WHO Temporarily Suspends Clinical Trials of Hydroxycholoroquine and Chloroquine

WHO Temporarily Suspends Clinical Trials 

of Hydroxycholoroquine and Chloroquine

Beth Baumann

|

 @eb454

Source: AP Photo/John Locher

The World Health Organization on Monday announced that it is temporarily suspending clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug that some Wuhan coronavirus patients have been given, and chloroquine. Michigan State Rep. Karen Whitsett (D) credited the drug with saving her life when she came down with the virus. President Donald Trump has advocated for the use of the drug and even went so far as to take the drug to prevent catching the coronavirus. 

"The executive group has implemented a temporary pause of the hydroxychloroquine arm within the Solidarity trial while the safety data is reviewed by the data safety monitoring board. The other arms of the trial are continuing," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in an online press conference.

According to Dr. Tedros, the decision to suspend the trial comes after The Lancet, a medical journal, published a student about the effects of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine.

"The authors reported that among COVID-19 patients receiving the drug, when used alone or with macrolide, they estimate a higher fatality rate," Tedros said. "The Executive Group of the Solidarity Trial, representing 10 of the participating countries, met on Saturday and has agreed to review a comprehensive analysis and critical appraisal of all evidence available globally. The review will consider data collected so far in the Solidarity Trial and, in particular robust randomized available data, to adequately evaluate the potential benefits and harms from this drug."

The Director-General said that although the two drugs could be harmful to those using them to treat the Wuhan coronavirus, it is still safe for people to take them to treat malaria and autoimmune diseases. 

WHO's emergencies chief, Dr. Michael Ryan, said there have been no safety issues in the organization's trials. 

"We're just acting on an abundance of caution based on the recent results of all the studies to ensure that we can continue safely with that arm of the trial,” he said, according to Fox News.

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The Food and Drug Administration issued a warning in late April about the drugs' effects.

"Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine have not been shown to be safe and effective for treating or preventing COVID-19. They are being studied in clinical trials for COVID-19, and we authorized their temporary use during the COVID-19 pandemic for treatment of the virus in hospitalized patients when clinical trials are not available, or participation is not feasible, through an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA)," the agency stated.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bethbaumann/2020/05/25/who-temporarily-suspends-clinical-trials-of-hydroxycholoroquine-and-chloroquine-n2569415

REVISITING THE IHME MODEL: STILL USELESS?

The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has become famous for producing a COVID-19 model that is widely referred to by policymakers and journalists. I have described the IHME model as useless as a guide to governors and other decision-makers, for several reasons.

First, because it runs out on August 4, by which time it assumes that fatalities will have been flat for some time. What happens after August 4? Is the epidemic over, or will it resume in the Fall? The model gives us no answer. Second, the model’s predictions of fatalities in individual states have fluctuated so wildly–e.g., declining by more than 90 percent in just four days–that no policymaker could properly rely on them. Third, while proclaiming that it “assumes social distancing,” it gives no guidance as to what will happen if a particular state reopens its economy–the key point on which governors need information.

The IHME model was updated a week ago; you can see the current information here. The most recent update didn’t change the fatality projection for the U.S. through August 4 by much. It sits at 143,357. What will happen after that is anyone’s guess, although the model implies that well before August 4 the disease has pretty much flat-lined. It projects fewer than 10,000 deaths between July 1 and August 4.

If you want to know what impact the current loosening on restrictions in various states will have on fatalities, you’ve come to the wrong place. IHME admits that its prior assumption that more liberal policies would lead to more fatalities was wrong:

With mobility rising throughout the US over the last several weeks, our team had expected to see large increases in reported COVID-19 cases and deaths in more recent days. After all, the time lag between heightened mobility and potential rise in COVID-19 infections is approximately two weeks. Yet such a surge has yet to materialize, suggesting that increases in human mobility alone may not fully capture risk of transmission.

This has been obvious in states like Florida, where liberal journalists wrote that the state was conducting an experiment in “human sacrifice” when Governor DeSantis relaxed his shutdown order.* Those predictions turned out to be entirely wrong, and Florida has been a shining example of how to deal with the COVID-19 epidemic.

The IHME team is now focusing on face mask use as possibly explaining why the disease hasn’t picked up in the wake of relaxed economic and social dictates. Good luck with that.

