Dr. Vinay Prasad will make sure new drugs actually work before the Food and Drug Administration approves them. The industry won't like that change. Patients will.
The ENTIRE reason I voted for Trump was to fix all this shit and it seems like RFK and his merry band of renegades are up to the task!!! Sooooooooo pumped!
The day RFK, Jr. announced he was joining Team Trump, I knew Kamala and the Democrats were finished. It had long been my dream that liberals would wake up and smell the coffee. President Trump is actually far more progressive than the neo-libs and neocons in charge of the Democrat Party. He's also more inclusive, more empathetic, more peaceful, and more open to dialogue than the leftists who run DSA (Democratic Socialists for America) and 50501. But people persist in believing media labels rather than seeking the truth themselves, and that's a pity.
Yes, this is great news. I'd like to add that a critical component is to ask WHY they need so many drugs approved and approved quickly. Of course covering costs and profit is a motive, but why is it so critical that they get approval in the US? Because much or ALL of the development costs of drugs is covered by the US since there is an almost entirely socialized market in the rest of the world. So the patient percentage of the around 350 million people in the US have to cover the development for 8 billion people. Instead of the cost being spread around 100% of the world, it is covered by 4% of the world - us. Like subsidizing defense around the world, we subsidize medicine to the detriment of care here which also increases the costs dramatically. The drug makes need 25 times the profit in the US to cover the cost. (I will say a more modern "Star Wars" defense shield the shields us and could also shield the world would be money well spent given the insanity of some places with nuclear weapons, e.g. Pakistan).
And this comment above reflects what Trump did in his EO, essentially MFN for drugs: "'The Pharmaceutical/Drug Companies would say, for years, that it was Research and Development Costs, and that all of these costs were, and would be, for no reason whatsoever, borne by the “suckers” of America, ALONE.'"
Yes. They know and knew and are attempting to do something about it finally. Stop subsidizing socialized medicine the world over.
Now I have grave concerns about the appointment of Vinay Prasad to head Biologics / vaccines
He is smart and prolific and very opinionated
He is arrogant - so much so that we need a new word to describe him
He blocked me on X .I have been trying to get him to respond to censored evidence on the risk of mammograms.i am respectful and polite.rather than respond he simply blocked me
I am trying to set up an open discussion between the Senior MD PhD scientist Dr Daniel Corcos ( French) who has ha$ his long unblemished career destroyed for publishing data about mammography risks, and a senior scientist in the field of oncology , radiology Etc. Given that Dr Vinay Prasad is an oncologist epidemiologist, this topic is perfect for him .
The public needs to know that low dose ionizing radiation delivered fast( mammography) is unsuitable as a screening tool
The open airing and debate of the data is
I am urging Alex to contact me about the mammography issue that is being censored
I can put you in touch with Dr Corcos who has had his illustrious career trashed when he published his data. The paper ha# been scrubbed off the internet .i have a copy and will gladly provide it
If we’ve learned anything at all from the covid era - it’s that censorship in science is dangerous and can be lethal
Midwestern Doctor (on Substack) wrote recently on the safety of mammograms and talked about the type of radiation exposure involved... which is important. Also if pharma drugs (hormones, for example) are better safety-tested, maybe breast cancer incidence will decrease (along with the presumed need for & value mammograms). Meanwhile, I'm wondering if we will soon see a huge increase in breast cancers & in reproductive organ cancers given the cancerhuge doses of hormones necessary to transition from male to female. Secondary sexual characteristics require quite the intense doses to reverse.
I don’t know the circumstances, but I do know that many have said that VP doesn’t read any comments so he may not have been the one who blocked you directly. There may be more to the story is all I am saying.
2- I have tagged him multiple times- always respectfully asking him to read the evidence that’s been censored and share his assessment. I was always professional and open about the need for women to have all the facts .
Blocking me and ignoring the request - to what end?
I still doubt that he has ever read anything you posted. I could be wrong of course but that is my feeling from listening to him speak and reading his articles over the past four years or so.
