guy who thought that stealth airplanes are actually invisible and said in a speech that the Continental Army captured the British airports. Not to mention the fact that he ordered his Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to SHOOT unarmed asylum seekers and was furious at his Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs that they wouldn’t send the military out across the country to act as a police force in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. Rarely in my life have I encountered one as profoundly ignorant and as profoundly stupid as Donald Trump is. And yet you defend him because he’s the friend of your hero, the indicted international war criminal, anti-homosexual bigot, murderer of opponents, and handler of Donald Trump Tsar Vladimir the Defenestrater. Ridiculous.
I guess it’s time to reprise this:
And of course, it wasn’t at all clear from Trump’s typical toddler speech at that moment in history whether he wanted the “medical doctors” to look into injecting people with disinfectant or do the injecting of people with disinfectant.
What an utter idiot.
“Putin won’t stop with Ukraine.”
–former General and CIA Chief, David Petraeus
“Unless we stop him.”
-Bob Shepherd, the Ukrainian people, and almost all of Europe
Here’s how Timothy Synder so eloquently put it recently: Our neighbor’s house is on fire. We have water and a hose.
Dolomphious Donny Invincible,
Triumphantly incompetensible,
Dined with No. 2, Pence
On hydroxychloroquince —
And now all his spoons are runcible.
HAAAAAA!!!!! The man’s a poet, too!!! OMG. Falling off my chair laughing.
Dolopmphious Donnie
Donnie the dolorous, amphibious,
was typically far from abstemious,
but he abstained from thought,
held ethics for naught,
and was unsatisfied and so envious.
oops. s/b Dolomphious Donnie
Toad and Frog Are Friends
A children’s picture book on how the leader of Russia brought Donnie and Lindsey together forever.
Too funny!
Lots of blood on those tiny, deformed hands because of that tiny, deformed mind.
Donald Trump’s delay, inaction, science denial, and touting of fake remedies cost many hundreds of thousands of American lives, not to mention the lives of people in places like Brazil that followed his lead off the cliff. This alone should disqualify him. He is responsible for killing people. And for kidnapping children in large numbers at the border. And for sedition. And for rape. And for violations of the Espionage Act. And for violations of the Emoluments Clause. And for tax evasion. And for financial fraud. For starters.
WHY IS THIS CRIMINAL WALKING AROUND FREE, much less running again for president!?!?!?!?!?!??
Trump is lethal to our democracy. How is this not screamingly apparent to millions of befuddled and deluded Americans?
This is the truly shocking thing. That many of our fellow citizens are utter idiots.
Trump epitomizes the worst of America. He is the ultimate expression of every horrible aspect and facet of the USA’s underside and of the human condition in this country. He is his own news feed with the mind of letters from a ransom note taken from many newspapers and magazines.
lol. well put
A variety of very intelligent people I know have as swallowed the hydroxy myth. This is testament to the power of urban myth, which has its own power over our modern day even as the medieval superstitions dominated the Europeans.
This shows that the reliability of information is vital to a modern society based on the rational and verifiable rather than the convenience of simplistic belief.
We need a lot more exercises in school on separating fact from fiction and identifying attempted extortion and fraud online, including identification of political spam.
I recently signed up for Instagram, not because I plan to use it but because friends post stuff there. I am getting about six or seven malicious actors posing as women looking for companionship PER DAY from that account. What percentage of these are Russian gangsters? Who knows.
Yos: interesting analysis. I am of the generation that was too young to go to Vietnam and too old to go to Afghanistan. Are those the trumpers or is it more complex?
They’re bots, not actual people. Twitter has the same problem.
The father of my next door neighbor is convinced that Bill Gates put microchips in the Covid vaccines and says he wouldn’t let those anywhere near him. People are freaking nuts.
Shep, how old is your next door neighbor’s father? What’s his background in terms of education, workforce experience if it’s possible to share….?
I would place him at about 60. He has been a DJ most of his life. I suspect that he has at most a high-school education.
Educated people forget that only 36 percent of Americans 25 and older have Bachelor’s degrees or higher. It’s a largely minimally educated country, which perhaps goes some distance in explaining the Trump phenomenon.
That’s not to say that one cannot be bright and even well educated without having attended college. I have a friend who is one of the foremost Burns scholars in the world but who doesn’t have a college degree. BTW, the WordPress spell checker wants to put a hyphen between well and educated there, above, but it’s supposed to have the hyphen only when the adverb + participial is being used adjectivally. LOL.
when it is being used adjectivally before the word it modifies
So
That’s a well-educated person.
That person is well educated.
My reference to being intelligent above has its base in my personal experience with the people who appear in my mind to be of sound mind over all. To some extent, all the people I reference are well-educated, some with College degrees, some with advanced degrees. One would think these sorts of people might be inured to the flights of trump ran fantasy, but their belief in questionable ideas promoted by the Orange genius makes me wonder.
