I have no clue about what’s actually involved in linking patient/hospital records at the detail level, I just know it must be a technical and legal nightmare.
So I knew Surgisphere was a complete fraud when I read their claims. Now I know more about exactly why my bullshit meters went off:
A peer-reviewed study that probably used fabricated data
If you’re following at all the search for COVID-19 treatments, and possibly even if not, you will have seen the flurry of media coverage for the observational study in The Lancet ‘Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis. It made the news not least because hydroxychloroquine is the drug President Trump says he is taking in the belief that it will reduce his chance of catching COVID-19. This view is not backed up evidence until some randomised trials come in. Getting in before the trials, the Lancet study used propensity score matching to try to control for the non-random treatment. It found that taking hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine were associated with an increased risk of heart problems.
I am highly skeptical of the powers of hydroxychloroquine with relation to COVID-19 (‘skeptical’ in the sense that I have suspended judgement for now - there simply isn’t evidence either way). But I want the test of its properties to be done properly, with random controlled trials. And if we are to use observational studies (which I do not object to, they just aren’t as useful as an experiment where you can manipulate the treatment), they have to use real data.
The data in that study, and in at least one preprint on a second treatment, were provided by an Illinois firm called Surgisphere. Allegedly the data represents the treatment and health outcomes of 96,032 patients from 671 hospitals in six continents. However, there is simply no plausible way I can think of that the data are real.
I’ll say that again - I believe with very high probability the data behind that high profile, high consequence Lancet study are completely fabricated.
If Surgisphere can name the 671 participating hospitals or otherwise prove that the data is real I will retract that statement, delete this post or write whatever humbling apology they desire. But I think there’s nearly zero chance of that happening.
Could Surgisphere really have patient data from 671 hospitals?
I’m far from the first to ask for more information on this amazing new database no-one had heard of, and they’ve had a week to explain. This what they came up with:
The Surgisphere registry is an aggregation of the deidentified electronic health records of customers of QuartzClinical, Surgisphere’s machine learning program and data analytics platform. Surgisphere directly integrates with the EHRs of our hospital customers to provide them actionable data insights to improve efficiency and effectiveness. As part of these QuartzClinical customer agreements, Surgisphere, as a global healthcare data collaborative, has permission to include these hospitals’ EHR data in its queryable registry/database of real-world, real-time patient encounters.
…
While our data use agreements with these institutions prevents us from sharing patient level data or customer names, we are able to complete appropriate analyses and share aggregate findings to the wider scientific community.
(“EHR” is Electronic Health Record ie patients’ personal data). Frankly, this doesn’t pass the laugh test.
I can imagine why any hospital customers would not want to be named, because if it came out that they are allowing their data to go to Illinois to be analysed at will - the Lancet article says it was “deemed” that ethical approval was not needed - there would surely be an outcry. This would be a much bigger scandal than Facebook giving data to Cambridge Analytica. After all, what we post on Facebook was seen by many people as quasi-public. Imagine having your electronic health records - patient demographics, medical history, medications, allergies, lab results, radiology results - given to Cambridge Analytica.
In Australia, we recently had a major public controversy about sharing health records between health providers. I can’t imagine the reaction if it was found they were being shared with overseas researchers without permission or knowledge. And the fact that hospitals aren’t named by Surgisphere means that no patient of any hospital in the world knows whether or not their data is used in this study.
But hang on, you might say, this data (which remember, I think doesn’t exist but let’s pretend it does for the sake of argument) isn’t going to a shady outfit like Cambridge Analytica, it’s going to the “global healthcare data collaborative” Surgisphere.
Right, let’s look at Surgisphere. Surgisphere has five employees with LinkedIn accounts. Other than the CE and co-author of the Lancet paper, these are a VP of Business Development and Strategy, a Vice President of Sales and Marketing, and two Science Editors (actually, one Science Editor and one Scoence Editor, which does not inspire confidence in their attention to detail while editing). LinkedIn also records one employee of QuartzClinical - a director of sales marketing.
Here are some of the people you might expect to work for a genuine global health care data collaborative, that had sold software to 671 hospitals and integrated with their electronic health record (EHR) systems, and that coordinates an ongoing international health research collaboration:
global network manager and coordinators
hospital/customer liaison team
support staff / help desk
trainers, and developers of training material
researchers
legal team to deal with privacy and contract issues in dealing with 670+ hospitals. Issues coming from the EU’s GDPR alone would keep a substantial legal team busy I’m sure.
software or database developers. Like, maybe a humble extract-transform-load developer or two to get those billions of rows of transactions data into a database.
database administrators and data engineers
EHR integration solutions specialists
data governance lead
if any of the above are outsourced, a procurement team to handle all the sub-contracting
Surgisphere does not have any of these people, except for Sapan Desai who doubles up as chief executive and medical researcher (a good indication of the size of the firm - most CEs are not also active publishing researchers). Judging from its LinkedIn profile, his team is three sales executives and two science editors.