Regarding mammograms, have you ever had thermogram for breast imaging? It’s a great tool that I recommend you explore in your own research. If its markers come back at a certain level, you’ll be referred for a mammogram. I’m not qualified to recommend you have one but I do recommend you learn about the technology and see if it might be right for your needs. My two cents as a nutrition professional and dentist, who has gone that route for the past six or seven years.
Alex, I love your work and so appreciate your perspective. Just wondering if you’ve come to these same conclusions about regular vaccines that are on the childhood schedule. Maybe I missed it and you have, but if you haven’t, I’m just wondering, why not?
Alex has consistently supported the scheduled vaccines given to infants and children, which he believes have been properly tested for both efficacy and risk. For this reason he resents being smeared with the "anti-vax" label. But there are many, many of us who are beginning to question EVERY vaccine given big pharma's record of cheating the tests and corrupting the FDA in order to be first to the market with this or that new product. I think Alex may get there soon - he's shown himself to be generally open-minded once he sees sufficient evidence to change his mind.
RFK, Jr. has become one such skeptic, and he's a very smart guy who knows the industry from the standpoint of a plaintiffs' attorney. I think we may see some surprising revelations in the next couple of years.
I've heard that some widely-prescribed drugs in use today probably could not even pass clinical trials, if new clinical trials were re-conducted in a fair and objective "level playing field" manner.
Prednisone in my mind fits that bill, Insomnia, suicidal ideation, hallucinations, irritability ,addisons disease and other kidney and adrenal malfunction, glucose spikes and metabolic syndrome inducement and probably a lot more, yet it is widely used, valued and prescribed
There is a time and a place - read appropriate use - for prednisone. I have had MS for over 40 years and it has been very helpful when I have had exacerbations, especially with resolving optic neuritis. It is appropriately used for other inflammatory conditions. There are possible side effects for every medication known to mankind - read the possible side effects for aspirin. Probable benefit vs. possible side effect - every med needs to be used appropriately.
Agreed, it is as I said widely used, valued and prescribed. It was a go to for my inflammatory condition but probably did lead to my Type 2 10 years later. I would like to see a further tweaking of some of these medications to perhaps iron out what I perceive as kinks. Preserve the benefits while making the adverse effects just memory
I've seen prednisone both work wonders and have the dangerous side-effects you describe -- both in the same individual. Any responsible doctor should use it sparingly and carefully monitor patients to whom they prescribe it.
Alex, if you have any pull in the FDA, please have stem cell treatments for spinal cord injuries put on the fast track. I’ve been to Panama once for my cervical myelopathy and damage to my spinal cord at C1 and it definitely repaired my spinal cord – not completely on the first go-around but it kept me out of a wheelchair. I needed to finance a second trip which I’m about to take and am optimistic, but my condition is degenerative. If the therapy is not approved in the near future I could face complete paralysis.
Yale and the Mayo Clinic have already verified that paralyzed people can restore some function with only one treatment – Japan approved it already based on their participation in the Yale study. There is NO FDA approved treatment for spinal cord injuries at this time but close to 20 years of positive experience overseas.
For the good of the spinal injured, please get the word out.
Was just posting on another site about how Trump allowed RFK to take the MAHA realm just how upset the status quo was and is, and this appointment drives that reality home too. At least we ALL hope it does! The Pharma-Medical-Government-Media industrial complex is still doing all it can to make sure the prior corruption of science and approval process stays in place or at least to the extent THEY are still in control! Stay above this nefarious FRAY RFK!
Spot on. In Big Pharma's mind, it's bad enough that the status quo will likely be forced to change. What's even worse is that, with any luck, people will now learn just how bad it's been for so long. Of course, the Democrat media won't be covering it, given how much of their programming is "brought to you by Pfizer, et al."
Yes well outlawing the ad revenue would be a game changer that is so necessary— isn’t the U.S. is an outlier in even allowing it…? Maybe one other nation.
I hope he wanders into the middle of the fray, wielding the axe of the berserker. The current agencies are rotted out with 'regulatory capture' and need to be purged and rebuilt.
Clinical trials are not science, they are statistics. True science would demonstrate the means by which a drug has its effect and identify all instances in which it would and would not work.