60ish, which puts him on the cusp of Boomer/X. Looking at this generationally, a majority to most of the J6 insurrectionists were aged 43 – 60 which is, more or less, the age range of Generation X (my generation). Gen Xers (under the glitz and glam of the Greed Is Good Reaganomic 80s with Material Girls In a Material World so, hell, What’s Love Got To Do With It?) were raised on TV as well as the hand-me-down advice of the Boomers that going to college and getting a career would guarantee a largesse of success. But in the words of an earlier Gen X spokesman in the celluloid prophet, Tyler Durden (Fight Club; 1999), “We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.” The irony here is that Donald Trump was all part and parcel of that 80s Greed Is Good zeitgeist that left the men mentioned in this quote, as well as women, far behind (as this neoliberal system still does). Amazes and frightens me at the same time that these MAGA men follow Donald Trump as if he’s Tyler Durden.
A fascinating analysis, Yossarian, he of the Catch-22 name! It’s astonishing that they do. Ofc, they know nothing, really, about how the world works or what’s going on in it, but they glean bits and pieces of falsehood from Donnie himself and from the Reichwing memesphere, and from these they construct a weird alternate reality and yes, they are pissed off. But they don’t have a clue whom they should be pissed off at. They think it’s liberals. LOL. And then they go to the polls and vote against themselves. And, as the Yossarian in the book said, “Insanity is contagious.”
Let’s not forget–let’s NOT forget–the suggestion by 45 that people ingest bleach to rid themselves of COVID. You can’t argue with stupid.
No, he didn’t say, “ingest.” He said, “inject.” He wanted people to inject disinfectant. Even worse.
Traitor Trump learned from two mentors: Roy Cohn, who taught him to win in court by causing chaos, and Roger Ailes, who turned American politics into a contact sport by giving the followers of FOX fake NEWS, fake news because that’s what the audience that turned into Traitor Trump’s MAGARINO movement wanted to hear/read.
So, Traitor Trump does both, spreads chaos while lying to his followers telling them anything but what they do not want to hear. When his loyalists take a drug that kills them because he said to since that’s what they wanted to believe would help them instead of a vaccine that works, Trump is also spreading chaos.
omg lies!!! The vaccine has killed tens of thousands and have injured tens of thousands. People dying suddenly left and right and myocarditis rampant.
HCQ, ivermectin and zinc work, diane has been wrong on everything how can you trust her???
Bob your next door neighbor is much smarter than you
Thanks for the laugh, Sneeze.
Comic relief.
HAAAAA!!!! OMG, Sneeze. You are an idiot.
Sneeze, did you know that Trump and every member of his family were vaccinated?
The vaccine have injured tens of thousands. And it have turned them into zombies programmed to sneak into school libraries at night and fill them with grooming materials and CRT and DEI indoctrination and directions to the Pizzaparlor and the Greatest Hits from Hunter’s laptop!
It have. Bad vaccine. Very bad. Thank the big guy in the sky that Donald J. Trump is smarter than scientists is.
Trump’s new lawyer for the state ballots case (SCOTUS) was formerly a Texas solicitor general, Jonathan Mitchell. He taught at Koch’s George Mason University.
Mitchell crafted the draconian Texas abortion law. He advocated for the $10,000 bounties on women and doctors. He also represented the side that characterized ACA as forcing Christians to subsidize homosexual behavior when the act paid for specified drugs.
He was one of 7 kids raised in a “Christian home.” Curious what Christ would think about Mitchell.
If SCOTUS decides in favor of Trump on the state ballot issue, it signals the support of Charles Koch for Trump. Any comments or campaign funding to the contrary is misdirection. Democratic candidates raise money by invoking the evil Charles Koch’s name. An association with Koch is a liability to a politician/judges’ reputation.
Koch’s allies, once signaled and Trump’s advance facilitated by court decision, will align for Trump. Money from the highest bidder makes Trump dance (not values) which makes it easy for oligarchs and despots to control him.
.
Good point.
I watched the so-called Koch version of being “anti-Trump” ads. “Trump can’t win” is not being anti-Trump. It is being anti- a Republican candidate for president losing.
Has Koch said anything, in all these ads, that is negative about Trump? Except he can’t win?
Koch is as “anti-Trump” in the same way that Ron DeSantis and Nikki Hayley are anti-Trump. They prefer themselves as the candidate, but are very careful to make sure that if it isn’t them, they aren’t doing anything to make Trump look bad. They would happily serve as Trump’s VP.
Diane Ravitch, that study was probably conducted by a crackpot who has no real medical expertise. If Dr. Anthony Fauci was encouraging the use of this stuff, why would you take his advice over that of Donald J. Trump if they both said the same thing?
More utter crackpot bs from the creature living under Diane’s Bridge to Sanity.