But after living through the media's credulity toward the war on terror, credulity toward the war on drugs, credulity toward the satanic panic of the 90s, credulity toward the broken forensics that have gotten innocent people executed, dismissal of Juanita Broaddrick and vilification of Edward Snowden, I'm inclined to believe they are totally capable of a kind of mass group think without any need for a belief in a kind of conspiracy.
I think you're using "The media" very liberally there. Were there pundits on some cable channel vilifying him? Sure. But that is in no way equivalent to every single major news publication refusing to back NYP on this report.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/wonkblog/ma...
Then, with this in mind, look at the fact that almost all media is controlled by less entities than you can count on your two hands (assuming you have ten fingers):
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
Marc Twain used to say: “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
(Interestingly you’re demanding the same: taking time to step back ;)
In a normal population you may be right, but in a field of experts, I'm happy sticking with the majority than with the one random scientist who believes in satanic rituals telling me hydroxychloroquine works.
Reporters 30 years ago might have had standards. I think those standards have slipped tremendously.
The North Koreans trust their journalists. They are the top of their field after all.
Democracy doesn't die in darkness. It dies in uniformity and groupthink.
But there have been dozens of studies showing HCQs efficacy: https://c19study.com/
Note that the only RCT with positive results is https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.22.20040758v...
Which was late, not early. Meanwhile, quickly searching through all the RCT's listed, there's 5 that are negative and 10 that were inconclusive (i.e. showed no benefit).
So there's 15 to 1 against the effectiveness of HCQ using the highest standard of study (RCT's), yet somehow that site attempts to represent that as 100% of 'early' RCT's showing positive results.
But the lede is buried for some reason, perhaps due to the absurd politics around HCQ:
"This is another paper where positive effects of HCQ are left out of the conclusions the paper reports. In the Table 2, the line for mortality at 28 days shows a cut by a factor of 0.54 on HCQ. The difference is not at the standard 0.05 significance level, with a p-value of 0.22. However this does not mean the result is false. It could just as well be the sample size is not large enough for the significance to reach the 0.05 level."
And some of these studies are having a hard time because the Covid mortality rate has dropped tremendously:
Internet survey RCT subject to survey bias. There was no death or ICU admission. Low risk healthcare workers, median age ~40. 494 1x/week dosing, 495 2x/week dosing, 494 control participants (1x and 2x participants received the same overall dosage).
They studied 1500 participants with no deaths.
One that shows as "Negative" : Early terminated PEP RCT comparing HCQ and vitamin C with 781 patients (83% household contacts), reporting no significant differences.
`Therapy started one day after enrollment and study supplies were sent to the participant "either by courier or mail". So the arrival time of the medication is not specified. In Boulware et al., the shipping delay was up to 3.5 days, if the delay is similar here the overall delays may be: time since first exposure - unlimited time to enrollment - up to 4 days time to telehealth meeting - 1 day (3 days if Friday enrollment?) time to receive medication - up to 3.5 days Most results including the primary 28-day PCR+ result has not bee reported yet. The study uses a low and slow dosage regimen, therapeutic levels may only be reached nearer to day 14, if at all, so day 28 results should be more informative when available (although labeled a PEP trial, with the low dosage and continuous exposure for most participants it is more of a PrEP/PEP trial where benefit might be seen later as HCQ levels increase). Endpoints were: Primary outcomes: PCR+ @28 days - NOT REPORTED YET PCR+ @14 days - aHR 0.99 [0.64-1.52]`
Right, so this RCT took up to 7 days for medication to arrive. Most people completely heal from Covid before 7 days is up.
This is why science is not some popularity contest where you can scan for counts and average the results together. It's messy, it's nuanced, it's difficult to find the correct answers and there's hundreds of confounding variables that are difficult to control for.
This paper you've cited supposedly showing positive results is a preprint and has not been published yet, which suggests it hasn't satisfied the peer review process in whichever journal it is intended to be published in. The study was also suspended partway through so it's unlikely it'll ever be completed. I don't entirely disagree that science is a pure numbers game (only papers that stand up to peer review, not only from the journal but from the wider scientific community are worth consideration), but you're undermining your own argument with this poor selection of a paper. If it does eventually end up published, and doesn't have too many glaring issues with its methodology pointed out (some of which are already indicated in the comments on medrxiv), it may be worth mentioning in the future but it certainly isn't right now. And the existence of this paper doesn't make the site's analysis any less dishonest. Suggesting 100% of papers of some particularly category when only one (in actuality none) exist is clearly wrong, and intentionally misleading if not dishonest.
I also don't entirely agree that numbers don't matter. Given a set of papers that are published, properly peer reviewed, and don't have any glaring issues with their methodology, it certainly matters if the vast majority demonstrate something while a tiny number suggest something else. This would indicate that tiny number are outliers, and may have had some problems that weren't immediately obvious. Otherwise, their results would have been reproducable which is a key indication of the validity of their empirical data.
There are also other, better studies that show negative results or no benefit. Why did you pick this particular one?