Nor does Surgisphere or any of its staff have a presence on GitHub. Nor an explanation anywhere of the impressive data engineering that would be required to wrangle all that data. Nor journal articles, conference papers or even blog posts describing its network, the APIs that connect it, how proud they are of their Hadoop cluster on AWS, which database platform they use, etc etc etc - all the things that real firms that have made impressive innovations (like the first ever world-wide database of individual level hospital data would be, if it were real).
Yet Surgisphere claims to have sold software to 671 hospitals. What would it cost to deploy machine learning data analytics software to a hospital and integrate it with the EHR? This isn’t some light and easy integration like installing a stats package on a PC and giving it an ODBC connection to a database.
The integration to the EHR systems and the way we know they use the data means, at a minimum, sending all the data to the cloud. That means you need to deal with network and security architects, have extremely robust testing, bullet-proof security (remember, some of the closest guarded sensitive data in the world), go through who knows what red tape at each hospital in terms of convincing their data governance people of what you are doing.
I don’t know, but $1 million each deployment can’t be far off the mark. Certainly not less than $300k a pop. So Surgisphere should be a billion dollar company if it’s done this 670 times, but it clearly is not. In fact, Dun and Bradstreet estimate its revenue at $45,245. You couldn’t even do the discovery stage of an EHR integration project at a single hospital for that, never mind deploy anything.
Of course, EHR integration is a real thing, and it’s done usually to move patient information securely around. For example, a quick google found this useful presentation about EMR integration (EMR and EHR are basically interchangeable terms) in the Great Lakes region. I notice Surgisphere is conspicuously absent from the list of presenters on slide 10.
This makes it kind of surprising (but not really) that they claim in the Lancet article to have data on most COVID-19 hospital cases in North America diagnosed before 14 April 2020 - 63,315 such cases in the study according to Table S1, which would have been a clear majority of all hospital cases.
Yep. Case closed. It's a complete fraud through and through. Now we get to see if any of the following have any integrity at all; Fauci, WHO, most of the mainstream media, various state governors and health boards, and pharmacists.
Seems like “complete fraud” is the answer.
It does appear that some group of people are so desperate to make HCQ go away, they move heaven and earth to get “studies” done that go the way they want, but to do this, they have to hitch their wagon to increasingly more dubious researchers…climbing further and further out on a limb, until the group of non-corrupt scientists finally get so outraged, they chop the limb off in utter disgust.
That’s what is happening now.
Now just imagine what happens if the desperate group doubles down?
Any remaining faith in the system by normal, thinking researchers will just totally snap. The desperate group will become totally discredited among the non-corrupt group.
Then - what happens next?
To add to all the other valuable observations, and video comments, already mentioned re: the Chloroquine / HCQ Lancet study:
What are the chances that 4 cardiologists, one of whom supplies the secret data, are going to find a result that HCQ / Chloroquine is related to a higher rate of mortality than the control group, when they include in the HCQ and Chloroquine groups a significant percentage of patients having comorbidities for which there would normally be a contraindication for these drugs?
The cardiologists excluded from their analysis patients who were administered HCQ or Chloroquine more than 48 hours after diagnosis, those on ventilators and those taking Remdesivir, so clearly they went through the step of considering which patients should be included and excluded. Is it not reasonable to assume that at least one of the 4 cardiologists should have thought to exclude the patients with heart related comorbidities and diabetes, as being invalid subjects in the test groups? And would it not be expected that if these patients are included in the analysis, a higher rate of deaths may be seen in the results?
