I think the Lanced study about hydroxychloroquine that was later retracted deserved this award much more as it was completely made up.
French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience
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Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience
#22> “It is hard to find an example of quackery that has spread so far, influencing the public health response to a deadly pandemic and creating widespread confusion across the entire globe.” It isn't hard: the Lancet has published a completely made-up study written by an unknown team, before they retracted the paper. If I wanted to fuel conspiracy theories, I don't think I could come up with anything better.
Since Trump publicised hydroxychloroquine the whole debate around it has become so poisoned by politics it's unable to find an unbiassed opinion. The Lancet study seemed to have rushed to publication purely to discredit Trump.
Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience
#23This is really counter productive and snarky. How does this advance science? There have been multiple studies on this, and it has been a mixed bag. This one is positive: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32418114/ There are others that are positive, and still others that are negative.
This award isn't about those other studies, it's about his choice to over-egg his research. > Subsequent analysis of Raoult’s data found that his sample size was incredibly small, with only 6 patients given the hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin combination. The study was also found to be improperly controlled, and data was excluded for a number of patients whose condition worsened as they were either transferred to int…
There was a study that was just as bad saying hydroxychloroquine was dangerous. Strange that they just chose to discredit this one...
Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience
#24As an actual pharmacologist I find it fascinating how the general public has suddenly taken such a poorly informed interest in drug discovery. For the HN audience it would be like people taking an almost tribal approach to go-lang vs rust, debating it on national television, without any of them knowing what a loop is.
Is it fascinating, or concerning and scary? Tell me if I'm wrong, but low quality papers get published all the time, in all domains. But nobody cares about Rust vs Go in the current crisis. Then the media take results at face value because they're constantly looking for breaking news, they give a platform to people with strong opinions rather than nuanced ones (good scientists probably don't have time for that anyway…
I don't blame people for taking an interest, it's the tribalism of it that I find so weird and fascinating, I'd be concerned if in the future, drug-discovery efforts for things other than coronavirus get so political and emotional to people.
Yes, low quality papers indicating that existing drug X may be effective in disease Y get published all the time, probably several a day. Fortunately most of these are left to pad academic's CVs and don't really influence the pharmaceutical industry.
Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience
#25I think the Lanced study about hydroxychloroquine that was later retracted deserved this award much more as it was completely made up.
But it was retracted shortly after. The process worked ultimately. Raoult has yet to admit anything.
Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience
#26There's a media war on Raoult in France. I don't know if Chloroquine is effective on COVID 19, but I know that it's comically cheap and people took it for years against malaria without side effects. So at worse it's a placebo. On the other hand there's Remdesivir that's astronomically expensive, destroys kidneys and hasn't any effectiveness against COVID (even the OMS says so). But it's still the recommended treatmen…
So many things in this post are inaccurate here and are trivially debunkable.
Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience
#27This is really counter productive and snarky. How does this advance science? There have been multiple studies on this, and it has been a mixed bag. This one is positive: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32418114/ There are others that are positive, and still others that are negative.
This award isn't about those other studies, it's about his choice to over-egg his research. > Subsequent analysis of Raoult’s data found that his sample size was incredibly small, with only 6 patients given the hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin combination. The study was also found to be improperly controlled, and data was excluded for a number of patients whose condition worsened as they were either transferred to int…
If the small sample size and control method were include in the publication, which I believe they were, the blame lies with those who took the paper, claimed it was more than it was, and politicized the results.
Im not sure I want to live in a world where doctors and scientists cant publish their data.
Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience
#28Didier Raoult is one of the brightest scientists in the world. Period. There’s no “major” flaw in his studies as people keep repeating. He was studying viral load in patients and excluded those who were in ICU because they did not have enough virus left. Thus suggesting his cocktail as an early treatment. There is indeed pseudoscientists and corrupt ones who published the famous now but ridiculous study in “the lance…
The cherry on top is the c19study link, which is a well known website in the conspiracy theorists sphere, and was debunked time and time again.
Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience
#29Didier Raoult is one of the brightest scientists in the world. Period. There’s no “major” flaw in his studies as people keep repeating. He was studying viral load in patients and excluded those who were in ICU because they did not have enough virus left. Thus suggesting his cocktail as an early treatment. There is indeed pseudoscientists and corrupt ones who published the famous now but ridiculous study in “the lance…
> There’s no “major” flaw in his studies as people keep repeating. ah, yes, it's all perfect. smh https://www.les-crises.fr/the-tremendous-ethical-and-methodo...
I guess other studies are perfect and survived this level of scrutiny.
Especially the "recovery" one, praised by everybody where the inclusion criteria was: "having flu like symptoms", without PCR. This is true science indeed.
https://www.les-crises.fr/the-tremendous-ethical-and-methodo...
1. Why is this a major flaw?
2. As stated by the title.
Remark: (Well conducted) RCTs introduce way too much variance.
As a statistician I care about a good trade-off between bias and variance.
OTOH, you don't need RCTs when you measure a physical property of a system.
3-6,8. Valid points. Especially as of publication date.
As of today, they updated the study with 3000+ patients.
7. This is not ethical.
9. Object of the study: measure viral load. After the cytokine storm, you don't care much about the virus.
10. We should ask DR directly about it, this is grave.
11-13. Irrelevant. They did PCRs to everyone, the important measure is the CT.
14. This is not good indeed.
15. PCR tests are reliable.
16. Why is it a flaw?
17-18. They published a lot of other papers on their work, and updated the early study.
Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience
#30Technically the Chinese Wuhan Institute was first to recommended hydroxychloroquine as a possible solution (among at least one other drug) months before this guy and the politicians ever published anything about it. There was also a small town US doctor who claimed anecdotal success among his hundreds of clients who was highly influential very early on. And tons of other speculative ‘experts’ talking about it on YouTube.
Then months later as COVID got really bad there was multiple bad science on both sides of the argument just muddied the water in an extreme event the entire population has a never experienced before in their lives. Causing mass desperation and flailing about.
I previously published a timeline on HN earlier that showed the UK also blocked exports of the drug at least a full month before the Trump brigades and bad papers came out. And other examples of authoritative institutions giving off signals and rumours which could easily be taken advantage of by people desperate to save family members lives. It was also listed as safe in small doses as by WHO so people were willing to take the risk before the full science was out.
I also remember the general consensus became that it was only useful as a prophylactic not a treatment after the fact when the infection was serious, so it was even harder to pinpoint good evidence when the doctors were giving it out to thousands and only a tiny amount got serious infections. Then the uselessness is even easier to hide with an easy exit argument.
It seems strange to me to target this one individual among a large group. Maybe he was the first to give it academic credibility with an actual paper?