The best statistical analysis can only demonstrate that a drug works sometimes in some patients. Even a drug tested in the most “rigorous” statistical trial may be completely ineffective in entire random populations of patients.
The whole reason that pharmaceutical companies can game these trials is that they aren’t science.
I really appreciate this comment. Frankly it is appalling that doctors prescribe meds when it is not actually understood how the med “does what it does”
One ridiculously bad example is the widely prescribed drug Ezetimibe — it took that smart young PhD med student , Nick Norwitz, to rather innocently land a YouTube bombshell about what scientists did NOT know and only recently uncovered about the way our bodies react to ingested cholesterol. I was glad I never used my prescription for this drug it would have had exactly the wrong outcome for me.
BTW Nick had been naive enough to have assumed doctors knew how drugs worked!
If you read enough of the labels for these drugs you'll find that a number of them say explicitly that the mechanism of action for the drug is unknown.
In addition, the risk profiles for things like high cholesterol are also based on statistical analysis. Your doctor is prescribing you drugs essentially by referring to an actuarial chart.
It is really a lazy way of being. If you show up to the office presenting symptom X, you are automatically prescribed drug Y because the label for drug Y says it is good for symptom X. There are very few doctors these days that will actually take the time and effort to examine a patient to determine the underlying cause of disease.
It's appalling how ignorant of science most doctors are. I knew lots of them as pre-med and med students. They were focused on grades so they could eventually gain money and status. Knowledge and understanding were not even secondary, they were completely unecessary.
Uh, Clinical Trials are science if the goal is Objective Truth. The calculated trajectory of a mortar round is seldom perfectly accomplished, but the result can still be very meaningful. And the process is very scientific.
Science is not the search for objective truth. Science is a method. It begins with observation, followed by formation of a hypothesis. That hypothesis is tested through experimentation. If an experiment verifies the hypothesis it must be repeated to confirm the results. If repeated experiments confirm the hypothesis, the hypothesis may become a law.
Your example of a mortar round is not really germane. Several different mortar rounds fired from the same mortar may have different trajectories, but their flights are all governed by the same laws of physics, which were established through experimentation. If you fire identical mortar rounds from the same identical mortar under identical conditions, they will all fly identical trajectories. The fact that this doesn't happen doesn't mean there is no law of physics, it means the conditions for each firing were different.
Clinical trials on the other hand use large cohorts of individuals to attempt to show a correlation between the administration of a drug and a clinical effect. Every subject in a given trial has a unique response to either the test drug or the placebo. That being the case, the response of each individual makes no sense on its own. In fact, if you've ever seen the raw data from these trials (I have) they make absolutely no sense at all. It is only when a sufficiently large set of data is subjected to statistical manipulation that anything that looks coherent is obtained. And yes, clinical trials data is sent to a statistician to try to make sense of it.
The results obtained from the statistical analysis is an amalgamation of thousands of subjects in a trial. No one person had "a" result. Take a look at the Clinical Trials section of a package insert for one of these drugs when you get the chance. It is Section 14 of the package insert.
If a drug us touted as 70% effective against breast cancer, it doesn't mean that it cures 70% of your breast cancer, it means that 70% of the cohort in the test drug arm of a clinical trial had some measurable clinical effect, such as progression free survival for some period of time. And honestly, 70% effective is a generous, made up example. The difference between test drug and placebo is usually much more nuanced than that, and therefore susceptible to being gamed by a skilled statistician.
Alex made a valid point in his piece. If your drug actually works, you don't need a placebo controlled clinical study and a statistician to prove it.
I rest my Case, Your Honor. The star witness has sufficiently contradicted him/her/its self. We will now leave the decision in the hands of an impartial Jury! Can I bum another cigarette?
Juries do not decide on science. Neither does consensus. "Statistically Significant" which is the measure used in clinical trials does not mean causation. It means I did something X number of times, and sometimes I got an answer I liked, sometimes I got the opposite answer of what I was looking for, sometimes I got no answer at all. Call that what you want, but it isn't science.