Some calculations from Table 2:
Number in the 4 test groups = 14,888
Number with heart related comorbidities (first 3 rows) in test groups: 3000
Number with diabetes in test groups: 2208
% with heart related comorbidities: 20.15 %
% with diabetes: 14.79 %
% with heart related comorbidities and/or diabetes: 34.94 %
Findings from the study:
“…when compared with mortality in the control group (9·3%), hydroxychloroquine (18·0%; hazard ratio 1·335, 95% CI 1·223–1·457), hydroxychloroquine with a macrolide (23·8%; 1·447, 1·368–1·531), chloroquine (16·4%; 1·365, 1·218–1·531), and chloroquine with a macrolide (22·2%; 1·368, 1·273–1·469) were each independently associated with an increased risk of in-hospital mortality. Compared with the control group (0·3%), hydroxychloroquine (6·1%; 2·369, 1·935–2·900), hydroxychloroquine with a macrolide (8·1%; 5·106, 4·106–5·983), chloroquine (4·3%; 3·561, 2·760–4·596), and chloroquine with a macrolide (6·5%; 4·011, 3·344–4·812) were independently associated with an increased risk of de-novo ventricular arrhythmia during hospitalisation.”
and
“Ventricular arrhythmias were more common in the treatment groups compared with the control population. Mortality was higher in the treatment groups compared with the control population (p<0·0001; appendix pp 15–18).”
Conclusion:
It seems that this study (if it were valid) would confirm what was already known, that HCQ and Chloroquine should not be administered to those with known heart issues (and perhaps also to diabetes patients)? Note the percentage of deaths is quite close between the heart patients and the percentage of deaths observed in the test groups - but we do not know if these are the same patients because the data is a secret.
Well any credibility it may have had has just been washed away into the Thames by way of a sewer.
That however is not the problem. The problem is John Q Public is never going to hear the rest of the story. This story has spread far and wide thanks to the lame stream media. What will not spread far and wide is the information here and elsewhere debunking the whole fantasy John Q Public Will have only gotten the headline and will go on believing HCQ kills people.
There is no one in any position to counter the onslaught of negative press. Roualt has been marginalized as some maverick. Zelenko has virtually disappeared after being on Hannity. A few doctors here and there continue to use HCQ but success gets no press.
The fix is clearly in. Money talks. Behind all of this you will find the Gates foundation. Not a day goes by that I don’t receive a Gates puff piece in my news feed. ( These are the three things Bill Gates does every week , and you should too). There is probably not one major drug company, medical organization, including the WHO. or government thay has not been influenced by Gates.
The question is what does a billionaire want? More money ? Of course? His net wealth has increased 2x since he started his foundation and has GIVEN AWAY BILLIONS. He wants control. He wants control of every aspect of every human on the planet. Vaccination is just one part of it. Think biometric ID cards for everyone. Think digital currency so the EVERY financial transaction can be tracked and traced. A digital global file with EVERYTHING about you in a database accessed by who? Much of it is already in place. Militarized police, a military police force thanks to 2012 NDAA sec. 1021 which allows the US military to arrest anyone anywhere w/o charges, indefinitely w/o access to a lawyer. As documented by Edward Snowden every email, text , phone conversation etc is collected and stored at the NSA in Utah. There is more, much more but you all get the idea.
These people have no allegiance to any country. None whatsoever. They are interested only in control over the entire planet. The suckers in this Kabuki Theater are the rest of us.
So as this tempest in a teacup plays out the credibility of prestigious medical journals, the integrity of journalists any faith in any institution at all is the least of the issues. These people never sleep and they never stop. They truly believe they are doing god’s work. That’s dangerous
I have posted this elsewhere but it seems like it should be posted here once again. This is 4 parts and will give you a pretty good idea of what the plan is. https://www.corbettreport.com/gates/
A friend of mine also recommended this personal air purifier to wear around my neck now that the person I live with has come home from a 4-day stay in the hospital (not because of Covid). This device does not seem like it could possibly be nearly as reliable as wearing a mask when we are in common spaces together, but I wanted to ask if anyone here knows about devices like this and what you think? https://moldinspectionspringfieldma.com/air-purification/
Regarding the question of who paid for the study, the ‘Follow up to the Lancet Study’ on the Surgisphere website states:
“This study was not funded by any drug company, private or public donor, or political organization. Our collaborators devote their time through personal funds and resources.”
It also states:
“Surgisphere itself is ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 27001:2013 certified – the latter is a very strict data security and data integrity standard. Mandatory audits happen at least four times a year, and everything from data acquisition to data reporting is independently reviewed by an external third-party auditor.”
The name of the company or individual which conducts the audits is not specified. It would be interesting for someone to ask for the auditor’s statement as to the validity of the data.
I mean its his or her own body? if one feels the risk of a bloody heart arrhythmia is worth the risk of saving your life or permanent damage from covid, so be it… But we have to accept that death and permanent vaccine injury is an acceptable risk for a perfectly healthy 4 year old? When there is no imminent risk of disease? WTF … comon/. really?!
