Virtual visits

One of the myriad ways that Covid-19 has changed our lives is the explosion in “telemedicine.” As hospitals, clinics and doctors’ offices shut down for non-critical illness visits, many shifted quickly to the use of “virtual” visits: visits done by connecting patients to their doctors and nurses via computer. While this has been done on a small scale for several years, most insurance plans had limited coverage for virtual visits, a major stumbling block to having them widely used in a revenue-driven fee for service environment. Medicare and most commercial insurers rapidly offered to cover these visits as the pandemic unfolded, and their use expanded 100-fold during the spring and summer.

Somewhat to their surprise, most patients found virtual visits to be satisfactory. It is obvious that for mental health visits, just as much can be done via remote communication as in person. Neither psychiatrists nor other mental health professionals normally do anything other than talk or listen. For other types of care, a virtual visit can be less than ideal. A good quality smart phone can allow the doctor to see a rash, but not to listen to the heart and lungs or feel an abdomen. As I noted in a prior post, the large majority of the information needed to make a diagnosis comes from a patient’s history – and this is done as well virtually as in person.

Advantages that have turned many patients into supporters of virtual visits include convenience and cost. Rarely does a patient with a 10 AM visit get seen at 10 – and cooling your heels in a waiting room is not high on most of our lists of favorite things to do. In-person visits also involve driving and parking (or taking public transportation), which add considerable time and often expense to the visit.

Doctors who were skeptics have widely come to accept this type of visit as well – having a patient seen conveniently and comfortably makes for a happier patient.

Are virtual visits for everyone? Almost certainly not. Specialties in which most of the data can be conveyed verbally will certainly continue to do this type of visit much more than those requiring high touch. A follow-up visit for diabetes revolves around reviewing test results and symptoms and is an easy one to do virtually. A visit for congestive heart failure requires much more physical examination and would be much harder to conduct via teleconferencing.

Another problem is access. Recent surveys found that 13% of the population, some 42 million people, do not have high speed internet access. Beyond that, many people do not have the technical skills to feel comfortable doing virtual visits, and these people are predominantly elderly and/or from minority communities that are already underserved. 25-30% of Medicare recipients and people with household incomes below $30,000/year lack both smart phones and high-speed Internet. An alternative for these people is the good old-fashioned telephone. This loses the ability to see facial expressions and other visual clues, but still allows for two-way communication “in real time,” which email does not provide.

Clearly virtual visits, no matter how high-tech, cannot (and should not) replace all in-person visits. Along with the inability to do more than a rudimentary physical exam, at a virtual visit one cannot give vaccinations or do procedures. Lab tests may be needed and require an in-person visit somewhere.

Our forced conversion to virtual visits in these uncertain times has, however, shown us that this is often a valuable addition to the medical care armamentarium. I think it is here to stay.


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Public health: what is it? Why should I care about it?

Clinical medicine is very much a one-on-one interaction. A doctor will sit with a patient to make a diagnosis and/or discuss treatment. A nurse will sit with a patient with newly diagnosed diabetes and teach them how to manage their insulin. Even very complex medical interactions such as major surgery may involve multiple professionals but only one patient. Very rarely in clinical medicine is the health of the broad community considered. Public health comes at health problems from the opposite perspective: the health of populations: local, national or world-wide.

John Snow, M.D. (1813--1858), a legendary figure in epidemiology, provided one of the earliest examples of using epidemiologic methods to identify risk for disease and recommend preventive action. Snow had an interest in cholera and supported the unpopular theory that cholera was transmitted by water rather than through “miasma” (i.e., bad air).

On August 31, 1854, London experienced a recurrent epidemic of cholera; Snow suspected water from the Broad Street pump as the source of disease. To test his theory, Snow reviewed death records of area residents who died from cholera and interviewed household members, documenting that most deceased persons had lived near and had drunk water from the pump. Snow presented his findings to community leaders, and the pump handle was removed on September 8, 1854. Removal of the handle prevented additional cholera deaths, supporting Snow's theory that cholera was a waterborne, contagious disease. This became a model for modern epidemiology.

