Critical thinking about medicine or any topic requires weighing multiple sources against one another and distinguishing between degrees of certainty, not ruling out all sources of evidence but one and equating “unproven” with “false.” The approach to health information increasingly taken by public officials, reporters, and social media—under which any statement is “unproven” and must be assumed harmful, barring some definitive pronouncement by public health authorities to the contrary—is thus not only authoritarian but also damaging to public health and science as a whole.

Imperial County, California, a poor, largely Hispanic agricultural region in the southeastern corner of the state, has been hit hard by Covid-19. By the end of January, according to the New York Times’s Covid-19 database, Imperial County had suffered 845 Covid deaths, or 4.7 per thousand inhabitants—a rate almost 80 percent higher than the U.S. average. The case fatality rate in Imperial County is 1.44 percent, the second-highest in California—and was significantly higher, 2.10 percent, at the end of October 2021 before the Omicron wave.
Two doctors in Imperial County, though—George Fareed and Brian Tyson, who run the All Valley Urgent Care network of medical centers—claim to have done far better with their Covid-19 patients. In fact, they claim near-perfect success: in a book that they published last January, they claim to have seen more than 7,000 patients and had only three deaths, all among patients who began treatment in later disease stages. A statistical analysis of part of their results by the statistician Mathew Crawford, included in their book, counts only seven hospitalizations and three deaths among 4,376 patients seen up through March 13, 2021—a reduction in hospitalization risk of well over 90 percent from the county average, even after (admittedly imperfect) statistical adjustments for differences in age between Fareed and Tyson’s patients and the general population.
According to prevailing medical views, Fareed and Tyson’s claimed results should be impossible. The doctors’ first protocol was based around hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), a repurposed anti-malarial drug, with other drugs such as ivermectin as more recent additions. Received opinion on the drugs is that ivermectin is at best unproven in treating Covid-19 (the Food and Drug Administration maintains an official webpage warning against using it as a treatment for the virus), and that HCQ has been actively disproved: early optimism from laboratory experiments and small clinical studies did not hold up in larger, more rigorous trials.
Such opinions have influenced not just news coverage but also the moderation policies of social media platforms, which have imposed ever-stricter rules against “misinformation” (meaning, in practice, contradicting American public health authorities). After Fareed and Tyson spoke by invitation at a meeting of the Imperial County Board of Supervisors, the Los Angeles Times ran an article noting that the Imperial County Medical Society “had urged supervisors to ‘not contribute to the dissemination of false or misleading information by legitimizing unproven treatments.’” The paper also quoted an executive at an Imperial County hospital, saying, “We need to stick with what we know is approved by the FDA for COVID-19 treatments. . . . Misinformation itself ought to be stopped.” In December, Twitter also suspended Tyson’s account for breaking its policies against Covid misinformation.
The dismissal of hydroxychloroquine as a possible Covid-19 treatment, however, was never based on solid science. The Los Angeles Times article reveals a fundamentally authoritarian worldview: medical claims are “unproven,” and dangerous for the public to discuss, until some official body endorses them—an approach that threatens public health and science alike.
Interest in hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment stretches back at least to 2005, when an in vitro study showed that chloroquine, a very similar compound, might protect against SARS infection. Based on laboratory studies and small clinical trials, medical authorities in China and South Korea recommended chloroquine as a Covid-19 treatment in February 2020.
Some doctors outside East Asia followed. Vladimir Zelenko, a doctor in a Hasidic community in New York, advocated a combination of HCQ, azithromycin (an antibiotic to guard against secondary infections), and a zinc supplement: HCQ increases the uptake of zinc ions into cells, a property that Zelenko surmised might provide antiviral effects. In an open letter in April 2020, Zelenko claimed to have treated about 1,450 patients, including 405 that he judged “high risk,” with only two deaths. Luigi Cavanna, a doctor in Piacenza, Italy, also claimed about the same time that thanks to an HCQ treatment protocol, none of his patients had died and only 5 percent were hospitalized—one-sixth the contemporaneous Italian hospitalization rate of over 30 percent. Many more systematic “observational” studies of HCQ—comparing patients in a hospital or elsewhere who received a drug (because of their own or a doctor’s choice) with those who did not—returned good results both as a treatment of Covid-19 cases (including one large study from the Henry Ford Health System in metropolitan Detroit) and for prevention of Covid-19 in individuals at high exposure risk. One especially striking example of the latter is a set of 11 “case-control” studies from India, where medical authorities recommended but did not mandate a weekly prophylactic dose of HCQ for medical workers. Most of these studies found that workers who took HCQ had reduced odds of testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, with especially marked reductions for those who took six or more doses of the protocol.
Medical researchers tend to discount doctors’ reports and observational studies—which, granted, have many potential biases that can’t always be spotted or corrected. For instance, observational studies can underestimate the efficacy of a treatment that’s given more often to sicker patients—or overestimate it, if health-conscious patients are more likely to demand experimental treatments, or if doctors who give ineffective experimental drugs are also more likely to give effective experimental drugs (this latter point was a common and valid criticism of the Henry Ford study). So doctors generally consider randomized trials, which avoid these classes of bias, to be more reliable—though they have drawbacks, too, such as considerably greater expense and, therefore, typically smaller sample sizes.
And most analyses of randomized trials of HCQ—on the basis of which mainstream medical opinion decided that it doesn’t work for Covid-19—do draw negative conclusions. For instance, a February 2021 review by Cochrane, an organization that produces comprehensive reviews of randomized trials, concludes, “HCQ for people infected with COVID‐19 has little or no effect on the risk of death and probably no effect on progression to mechanical ventilation.” Another meta-analysis in Nature by Cathrine Axfors et al. estimates an 11 percent increase in risk of death on the basis of 26 randomized trials.
The results of both meta-analyses were essentially determined by two large, similar trials: the Solidarity trial run by the World Health Organization and the Recovery trial at the University of Oxford. These trials accounted together for over 97 percent of the statistical weight in Cochrane’s main analysis, and both claimed to rule out more than a tiny benefit of HCQ for hospitalized Covid-19 patients.
But neither trial disproves claims such as Fareed and Tyson’s. First and most importantly, both trials were on hospitalized patients and are not necessarily applicable to “outpatients” earlier in the disease course. Antiviral treatments work better earlier: for instance, oseltamivir (also known as Tamiflu), an antiviral influenza treatment, works well if started within two days of symptom onset, but not later. In Covid-19, viral load peaks soon after symptom onset, and viral replication has already ceased in most hospitalized patients, guaranteeing that antiviral treatments will have limited effect. One review in The Lancet found that dozens of studies consistently find that viral load in Covid-19 peaks in the first week of symptoms and that “No study detected live virus beyond day 9 of illness.”
Read More