For sure , you would have to have real world drs going, i tried use of HCQ but i lost a bunch of patients to Ventricular arrhythmia. But instead , we have drs saying, this stuff is working. I am not having any heart issues with my 1000s of patients treated…
Simple sugisphere… Give me just two drs… Y ou have to have the treating drs for these 96k patients… give me just two - with affidavit , that say they lost patients , due to heart issues they think or believe was due to the medications use.
Because , HCQ doesnt cause these problems. And has never caused these problems. and any dr who has used it will not testify to such problems. and You and I know this works. Why, simple, those who took it early are alive and well - and did not even have to be counted in anything relating to hospital treatment - You can not prove a negative. I cant prove that I saved a life with a drug… If you give a drug to 100 people and 100 people die - you would bet its not by accident. If you give a drug - to 100 people and none die - there is no way to prove that they were saved by the drug. I can tell you , give me the drug… people taking HCQ dont die and are not hospitalized for covid… You are going to have to give me a lot more evidence then the fact you gave it to dying people… and they died… to tell me it doesnt work//
It is about being god. I have no doubts that there is a serious god complex present in Bill Gates as well as all of his co-conspirators. The following is from a 2014 interview re Bill Gates’ religious beliefs (the bold my emphasis):
"... As for his biggest fears in the next 50 years, he said that the world needs to do more to address climate change, counter large-scale terrorism and address global health concerns.
"I understand how every healthy child, every new road, puts a country on a better path, but instability and war will arise from time to time, and I'm not an expert on how you get out of those things," he said.
"I wish there was an invention or advance to fix that. So there'll be some really bad things that'll happen in the next 50 or 100 years, but hopefully none of them on the scale of, say, a million people that you didn't expect to die from a pandemic, or nuclear or bioterrorism."
Source
Knowing what we know now, I see two things in what he said 6 years ago: an acknowledgement of a plan, and a hope the plan would not go awry and have worse outcomes than anticipated.
I believe it was Stalin who said "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." There is evil within every ideology. Capitalism, or rather this crap they are calling capitalism, does not get a pass as being all wholesome and good. That system just happens to be better at controlling the optics & narratives, and hiding the atrocities. That is where having lots of money comes in handy - to spend, bribe and fund all manner of deceit to cover up evil shit. (Oh, and to also be able to hide from said shit and keep on living the good life on big yachts and far away islands or locales...)
I do still think they are not invulnerable. I can only hope that at some point in the future there will be a reckoning and justice for all those culpable, especially those at the top who hold positions of trust. I dearly hope I live long enough to see crimes against humanity proven and prosecuted, and justice, whatever possible in a corrupt world, served.
In that, perhaps we need to place trust in the real God, or whomever, or whatever power or deity suits one's personal belief system. It sure would be nice to have some divine intervention to ensure we are able to continue our existence as more than just statistics.
Jan
When you are disabled and have difficulty shopping mind playing a round of golf… - coronavirus has little to no impact on my life… virtually none , sad to say.
Our group practice needs hospital patient data to bill professional component (hospital bills technical component). After the hospital changed ownership, it took 2 years for the IT personnel of the respective entities to build an interface. One hospital, one country, one language. I am in Utah and trained at the University of Utah. Embarrassing that their Biomedical Engineering Department (A N Patel, MD) signed on to this fraud. The implications of this fiasco for public health are staggering. I will write the University President, Governor and Department of Professional Licensing. Someone needs to be held accountable.
Thanks for your excellent reporting, Chris.
I subscribe to your channel, but this video does not appear in the list of videos. I was expecting it after reading the Guardian article, so was wondering had happened. You are getting too close to heart of something dark in my view. When you join the concurrent threads of the source of the virus and the suppression of HCQ it really is time to get the tin foil hat out. I have resisted all the 5G nonsense, and that crazy Mikovits woman, but there is something going on.
Chris, you work is truly exemplary and what is truly excellent is that you do what you do for completely unselfish reasons.
In Desai’s NEJM retrospective study that was said to be looking at any potential effect of ACE-I’s, ARB’s, and statins on CV-19 in hospitalized patients the number of current smokers in North America, Europe, and Asia was around 5% each. In the Lancet study it doubled to between 10-12% for each continent. Damn, I restarted taking my ARB (Micardis) because of seeing that in the NEJM. I feel like such an idiot. NEJM Sapan Desai article
It appears that the Surgisphere study was made up out of whole cloth. So, the question now is whether the people/publications/govt entities–those we count on to know what they are talking about–will have the integrity to either admit they were hoodwinked or have to admit to being, in essence, accessory to fraud. It is becoming increasingly hard for the anti-hydroxychloroquine bunch to keep up the appearance of credibility.
