Censorship 101

A few years ago, the Houston Astros won the American League pennant and the World Series. Baseball writers lavished praise on the effectiveness of the Houston system in producing winning teams. A couple of years later the baseball world was shocked to discover that the Astros had been cheating.

Now, fast forward to the 2020 Presidential election. The claims that President Trump has made about cheating or fraud in the election have been routinely dismissed as dubious and without evidence. Typically, news outlets do not investigate the claims but just say that they have been dismissed by judges and state officials and settle for that.

The conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal agrees, even though to my knowledge, its news pages have never conducted an investigation into the voting irregularities and anomalies in the key battleground states.

However, things have gone a step further since protestors stormed the Capitol on January 6. Just talking about fraud in the past election has been elevated to speech that must be suppressed as seditious and tending to insurrection. In a recent op-ed in my local newspaper, a teacher at Connecticut’s Pace University argued that it was right and proper for social media sites to censor and suppress claims of fraud. 

Of course, he lauded the ban on President Trump’s social media accounts. He compared President Trump to Hitler claiming that he used his social media platform to advance a “Big Lie” strategy. He did believe that censorship should only be a short-term solution and argued that in the future social media and other news sources should insist that posts or tweets by politicians be accompanied by equal length contrary posts.

One wonders where the Pace prof. has been the past four years. During his term in office President Trump spawned a whole industry of fact checkers who closely scrutinized his every word. I suspect that these “fact checkers” will soon be filing unemployment claims since the new administration will likely be above reproach or criticism.

Moreover, I wonder if the professor even reads the newspaper in which his op-ed appeared. Like many other news organizations, the CT Post has a diverse group of political columnists but despite differences in color and gender they are all of the same opinion, especially when it came to the Trump administration. Even the political cartoons were invariably anti-Trump. 

Op-ed pages in newspapers were originally designed to provide opposing points of view, but no more. Over the past four years the great majority of guest opinion pieces have generally supported the paper’s editorial positions. For a while, the paper had a “You Said it” column where readers could provide short responses to editorials or generally voice their opinion. But that has largely disappeared.

The Pace prof. was just mirroring the thoughts of many Trump haters throughout the nation. He calls for reasoned discourse and the sharing of opinions but where has it been in the past four years?

Finally, have the people who believe that there is no evidence for fraud in the past election, and dismiss such claims as dubious, forgotten the claims of fraud and Russian collusion in the 2016 election? The fact that these claims were spawned by a dubious document put forward by Democratic political operatives did not stop them from calling for incessant investigation. The $40 Million Mueller investigation that ensued found no evidence to support these dubious claims. Nevertheless, many still believe that Trump stole the election of 2016. Did any professor ever speak out against this hoax or call for censorship then?

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Quote of the day: 

"Badges! We don’t need no stinkin badges!" Mexican bandit in Treasure of Sierra Madre.

Coronavirus Treatment

                                                

Back in March on the advice of my science advisor, I put up a post on coronavirus antidotes that included a reference to doctors that had been using a combination of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine and the Z-pac to successfully treat patients with severe symptoms of coronavirus infection.

At the time the treatment, despite its success, was controversial. Although hydroxychloroquine had been used successfully for many years in treating malaria and lupus, it had not been tested for coronavirus. The now famous Dr. Fauci explained that the CDC could not support the use of the drug until it had been fully tested. Moreover, the drug could have serious side effects for those with heart and other conditions.

The drug became even more controversial when President Trump at a press conference alluded to the success that doctors in the field were having with the hydroxychloroquine treatment. Commentators were up in arms. The President’s support meant that the drug entered the political arena.

However, a study has just been published by the respected Henry Ford Health center in Detroit that shows the effectiveness of low-cost hydroxychloroquine in saving lives. It should convince Dr. Fauci although it will not persuade those who cannot believe that President Trump can be right about anything. ** 

Here is the headline from the July 2 press release of the study, “a large-scale retrospective analysis of 2,541 patients hospitalized between March 10 and May 2, 2020 across the system’s six hospitals”: *

DETROIT--Treatment with hydroxychloroquine cut the death rate significantly in sick patients hospitalized with COVID-19--and without heart-related side-effects, according to a new study published by the Henry Ford Health System.

The following quotes from the press release illustrate the study’s methodology and conclusions. (quotes in italics).

The study found 13% of those treated with hydroxychloroquine alone died compared to 26.4% not treated with hydroxychloroquine. None of the patients had documented serious heart abnormalities; however, patients were monitored for a heart condition routinely pointed to as a reason to avoid the drug as a treatment for COVID-19.

Patients treated with hydroxychloroquine at Henry Ford met specific protocol criteria as outlined by the hospital system’s Division of Infectious Diseases. The vast majority received the drug soon after admission; 82% within 24 hours and 91% within 48 hours of admission. All patients in the study were 18 or over with a median age of 64 years; 51% were men and 56% African American.

"The findings have been highly analyzed and peer-reviewed,” said Dr. Marcus Zervos, division head of Infectious Disease for Henry Ford Health System... “We attribute our findings that differ from other studies to early treatment, and part of a combination of interventions that were done in supportive care of patients, including careful cardiac monitoring. Our dosing also differed from other studies not showing a benefit of the drug. And other studies are either not peer reviewed, have limited numbers of patients, different patient populations or other differences from our patients.”

Our analysis shows that using hydroxychloroquine helped save lives,” said neurosurgeon Dr. Steven Kalkanis, CEO, Henry Ford Medical Group and Senior Vice President and Chief Academic Officer of Henry Ford Health System. “As doctors and scientists, we look to the data for insight. And the data here is clear that there was benefit to using the drug as a treatment for sick, hospitalized patients.”

Speaking of saving lives, last week a group of doctors held a press conference at the Nation’s Capital to describe how they had used the hydroxychloroquine treatment to save lives in the hospitals in which they worked. One was impassioned in claiming that no one has to die from the coronavirus. She claimed that she had treated 350 patients with severe symptoms and none of them had died. Her remarks went viral with over 17 million hits but were taken down by media outlets like You Tube which claimed that the brief video did not meet its community standards. 

The Henry Ford Health Center study has received little attention in the media. Everyone wanted a study back at the outset of the pandemic but when one appears that contains good news, it is ignored. It would appear that there are many people who not only can’t believe a study that shows good results but who actually do not want to believe it no matter what its scientific bonafides.

It is too bad that doctors actually saving lives are censored. I have heard that doctors in hospitals take hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic but keep it secret for fear of ostracism. The other day I heard a TV commentator refer to health officials who recommended the drug as "killers."

The doctors’ strategy could actually help schools to reopen in the Fall. I don’t mean that children should take hydroxychloroquine. Their immune systems handle the virus easily and they are at virtually no risk of being infected. But their teachers, especially the older ones, could routinely take the inexpensive medication as a precaution.  

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*The study was published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases, the peer-reviewed, open-access online publication of the International Society of Infectious Diseases (ISID.org).

** If you click on the link to the Henry Ford Health center study, you will find that it comes with a warning label as if it is dangerous to read.