While progressive opponents of the legislation have labeled the measure the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, Republican state senator Dennis Baxley, who spearheaded the bill, said it is intended to restore authority to parents who are better equipped to address the topics of gender identity and sexual orientation in the early stages of childhood development.

Several ESPN broadcasters on Friday participated in an on-air moment of silence to protest Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, which would prohibit classroom instruction relating to sexual orientation or gender identity for students in kindergarten through third grade.
ESPN’s Elle Duncan on Friday spoke out against the Florida bill and similar proposals in other states, claiming they are “targeting our LGBTQIA+ communities.”

She added that many of her ESPN colleagues planned to walk out on Friday afternoon.

“We understand the gravity of this legislation and also how it is affecting so many families across this country, and because of that our allyship is going to take a front seat,” she said.
“And with that, we’re going to pause in solidarity,” she added, before observing a moment of silence.
Meanwhile, ESPN’s Carolyn Peck and Courtney Lyle took a two-minute-long moment of silence during the NCAA Women’s Tournament on Friday to protest the bill.
“There are things bigger than basketball that need to be addressed at this time,” Lyle said. “Our friends, our family, our coworkers, the players and coaches in our community are hurting right now.”
“Our LGBTQIA+ teammates at Disney asked for our solidarity and support,” she added.

Staffers at Disney, ESPN’s parent company, planned to hold walkouts last week and this week to protest the measure, the Guardian reported.
Disney CEO Bob Chapek said he and other Disney executives called Florida governor Ron DeSantis earlier this month to “express our disappointment and concern that if the legislation becomes law, it could be used to unfairly target gay, lesbian, non-binary, and transgender kids and families,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Chapek first came out against the bill during the company’s annual shareholder meeting when he announced Disney planned to donate $5 million to LGBTQ groups.
The bill passed the state legislature earlier this month. DeSantis is expected to sign the bill into law.

Read More

Like the Methodist missionaries two centuries ago who risked their reputations to re-awaken America from its slumbers, many Christians today may need to relearn what it truly means to be convinced of our convictions. You must learn to speak them out, knowing that the world—and even a good deal of Methodists—may never forgive you for it. Christianity will land you in some kind of trouble one way or another. They’ll find out what you believe in the end.

