Daniel Hopkins is a physician.
Bloodletting may be the best-known example of a once widely used, faulty medical treatment, but there are many more. Hormone replacement therapy for postmenopausal women, famously touted by experts, turned out to be complicated and sometimes harmful.
The list of medical reversals is long, and one cause is common. When observational studies compare people in the community who receive treatment with those who don’t, the treatment …
Coronavirus vaccines are crucial to taming the pandemic. Everyone should get one. Please, please, get vaccinated.
Now, that’s out of the way—I’m no anti-vaxxer. I am a huge supporter of vaccines and believe vaccination will help bring an early end to the worst global health disaster in modern history.
But there is something strange happening. Media and scientific articles on vaccine effectiveness are increasingly unhinged. Reports are drifting away from science on …
On March 2nd, 2020, as New York State announced its first proven case of COVID-19, a federal court there handed down a stunning decision. For 10 years, according to the court, the United States government illegally failed to hold drug companies accountable when they did not report, or inaccurately reported, crucial data about their drugs’ safety and efficacy.
Between 2007 and 2017, the court held, the Food …
Gilead’s $1,000-a-pill antiviral remdesivir is no wonder drug. We knew this when it failed for hepatitis, the disease it was created for. And then when it failed for Ebola. And then again, when it failed for COVID-19.
But like a bolt, in late April, a breakthrough: in a second trial for COVID-19 patients, remdesivir sped time to recovery—proof of benefit, Read more…
On April 29th Anthony Fauci announced the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an institute he runs, had completed a study of the antiviral remdesivir for COVID-19. The drug reduced time to recovery from 15 to 11 days, he said, a breakthrough proving “a drug can block this virus.” Now people are clamoring for $1,000-a-pill remdesivir.
While the results were preliminary, unpublished, and unconfirmed by …
In January, we learned of an emerging threat in China, a variant of the frightening SARS virus, but worse—more infectious. Since then, we learned China, the first to both see and successfully manage its outbreak, seriously under-detected the disease. According to a widely circulated computer model study, true cases were probably around seven times greater than the official count. Calculations published a …
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