Because communities, rather than individuals, benefit from public health, it must be taxpayer-supported, and this is its Achilles heel. Whether you believe, as I do, that medical care is a basic human right, or that it is just another service that people should be prepared to pay for, needed medical services are usually provided and charged for. Those without or with poor insurance may be bankrupted, but they usually get the services they need. As a taxpayer-funded activity, public health must compete with myriad other demands for public funds, and since its successes are usually invisible, it does not have the same constituent pressure that do police, fire or public works.

At the local level, public health staff work to make sure restaurants are serving sanitary food; unless you have suffered from a food-borne illness caught at a restaurant, the need for this surveillance is probably not high on your radar. The very success of disease prevention makes it less visible. At the national and international level, public health agencies should protect us from major disease outbreaks such a Covid-19, or at least limit the damage. Again, since pandemics are thankfully rare events, it is easy for governments to cut the funding of public health agencies without much pushback from the citizenry.

A huge problem at the national level is the conflict between politics and science. We saw this early on in China, when Wuhan authorities tried to hide the emergence of the novel coronavirus. We saw it in spades in the United States when the warnings of the lead scientists at the renowned CDC (Communicable Disease Center) were ignored by Trump and his administration because their advice to slow down economic activity did not fit with his desire for a booming economy. We saw it in the wholesale rewriting of various CDC guidelines when they did not fit the narrative that Trump wanted to present.

The United States should have been among the countries best prepared to deal with Covid-19: our hospitals are first rate, our financial resources are more than adequate, and we have the world’s leading agency in dealing with disease outbreaks. We did not have adequate stockpiles of things like ventilators and personal protective equipment, because carrying rarely used inventory was bad for a hospital’s “bottom line,” and because other needs for public funds were given higher priority. What we also lacked, and still lack, is public trust in the government, a factor made worse by the actions of Trump and his enablers.

Countries such as Taiwan, Korea and Canada, all of which have performed much better than did we, had credible spokespeople, a consistent message, and a public inclined to listen. We thus find ourselves with 4% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s Covid-19 cases and are among the top 10 in per capita deaths. Covid-19 will eventually be tamed, through some combination of vaccines, better treatments and eventual “herd immunity.” Unfortunately, the next pandemic is almost certainly brewing in some animal species, ready to make the jump to humans. NOW is the time to ensure that we do better next time. Public health must be adequately funded, and scientists must be allowed to have a leading voice (though not the only voice) in making public health policy.


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The Physical Exam: The next dodo?

Most experts who have looked at the relative value of the medical history, the physical examination and the findings of laboratory tests and imaging studies have come to the same broad conclusion. The medical history is by far the most important contributor to an accurate diagnosis; some 60 to 80% of the time, the history alone leads to the correct diagnosis. The physical exam generally contributes 12-20% of the needed information and laboratory/imaging results 10-20%. Both the physical exam and test results do increase practitioners’ confidence level that their diagnosis is correct.

You would thus expect that physicians would spend a lot of time taking a careful history and devote roughly equal time to doing a comprehensive physical exam and ordering and reviewing lab tests.

Alas, over the last few years my observations while accompanying friends and family members to medical appointments has been just the opposite. History taking is brief and appears to be largely devoted to “checking off” items such as smoking history and medications that are needed to complete the electronic chart. When patients start to tell their stories, the doctor typically interrupts in less than a minute.

As to the physical exam, it is charitable to call most I have witnessed cursory. Well-defined problems do not need a complete physical exam; if you are complaining of a sore throat, the doctor generally needs only check the inside of your mouth and your neck. Less well-defined problems such as weight loss or fatigue may need a classic head-to-toe exam. Even seemingly localized problems may need more than the obvious. Could your sore throat be mono? If so, checking for an enlarged spleen may be very useful.

You would expect hospital admission, reserved for the sickest patients, to require a thorough physical exam, as it was “in the old days.” What seems to pass for a complete physical these days seems to be listening to the heart and lungs and quickly feeling the upper abdomen. Rarely if ever do admitting doctors check the head and neck, and almost never is a breast or rectal exam done.

Instead the focus is on testing: “routine” blood work that gives little information and advanced imaging. The head echocardiography technician at a hospital where I worked once joked to me that the main reason residents ordered echocardiograms was that “the patient has a heart.” When ordered to follow up on a suspected diagnosis, imaging can be very useful; when ordered in a shotgun manner, it is equally likely to produce confusion and misinformation.