Great news on Dr Prasad. Question...did you see the report that came out from a study done by MIT and the Florida Surgeon General? It impales Pfizer and the mRNA shot.
I am really excited about his new position. I've been following him since Covid. I credit him with keeping me sane (along with Alex and others) during that dark time. Between him, Dr. Jay and Dr. Makary I believe we can bring some trust back to healthcare.
Right there with you! I credit mainly VP, Alex, and Dr. J for keeping me sane and for their courage. I found Dr. Makary later, and think he’s excellent as well. What a team! They also have Tracy Beth Hoag, MD, who has co authored papers with VP, and was a voice of reason during the pandemic, which resulted in her losing her job at UCDavis. Fortunately she was hired by UCSF and now works at the FDA. Great group!
Generally I am in favor and definitely willing to give her a chance. It’s largely a figurehead position with not a huge amount of power although she will wield soft power that can be used for initiating movements and supporting others in HHS, and the MAHA movement which I support.
People say Joe Ladapo would have been better and on merits I agree but maybe he didn’t want the job or many other reasons.
I have a bit of concern surrounding the claims that she and her brother are sort of grifters in that they’ve inserted themselves somewhat quickly to the spotlight. I’m hoping those are false narratives.
The ENTIRE reason I voted for Trump was to fix all this shit and it seems like RFK and his merry band of renegades are up to the task!!! Sooooooooo pumped!
Never would have happened without Trump. A "regular" Republican would never have had the guts to make an RFK appointment.
. . . nor the inclination!
The day RFK, Jr. announced he was joining Team Trump, I knew Kamala and the Democrats were finished. It had long been my dream that liberals would wake up and smell the coffee. President Trump is actually far more progressive than the neo-libs and neocons in charge of the Democrat Party. He's also more inclusive, more empathetic, more peaceful, and more open to dialogue than the leftists who run DSA (Democratic Socialists for America) and 50501. But people persist in believing media labels rather than seeking the truth themselves, and that's a pity.
We should include the Republican establishment in the same basket of deplorables as the Democrat Party establishment.
Awesome news! Dr. Prasad's followers have all been waiting for this!
Yes, this is great news. I'd like to add that a critical component is to ask WHY they need so many drugs approved and approved quickly. Of course covering costs and profit is a motive, but why is it so critical that they get approval in the US? Because much or ALL of the development costs of drugs is covered by the US since there is an almost entirely socialized market in the rest of the world. So the patient percentage of the around 350 million people in the US have to cover the development for 8 billion people. Instead of the cost being spread around 100% of the world, it is covered by 4% of the world - us. Like subsidizing defense around the world, we subsidize medicine to the detriment of care here which also increases the costs dramatically. The drug makes need 25 times the profit in the US to cover the cost. (I will say a more modern "Star Wars" defense shield the shields us and could also shield the world would be money well spent given the insanity of some places with nuclear weapons, e.g. Pakistan).
And this comment above reflects what Trump did in his EO, essentially MFN for drugs: "'The Pharmaceutical/Drug Companies would say, for years, that it was Research and Development Costs, and that all of these costs were, and would be, for no reason whatsoever, borne by the “suckers” of America, ALONE.'"
Yes. They know and knew and are attempting to do something about it finally. Stop subsidizing socialized medicine the world over.
We absolutely have!!!
I followed Dr Prasad on X up until he blocked me
Now I have grave concerns about the appointment of Vinay Prasad to head Biologics / vaccines
He is smart and prolific and very opinionated
He is arrogant - so much so that we need a new word to describe him
He blocked me on X .I have been trying to get him to respond to censored evidence on the risk of mammograms.i am respectful and polite.rather than respond he simply blocked me
I am trying to set up an open discussion between the Senior MD PhD scientist Dr Daniel Corcos ( French) who has ha$ his long unblemished career destroyed for publishing data about mammography risks, and a senior scientist in the field of oncology , radiology Etc. Given that Dr Vinay Prasad is an oncologist epidemiologist, this topic is perfect for him .