IHME has moved toward expressing COVID fatalities, by default, as a percentage of population rather than in raw numbers, although those are still available. Perhaps the most helpful item on the current IHME web site is this map, which shows COVID fatalities per 100,000 of population in each state. At the IHME web site you can hover over each state for information. But the map pretty much speaks for itself. Click to enlarge:

COVID-19 is a local or regional phenomenon. It has struck Northeastern states–some of them, anyway–hard, and has been a non-factor in most of the rest of the country. I believe there are a number of states where Wuhan fatalities are lower than those from a typical seasonal flu.

New York City and environs are obviously the center of the epidemic in the U.S. It still is not clear why that is, although Governor Cuomo’s mismanagement of the state’s nursing homes is undoubtedly a factor. Certainly densely-populated cities are likely to be hit harder than rural areas, but that doesn’t explain the low impact in San Francisco, or in the large cities of Texas, Florida and other states.

Also, you can see that in the Upper Midwest, Minnesota and Iowa perform poorly compared with other states. South Dakota, the only state that has refused to enter any sort of shutdown order and was viciously smeared by the Washington Post and other Democratic Party news outlets as a result, has one of the lowest fatality rates in the U.S. Not quite as low as Arkansas, however, which the virus seems to have skipped altogether. The fatality rate in New York is around 150 times that in Arkansas. The uniform solution insisted on by our national press makes, apparently, no sense.

Still, I have assumed that the virus will come to less-populated areas in time, and that eventually, case rates will be similar from one place to another. It looks increasingly like that assumption is wrong. In fact, there is evidence that the virus is dying out on its own.

What will happen in the coming months is anyone’s guess. To me, it is striking how little guidance America’s most-cited model even pretends to give.

* A reader reminds me that it was Georgia, not Florida, that the Atlantic accused of engaging in human sacrifice. Memory is fallible, but the point is the same: Georgia’s track record has been about as good as Florida’s. If liberals are looking for human sacrifice, they need look no farther than New York State and its feckless governor, or Minnesota, whose inept governor has allowed hundreds to die in nursing homes without taking any meaningful action.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/05/revisiting-the-ihme-model-still-useless.php

Rebekah Jones’ firing is the COVID clickbait the media dreams of – but it’s all fake

By Staff 

20

By Brian Burgess, The Capitolist

Dozens of media outlets, both in Florida and nationally, published the sensational story of Dr. Rebekah Jones, a state Department of Health employee who was fired by the administration of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump ally, after – she says – she refused to manipulate data to support the governor’s plan to reopen the state.

But a deeper look at the underlying facts expose a less sensational, yet all-too-common narrative: a media feeding frenzy caused by a deep-seated desire to report on scandal and cover-ups, which Rebekah Jones’ claims delivered – if only they were true.

They are not.

Let’s pick through the individual pieces of wreckage from this crashed-and-burned narrative one by one:

Claim #1: Rebekah Jones was the “architect” of the Florida’s COVID-19 dashboard.

The truth: Jones was more like the drywall hanger of the dashboard rather than the “architect.” The dashboard was built on the same visual mapping tool that Johns Hopkins University made famous at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis. In fact, Florida’s tool looks extremely similar. That’s because Johns Hopkins University is not the “architect” of the dashboard, either. The tool is actually built not on any of Florida’s many data servers, but using ready-made modules from a subscription service called ArcGIS. Jones’ job was to load data into those modules and decide how it appeared to visitors.

• Media outlets who published the false “architect” claim: Florida Today, The Daily Beast, New York Post, The Guardian, CBS 12 News, The Hill, Miami Herald, ClickOrlando, WEAR-TV
• Who got it right? The Tampa Bay Times described her as a “top Florida Department of Health data manager” and never ran with the “architect” claim. They even correctly pointed out that it was Jones herself who claimed to have built the site “from scratch.”

Claim #2: Rebekah Jones was a coronavirus “scientist” 

The truth: Jones has a doctorate degree in geography. Her skill set, as applicable to COVID-19, was in mapping data, as we explained above. That’s it. No special skills in epidemiology, biology, or even public health. Depending on the narrative a media outlet wants to convey, using the term “scientist” in headlines about coronavirus carries with it a very specific connotation, leading readers to believe Jones was involved in the front lines of coronavirus research. If media outlets insist on describing her as a “scientist,” they owe their readers a fuller explanation of her role, and should, at most, describe her as a “data scientist,” though even that could be misleading and would still be misconstrued for political gain.

