Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Please think about this for just a second. Assume the following data (from a 10-day old article in US News) is right:
You give the malaria drug to 100 infected people in their 40s. Only six are hospitalized. Good result? No, the opposite. That's 6% hospitalization instead of of baseline 4.3%. But that's 94 people who go around saying, I took the malaria drug and it cured me!
You give the malaria drug to 100 hospitalized people in their 40s. Fifteen of them die. Good result? No, the opposite. From the data above, you would expect the mortality rate to be a third of that. But now you have 85 people who say, I was hospitalized and I took the malaria drug and it cured me!
Is it any surprise that you see a ton of anecdotal evidence of people who took the drug and say it made them better? No. If we tried the same thing with placebos, you could get the same result without risking the health of people with lupus.
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That’s a nice strawman.
Now deal with this:
1. There is no huge data set. All we have is anecdata. These are the cards. Play the hand. Don’t argue about how great it’d be if we had a better hand. No shit it’d be better.
2. Icky and I have both known people who have had excellent results on this drug. I’ve spoken to docs who have seen it cause people on oxygen to come off oxygen. I’ve also had docs tell me lupus patients on it have bizarrely done well with Covid despite being compromised. Guess what drug they were on.
I noted a few posts back that the next bit of sophistry we’d see was a placebo effect argument. You’ve crafted a strawman and topped it with that.