The studies that show no benefit aren't complete in and of themselves. I have yet to see some perfectly conducted RCT on HCQ. The treatment that was prescribed originally by Didier Raoult was HCQ + AZ + Zinc. I have a hard time finding a good RCT on those 3 drugs provided immediately after diagnosis. The retrospective analysis seems to indicate a benefit. Either way, I think the entire politicization of the drug early on in the pandemic, where it was cast as "dangerous" even though it has been approved as a phrophylactic in pregnant women and used as an antiviral for 60 years, was completely hysterical.
My understanding is that another side effect of HCQ is that it extends the QT cycle, and given the duress COVID-19 puts on the heart, there is not an insignificant risk of cardiak arrest. There may not be as much data to show this as conclusively or prevalently as some might like, but the underlying mechanisms are well enough understood that it would be reckless to continue prescribing HCQ until it had been sufficiently demonstrated that the benefits outweighed this risk.
There really wasn't sufficient reason to think that HCQ would work in the first place, based on any understanding of how the drugs works. It was just the original, now discredited paper from China that opened up the floodgates in the first place. The antiviral properties are far too weak and would require far too high (dangerous) concentrations in vivo, far in excess of what's commonly prescribed for other purposes, to match the earlier in vitro results. If there's any benefit to HCQ, it would be from immunosupression. But dexamethasone serves that purpose much more effectively, and has shown much better results so it doesn't make much sense to continue exploring HCQ.
And IMO, that should be seen as an indictment of the state of the modern corporate press, as opposed to an indication that the story lacks veracity.
As we've seen repeatedly over the last four years, the mainstream media is happy to amplify absurd stories - the Trump "suckers and losers" story which was quickly debunked, the entire Russia Collusion narrative, etc - if it serves their own interests.
So to view what is reported in the mainstream media as the barometer of what is true is to commit an enormous error.
And again, as stated above, take a moment to consider what you're actually implying. That publications such as NPR, AP, BBC, Reuters, some of the least partisan and most trusted news source with the hardest working journalist dedicated their life to communicating the facts. You're claiming that they are hiding the truth in some big conspiracy and that your one flaky source is the one telling the truth? Cmon man, don't be an old facebook grampa...
Tucker Carlson is telling absurd lies that he "lost the evidence in the mail" before making copies of it.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/oct/29/fox-news-tucke...
UPS also acknowledged that the package was indeed opened and the contents missing (though they did find them later).
The point, as he admitted in a text to journalist Roger Sollenberger, was that he was convinced that someone was monitoring his texts. That may be paranoid speculation, but it is not a lie.
By the way, the emails found on the laptop have now been authenticated by a 3rd party security firm that has been relied upon before by "mainstream" publications like the Washington Post[1]. Not to mention that there is Tony Bobulinski, the CEO of Sinohawk that was founded in partnership with the Biden's, who has publicly stated that not only was Joe Biden aware of his son's foreign business activities, but that he believes Joe Biden was part of the bribery scheme.
[1] https://amp.dailycaller.com/2020/10/29/cybersecurity-expert-...
Great thought exercise. I'm happy to inform you that I have actually already considered both scenarios and am confident that it really is this:
> every single news organization out there, every single journalist, including NPR as you mention, are trying to hide this very real story and are wrong
If you look back at the media in the last four years that shouldn't be as surprising as you are implying.
Although I take issue with "every single journalist", since the point of Greenwald's piece, among others, is that even if one journalist wants to tell the truth, they will be suppressed.
---
To go more concrete here though, are you specifically claim that the materials are not real, or that the story of how they were acquired is false? The former is absolutely undeniable; the latter is up for debate but I personally don't even think the laptop repair shop story is fabricated.
I personally watched (part of) the video of Hunter Biden smoking crack while receiving a footjob, so unless you think it's a body double or a deepfake there is no doubt in my mind that these documents are real. Furthermore the big smoking gun is the financial documents which should be trivially easy for a journalist to debunk. So if you want to question how the materials are acquired, go ahead, but the documents themselves are real, and they show very questionable business dealings in China, Ukraine, and Russia.
BTW, the existence for years now of the Russia Collusion hoax - namely, the debunked notion that Trump is a vassal of Vladimir Putin and directly colluded with Russia to win the US election - should tell us everything we need to know about the intellectual integrity of the corporate press.
Fox covered it. NYP covered it. Independent journalists covered it. Left wing corporates did not.
Given the events of the past few years, with the media spending 3 years of our precious existence on salacious and false Russia conspiracy theories...maybe just maybe the NY Post has it right.
NYP has had access to the hard drive for two weeks. Independent journalists do not. Left wing corporates do not have access to the hard drive and don't run stories when they can't vet it.
And yes they do run stories when they can't vet it. They lost a settlement with Nick Sandmann over it: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/24/media/washington-post-sandman...
They don't have to physically hold every piece of evidence and forensically investigate it in order to report a story. No one did that with the Snowden story that Glennwald broke. That's ridiculous. You simply frame it as "Documents Reportedly Show Biden Family Involved with Chinese Business Deals" or "Questions Surround Biden Family Foreign Business".
Do you consider fact-checking a form of censorship?