The public needs to know that low dose ionizing radiation delivered fast( mammography) is unsuitable as a screening tool
The open airing and debate of the data is
I am urging Alex to contact me about the mammography issue that is being censored
I can put you in touch with Dr Corcos who has had his illustrious career trashed when he published his data. The paper ha# been scrubbed off the internet .i have a copy and will gladly provide it
If we’ve learned anything at all from the covid era - it’s that censorship in science is dangerous and can be lethal
What’s happened here is out of the Covid playbook
Midwestern Doctor (on Substack) wrote recently on the safety of mammograms and talked about the type of radiation exposure involved... which is important. Also if pharma drugs (hormones, for example) are better safety-tested, maybe breast cancer incidence will decrease (along with the presumed need for & value mammograms). Meanwhile, I'm wondering if we will soon see a huge increase in breast cancers & in reproductive organ cancers given the cancerhuge doses of hormones necessary to transition from male to female. Secondary sexual characteristics require quite the intense doses to reverse.
I don’t know the circumstances, but I do know that many have said that VP doesn’t read any comments so he may not have been the one who blocked you directly. There may be more to the story is all I am saying.
1- He’s responsible for his account
2- I have tagged him multiple times- always respectfully asking him to read the evidence that’s been censored and share his assessment. I was always professional and open about the need for women to have all the facts .
Blocking me and ignoring the request - to what end?
I still doubt that he has ever read anything you posted. I could be wrong of course but that is my feeling from listening to him speak and reading his articles over the past four years or so.
Regarding mammograms, have you ever had thermogram for breast imaging? It’s a great tool that I recommend you explore in your own research. If its markers come back at a certain level, you’ll be referred for a mammogram. I’m not qualified to recommend you have one but I do recommend you learn about the technology and see if it might be right for your needs. My two cents as a nutrition professional and dentist, who has gone that route for the past six or seven years.
I’m familiar with thermography.
It’s useful in conjunction with physical exams and sonography.
Unfortunately it’s rarely a covered service and few technicians who do it. I just heard from one that she can no longer afford to stay in business
This is great news. Love Vinay Prasad.
"make sure new drugs actually work"
That's very important, but it's even more important to make sure ALL existing drugs "work"
Alex, I love your work and so appreciate your perspective. Just wondering if you’ve come to these same conclusions about regular vaccines that are on the childhood schedule. Maybe I missed it and you have, but if you haven’t, I’m just wondering, why not?
Alex has consistently supported the scheduled vaccines given to infants and children, which he believes have been properly tested for both efficacy and risk. For this reason he resents being smeared with the "anti-vax" label. But there are many, many of us who are beginning to question EVERY vaccine given big pharma's record of cheating the tests and corrupting the FDA in order to be first to the market with this or that new product. I think Alex may get there soon - he's shown himself to be generally open-minded once he sees sufficient evidence to change his mind.
RFK, Jr. has become one such skeptic, and he's a very smart guy who knows the industry from the standpoint of a plaintiffs' attorney. I think we may see some surprising revelations in the next couple of years.
I've heard that some widely-prescribed drugs in use today probably could not even pass clinical trials, if new clinical trials were re-conducted in a fair and objective "level playing field" manner.
Its WAY worse than most know, and has been literally ALLOWED to be so for many decades
Prednisone in my mind fits that bill, Insomnia, suicidal ideation, hallucinations, irritability ,addisons disease and other kidney and adrenal malfunction, glucose spikes and metabolic syndrome inducement and probably a lot more, yet it is widely used, valued and prescribed
There is a time and a place - read appropriate use - for prednisone. I have had MS for over 40 years and it has been very helpful when I have had exacerbations, especially with resolving optic neuritis. It is appropriately used for other inflammatory conditions. There are possible side effects for every medication known to mankind - read the possible side effects for aspirin. Probable benefit vs. possible side effect - every med needs to be used appropriately.
Agreed, it is as I said widely used, valued and prescribed. It was a go to for my inflammatory condition but probably did lead to my Type 2 10 years later. I would like to see a further tweaking of some of these medications to perhaps iron out what I perceive as kinks. Preserve the benefits while making the adverse effects just memory
I've seen prednisone both work wonders and have the dangerous side-effects you describe -- both in the same individual. Any responsible doctor should use it sparingly and carefully monitor patients to whom they prescribe it.
