Dr. Harvey Risch's presentation at the C19 minisymposium session, November 7 2021

Hydroxychloroquine and Other Outpatient Treatments for Covid-19, with Critique of Epidemiologic Methods

Abstract: To most academics and clinicians, the field of epidemiology seems like a no-brainer--you just get some cases and controls, run some regression models if you are a quant, and see what's different. Is there really any science there? Epidemiology is indeed a science but what is scientific about it per se is subtle. The crucial scientific aspect about epidemiology is representativeness: that the patients are generalizable to the disease as a whole, the controls are generalizable to the population of relevance, the exposure measures accurately reflect what the subjects really experienced, and the exposure association is not reflective of some other reason why an association is present. Epidemiologists agonize over these issues in terms of bias and confounding, as well as misrepresentation of studies, cherry picking and other more general corruptions of the scientific method. In this talk, I will discuss how non-scientific factors created aberration of knowledge greater than the scientific evidence itself, and show what the evidence for early treatment really does show.

References:
H.A. Risch. "Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High-Risk Covid-19 Patients that Should be Ramped-Up Immediately as Key to the Pandemic Crisis", American Journal of Epidemiology 189 (2020), 1218-1226
https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwaa093
H.A. Risch. "Hydroxychloroquine in Early Treatment of High-Risk COVID-19 Outpatients: Efficacy and Safety Evidence." Sixth version, updated June 17, 2021.
https://earlycovidcare.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Evidence-Brief-Risch-v6.pdf

Presented at the "Efficacy and safety statistics of COVID-19 treatment and prophylaxis protocols" minisymposium session at the 4th Annual Meeting of the SIAM Texas-Louisiana Section on November 7, 2021. This presentation does not necessarily represent the opinions or policies of the presenter's institution or SIAM, but it is protected under Academic Freedom in Research and the 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution.