Bill Gates' U Washington lackies publish a new paper claiming HCQ doesn't work. Let me count the ways they may have fixed the result

 1.  Bill Gates has poured lots of money into the University of Washington and its Global Health department and its Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).  Global Health and IHME share a new building provided them by BMGF, away from the campus but close to BMGF headquarters. Four years ago, BMGF gave them $489 million dollars, after founding the Global Health department ten years earlier. And why not?  He gets to control the world's public health narratives with that money. And, apparently, much of the University of Washington as well:

"Through a generous gift and endowment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and complementary Washington State resources, the UW Department of Global Health was established in 2007, bridging the schools of Medicine and Public Health, with a mandate to harness the expertise and interdisciplinary power of all 16 UW schools and colleges." 

The Merriam Webster dictionary says a mandate is:

1. : an authoritative command
especially : a formal order from a superior court or official to an inferior one
2. : an authorization to act given to a representative 

You might want to read more about the IHME's frauds and its close relationship to Bill Gates.  Journalist Tim Schwab did a wonderful expose on the IHME in December, in The Nation. Its subtile is:

Thanks to the Microsoft founder’s support, the IHME can make its own rules about how to track global health. That’s a problem.

2.  The University of Washington (with researchers from many departments, which is no surprise given BMGF's mandate) began last spring to study the early outpatient use of hydroxychloroquine.  Their paper, "Hydroxychloroquine with or without azithromycin for treatment of early SARS-CoV-2 infection among high-risk outpatient adults: A randomized clinical trial" is a study in corrupted science.  The research was of course funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Most of the many authors work for the University of Washington.  Several have or had financial relationships with Gilead, which is the maker of Remdesivir.  One author went to work for Gilead after completing the research.  

Hydroxychloroquine was considered the chief (and perhaps only) competitor to Remdesivir for treating Covid when the research was started.  Had hydroxychloroquine been an approved drug for Covid, Remdesivir would have been unable to receive an Emergency Use Authorization from FDA, because a licensed drug already existed. However, despite its lack of efficacy (according to the WHO and others), its backing by Tony Fauci and a group of 16 Gilead-supported experts on his NIH Covid Treatment Guidelines panel led to Remdesivir being given an EUA and later a full license.

Furthermore, if a licensed drug like hydroxychloroquine was generally known to be highly effective as an early treatment for Covid, there would have been no need for the tens of billions of dollars invested in Covid vaccines, nor for everyone to be vaccinated.  Bill Gates is very heavily invested in vaccines and new drugs for Covid.  The availability of an old generic drug for Covid would have cost him $billions.  The fact that treatment exists, and so far has worked well regardless of which viral variant you are treating, is a secret that must be continuously suppressed.

3.  Here are some ways the study made sure HCQ failed.  The patients did their own nasal swabs, took their own temperatures, even obtained their own 6 lead EKGs. The entire study was done remotely,   via telemedicine. How valid were the diagnoses, swabs, temperatures, EKGs etc?

4.  Treatment drugs were sent by courier to the patients, while it was acknowledged by the authors that "kit shipment increased the time from screening to study medication initiation. This may have affected measurement of the virology outcome since a large proportion (34.2%) had already met the definition of viral clearance at enrollment."  In other words, more than a third of patients were not early in their course, or perhaps did not even have Covid, since there was no virus at the time they enrolled.

In addition to enrolling more than 1/3 of subjects who were not early cases, the study administrators note that meds were delayed in getting to patients.  This is a second great way to turn an early treatment study into a delayed treatment study, when the drug is known to be less effective.

5.  While the BMGF funded the trial, and funded the University that conducted the trial, apparently that was still not enough to assure the results Bill Gates wanted.  So two employees of the BMGF, not listed as authors, are acknowledged as having "provided input and guidance."

6.  In the "Declaration of competing interests" section of the study, there is a note that author Anna Bershteyn received "personal fees from Gates Ventures." While the article provides her sole affiliation as SUNY Syracuse, in New York state, Dr. Bershteyn is actually listed on their website as an assistant affiliate professor at the same Global Health/U Washington department funded by BMGF.  Furthermore, her field is not hydroxychloroquine, but rather lipid nanoparticles for vaccines. She is not an MD, so what was her role in this?

7.  Participants were "recruited through social media or at local sites."  I recall that Stanford Professor John Ioannidis was beaten up last April for recruiting subjects through social media. Why is this a reasonable way of getting random subjects when BMGF does it?

8.  PCR test cycle thresholds were "less than or equal to 40." Hopefully everyone now knows that cycle thresholds above 30-35 have high false positive levels.

9.  There were insufficient "clinical endpoints" in the study so the study was ended prematurely.  The authors called this "operational futility" and "the decision was made to terminate the trial."  Thus the entire published study has to do with a secondary endpoint, whether HCQ speeded recovery, as the main issue the study was designed to examine was jettisoned.  There were a very small number of subjects in each arm, about 50, which made it easy to get rid of statistically significant findings with a little massage. 

10.  Actually, HCQ did speed recovery, despite the authors claiming it didn't.  They admit, "In the Cox model compared to the control group, clearance for the HCQ group was 62% faster... and the HCQ-Azithromycin group tended to faster clearance..."

But two post hoc analyses (not planned prior to conducting the study and examining the data, and such analyses are usually frowned upon) were performed.  Only when baseline viral load was added as another factor, were the study authors able to make the benefit of HCQ no longer statistically significant.

11. The authors congratulate themselves for this poorly performed and analyzed study--using the word rigorous twice and robust once in their Discussion section. Then they beg for new drugs to defeat the pandemic, saying "it is essential to continue to search for interventions that could alter the course of early disease" and "we must continue to search for therapies that reduce morbidity and transmission."  They never say that perhaps if they had reached people earlier with hydroxychloroquine and done a true early intervention study, viral clearance would have been even better than 62% faster in the HCQ arm, which is what the study found but brushed aside. Would they ever admit we already had that sought-after intervention, which they themselves showed altered the course of disease?

12.  So, when you control the statisticians, you have no fear of criticism for post hoc analyses, and you have the ability to shut down a trial early when it is giving you an answer you don't want to see, you can make the benefit of hydroxychloroquine seem to disappear. Just like magic. Bill Gates' Modus Operandi is there for all to examine.

And here is Bill himself warning us that vaccines could be ready relatively quickly, but it would take two additional years to know about their safety.  Seems he is okay with us shouldering that risk.