Dr. Prasad will be a game changer. RFK Jr has shown he is genuinely looking to make America healthy again!!!!
Alex, if you have any pull in the FDA, please have stem cell treatments for spinal cord injuries put on the fast track. I’ve been to Panama once for my cervical myelopathy and damage to my spinal cord at C1 and it definitely repaired my spinal cord – not completely on the first go-around but it kept me out of a wheelchair. I needed to finance a second trip which I’m about to take and am optimistic, but my condition is degenerative. If the therapy is not approved in the near future I could face complete paralysis.
Yale and the Mayo Clinic have already verified that paralyzed people can restore some function with only one treatment – Japan approved it already based on their participation in the Yale study. There is NO FDA approved treatment for spinal cord injuries at this time but close to 20 years of positive experience overseas.
For the good of the spinal injured, please get the word out.
The stem cells need to be uncontaminated from the MRNA jabs- especially from Coronavirus-
True. The same can be said of the blood supply. But blood transfusions are still needed, and stem cell therapy is still needed.
The FDA is responsible for a clean blood supply; that is their responsibility as well with stem cells.
RFKjr is kicking ass!!!
Was just posting on another site about how Trump allowed RFK to take the MAHA realm just how upset the status quo was and is, and this appointment drives that reality home too. At least we ALL hope it does! The Pharma-Medical-Government-Media industrial complex is still doing all it can to make sure the prior corruption of science and approval process stays in place or at least to the extent THEY are still in control! Stay above this nefarious FRAY RFK!
Spot on. In Big Pharma's mind, it's bad enough that the status quo will likely be forced to change. What's even worse is that, with any luck, people will now learn just how bad it's been for so long. Of course, the Democrat media won't be covering it, given how much of their programming is "brought to you by Pfizer, et al."
Yes well outlawing the ad revenue would be a game changer that is so necessary— isn’t the U.S. is an outlier in even allowing it…? Maybe one other nation.
I (almost) pity the poor MSM journo who attempts an uniformed and/or hostile interview with Dr Prasad😂
Would be fun to watch, though!
I hope he wanders into the middle of the fray, wielding the axe of the berserker. The current agencies are rotted out with 'regulatory capture' and need to be purged and rebuilt.
This is fantastic!!!!! Love Dr. Prasad!
Clinical trials are not science, they are statistics. True science would demonstrate the means by which a drug has its effect and identify all instances in which it would and would not work.
The best statistical analysis can only demonstrate that a drug works sometimes in some patients. Even a drug tested in the most “rigorous” statistical trial may be completely ineffective in entire random populations of patients.
The whole reason that pharmaceutical companies can game these trials is that they aren’t science.
I really appreciate this comment. Frankly it is appalling that doctors prescribe meds when it is not actually understood how the med “does what it does”
One ridiculously bad example is the widely prescribed drug Ezetimibe — it took that smart young PhD med student , Nick Norwitz, to rather innocently land a YouTube bombshell about what scientists did NOT know and only recently uncovered about the way our bodies react to ingested cholesterol. I was glad I never used my prescription for this drug it would have had exactly the wrong outcome for me.
BTW Nick had been naive enough to have assumed doctors knew how drugs worked!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q00wHV2tcy4&pp=0gcJCYUJAYcqIYzv
If you read enough of the labels for these drugs you'll find that a number of them say explicitly that the mechanism of action for the drug is unknown.
In addition, the risk profiles for things like high cholesterol are also based on statistical analysis. Your doctor is prescribing you drugs essentially by referring to an actuarial chart.
It is really a lazy way of being. If you show up to the office presenting symptom X, you are automatically prescribed drug Y because the label for drug Y says it is good for symptom X. There are very few doctors these days that will actually take the time and effort to examine a patient to determine the underlying cause of disease.
See also: osteoporosis drugs that I (also) refused to take😁
It's appalling how ignorant of science most doctors are. I knew lots of them as pre-med and med students. They were focused on grades so they could eventually gain money and status. Knowledge and understanding were not even secondary, they were completely unecessary.