• Media outlets who ran with the “scientist” narrative: National Public Radio, The Guardian, MSNBC, and many others.

Claim #3: Rebekah Jones was asked to manipulate data to support the governor’s plan to reopen Florida

The truth: Jones was asked to temporarily disable the ability to export data from the dashboard so that it could be verified that the data matched other sources.

We previously gave credit to the Tampa Bay Times for accurately describing Jones’ role in managing the COVID-19 dashboard. They also accurately describe events leading to Jones termination. Don’t misunderstand – the Times is still guilty of trying to make Jones a martyr. Take a look at how they describe what happened:

[On May 4th] the [EventDate] column vanished from the “Person Cases” data, which lists anonymized records for every confirmed case in Florida. The Palm Beach Post reported the disappearance the next day, May 5.

The Tampa Bay Times automatically checks for changes in the data and archives new updates. Shortly before 10:12 a.m on May 4., data still included the EventDate field, showing records with listed dates that people reported symptoms as early as January 1. By 3:02 p.m., the column was gone.

For much of the next day, May 5, the column was either missing or empty, with every row listing “None.” Finally, it returned shortly before 8:02 p.m.

If you’re struggling to see what all the fuss is about, you’re not alone. By the Times own account, a single column of data became temporarily unavailable for a day and a half. The only other item worthy of note in the Times’ story is that the state’s official epidemiologist (i.e. an actual medical scientist, not a data mapper, like Jones) asked to have the ability to export data from the dashboard temporarily disabled while health officials verify that the dates match other official sources.

This is critical. The Tampa Bay Times had the full explanation for why the data was temporarily unavailable, but they and other media outlets decided to run with “coronavirus conspiracy” instead. In fact, the Times headline claims Jones was asked to “delete” data. No where in the story itself does the word “delete” appear. It’s another clickbait headline.

• Media outlets who published the “manipulated or deleted data” conspiracy theory: National Public Radio, The Guardian, MSNBC, USA Today, Tampa Bay Times and many others.

Claim #4: Rebekah Jones was fired because she refused to comply with orders to hide the truth about COVID-19

The truth: The idea that Jones is somehow a martyr for truth about coronavirus and a victim of a DeSantis administration cover up is a narrative too many media outlets were willing to jump on.

She was fired for insubordination, according to the DeSantis Administration:

“Rebekah Jones exhibited a repeated course of insubordination during her time with the department, including her unilateral decisions to modify the department’s COVID-19 dashboard without input or approval from the epidemiological team or her supervisors,” DeSantis spokeswoman Helen Ferre said in a statement. “The blatant disrespect for the professionals who were working around the clock to provide the important information for the COVID-19 website was harmful to the team.”

Jones is no stranger to insubordination. In 2016, she was arrested on the campus of her employer, Louisiana State University, for refusing to obey the orders of a police officer:

On June 13, 26-year-old University staff member Rebekah Jones was booked on one count of battery on a police officer, one count of remaining after forbidden and two counts of resisting arrest, Scott said. Scott said officers arrived at the Sea Grant building when Jones refused to leave at the request of LSU Human Resources. Scott said Jones initiated physical contact against two LSUPD officers while resisting arrest and officers were forced to subdue her.

It’s not clear why LSU’s Human Resources department asked one of their own staff members to leave the area.

Jones also has an extensive criminal history in Leon County, where she’s been arrested and charged with three felonies, including one for robbery, and a handful of misdemeanor cases including “sexual cyberstalking,” a case where she created a website and used it to sexually harass her ex-boyfriend. The website has been taken down, but images from the case exist in Leon County court records.

Most of the charges filed against her came after she was hired by the Department of Health, so they would not have turned up in any background check.

The bottom line: Rebekah Jones was fired for performance issues, not for “refusing to manipulate data.” And her extensive criminal history, which predates her employment in Florida, lends credence to the DeSantis administration that she was just a troublesome employee who is now disgruntled and trying to get media attention about her firing. The easiest way to get media attention right now is to claim a Republican elected official is involved in a conspiracy to cover up COVID-19 data detrimental to reopening the state economy.

The media outlets listed above will not issue retractions. They will double down on the idea that DeSantis’s administration is withholding / manipulating / deleting / altering data. That, too is totally false. But mark these words, the embarrassment of touting Rebekah Jones as their coronavirus martyr will quickly fade into the mainstream media memory hole.

https://tallahasseereports.com/2020/05/20/rebekah-jones-firing-is-the-covid-clickbait-the-media-dreams-of-but-its-all-fake/

9th Circuit Court: Allowing California Churches to Open Is a 'Suicide Pact.'

BY VICTORIA TAFT 

Anti-lockdown protest in Salem, Ore. Photo Credit: Jeff Reynolds, PJ Media.

Even as California ever slowly emerges from the lockdowns prompted by COVID-19, as workplaces, manufacturing plants, and restaurants begin re-opening, a federal court has upheld a ban on in-person church gatherings put in place by Governor Gavin Newsom.

The decision will likely propel even more churches to participate in a plan to re-open on May 31, The Day of Pentecost, in defiance of the governor’s order.

A three-judge panel on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Newsom’s March lockdown order, basically saying they couldn’t trust Christians to follow the rules and gather without getting someone sick, therefore allowing them to open would be tantamount to allowing churches to enter into a “suicide pact.”

We’re dealing here with a highly contagious and often fatal disease for which there presently is no known cure. In the words of Justice Robert Jackson, if a “[c]ourt does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”

One Rule for Workers a Different One for Worshipers

Two judges said that the church appealing the order, South Bay United Pentecostal Church in Chula Vista, wasn’t likely to succeed on appeal and further argued that the “constitutional standards that would normally govern our review of a Free Exercise claim should not be applied” because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Where state action does not “infringe upon or restrict practices because of their religious motivation” and does not “in a selective manner impose burdens only on conduct motivated by religious belief,” it does not violate the First Amendment. […]

As a threshold matter, the State contends that, in light of the ongoing pandemic, the constitutional standards that would normally govern our review of a Free Exercise claim should not be applied. “Although the Constitution is not suspended during a state of emergency,” the State tells us, “constitutional rights may be reasonably restricted ‘as the safety of the general public may demand’”

But a Trump appointee, Judge Daniel Collins, dissented, saying that the governor’s lockdown order treated the same people in two different ways, when they worked and when they worshiped.

…the State’s position on this score illogically assumes that the very same people who cannot be trusted to follow the rules at their place of worship can be trusted to do so at their workplace: the State cannot “assume the worst when people go to worship but assume the best when people go to work or go about the rest of their daily lives in permitted social settings.”The injury here is particularly poignant, given that Pentecost—which the eponymously named Church greatly desires to celebrate—falls on May 31.

He said in his dissent that the state has an “undeniable” interest in public health, but that it “could be achieved by narrower [regulations] that burdened religion to a far lesser degree.”

The Chula Vista church, which is located in South San Diego County, has offered a plan for social distancing and keeping people safe while they worship. The churchgoers will wear masks, sit six feet apart, and refrain from singing, hugging, and holding hands, according to The San Francisco Chronicle.

REVOLT: 1,200 Calif. Clergy Tell Newsom They’re Meeting in Person, With or Without Permission

‘Jail Break’ Worship

Though clergy are listed as essential in California, the First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion is not essential under the governor’s emergency orders.

Churches throughout the state are planning to meet in defiance of the order, in a socially-distanced way, on May 31st.

More than 1,200 churches plan to open on The Day of Pentecost in defiance of Newsom’s order, expressing the churches’ “essentiality” in a letter to him and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra.

The letter, written by attorneys for Liberty Counsel, The National Center for Law and Policy, Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund, Advocates for Faith & Freedom, and First Liberty, said it represented “hundreds of members of clergy and thousands of churches and ministries in California.”

Some of the pastors and rabbis signing the letter are household names in religious circles. There’s Calvary Chapel of Chino Hills’ Jack Hibbs, Ron Hill of Love and Unity Christian Fellowship of Compton, Rabbi Michael Barclay of Temple Nee Simcha in Westlake Village, Jim Franklin of Cornerstone Church in Fresno, and Water of Life Community Church in Fontana, among others who are cited in the letter.

The religious leaders thanked the governor for leadership but believe the cure is worse than the disease.

The clergy of this state are convinced that they must reopen their ministries to fully serve the needs of their communities. The spiritual services of ministries are absolutely essential to the health and welfare of the people of California. For example, a study published on May 6, 2020, in JAMA Psychiatry found “that religious service attendance is associated with a lower risk of death from despair among registered nurses and health care professionals. These results may be important in understanding trends in deaths from despair in the general population.” [7] The addiction and counseling services conducted in churches need to resume.

