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Comment by gator-io | Hacker News Reader

Fantastic analysis of the Lancet study's flaws: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUD_wvkNhnk

This is a garbage analysis that ends up with a plug for vitamins and t-shirts. You don't write off a journal for making mistakes. Retraction is part of the scientific process.

What this YouTuber failed to mention is that there were already a couple of other studies before this one that reached the same conclusion - that there was no evidence of it working for COVID-19, or that it potentially made things worse in the most sick patients. The retraction of a single paper doesn't invalidate the body of evidence (albeit small) provided by other papers prior to it.

Don't get hung up on the how the channel survives. The channel, whose host has a Phd in pathology, has been focused on Covid issues for months, after being demonitized by YouTube.

And from his experienced analysis, the study is clearly, obviously junk, and the Lancet should be held to account for publishing it.

If a channel advertises snake oil supplements and products then that should be a valid reason to criticize them.

And just to be clear, the supplements are recommendations based on research, not advertisements. No commissions.

Go back a few episodes and you'll see the rationale for them.

As a reference, here's an observation study published in NEJM on May 7th, that wrote:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2012410?query=fe...

> "In this analysis involving a large sample of consecutive patients who had been hospitalized with Covid-19, the risk of intubation or death was not significantly higher or lower among patients who received hydroxychloroquine than among those who did not..."

Note that this study did not use any of the data from Mehra et. al. You see all the other studies that found similar results by reading the references.

I'm not arguing other studies - they seem fine, except none of them studied the early use of HCQ with Zinc.

I'm saying specifically that the Lancet should not have published the Surgisphere study due to its flaws.

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