The left wing Lancet medical journal has a long history of woke...

  1. 7,319 Posts.
    lightbulb Created with Sketch. 49

    The left wing Lancet medical journal has a long history of woke causes with unscientific articles.

    In the latest stunning demonstration of brazen quackery and junk science, both The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine have published a widely-touted science paper trashing hydroxychloroquine that turns out to be based on data acquired from a company run in part by a science fiction author and an adult content model. None of the individuals from the company appear to have any background whatsoever in legitimate science or epidemiology. The data from this company, known as “Surgisphere,” appear to have been wholly fabricated. Yet it was the dominant source of data for the study published by those science journals, neither of which has retracted the flawed study.
    The study, published in The Lancet on May 22, 2020, is found at this link. Its authors include Prof Mandeep R Mehra, MD, Sapan S Desai, MD, Prof Frank Ruschitzka, MD and Amit N Patel, MD. Sapan Desai is the founder of Surgisphere, the company that claims to have provided the data for the study.

    As The Guardian explains in its investigative report:
    The Lancet study, which listed Desai as one of the co-authors, claimed to have analysed Surgisphere data collected from nearly 96,000 patients with Covid-19, admitted to 671 hospitals from their database of 1,200 hospitals around the world, who received hydroxychloroquine alone or in combination with antibiotics.
    The negative findings made global news and prompted the WHO to halt the hydroxychloroquine arm of its global trials. But only days later Guardian Australia revealed glaring errors in the Australian data included in the study.

    All the usual fake news media outlets parroted the (false) findings of the study, including the BBC, NYT, Washington Post, CNN, NBC News, etc. None of them cared about the absolute fraud behind the study. Only The Guardian, it seems, has managed to conduct a serious investigation that exposes the total fraud.
    The fraud is so obvious and so horrifying to real scientists that the scandal has earned the name “LancetGate.” Both The Lancet and the NEJM have been reluctant to pull the study because, of course, discrediting hydroxychloroquine (plus zinc) is a necessary step to clear the way for hundreds of billions of dollars in profits for the vaccine companies that fund the medical journals. The fabricated study published in the journals was used to cancel clinical trials on hydroxychloroquine, which was the goal from the very start. As the Guardian reports:
    Data it claims to have legitimately obtained from more than a thousand hospitals worldwide formed the basis of scientific articles that have led to changes in Covid-19 treatment policies in Latin American countries. It was also behind a decision by the WHO and research institutes around the world to halt trials of the controversial drug hydroxychloroquine.
    The study claims the data were acquired through a seemingly credible, complex system that should be reliable. Here’s the sciency-sounding jargon used in the study text to describe where the data come from:

    The Surgical Outcomes Collaborative (Surgisphere Corporation, Chicago, IL, USA) consists of de-identified data obtained by automated data extraction from inpatient and outpatient electronic health records, supply chain databases, and financial records. The registry uses a cloud-based health-care data analytics platform that includes specific modules for data acquisition, data warehousing, data analytics, and data reporting. A manual data entry process is used for quality assurance and validation to ensure that key missing values are kept to a minimum. The Surgical Outcomes Collaborative (hereafter referred to as the Collaborative) ensures compliance with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidance on real-world evidence. Real-world data are collected through automated data transfers that capture 100% of the data from each health-care entity at regular, predetermined intervals, thus reducing the impact of selection bias and missing values, and ensuring that the data are current, reliable, and relevant. Verifiable source documentation for the elements include electronic inpatient and outpatient medical records and, in accordance with the FDA guidance on relevance of real-world data, data acquisition is performed through use of a standardised Health Level Seven-compliant data dictionary, with data collected on a prospective ongoing basis. The validation procedure for the registry refers to the standard operating procedures in place for each of the four ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 27001:2013 certified features of the registry: data acquisition, data warehousing, data analytics, and data reporting.
    It all sounds really credible and sciency, right? Except for the fact that the company apparently fabricated everything.
 
arrow-down-2 Created with Sketch. arrow-down-2 Created with Sketch.