Most of the MDLs go to trial. They set a number of bellwether trials and then the judge tries to get a settlement.
Look at the trials set up for 3M earplugs coming up. Or the many roundup trials. Trials for valsartan should be coming up.
All of these are MDL cases that have been consolidated with many talented firms. If they weren’t able to conosolidaye the cases, none of those firms would be able to litigate the cases on their own.
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Hypothetically, let’s say when the larger trials are done with larger control groups…the drug is proven to be ineffective or to only have rare positive benefits…and also, let’s suppose that it isn’t a “dangerous drug.” Would it have been bad to promote it as a known cure?
The answer is: it would be absolutely dangerous. Why? Because we are talking about an infectious disease. So, it isn’t just those who are sick we have to think about…there are also risks among the uninfected.
If you lead people to believe that there is a cure, you will also increase the likelihood of people letting their guard down. We know from STDs, that the less dangerous a person thinks a sexual encounter is, generally, the less likely they are to use protection.
To downplay the threat of a disease or claim there is a cure when there is no cure, is to put people’s lives at risk by spreading medical misinformation that may increase the chance of people engaging in dangerous behavior.
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No one has ever said it was a fool proof cure. However, as I documented, France, Italy, India, Spain, many countries are using it right now and people are getting better,
Perhaps simpler and more specific name would the Xi-Virus or XiV for short.
JayJay
705
But it can’t be definitively said it’s because of the medicines that they are getting better.
No, there are many people in this thread who are acting as if it’s a reliable cure. If you lead people to believe there is a cure, and that thing is not as effective as you lead people to believe… then you can be endangering people’s lives.
The FDA will shut you down if you sell a supplement claiming that it cures serious medical ailments. The supplement itself may be non-toxic. However, if you’re selling that supplement as a cure without proving it’s a cure, you may cause people to make bad decisions.
It is very irresponsible to hype up drugs before they’ve been thoroughly tested.
Yeah, that’s what they are not getting. No one is arguing that you shouldn’t try out drugs that have potential benefits if it’s done in a smart and controlled way. However, to claim the evidence is conclusive when it’s still too early to tell carries a whole set of dangers, even if the drug itself has low toxicity.
When multiple countries are using it, and that is the main thing that is being used, it is not a bad conclusion that that thing that they are giving, it is most likely that thing that is getting people better. Few people are not saying to do it in a smart and controlled way. However, many people will agree, this is not foolproof not %100 effective and no one is saying to not look at other things in the meantime. Whenever Trump mentions the possibility, he has always said it with huge qualifications, it depends.
The coronavirus doesn’t have a 100% kill rate, so that’s why you need large controlled trials to measure the efficacy of drugs. Medical practitioners are more akin to human body mechanics, rather than scientists. Most don’t conduct research… so other than reading the literature, their opinions are largely based on anecdotal evidence and very susceptible to expectation bias.
So while it may be safe to say that the drugs probably aren’t that toxic, only large controlled trials can establish their effectiveness.
Years ago I read a book Travels by Michael Crichton; he completed his MD before working full time as an author. His observation is that many practices in modern medicine have never been scientifically proven.
The use of ventilators to treat severe pneumonia in COVID-19 patients appears to be a good example of a practice which provides only limited benefit at best and has not been studied scientifically.
As far as the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, previous studies have shown little benefit in treating other viruses although it does have an anti-viral effect in the test tubes. The main benefit may actually be its ability to suppress the immune system, which explains its widespread use with autoimmunity conditions such as arthritis and lupus. Severe cases of pneumonia may be a result of an immune response.
My observation is that doctors tend to accept treatments that have theories that make sense to them even if the scientific evidence is lacking. Ventilators logically make sense, but a possible action of hydroxychloroquine makes less sense.
An extreme example of this bias was the decades of widespread use of hormone replacement treatments for middle-aged women. The treatments were touted as reducing risk of cancer, heart disease, and other ailments in addition to treating the direct symptoms of menopause. Only decades later did a controlled study show that the treatments increased the risks of cancer and heart disease. The alleged benefits were simply a result of women who got the treatments tended to be healthier, less likely to smoke, etc. than the general population.
In the case of COVID-19, an advantage is that useful test results come within a few weeks so actual scientific evidence of the alleged benefits of drugs should be available quickly. In the meantime, I see no reason to restrict the use of these drugs while we continue with widespread use of ventilators.
Smyrna
711
If you had the virus and had strong symptoms that were spiraling the wrong way and this medicine was offered to you…would you take it or decline it?
JayJay
712
In a scientific experiment, you try to control for all the variables except one.
They are treating these patients with a lot of things, not just drugs.
Absent a well-designed study, there is no way to tell if the hydroxychloroquine is the thing that’s making the patients better. Or if they are just getting better on their own.
In the one French study, for example, that everyone likes to cite…75% of the 80 patients given the drugs had no fever. 92% of them were in the lowest category of seriousness of illness. The patients in the control arm did not match these statistics.
So for all we know, the patients were going to get better themselves anyway.
Absent any details from these “hundreds of anecdotal cases” about how well they tried to control for other factors so they could definitively tie benefit to CQ/HCQ, the best we can say is…keep studying the medicines.
I know people are desperate. I know we want therapies that can help these people. I do too.
But we can’t rush things.
JayJay
713
Non sequitur.
a) patients are being give the drugs…no one here is saying not to give it to them…just under watchful supervision and informed consent
b) my choice whether to take the drugs or not take them says nothing about their effectiveness.
@Tangible08 makes a key point as to why we simply cannot take anecdotal evidence at face value. Most doctors I am sure are great at what they do…however most doctors aren’t clinicians.
Smyrna
714
It’s called a yes or no question. Wow…isn’t that ezpz?
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JayJay
715
Your question is a non sequitur.
And you know it is…which is why you asked it. Because you can’t address what’s being discussed, you want to change the subject.
If a doctor told you Laetrile could help you recover from COVID? Would you take it? Yes or no?
How about Compound Q from the Chinese cucumber plant? Yes or no?
Unless I had some intimate knowledge of the best treatment, I’d go with whatever the medical staff brought up.
I don’t see how that’s relevant as I never suggested that these drugs shouldn’t be given to people.
If you bluntly say, “here’s some experimental treatment that we don’t know if it really works or not, but it shows some promising result in two small trials with questionable designs” and everyone was evaluating it from that level… then you wouldn’t get much push back.
However, when you start to overhype stuff based on magical thinking, then that’s when we enter into dangerous territory, especially if it leads to people who are not infected to think that there is a known cure.
Authentic hope prematurely labeled as false hope and avoided, is better than no hope? Right. 
No doubt there may be some shenanigans with reporting. The 21 million cellphone user statistic is worthless, however. Of course phones used for business were turned off during a pandemic.
JayJay
719
I’m not labeling hope in the drugs as false hope…I’m labeling the overhyping of them false hope.
How do these clinical trials work in this case?
Some patients who present with CV and want HCQ are given it and some are not, just to see if the ones denied survived as well as the ones given it? Or do they only include those who don’t know about HCQ, and those who mock its use, in their trials?