Uh, Clinical Trials are science if the goal is Objective Truth. The calculated trajectory of a mortar round is seldom perfectly accomplished, but the result can still be very meaningful. And the process is very scientific.
Science is not the search for objective truth. Science is a method. It begins with observation, followed by formation of a hypothesis. That hypothesis is tested through experimentation. If an experiment verifies the hypothesis it must be repeated to confirm the results. If repeated experiments confirm the hypothesis, the hypothesis may become a law.
Your example of a mortar round is not really germane. Several different mortar rounds fired from the same mortar may have different trajectories, but their flights are all governed by the same laws of physics, which were established through experimentation. If you fire identical mortar rounds from the same identical mortar under identical conditions, they will all fly identical trajectories. The fact that this doesn't happen doesn't mean there is no law of physics, it means the conditions for each firing were different.
Clinical trials on the other hand use large cohorts of individuals to attempt to show a correlation between the administration of a drug and a clinical effect. Every subject in a given trial has a unique response to either the test drug or the placebo. That being the case, the response of each individual makes no sense on its own. In fact, if you've ever seen the raw data from these trials (I have) they make absolutely no sense at all. It is only when a sufficiently large set of data is subjected to statistical manipulation that anything that looks coherent is obtained. And yes, clinical trials data is sent to a statistician to try to make sense of it.
The results obtained from the statistical analysis is an amalgamation of thousands of subjects in a trial. No one person had "a" result. Take a look at the Clinical Trials section of a package insert for one of these drugs when you get the chance. It is Section 14 of the package insert.
If a drug us touted as 70% effective against breast cancer, it doesn't mean that it cures 70% of your breast cancer, it means that 70% of the cohort in the test drug arm of a clinical trial had some measurable clinical effect, such as progression free survival for some period of time. And honestly, 70% effective is a generous, made up example. The difference between test drug and placebo is usually much more nuanced than that, and therefore susceptible to being gamed by a skilled statistician.
Alex made a valid point in his piece. If your drug actually works, you don't need a placebo controlled clinical study and a statistician to prove it.
I rest my Case, Your Honor. The star witness has sufficiently contradicted him/her/its self. We will now leave the decision in the hands of an impartial Jury! Can I bum another cigarette?
You can take that as, "It is up to the Jury." Thank them.
Juries do not decide on science. Neither does consensus. "Statistically Significant" which is the measure used in clinical trials does not mean causation. It means I did something X number of times, and sometimes I got an answer I liked, sometimes I got the opposite answer of what I was looking for, sometimes I got no answer at all. Call that what you want, but it isn't science.
I'll take that as a "no mas." You're welcome.
This is good news. The whole industry is so murky.
Great news on Dr Prasad. Question...did you see the report that came out from a study done by MIT and the Florida Surgeon General? It impales Pfizer and the mRNA shot.
Have a link to that Tom?
https://substack.com/@stevekirsch/p-162544100
Thank you!
I am really excited about his new position. I've been following him since Covid. I credit him with keeping me sane (along with Alex and others) during that dark time. Between him, Dr. Jay and Dr. Makary I believe we can bring some trust back to healthcare.
Right there with you! I credit mainly VP, Alex, and Dr. J for keeping me sane and for their courage. I found Dr. Makary later, and think he’s excellent as well. What a team! They also have Tracy Beth Hoag, MD, who has co authored papers with VP, and was a voice of reason during the pandemic, which resulted in her losing her job at UCDavis. Fortunately she was hired by UCSF and now works at the FDA. Great group!
What do you think about Means appointed to Surgeon General?
Generally I am in favor and definitely willing to give her a chance. It’s largely a figurehead position with not a huge amount of power although she will wield soft power that can be used for initiating movements and supporting others in HHS, and the MAHA movement which I support.
People say Joe Ladapo would have been better and on merits I agree but maybe he didn’t want the job or many other reasons.
I have a bit of concern surrounding the claims that she and her brother are sort of grifters in that they’ve inserted themselves somewhat quickly to the spotlight. I’m hoping those are false narratives.