This is an infuriating new frontier in #COVID19 #disinformation.

Here we a professional-looking website claiming to present results from a randomized controlled trial of hydrochloroquine.

No authors or affiliations are listed, just a twitter account. https://hcqtrial.com/ 

The report itself is a case study in Humpty-Dumpty's "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

The fact that different countries used different treatment approaches is referred to as a randomized controlled trial.

I try hard to follow the advice we give in Calling Bullshit of not ascribing to malice what can be explained incompetence, but when the authors co-opt the language of randomized controlled trials and pretend countries were assigned different treatments, my self-control shatters.

I mean....

For those who are not familiar with the area, there *are* sophisticated methods for attempting casual inference from "natural experiments" like the one here.

None of them involve costuming a study as a randomized controlled trial and waving one's hands around confounds.

Someone has put a lot of work into this sham report, and that someone doesn't want to be identified. Not only are no authors or affiliations listed, but the ICANN registry information is shielded. This—along with the dreadfully misleading analysis—should be an enormous red flag.

Yet the website is exploding across certain sectors of the internet. I would extremely interested if someone with far greater investigative talents than I could figure out who is behind this.

@stephaniemlee @bellwak @chrislhayes @cwarzel @juliacarriew @chrissyfarr

If it turns out it really is just a few scientists who would rather not put their names out there, fine—say that, keep them confidential, and report "Bergstrom has gotten paranoid after too much time on twitter."

If there's something darker going on, we ought to know.

Meanwhile, the consequences were predictable. This is already being presented as serious science on FOX News.

How many viewers, having been told that RCT's are the gold standard, will know that Country-RCT is a made-up term that isn't randomized at all? https://twitter.com/besttrousers/status/1291914858942930944

I doubt that anyone reading this is responsible, but I hope it's clear that hacking the site, launching denial-of-service attacks against it, etc. is counterproductive.

Don't create a martyr. If you don't like what they are saying (and I don't!), then explain why they are wrong.

This discussion of the article goes into further detail on some of the ways that it abuses the language of clinical trials. https://twitter.com/PapaGlider/status/1291063048472584192

Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz @GidMK has a more detailed breakdown of the article here. https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1292303265644728320

Over at @sciencebasedmed, @gorskon provides additional analysis. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/hcqtrial-com-astroturf-and-disinformation-about-hydroxychloroquine-and-covid-19-on-steroids/