The Tale of a Tweet
On March 8, 2023, I was fired from my job as a lecturer and programme lead at an evangelical Methodist Bible college. I had worked in this role for seven years and had never faced any formal disciplinary action previously. I was dismissed on the charge of “bringing the college into disrepute” due to a tweet I posted on February 19, 2023.
Here is what I said that was deemed so disreputable to so many:
Homosexuality is invading the Church. Evangelicals no longer see the severity of this because they’re busy apologising for their apparently barbaric homophobia, whether or not it’s true. This is a ‘Gospel issue’, by the way. If sin is no longer sin, we no longer need a Saviour.
The tweet went viral. I was routinely Twitter-mobbed before being publicly denounced by the college on Twitter, who called my tweet “unacceptable” and “inappropriate.” They also posted the following remarkable sentence:
Cliff College is committed to being a safe and hospitable place where those with differing convictions are welcomed and encouraged to live and learn together as faithful disciples of Christ.
The following day, after I had said I could not take down the tweet in good conscience, I was suspended, instructed to leave the college site within half an hour, and banned from all contact with fellow staff or students. Following a disciplinary hearing two weeks later, I was dismissed for misconduct.
The Investigation Report compiled about that single tweet was 17 pages long. It itemized a selection of the many public and private complaints made against me, and the many institutional and reputational risks incurred by the college as a result. Most of the complainants characterized the tweet (incorrectly) as homophobic, whilst some pro-LGBT+ students declared they would now feel “unsafe” in any classroom where I was teaching. The report further noted that the college was reviewing whether the tweet should be reported under the college’s “Prevent” duty (the UK government’s anti-terrorism and hate speech programme).
Cultural Pressure and Ecclesial Compromise
The wider context of my tweet was the recent Church of England decision to offer official blessings for same-sex couples. Even whilst refraining from fully accepting same-sex marriage (for now), the event was disturbing enough to cause ten global Anglican dioceses to publicly break communion with the Church of England. In the weeks prior to my tweet, I had been debating various pro-LGBT+ ministers and theologians on social media, each of whom were speaking as though the affirmation of homosexuality within the Church was inevitable and that sooner or later the Church simply had to “catch up.” Even prominent evangelical bishops like Steven Croft began declaring how sorry he was for all the harm and distress the Church’s position had caused the LGBT+ community, leading him to make a dramatic public u-turn to affirm same-sex marriage. Croft, like many, believed that now was the time to take the brave stand of solidarity with the powerless: by siding with the majority within secular Western society who were already standing precisely there and had been for some time.
It almost goes without saying that the shifting of the Overton Window on homosexuality in the west has been one of the most successful marketing campaigns of the last thirty years. As shown by the tactics employed in Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen’s book, After the Ball: How America Will Conquer its Fear & Hatred of Gays in the ‘90s, this was a concerted campaign to present the for/against narrative at its most extreme in order to enact a dramatic shift in public opinion towards the progressive view. As a result of these determined efforts, the LGBT+ movement today has effectively gained not mere cult status but major religious status.
What I found especially reprehensible about the Anglican situation was that these many pro-LGBT+ vicars, bishops, and theologians refused to admit that their theological position on marriage was determinatively influenced by those shifting cultural currents. They were adamant that their view was simply the fruit of diligent Biblical exegesis and prayer. Apparently, it had nothing at all to do with the pressures exerted upon the Church by secular society, nor any burning desire to keep in step with public opinion on LGBT+. Apparently, God’s sheer delight in homosexuality was in the Bible all along, just sitting there in the text, waiting to be exegeted.
Such disingenuity in defense of the recent shifts is precisely why I used the language of “invasion” (the term which seemed to cause most of the trouble, especially for “winsome” evangelicals). If the affirmation of homosexuality did not come from Biblical exegesis then it came from the world, and if it came from the world then it did not come in peace.
The Apology Complex
My tweet, in essence, was not actually aimed at homosexuals, nor even at pro-LGBT+ Christians. It was aimed towards the safe centrist evangelicals who are not pro-LGBT+ but do not speak up because they find themselves stuck in the endless spiral of apologizing for their beliefs rather than proclaiming them. I had already observed far too often how evangelical leaders could no longer simply declare their non-affirming view on homosexuality without marinating it with lashings of heartfelt woe over just how much hurt the LGBT+ community has suffered at the hands of churches just like theirs.
I am not saying there is never a reason to repent of sinful discrimination against homosexuals, if warranted. But many of the mainstream apologies were exhibitions of reputational safeguarding, stemming more from fear of the world than fear of the Lord. And in any case, just how far back in one’s ecclesial history are these apologies supposed to stretch? If even the nice conscientious evangelicals are guilty of systemic homophobia, then who isn’t? What would be the systemic pastoral and theological implications of that? Surely if we now think that most Christian churches have been actively suppressing homosexual people for most of their history, this would have to be one of the greatest oversights of sin in church history, would it not? Given the lack of any historic precedent for explicit homosexual affirmation in the history of Christendom before the (post)modern west, one does wonder: why did God permit all his people to get it wrong for quite so long? Either God’s people really have no ears to hear after all, or else God has a very serious communication problem.
Read More
Related Posts: