A man's got to know his limitations
Dirty Harry was right on this one.
Dirty Harry has a few more well known lines, like “Go ahead, make my day”, but his line from the end of ‘Magnum Force’ is also one of his best.
Listening to the pseudo experts who have been denying the efficacy of Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine over the past 2.5 plus years, and reading guys like Alex Berenson on that same topic, demonstrates Dirty Harry’s truism quite well.
I’ve blasted Berenson before when and where he’s deserved it, and he’s deserved it multiple times on the topic of “RCTs”, which is an acronym most commonly for “randomized controlled trials”. In a Substack post today Berenson used a far less common version, swapping in “clinical” for “controlled”:
Just a reminder that the only truly bias-free data comes from large, properly run randomized clinical trials matching a control group and a treatment group. We had those for Covid, but the vaccine companies ruined them in early 2021 (with government approval). Now we have lots of questions - and death rates that remain far above normal.
Not only is the C far more commonly used for “controlled” in the acronym, but it also makes far more sense to use “controlled”. A number of studies could meet a definition of “clinical” without being very well controlled. So control of any trial or overall study is crucial. Ironically but typically, Berenson points out that big pharma “ruined” RCTs in early 2021, but he’s apparently certain that neither big pharma nor anyone else is or was messing with any RCTs elsewhere. And he’s even fool enough to say big pharma conducted a “bias-free” trial before they jabbed their control group.
Dr. Stella Immanuel is finally back on Twitter thanks to Elon Musk, and she was in a Spaces discussion with a couple similar limited minds within the past couple days. The mantra of “RCT, RCT, RCT” was chanted multiple times. This is what happens when someone hears some technical jargon repeated enough times such that they have committed it to memory, but they do not have the technical knowledge and/or the intelligence to really understand it. They will repeat it anyway and treat it as gospel.
One other doctor in particular that was also in the Spaces discussion told Dr. Immanuel that even if she provided him data on the 100,000 patients her team has treated, he would not pay it much attention because it was not part of an RCT. My reaction to that is “FFS”, and I hope you know that acronym without explanation.
So let’s look at the term “randomized controlled trial” and break it down. The last word is fairly obvious and really simple. Anyone can do all sorts of “trials” in their everyday life. If you cook for a group of people, even just your family, you can try adding more salt to something you’ve cooked and then ask the people how they like the food compared to the last time. Ideally you don’t tell them that you added more salt. Whatever the results were from how well the people liked the food, you did conduct a trial.
It’s not necessarily scientific nor is it necessarily strictly controlled or randomized, but it’s still a trial. Point being the word “trial” in the RCT term is very easy to understand and is the least likely to be misconstrued. Any drug or medical treatment being tested is going to involve some kind of trial. The word “study” is often used interchangeably with “trial”, but a study may consist of many different trials.
Working backwards we get to the word “controlled”. This one is a bit more complicated in terms of medical treatment testing, and can be where the technically challenged get tripped up. For many truly accurate tests of medical treatments, you use a “control group” of people who do not get the treatment and instead and get a placebo or whatever else to “simulate” the treatment (such that they believe that they were treated), and you need your trial participants to carefully follow the instructions they are given. You also need for nothing else substantial to change in that trial/study participant’s life that could affect their health in any way.
That latter part is often quite difficult to control, and it is frequently the case that trial participants are tossed out due to some unforeseen change in their life or health. It is also frequently true that trial participants have some event which is medically relevant and they are NOT tossed out of the trial. This is true whether they fail to reveal the potential issue or the trial managers simply choose to continue with that person based on whatever criteria they come up with for dismissing people. This sort of “failure to control” is actually quite common. It may or may not be mentioned in the footnotes for the trial results.
On top of this, trial participants may suffer some sort of adverse event after treatment has begun, and the people running the study may conclude that their medical treatment had nothing to do with the adverse event. Sometimes it will be true that the adverse event was unrelated to the treatment, but other times it will be false and the truth is that the adverse event was caused by the treatment. Pfizer’s study people “ruled” that certain heart events were NOT due to their “vaccine” in their trials, but knowing what we know now Pfizer’s people were almost certainly wrong or were deliberately lying.
In an ideal study, all the participants would live in a special controlled facility, they would be there for at least 3 months before the study began, pretty much every medical test under the sun would be run on them before treatment began, they would be monitored daily and their diet would be strictly controlled for the entire time, their daily routine would be pretty much the same, and they would be kept under these controlled conditions for at least 6 months after the treatment with continued testing of all sorts being done, and only then would the study reach final conclusions on efficacy and safety.
In reality, probably no medical study of any kind in history has even approached this level of control. Most of the time it’s not even close, which is why you need to read study footnotes and appendices, and then hope that the people running the study did not leave out anything relevant. And again, this is assuming that the trial participants were aware of any potentially relevant events and were forthcoming about them. Read a few studies and see how the vast majority involve only brief contacts before, during, and after the trials, along with a limited number of tests, and then ponder how meaningful that word “controlled” really is with respect to the majority of studies.
Then consider that in the Corona “vaccine” trials, as with any other vaccine trial, the participants were NOT directly exposed to the virus as part of the trial. Direct exposure is required for a true test, but would be both problematic and unethical with viruses, because you would also have to directly expose the “unprotected” control group:
So ponder it a bit more and compare to doctors treating patients in hospitals with various drugs and seeing results right before their own eyes. People who had definitely been exposed to the virus being treated for. While as Dr. Immanuel pointed out in that Twitter space no ethical doctor is going to have a “control group” that does not get treatment, the patients that are in the hospital are in a far more controlled situation than an outpatient trial participant. Even outpatients being treated for Corona will be typically be in much closer contact with medical personnel than many study participants will. And you can find plenty of doctors reporting great success rates with early treatment using low cost well proven drugs and supplements.
With Corona in particular, if your condition is not improving or is worsening you’re going to seek help. (Unless you’re scared away from seeking help because you see that hospitals are fine with you dying and may in fact be allowing you to die on purpose.) If you’re just in a Corona “vaccine” study, and you’re one of the majority that clears Corona with zero symptoms or you don’t get exposed to Corona at all, you’re only going back when you’re told to go back, or if you have an adverse event. So in summary, the technically shallow types like Berenson don’t really have a grasp of just how uncontrolled most trials are.
So that brings us to “randomized”. With this word the technically limited are probably worse off than with the word “controlled”. They key is NOT a “randomized” sample of trial participants, the key is a “REPRESENTATIVE” sample of participants. Your study groups must be a good representation of the general population you intend to treat. In my previous post linked above I already discussed how Pfizer’s groups were not representative of the general population, and they were absolutely NOT representative of those most at risk of dying from Corona.
An easy and topical example of failing to have a representative sample would be any treatment specific to women where some lunatics include transvestite men claiming to be women in their study. Of course this sounds insane, but note that Apple created a “pregnant man” emoji many months ago now. and a major UK newspaper had an article with the words “her male genitals” in the headline:
Yes choosing delusional men to act as female test subjects would still be a big outlier even today, but choosing people at random to test any Corona “vaccine” was a horrible idea. All of the study groups should have been very heavy on the elderly and on people with the most common comorbidities. It was well known by May of 2020 who was most at risk. Ideally you get to where your incidence of poor outcomes with no treatment is the highest, in order to have the best trial group and thus the best indication of whether your treatment is effective.
Many drugs are developed for specific conditions, and in those cases the trial participants will be those having that condition when testing for efficacy. Imagine testing a drug to treat psoriasis, and 60% of your test subjects don’t even have psoriasis. How useful are those 60% going to be in testing for efficacy when they don’t even have the condition you’re treating for?? If you count them as “successes” you’ve falsified your results.
That scenario sounds like another outlier that would be extremely rare, but Pfizer did something similar to this with their Corona “vaccine” trials, as they mostly excluded the people at the highest risk. It ended up with at least 3 of the 4 trial groups having a better than 99.9% chance of surviving Corona.
More than half the people exposed to Corona never show symptoms, whether from pre-existing immunity from other Coronaviruses, or because they are simply in great health with plenty of vitamin D, zinc, and other nutrients such that they have hard core immune systems that can smash Corona like The Hulk smashing your average left wing soy boy. (Mark Ruffalo is an insult to The Hulk, but I digress.)
Even if you do a purely random sampling and you end up with a group that represents the general population fairly well, that is still NOT ideal in many cases of testing medical treatments, whether drugs, vaccines, or other options.
