Filipe Marchesini

This is a translation of (what I consider the most important bits) part (32%) of the original article "Hidroxicloroquina: o dia em que a ciência parou" from Luis Cláudio Correia, posted on Evidence Based Medicine Blog, 20th March 2020. Please correct mispellings, any English mistakes should be attributed to my translation, not to Luis Claudio Correia. (There are no good translators from Portuguese to English, or vice-versa, up to date, except DeepL. Google Translator does terrible job. Most of the time I use DeepL.com and manually correct mistaken translations). Let me know if you want me to translate the whole article. I also would like to know if there exist a LessWrong Discord. [...] The French Article This article is a bias cluster. But it's not just classic biases, there are conducts that aren't even on the traditional checklists. Something caricatured. Twenty-six patients used hydroxychloroquine versus 16 control patients. A hospital in Marseille recruited patients for treatment and other centers in other regions recruited the controls. The outcome was a substitute: the virologic negation of the nasal swab on the sixth day. At day6 post-inclusion, 70% of hydroxychloroquine-treated patients were virologicaly cured comparing with 12.5% in the control group (p= 0.001). First, confusion bias. Randomization would serve to avoid confusion bias, which did not occur. But this study goes further, it causes confusion bias. Not preventing is not the same as causing it. The unusual: patients in Marseille who refused treatment continued in the study as a control group! This causes great basal heterogeneity between the groups, because patients who refuse are different from patients who accept. When refusing a treatment, the patients should not be included in the study. In fact, in a clinical trial, potential volunteers do not refuse treatment. What they refuse is to enter the trial. Following the pattern of irrationality, patients who met exclusion criteria (comorbid