> If you come down with a 'breakthrough' case of COVID-19, don't let the doctors ventilate you…
> I heard recently of a friend's 70-yo neighbor who tested positive for COVID-19. She tried to sit it out for two weeks at home, deteriorated, went to a hospital in the big city, got ventilated, died.
If this doesn’t illustrate how conspiracy theories invert cause and effect, I don’t know what does. As an analogy:
Motor vehicle accident victims who present to the ED with the most severe injuries are most likely to die.
Motor vehicle accident victims who present to the ED with the most severe injuries are also the most likely to go right into emergency surgery.
Only someone bereft of common sense and reason would conclude that the solution is to warn everyone to never let trauma surgeons operate on you.
I don't think your analogy fits very well. Trauma happens outside the medical system, trauma surgeons attempt to patch people up. 'Iatrogenesis' refers to conditions that are caused or worsened by medical interventions.
Barotrauma is the term that describes the mechanism through which ventilation damages lungs. Ventilators were studied scientifically and found to not help with pneumonia.
After posting my blog post I figured out specifically how the antidote for oxygen poisoning got memory-holed in 1955. There was a little protest in 1959 about how the New Science didn't work very well for carbon monoxide poisoning. My post did cover the studies in the early 2000's confirming the validity of the Old Science.
If you read the preprint that first blog links to, they didn’t actually find a negative efficacy with any kind of confidence. They find large confidence intervals that include zero, with large(ish) p-values to boot.
P-values and multiple comparison discussion aside, calling this evidence of negative efficacy is disingenuous at best.