Patients, too, place more faith in CT scans and MRIs than in a good “H+P” (history and physical). That faith can be misplaced. Take back pain as a good example. Most people over 40 and almost everyone over 60 will have some abnormality when imaging is done of the spine. This includes people who have never had a backache in their life. All-too-often I have seen patients with muscular or arthritic back pain taken to surgery to fix an abnormality seen on a CT scan, and of course they were not benefitted in the least. A good H+P should strongly suggest the likelihood of a surgically curable source of back pain, and imaging can then confirm it, but the surgeon “who will not see me without a CT scan” is practicing poor quality medicine.

Worried about too much X-ray exposure? A recent study found that if you go to the Emergency Department with pain in your left lower abdomen, a simple combination of findings (absence of vomiting, presence of a fever and tenderness when the doctor presses on your abdomen that is only found in the lower left portion) makes a diagnosis of diverticulitis so accurately that a CT scan is not needed unless the doctor is worried about complications.

Let us not let the clinical exam, and in particular the physical, follow the dodo into extinction. Good history-taking skills and physical exam skills must be taught, and their use rewarded. We will see better results and lower costs.

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Fauci and Galileo

On April 12, 1633, the chief inquisitor appointed by Pope Urban VIII began the inquisition of physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei. Galileo was ordered to turn himself in to the Holy Office to begin trial for holding the belief that the Earth revolves around the sun, which was deemed heretical by the Catholic Church. The Church had decided that the idea that the sun moved around the earth was an absolute fact of scripture that could not be disputed, even though scientists had known for centuries that the Earth was not the center of the universe. On June 22, 1633, the Church handed down the following order: “We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo… have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, that is, of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the center of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world.” Galileo agreed not to teach the heresy anymore and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. It took more than 300 years for the Church to admit that Galileo was right and to clear his name of heresy.

Almost 400 years later, are we any better? Any smarter? Or is science still subservient to faith?

Science should be a powerful and positive force in society; it shapes the present, and it can guide our future. Politicians and policy makers should rely on validated research at critical moments of crises and emergencies to help guide their actions. Instead, what we have seen since the start of the Covid-19 crisis is shockingly close to Galileo’s treatment by the Catholic Church of the 17th Century.

By late February, many scientists were predicting hundreds of thousands of American deaths if strong measures were not taken but they were drowned out by Trump’s insistence that the virus would “disappear” mysteriously. The mainstream media deserves condemnation by reporting the fantasies of politicians as having equal weight to the opinions of epidemiologists. Highly opinionated politicians had their rhetoric amplified by social media. Wearing a mask to slow the spread of the virus has become a political stance instead of a scientifically proven way to protect others (and ourselves).

More recently, we have had the spectacle of CDC guidance about testing people exposed to the virus but without symptoms removed (and later restored) because Trump did not want numbers to look bad. This was done despite overwhelming evidence that asymptomatic carriers were a major source of spread. Guidance on how to safely open schools was redacted and edited to push for more school openings regardless of health consequences. The FDA gave “emergency use” approval of hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 based largely on rantings by Trump and Peter Navarro, an economist by training, who insisted he knew more about the science than medical scientists. This was, again, removed when studies showed the drug did no good and might do harm.

The latest blurring of science and faith came when the CDC posted information about respiratory spread of the coronavirus, only to remove the post a day later – clearly because the information in the post did not gibe with large indoor rallies or rapid reopening of all businesses.

Case reporting was taken away from the CDC so that the numbers could be massaged to look better. Most recently we have had Alex Azar, the Secretary of HEW, insisting that he alone could sign off on any new rules, regardless of the opinions of the career scientists who were much more qualified to do this.

Anthony Fauci, America’s most esteemed virologist, who refused to kowtow to every Trump pronouncement, has been subjected to harassment and character assassination by Trump and by his right-wing media enablers.

Science does not have all the answers. Some decisions are inherently political. A 55 MPH national speed limit would probably cut deaths and would cut some greenhouse gases, but it would be widely flouted and may not be politically acceptable. Similarly, a total economic shutdown might be estimated to potentially save X deaths over the rest of the year but might be economically intolerable. What should happen is that politicians take advice from scientists, weigh the competing factors, and decide what is best for the country.

What, alas, is happening is that politicians ignore scientists and make decisions based on what they think will help them be re-elected. Vote for science. The life you save may be your own.

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Coronavirus vaccines: ready for prime time?

When will we have a vaccine? Can life get back to normal when we have a vaccine? Questions like this have been in the news almost daily. The underlying questions of most interest to the public can be expressed as “when will a safe and effective vaccine be available to me and my family?” and “will the availability of a vaccine allow normal life to resume?”

Vaccine availability will not fail for lack of trying! Vaccine development is usually a back-page issue, and not a high priority to the pharmaceutical industry because profits from sale of vaccines lag well behind those of most pharmaceutical products. With the world’s attention so focused, we now have 38 vaccines against Covid-19 in clinical trials in humans and another 90+ that are in animal trials.

If you are a regular reader of these posts, you know that I consider vaccines to be the most important public health development in medical history. Prevention is always better than treatment, and vaccines have saved many millions of lives over the 225 years since Jenner’s first experiment.

What may be confusing to many is the different approaches that different researchers and companies are taking to making vaccines. Traditionally, vaccination has taken one of two forms: give people a mild illness that is close enough to a serious one that they build up their immunity to the serious one – Jenner’s approach in 1796 – or inject people with killed virus or virus particles that also lead to an immune response without getting sick – the standard approach with influenza vaccines. A major problem with the latter approach is that it is very slow, growing virus in egg cultures before destroying the virus and using it to make vaccines.

Current vaccination research is much more “cutting edge.” Genetic engineering techniques are being used; “viral vectors” are being tested: putting bits of Covid-19 RNA into harmless adenoviruses which infect human cells and produce an antibody response; getting various Covid proteins, including the spike protein, into such vectors. The many approaches taken reflect our inability to know which is most likely to work (as well as companies’ need to have their own unique product!).

As to the “when,” the issue is not developing a candidate but proving that it is both effective and safe. An effective vaccine not only results in recipients developing antibodies, which is easy to measure, but prevents disease in exposed individuals, which is much harder. There is still much we do not know about the body’s response to Covid-19; a clear worry is that people can get repeated colds, many of which are caused by other coronaviruses, so it is not clear that exposure always results in immunity. In my practice, I observed that first or second year teachers seemed to be sick all winter, but that veteran teachers rarely got colds. Perhaps we need repeated exposures to coronaviruses before our immune system can fight them off?

While vaccines in general are very safe (please don’t get me started on the “anti-vax” movement!), vaccines developed and deployed too quickly have been problematic. This can reflect poor manufacturing practices: in the 1950’s a polio vaccine manufactured by Cutter Labs intended to contain inactivated polio virus mistakenly had some batches with live virus.

In the late 1990’s the FDA halted use of a vaccine against rotavirus, a potentially fatal diarrheal illness of children, when it appeared to cause bowel obstruction, and it was eight years before a safe rotavirus vaccine was approved. The complication was rare, and so was only found after the vaccine was in widespread use.

Rushing a vaccine into use is a serious risk. Faced with predictions of a swine flu pandemic in 1976, President Ford launched a huge effort to develop and distribute a vaccine against swine flu, but the flu was less serious than predicted and some 450 people who got the vaccine developed a rare form of paralysis.

How do you develop and test a vaccine to be sure it is both effective and safe? You do not cut corners!

The first step is testing in laboratories, first in cells and then in animals. Initial human testing, Phase 1, is done in small numbers of healthy volunteers to be sure the vaccine results in an immune response and does not have obvious safety issues. In larger, Phase 2 trials, the vaccine is given to hundreds of people, generally including both children, young adults and the elderly, to see if it acts differently in different groups and to watch for obvious safety issues. If these small samples do not raise any concerns, the vaccine moves into Phase 3, in which thousands of volunteers are given either the vaccine or a placebo. These trials must show that many fewer people receiving the vaccine get sick than do those given placebo. They are also watched carefully for any less common side effects that did not appear in the early phase trials.

Only when the results of Phase 3 trials show that a vaccine is both effective and safe should it be approved. The vaccines developed in China and Russia that were rushed into production without results of Phase 3 trials may have serious risks and/or may not work.

