Remember This When the FDA Signs Off on Uncle Vlad's Magic Wizard Oil Just in Time for the Election

[Nevilledog]

I will remember this story when the administration announces the arrival of a shipment of Uncle Vlad’s Wizard Oil right in time for the election. From Bloomberg:

On Sunday night at a press conference with President Donald Trump, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said that blood plasma from Covid-19 survivors given to new patients could save huge numbers of lives. “What that means is -- and if the data continue to pan out -- 100 people who are sick with Covid-19, 35 would have been saved because of the administration of plasma,” Hahn said. Hahn’s remarks followed similar comments by Trump, who said that the therapy is “proven to reduce mortality by 35%,” and by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.
Great! Wait. What?

On Monday night, Hahn reversed himself.

“I have been criticized for remarks I made Sunday night about the benefits of convalescent plasma. The criticism is entirely justified,” Hahn said in a tweet. He went on CBS on Tuesday morning to continue walking back the claim, telling the network that “I could have done a better job of explaining that at the press conference.”...

In another interview, with Reuters, Hahn said he had seen no evidence that anyone at the FDA was working against Trump. “I have not seen anything that I would consider to be ‘deep state’ at the FDA,” Hahn said to Reuters.

How did Hahn go back to work on Tuesday? He pretty much admitted that he buckled under pressure on Sunday, and that he knows that the President* of the United States knuckled him and his agency into joining an anti-science performance piece concocted for purely political reasons. He has to know that this will happen again and again until, finally, the FDA may be asked to put its endorsement on a potion brewed up over in Russia at the behest of the most famous international poisoner since Locusta. And thus will Nero meet Vladimir Putin for the purposes of re-electing the president*. At least that’s the way I‘m betting.

*nothing further at link*

[The Magistrate]

1. The Error, Ma'am, Is Fantastic in Scale

Leaving aside that the figure is based on results from a particular subgroup of the study, the difference was an eleven percent rate of fatality in the group receiving the plasma within three days of diagnosis, versus fourteen percent among the group who received the plasma later. Thus, the number of deaths in the former group was about one third less than among the latter, but as a percentage of the total treated with the serum, early use resulted in perhaps three fewer deaths per hundred than later use, or a three percent improvement in the overall survival rate. That the man actually stood there and agreed the study showed that out of a hundred treated, thirty five fewer would die is flat unforgivable.

[crickets]

2. K&R for the post and the discussion.

[dalton99a]

3. Hahn is probably the most useless FDA commissioner in U.S. history