Sometimes it’s just stupidity but these seem to be more than that.
But since I thinking of it, my outfit transferred some technology to a National lab. The product yield varied in a very narrow window. The sum total of the product plus by-products gave a very tight carbon balance. I had run it several hundred times.
They ran it and got exactly half of our values and then made a big deal about half the carbon being missing. As this was an anaerobic process there are not many options of missing carbon.
Turns out that they confused normality and molarity. A bunch of PhDs couldn’t wrap their brains around divalent species and make the simple x2 adjustment. Literally first semester high school chemistry stuff.
In the interim they justified buying a VERY expensive instrument to look for the “missing” carbon.
Their head guy had a big reputation in academic circles. He was a well connected clown.
I wonder about the motivation for this conscious fraud. With the Indian one I can imagine that the people who proposed to the powers that be that everyone at the hospital be given ivermectin wanted to demonstrate that this had been worthwhile, perhaps. The Brazil one, is it just that it gets you cited a lot? Or perhaps they are just convinced that all these drugs work and they want to manufacture compelling evidence to get people to use them? Even reading it yesterday before I read about the fraud, I thought they were laying it on a bit thick with the “omg better just skip RCTs for ethical reasons and just use these drugs”, given the highly surprising nature of their results - three disparate drugs all showing a large positive effect in the context of how difficult it is to find good antivirals.
This is more or less what I was alluding to when I mentioned that it would be reasonable for the hospital to not allow this.
What follows is my thinking about this issue in very general terms (not specifically what happened in this case). I’ll stipulate that there are certain specifics that can change the calculus quite a bit.
I’m not sure I get your point about the ICU being walled off from other doctors. Sure there are docs that practice there and are directly responsible for the patients. But it would not be atypical for them to consult an infectious disease doc, for example. Using our imaginations we can conjure up scenarios for lots of different types of doctors to see patients in the ICU in a consultative capacity.
And that doc could come to the ICU and evaluate the patient and make recommendations. Or course these are just recommendations, but in practice they’re probably mostly followed since most such encounters are devoid of the quackery in that article.
So hypothetically the doc in the ICU doc could consult another doc or maybe the patient/family could request an infectious disease or other doc come evaluate the patient. That doesn’t seem so unreasonable.
Then that person could recommend some quack treatment and the ICU doc would rightly say “lol, no”. But maybe the patient/family prefers the advice of the other doc? And then you have the type of lawsuit that you linked. The perfect remedy would be to just transfer the patient to a facility where they are OK with the quack treatment and let them have at it. Obviously, in the case of an unstable ICU patient that is often not an option.
So, in the hospital’s shoes it is reasonable to fight that. But I don’t feel that terrible that they lost. Assuming they are completely shielded from liability, then I don’t think it’s that bad. The person who gets hurt is the patient and they clearly wanted it despite presumably being strongly cautioned against it. I just can’t get that worked up about that.
The Indian one could be as simple as some hospital employees relatives wanted in the study so they made some loophole where they could sign up for a class at the hospital and be elligible. The spikes at 35 and 40 seems a little weirder. But there’s also a spike at 28 and 32.
India is a very weird very bureaucratic country where half the stuff you see on a daily basis makes zero sense. I was mentioning some crazy thing to my Indian boss when we went over there. He replied, completely unfazed, “It’s India”.
That would make some sense, but it’s not the only issue with the data. There are number-distribution issues that look a lot like participants were made up out of whole cloth. It’s explained in the Twitter thread.
I read an article about 20 years ago about something like that some place in Alaska. It’s been a while, so I’m fuzzy on the details. But basically there was a law that said they had the reduce the level of a certain undesirable compound in their water supply by X%. However, their unique water source was so devoid of that particular compound that it was impossible to reduce it further with existing technology. So their solution was to pollute the water by adding that stuff, and then they would purify it back down by X%. This allowed them to meet the regulation.
Publicly traded companies do all kinds of shenanigans. One I worked for had a motto “miss by a penny, might as well miss by a dollar” which meant if there was going to be a bad quarter then all kinds of inventory was written down. Then when it was sold down the road (often at full value) that could be recorded as pure profit. Stuff would be moved around as to be “in transit” on the appropriate accounting day. Our whole world is gamed.
There are protests in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane today. The organiser of the last protest in Sydney got jailed for 8 months yesterday, 3 month non-parole period.
Yes, need some real talk from the medical people about how to make this happen. If this was a regular drug, we could just get our pediatricians to write our kids a prescription for it, and then fill it and give it to them, right? But vaccines don’t work on prescription, so what can be done here?
First gym trip since the NYC vax mandate. Scan my membership card. Look at the guy at the desk, anticipating him asking me something. He looks at me. We have an awkward locking of the eyes for a few seconds. “Do you need to see anything?” I ask. He mumbles something I can’t understand - not sure if English or Spanish. Shakes his head. I move on into the gym.
There are other examples, not trying to pick on India.
It certainly wasn’t ethical just to manufacture and then destroy. I get the economics, though. Other than the worker wages that money was going into deep pockets.
I believe the CFC thing was originally a Montreal protocol from way back. Not sure if Kyoto modified it. In my googling it looks like perhaps China was cheating until recently. It was note that CFCs had gone, the source seemed to be somewhere in China, whatever agency bitched. It stopped. No real detail though. (I didn’t look very hard for more info).