My big worry is that a beleaguered FDA, which we have already seen respond to political pressure and approve hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 only to later rescind that approval, will bow to political pressure and approve a coronavirus vaccine before Phase 3 trials have been completed. Hopefully the manufacturers, wary of lawsuits, will be the regulating force that our regulators should be.

A truly effective and safe Covid-19 vaccine is badly needed and will be welcomed, but “warp speed” is better left to the ships of Star Trek than to public health.

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What is the truth about marijuana?

Other than alcohol, marijuana (cannabis) is the most commonly used drug in the United States. Some 39 million Americans, 12% of the population, use marijuana at least occasionally. While clearly more commonly used by adolescents and young adults, in 2018 4% of adults over 65 admitted to using it within the prior 30 days.

In the United States, the use and possession of marijuana is illegal under federal law for any purpose, by way of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. Under the CSA, cannabis is classified as a “Schedule I” substance, right up there with heroin and methamphetamine, determined to have a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use – thereby prohibiting even medical use of the drug. At the state level, however, policies regarding the use of cannabis vary greatly, and in many states conflict significantly with federal law. As of 2020, medical use of marijuana is legal in 33 states and the District of Columbia, and recreational use is legal in 11 more states.

What are the benefits of marijuana? What are the harms? To a large degree, we simply do not know. Marijuana is not a single substance; the plant contains at least 500 chemical substances. The best known and studied are cannabidiol (CBD) which I wrote on recently and delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). It is THC that has the CNS (brain) effects. Because of the federal classification of cannabis, much less research has been done than should be, and much of what you read is low quality. Many of the reputed benefits and harms arise from studying people who admit or deny use. Since use was until recently a criminal offense, self-reporting is likely to be unreliable. There is also the confounding factor of whether people who do or do not use marijuana are otherwise the same. Many of the studies claiming adverse effects on intellect are of this variety and not necessarily valid.

Another confounding factor is that the THC content of marijuana, at least that seized by the DEA, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, has been going steadily and dramatically higher. In 1995, the average concentration of THC in seized products was 4%; in 2014 it was 12% - this is not the pot of the 1960’s!

The human brain has cannabinoid receptors, which mediate the psychoactive effects of cannabis. There are other receptors in immune cells and other tissues that may be more targeted by CBD. Acutely, the effect of THC is the “high:” euphoria, relaxation, altered sensations – and also: decreased processing speed, attention and reality testing. “Tolerance” develops quickly as the receptors are down regulated, so that daily use results in much less response.

Proven benefits of THC are limited. It has some benefit in preventing chemotherapy-related nausea and improves the appetite in many people with wasting disease such as AIDS. While it has been “approved” for pain relief in states where medical marijuana is legal, its benefits beyond those of prescription and OTC pain relievers are modest.

The headlines were dominated in August by a statement from the American Heart Association which stated that cannabis had no cardiovascular benefits but did have adverse CV effects, including arrhythmias and heart attacks. Critics noted that most of the adverse effects were anecdotes and case reports.

Inhaled marijuana products can have the same adverse effects as smoking any product. Before Covid-19, when vaping-relating lung disease was our biggest public health concern, it appeared that vaping cannabis products was particularly dangerous.

Bottom line? Cannabis is not a miracle drug. It is probably no worse than alcohol. (I have never heard of an angry belligerent pot user.) It can clearly impair your ability to safely drive or operate machinery. If you feel it helps your migraine or other painful condition, use it, but use it cautiously, as it is habit-forming.

Until we know more about its effects on the developing brain, I would actively discourage use by adolescents, as I do for alcohol.

More quality scientific study is needed and would be encouraged by moving cannabis out of Schedule I by the DEA.

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Lies, damn lies and statistics

This was going to be a post about THC, but the recent dust-up over the FDA’s emergency approval of convalescent plasma to treat Covid-19 has encouraged me to deal with this subject as a more pressing topic. We are going to discuss the use of statistics in medicine. While I know that sounds dull, trust me, it is important to all of us, not just to doctors.

Picture this. 100 people come to my clinic complaining of fever and a cough. All hundred test positive for Covid-19. I give all of them a secret potion made with ground up dried newt, sunflower seeds and some CBD. A month later, 95 have recovered completely, 3 are still in hospital but recovering and two have died. I call a press conference and announce that my remedy has a 98% cure rate and should be widely used.

