Mirno Pasquali: I hear what you 'did' say, not what you were 'trying' to say

To The Daily Sun,

Here we go again. Russ "the Incubator" Wiles is accusing me of playing “gotcha" politics from the left. If someone writes a letter to the paper and signs their name, I would hope that they have the intellectual curiosity to make sure that their letters make sense and contain factual information. Unfortunately, Russ, you fail on both of these grounds. In your latest letter you stated this: Patients in the non peer reviewed, not randomized study of VA patients were given hydroxychloroquine after having been "intubated." This is what you said, right Russ. Mr. Pasquali was, I guess, too busy playing the "gotcha" game to take a quick glance at the study to understand what I was trying to say.

Well Russ I don’t think it is my responsibility or the readers of this paper to try and figure out what you are trying to say, but the study you are referencing, that you want me to look at is very clear, and the only "gotcha” moment is that either you are lying or just too stupid to look at a study and understand it. I know from the past you are unable to understand scientific data, or how to read medical studies.

The VA study you are referencing was set up this way. A group of patients were randomly divided into one of three groups. The VA analysis, published before peer review on medRxiv, analyzed 368 patients in the VA health system with SARS-CoV-2 who were treated with standard supportive management with the addition of either HC alone (n=97), HC plus AZ (n=113), or no HC (n=158). The primary endpoints of their analysis were the need for mechanical ventilation or death.

“Rates of death in the HC, HC+AZ, and no HC groups were 27.8 percent, 22.1 percent, 11.4 percent, respectively,” Jayakrishna Ambati, MD, and colleagues wrote. “Rates of ventilation in the HC, HC+AZ, and no HC groups were 13.3 percent, 6.9 perecent, 14.1 percent, respectively.” So it seems Russ once again you get it completely wrong,. The end point of the study was mechanical ventilation or death. The patients were not given the hydroxychloroquine after intubation, as you state, but before, to see if there was any difference. And what they found was that the death rate in the hydroxychloroquine was the highest.

I believe you owe me and the readers of this paper an apology for the lies and nonsense you try to pass off in your letters.

Mirno Pasquali 

Laconia