Searching for truth and the natural laws that govern our world is a fine endeavor. The search itself is not a problem. Most new discoveries do not stand the test of time, however, depressing though that may be for people living their lives by self-selected studies. As new studies are published, it is usually found that the findings are not repeatable, and therefore are invalid. This phenomena is what makes science a good tool for learning and understanding our world. It is also the one aspect which is consistently attacked when new studies are promoted in partisan efforts to enforce policies.
Briefly covering a more recent history of science, it doesn’t take long to understand how quickly this becomes a problem. We turn poor science into immoral politics about as quickly as we can interpret the findings to our liking.
Science textbooks displayed and promoted the idea that all animal kinds could be proven to share a common development based on the way embryos looked at similar stages of development. Haeckel’s embryos were fraudulent, with some of the photos doctored and embryos from different animals taken at clearly different stages of development so as to make them look more similar. They were still in textbooks for several decades after they had been proven fraudulent. Still, the same people forwarding similar views decades before did not balk at latching their “science” onto political positions, like eugenics, in which they supported measures like forced sterilization and advocated for policies that led to genocide and human experiments.
Science wasn’t to blame. It is a human defect that when we have a bias, we tend to see the world through that lens. If a new discovery seems to support our already held beliefs, we are less likely to challenge the discovery and more likely to promote it.
If only humanity learned anything from its own history, we might be able to avoid such disastrous reactions to new studies, but in more recent years, it seems the problem is only getting worse. We cannot forget vaunted figures like Paul Ehrlich who warned continually about population excess, advocating for population controls to keep the world from overpopulating and causing mass starvation and overwhelming the world’s capacity to sustain life. He has been wrong on at least 3 different occasions but continues to move the goalposts and his acolytes have embraced the same fear-based foolishness.
Researchers like Michael Mann became famous for their global warming evidence in 1998 that indicated there would be a huge warming effect. The idea was popularized by, none other than, a politician. Al Gore harnessed himself to the idea as a climate activist when running for President in 2000 and even made a documentary to drive the point home that we needed to take the issue seriously. As the climate warnings always go, no matter how long it has been, we are always only 10-12 years away from catastrophe. This has been the case since at least the 1970’s and yet we have avoided any draconian measures while still managing to avert a new ice age, the melting of the polar caps, and I’m sure we will manage to avoid whatever calamity climate change is supposed to bring.
More recently, we have experienced an onslaught of new studies, all poorly designed, to promote partisan views. When President Trump came out in support of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), an anti-malarial medication used for decades and extremely inexpensive, it took seconds for partisanship to take hold. As someone with some insight into the studies that were being conducted, I was aghast. Nearly every one of the initial studies avoided determining whether hydroxychloroquine would work at all. Instead, they isolated the medication and determined it has no effect.
Normally, that would be the first aspect of a study. What I want to highlight is that the reason they did this wasn’t because of any indication that the drug couldn’t work, but because rather than look at the science behind the medication, they focused on the claim from a politician they didn’t like and desired to prove him wrong.
When I first heard him say it, it didn’t make sense to me. Malaria is really a parasitic infection and the nature of HCQ is not antiviral. I was willing to challenge my bias, though, because I realized that Trump wasn’t a doctor. He has likely been told about HCQ from someone else on the staff and they wouldn’t have mentioned it unless they thought there was some potential. So I looked at some of the case studies which had indicated potential success, and each of them cited it wasn’t HCQ, but what HCQ did which helped. Hydroxychloroquine operates as an ionophore for zinc, which means it helps transport zinc across the cell wall. Viruses infect cells by getting inside and using our own cellular machines to replicate themselves. Zinc interferes with this process.
Natural processes, like diffusion, would attempt to push the zinc back out of the cell, so supplementing zinc ensures adequate quantity to get in the cell, while also limiting the natural process of diffusion which would push zinc back out of the cell to balance the internal and external density.
Understand that this indicated to me that the studies had all been designed to ignore the very aspect of what potentially allowed for HCQ to work against a virus. By not supplementing zinc, they were dependent on patient zinc already circulating in their bodies. Normally, we have adequate dietary intake of zinc, so this shouldn’t be a problem, but one of the major causes of zinc deficiency is increased demand due to inflammatory conditions. If you understand that, as the infection takes hold and the body responds, it increases inflammation and the body demand for zinc goes up. So everyone begins to move towards zinc deficiency once they are infected and showing symptoms.
Giving HCQ to a patient without excess zinc circulating would have rendered the medication useless. Which was indicated by most of the early trials in the United States which included HCQ. Everything being reported was that it wouldn’t work and didn’t work.
But we already knew that about the medication in the absence of zinc. Biochemistry and pharmacology would have already made that clear to us. The most understandable mechanism for the drug to work would have been making zinc more available inside the cell.
These studies were all designed to prove the President wrong, and not towards identifying a potential treatment. When I asked on social media boards, communities for healthcare providers, I was sneered at and treated like I didn’t know what I was talking about because we already have zinc in the body.
That ignores the inflammatory state of the body, though, and further ignores the mechanism that was being promoted in which the medication might be effective.
New science sucks. It is a dirty process. It takes many studies and repeatedly observed, consistent results to indicate something is scientifically accurate or not. The way a piece of research is designed determines if it can actually make the claims it makes.
We need not stop at hydroxychloroquine with more recent claims about masks, exaggerating the infection fatality rates, conflating infections with hospitalizations and deaths, because this isn’t new and it won’t stop. Science has long been hijacked by partisan hacks willing to exploit some journal article’s abstract for political gain. Scientists, often with their own biases, often seek to find evidence that supports their already held beliefs rather than to put together an adequate study which would give us an accurate result to learn from and make incremental changes to societal behavior.
With the new study from the Henry Ford Health System, indications could be that once a study was designed properly, with supplemental zinc provided to control for another variable, that HCQ may have been effective all along. More studies will be needed to indicate if that is accurate, but it can’t be ignored that HCQ is an incredibly inexpensive medication compared to the incredibly expensive antivirals which were being promoted in spite of lackluster results. So designing further studies would not only be easy, but incredibly affordable.
Sadly, it might turn out that once again, the wisest course of action for society to take is to ignore new science for at least 10-15 years. They are wrong more than they are right. Now, we shouldn’t forget that I am pro-science. I just embrace science for what it is and don’t hope to exploit it for partisan gain. It is a tool, not an ideology. There is a danger in raising anything to a status as an idol. Worse is when it isn’t worthy of that position:
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