Do you accept my claim? I hope not! As Groucho Marx said when asked “How’s your wife:” “compared to what?” If you have followed this evolving story, the death rate among people with Covid-19 who have symptoms is estimated to be somewhere between 1 and 2%, with a huge variation dependent on age and ethnicity. Young Caucasians have a death rate well under 1% while octogenarians have a mortality well over 10%. Thus, to make any sense about my claimed “cure,” you must first ask for a breakdown of the ages and ethnicities of those I treated. If they were all white college students, chances are my remedy killed rather than cured. If they were all elderly Blacks, there may be something that warrants further study. Finally, no matter what the demographic breakdown, the most important question of all, is how my remedy compared to other available treatments.

This brings up the idea of the controlled clinical trial. There is a well-known aphorism in science: the plural of anecdote is not data. Medicine is full of “accepted” treatments that were proven worthless, and the fact that a patient improved after a treatment does not always mean they recovered because of the treatment. They may have recovered despite the treatment, which actually made some patients worse, or would have recovered with no treatment.

The current gold standard in deciding whether one treatment is better than another is the controlled trial. A large group of patients are randomly given treatment A or B; neither the patients nor the doctors know which they are given. After an appropriate amount of time, the pre-specified outcome is compared between the two groups. The outcome chosen is crucial: ideally, it is both important and clear. I always look first at death rate – whether one is alive is obviously important, and it is also very clear; you don’t need a committee to decide if a patient is alive (as you do in many reported outcomes).

When the trial is reported, the researchers will describe the difference and will usually indicate whether it is “statistically significant,” using a P value. This is simply the odds that the outcome was due to a real difference between the treatments or simply by chance. If you flip a coin and it comes up heads three times in a row, this does not mean the coin is unbalanced. Every time you flip a balanced coin, there is a 50% chance it will be heads, so getting heads three times in a row is not surprising. If you get heads 20 times in a row, you should be suspicious that there is something unusual about the coin. Hence, when a study reports a difference, they indicate the likelihood the account was due to chance. A “P less than .05” simply means that there is less than a 5% chance the difference was due to chance. Note that this is not a guarantee the results were valid.

Also important, and particularly relevant to Covid treatments these days, is whether the results are presented as relative or absolute differences. Drugs companies, not surprisingly, tend to emphasize relative differences, which are usually larger. Let’s say that 40% of patients with a very nasty disease are dead in year without treatment, while with treatment A, 25% die and with treatment B, 22% die. The honest way of presenting this would be to say that 3 out 100 more patients lived with B than A. A marketer would rather say that the death rate was reduced by 12% (22 compared to 25).

The Mayo Covid study had several issues limiting its value for making life-and-death decisions. Most important, the study was observational, not controlled. There was no group given an alternative (or only supportive care). No attempt was made to select who got serum with different amounts of antibody. They followed a large group of patients who were given plasma and compared those who received transfusions within three days of the diagnosis with those transfused four or more days after. They also compared those who received higher, medium or lower amounts of antibody in the plasma they happened to receive.

My focus was on the death rate at 30 days (a “hard” end-point – good). Those transfused earlier had a 21.6% death rate; those who got the plasma later had a 26.7% death rate. Thus, the absolute difference was 5% - possibly important if verified by better studies, but not the “35% reduced death rate” put out to the media. The latter figure came from comparing death rates at 7 days between those who received very high dose of antibodies (8.9%) and those who received very low levels (13.7%), a difference that was less at 30 days. There was no way to prove the groups were the same.

Does convalescent plasma help patients with severe Covid-19 survive? I think the only honest conclusion one can reach is “Maybe.” It is biologically plausible. The observations reported are consistent with a possible benefit, but better designed trials are clearly needed before this can be considered of proven benefit.

What I do know is that the FDA, which is supposed to be our defense against allowing ineffective and/or dangerous medications to be marketed, has increasingly made decisions based on political pressure rather than science.

This goes hand in hand with the Trump administration’s directive to the CDC to change its testing guidelines to discourage testing of asymptomatic Covid contacts, a decision that is opposed by almost every expert in the field. Fewer tests may lead to fewer reported cases but will lead to wider spread and more deaths.

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