Trump-haters giddy over new Hydroxy study, except . . .

Trump (public domain photo)

With more time on my hands thanks to the lock-down, I recently subscribed to the Washington Post.  I won’t be renewing.  WaPo, like CNN and numerous other “news” outlets, is obsessed with a prescription drug called Hydroxychloroquine (“Hydroxy”).  Why?  Because Trump touted it as a possible treatment for the Chinese / Wuhan / Covid-19 Virus (“the Virus”).  It’s a drug that’s so old it’s available in generic form and therefore is cheap, has been used for malaria, is currently used for arthritis and other ailments, and was even used to treat SARS.  It also has few side effects, and can even be used by pregnant women.  Trump was very enthusiastic about the drug, but also somewhat guarded, describing it as “encouraging” and “exciting” and saying it “could be a game-changer but maybe not” and “we really hope” this is going to work as we move toward a vaccine.  Nor did Trump pull the drug out of thin air: doctors were already prescribing Hydroxy for the Virus in other countries and even in the U.S.  (Remember, this is a prescription drug; individuals can’t run out and buy it at the local pharmacy.)  And there was even a published French study showing its benefits.  

But never mind all that.  Trump said it could work, and even said that he thought it will work, and that’s all it took.  The media (or much of it) instantly became obsessed with discrediting the drug.  And their quest to defeat Trump and prove him wrong received a boost, as a WaPo headline recently and victoriously proclaimed: “Anti-malarial drug Trump touted is linked to higher rates of death in VA coronavirus patients, study says.”

To his credit, the WaPo author did disclose that the study was an “observational study of outcomes” and was not a “randomized, placebo-controlled” study.  He further disclosed that the study was not even published, but was posted on a website, a “clearing house for academic studies.”  But what I didn’t see in the article—and if I missed it, I will happily correct or even remove this blog post—is this quote from the study itself:

[In the study], hydroxychloroquine, with or without azithromycin, was more likely to be prescribed to patients with more severe disease, as assessed by baseline ventilatory status and metabolic and hematologic parameters. Thus, as expected, increased mortality was observed in patients treated with hydroxychloroquine, both with and without azithromycin. . . . .

The study then goes on to discuss the three experimental groups in greater nuance, including distinctions between the Hydroxy-only group and the combination-drug group (Hydroxy and azithromycin), which is the drug cocktail that Trump often discussed.  You should read the study and decide for yourself.  However, the above block quote from the study itself sheds some light on why death rates were higher for those treated with Hydroxy, as the article’s headline enthusiastically conveyed.  Further, this study’s limitations including (thus far) its lack of publication, seems to put it (at best) into the same category of the French study cited by Trump.  Trump’s critics were quick to call the French study “anecdotal”—which is actually not an accurate label for a published study—yet seem oddly enthusiastic about the VA study.  

In addition to the WaPo article, countless other reports went much further.  One elitist publication, The New Yorker, claimed that by merely discussing Hydroxy, “Trump’s quackery was at once eccentric and terrifying[.]”  (That’s right, the author was terrified by the discussion of a possible treatment for the Virus.)  It also cited Trump’s “scorn for rigorous science” while completely failing to grasp this reality: In a pandemic, doctors must make decisions for severely ill patients based on the best available information at that time.  Unlike the coastal elites and the journalists, doctors cannot wait for expensive, time-consuming, randomized, controlled, peer-reviewed studies while their patients get sicker and sicker.  The failure to grasp this distinction is the underlying flaw in the sometimes true, but often irrelevant, journalistic cry that “there is no evidence for that!” when challenging Trump on anything and everything Virus-related. 

Hydroxy is currently the subject of several ongoing gold-standard studies.  That makes the media’s obsession with Hydroxy, and its giddiness over this unpublished VA study, very risky.  It’s sort of like when Marquette is up by five points at halftime over the Badgers.  I don’t call up Badger fans that I know and start rubbing it in their faces.  Why not?  Because the Badgers could still win the game.  Similarly, Hydroxy might prove effective in gold-standard studies.  But the media is filled with such anti-Trump rage—sometimes called Trump Derangement Syndrome—that they just can’t contain themselves.  (My own position is that I have no idea how the gold-standard Hydroxy studies will turn out.  Just as Trump said, maybe it’ll work, and maybe it won’t.)  

It’s also funny how Trump’s “hope” is flat-out condemned, while that same “platform of hope” is what propelled Barack Obama into the White House with the media’s standing applause.  I guess when you don’t like the guy in office, you want doom and gloom.  If the country goes to hell in a hand basket, he’ll be out of office sooner rather than later.  I guess, in a twisted way, that is its own form of hope.

On second thought, Trump might be on to something when he calls these media outlets “fake news.”