In sum, a great crisis has arisen from the secondary effects of the COVID-19 shutdown. The societal effects are not temporary and will last a lifetime in many individuals. In times of crisis, the clergy have a calling and responsibility to lead and care for their congregants and community.

Trump Calls for Opening Churches

President Trump himself called for reopening churches this week, flanked by Dr. Deborah Birx of his Coronavirus Task Force.

Trump this week deemed houses of worship essential services and chastised governors who have declared abortion clinics and liquor stores as essential but have left out synagogues and mosques essential services. “It’s not right,” he said.

BBC News (World)

✔@BBCWorld

President Trump says churches are "essential services" and he will "override governors" so they can reopen http://bbc.in/2A51UeE 

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With the CDC continually changes its case fatality rate numbers, it appears the death rate from coronavirus is much, much lower than experts first believed.

As Judge Collins noted in his dissent in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision, “the State cannot “assume the worst when people go to worship but assume the best when people go to work or go about the rest of their daily lives in permitted social settings.” He argued that the closing of religious services happened simply because they’re religious services.

Time to open them up.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2020/05/24/9th-circuit-court-allowing-california-churches-to-open-is-a-suicide-pact-n423568?utm_source=pjmedia&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm&newsletterad=&bcid=333548a2571394d78f5984884e55069e&recip=28668535

Don't Buy the Misleading Figures. Here's the Real Story About How the U.S. Matches Up on Coronavirus Deaths

BY MATT MARGOLIS 

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

The sheer ease with which the American left has politicized the deaths of thousands of Americans has shocked even me. The United States is approaching 100,000 deaths and the left seems determined to make sure the public blames President Donald Trump for those deaths. As PJM’s Tyler O’Neil noted, the Democratic Coalition is trying to make “Trump Death Toll” a thing. While Tyler effectively demonstrated the absurdity of blaming these deaths on Trump, I’m going to show that despite the headlines that suggest things in the United States are the worst in the world, that is emphatically not the case.

First, let’s take a look at the total confirmed deaths of the ten worst-hit countries in descending order (based on the numbers from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University as of 9:30 am ET May 24).

1. USA (96,046)
2. UK (36,757)
3. Italy (32,735)
4. Spain (28,678)
5. France (28,218)
6. Brazil (22,013)
7. Belgium (9,280)
8. Germany (8,275)
9. Iran (7,417)
10. Netherlands (5,841)

But, here’s what happens when you adjust these numbers per capita. The following countries are arranged in descending order by their coronavirus death rate per million people (based on population data from The CIA World Factbook).

1. Belgium (791.76)
2. Spain (573.38)
3. UK (558.95)
4. Italy (524.58)
5. France (415.90)
6. Sweden (391.87)
7. Netherlands (338.01)
8. Ireland (309.86)
9. USA  (288.74)
10. Switzerland (226.80)

It makes an amazing difference, doesn’t it? The United States dropped from number 1 to number 9 once you adjusted for population. Oh, but wait! I’ve previously documented how the United States’ coronavirus numbers are skewed by downstate New York. So, here’s the same list as above, treating downstate New York as a separate country from the rest of the United States:

1. Downstate NY (1,771.86)
2. Belgium (791.76)
3. Spain (573.38)
4. UK (558.95)
5. Italy (524.58)
6. France (415.90)
7. Sweden (391.87)
8. Netherlands (338.01)
9. Ireland (309.86)
10. USA sans downstate NY (233.44)

Once you separate downstate New York from the rest of the United States, it jumps to the top (by a long shot), while the rest of the United States is at the bottom—barely edging out Switzerland.

It should be noted here that several countries are reportedly undercounting both cases and deaths, including Iran, China, and Russia. It’s very possible that the actual case and death numbers for these countries are much higher, possibly even putting them in the top ten, but without reliable data I can’t correct for this.

As usual, the media wants the public to believe that the situation in the United States is worse than anywhere else in order to make Trump look bad. The United States approaching 100,000 coronavirus deaths is a grim milestone to be sure, but these deaths should not be politicized. Trump’s response was quick and decisive, and likely saved thousands of lives.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/05/24/the-united-states-still-doesnt-lead-the-world-in-coronavirus-deaths-n423763?utm_source=pjmedia&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm&newsletterad=&bcid=333548a2571394d78f5984884e55069e&recip=28668535