In the semiconductor world things are much better controlled, and choosing representative samples is how things are done. Any time a new chip is released, and any time there is any substantial change to the process of fabricating that chip, special verification/characterization/qualification testing is done. The engineers involved will study the results of initial testing across many different lots to determine how much the process varies, and then they will choose what are called “corner lots” to pick parts from for the testing that needs to be done.
They will find the process factors that most influence final test results, and then see the variation in those factors across all lots, and from this determine which lots represent the “corners” or extremes of the process. Those corner lots are picked to cover all expected variations in the process such that nothing will be missed and the final production yield for that chip will be optimized. It is FAR more controlled than any medical testing will ever be.
But medical treatment testing can still be improved, and understanding the need for “representative” samples instead of just “randomized” samples is part of that. So when you hear someone simply repeating “randomized controlled trials” over and over, as if that phrase guarantees useful data, you know that person has no real clue what they are talking about.
At the risk of big time TL:DR with this post, there’s another point to consider. In many cases, you do NOT need a control group to test efficacy. Take pancreatic cancer as an example. Unfortunately the fatality rate is very high, especially once it has spread. For the sake of simplification, let’s consider any illness with a 70% or higher fatality rate, and that fatality rate has been well established for a number of years.
If you have just 20 or so fully confirmed cases of the disease in late stages, and you give all of those people a drug, supplement, or some combination of ingredients, and they all go into full remission within 3 months, you KNOW your treatment works. You do NOT need a control group of people dying, and in fact other untreated people dying that you don’t even see make up the control group without you even having to see them.
Granted that is an extreme example, but even if 75% of the people go into remission you know your treatment is working. The death rate is so high and has been so well established that any treatment which substantially changes that outcome is proven to have some effect even with small sample sizes in trials. As the death rate drops, your trial sample size needs to increase to be statistically significant.
When your death rate is tiny as it was with Corona prior to any jabs, you need HUGE trial groups to determine efficacy. Pfizer’s total number of people getting their “vaccine” was just over 20,000, and that is not nearly enough people given a 0.15% death rate overall, and a less than 0.1% death rate for the “random” sample of people that they had. So their testing was completely inadequate to determine efficacy from the get go, and their lack of follow up time as well as sweeping certain adverse events under the rug meant that they presented completely false claims on the safety side of things.
Getting back to scenarios where no control group is need to determine efficacy, of course if you are dealing with new drugs you need safety data, so small groups will not do. BUT, what if you are using drugs and vitamin supplements with DECADES worth of safe use?? Well of course now any safety concerns are minimized.
To mention Dr. Immanuel again, she stated in the Twitter space that she and her team have data from where they have directly treated 100,000 or more patients using Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine, and various other well known drugs and supplements with excellent results. So she is NOT going off a small sample size at all, but instead a very large one. MUCH larger than Pfizer’s total “vaccine” test group size, with the aforementioned decades of safe use in hundreds of millions of people, if not billions, worldwide. And these people already had Corona symptoms. There was no guessing whether they had Corona at all, and none of them had full immunity for whatever reasons. Thus their non-randomized sample was better by far for testing the efficacy of their treatments.
Finally, about now for most readers here I should not have to get into the many bogus studies that have been put out to deliberately smear all kinds of early treatments as well as to downplay or outright deny that natural immunity is FAR superior to the fake “vaccines”, even assuming the “vaccines” have any beneficial effect at all, even for a short period of time. We don’t even need to get into the sudden deaths that are becoming more and more common in people who have been jabbed. You just need to know that per US law, no emergency use authorization can be given for an experimental treatment if there is any other useful treatment available with proven drugs.
So if there is anything else available that is an effective treatment, big pharma kisses hundreds of billions of dollars in profits goodbye. Who thinks big pharma would ever just let that happen?? What does their long established past history show??? How dumb, ignorant, and/or compromised do you have to be to claim big pharma is honest and trustworthy??? Who can’t see that pretty much every single other treatment that would not result in big bucks for big pharma had a smear campaign mounted against it??? “Horse paste” anyone???
Ultimately it’s just another case of follow the money, and yet numerous technically challenged people will still spout “randomized controlled trials” over and over, completely oblivious to all the dollars available to fund all the different ways to falsify those supposedly gold standard “randomized controlled trials”.
Thank you for laying out the distinctions so clearly.