The Padian et al study showed a lack of seroconversions despite 282 "couple years" of follow up. The less rigorous retrospective arm of their trial estimated 1000 sexual contacts needed to transmit HIV from male to female, and 9000 to transmit from female to male. This makes it nearly impossible to believe a research study claiming to reduce this significantly using PreP - or anything else. You would need hundreds of participants and to follow them for at least 5 years (Rebecca you are the stats whiz so maybe you can correct my rough estimates). There are so many biases in pharmaceutical research that every drug study deserves careful review.
For example, studies that have no positive result or even worse, show "negative efficacy", do not get published and are instead buried in company vaults that are nearly inaccessible even with a Freedom of Information Act requests. Cochrane researchers Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan detailed their efforts to find the unpublished trials of Tamiflu and Relenza, and after many years they finally found that the drug companies' own studies showed that they caused more harm than good. Here is a quote about their efforts from one of their Substack posts:
The Story of Influenza Antivirals: Part 14: Moving beyond the confusion
TOM JEFFERSON AND CARL HENEGHAN
MAY 15, 2023
"As you may recall, we started with the idea of updating our adult Cochrane review (on Tamiflu and Relenza) in 2009. We swiftly learnt that no one outside manufacturer or regulator had seen the complete dataset of trials and that the published trials had been ghostwritten. ..."
"Our requests for data had met with confidentiality agreements and secrecy clauses. The key claims made by manufacturers, especially of Tamiflu/oseltamivir, was that it had effects on complications reducing respiratory tract complications, antibiotic use, and hospitalization in both healthy and "at-risk" adults. But no such effect was visible in published trials.
After 18 months after the start of our search for the evidence, we still could not answer several basic questions:
How many trials were there?
Who is responsible for each trial?
Why were large phase III trials (e.g. M76001, NAIA 3002) not published?
Who was responsible for the decision not to publish studies in which humans were randomised?
What were the harms and benefits of NIs?
Why were trials published ten years after their completion?"
They persisted for a few more years, and went through thousands of documents finally released through FOIA requests, and found that the adverse effects were worse than the benefits.
It’s actually a pretty big study, because they just followed people in STI clinics, but they cut it off after three years, I think when Covid shut everything down. I’ll report back with a full analysis soon. But yes, the lack of sexual transmission in Padian (and others) casts all the figures and numbers they come up with into serious doubt.
My understanding is that relative risk reduction is the trick used to make things look really favorable. So you're studying say, 5000 people, and the control group has 2 incidence of whatever you're measuring, and the studied group has 1, and they call that a 50% reduction without reporting the actual numbers. I wonder if that's also something going on here.
If only 1% of people who test positive for HIV ever get "AIDS" anyway, then ANY "prophylactic" preparation, even daily orange juice, will be 99% effective, according to statistics. And medical "efficacy" is always based on statistics, never on actual experiments to test hypotheses.
Rebecca - have you seen this; patents for AIDS etc ... some dispute:
D
@Diddzed
"Just started checking, this is not an AIDS patent; rather, it is a patent from the 1990s for tetrasilver tetroxide molecular crystal devices that the patent applicants had hoped would be able to effectively cure AIDS . It has now expired"
The Padian et al study showed a lack of seroconversions despite 282 "couple years" of follow up. The less rigorous retrospective arm of their trial estimated 1000 sexual contacts needed to transmit HIV from male to female, and 9000 to transmit from female to male. This makes it nearly impossible to believe a research study claiming to reduce this significantly using PreP - or anything else. You would need hundreds of participants and to follow them for at least 5 years (Rebecca you are the stats whiz so maybe you can correct my rough estimates). There are so many biases in pharmaceutical research that every drug study deserves careful review.
For example, studies that have no positive result or even worse, show "negative efficacy", do not get published and are instead buried in company vaults that are nearly inaccessible even with a Freedom of Information Act requests. Cochrane researchers Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan detailed their efforts to find the unpublished trials of Tamiflu and Relenza, and after many years they finally found that the drug companies' own studies showed that they caused more harm than good. Here is a quote about their efforts from one of their Substack posts:
The Story of Influenza Antivirals: Part 14: Moving beyond the confusion
TOM JEFFERSON AND CARL HENEGHAN
MAY 15, 2023
"As you may recall, we started with the idea of updating our adult Cochrane review (on Tamiflu and Relenza) in 2009. We swiftly learnt that no one outside manufacturer or regulator had seen the complete dataset of trials and that the published trials had been ghostwritten. ..."
"Our requests for data had met with confidentiality agreements and secrecy clauses. The key claims made by manufacturers, especially of Tamiflu/oseltamivir, was that it had effects on complications reducing respiratory tract complications, antibiotic use, and hospitalization in both healthy and "at-risk" adults. But no such effect was visible in published trials.
After 18 months after the start of our search for the evidence, we still could not answer several basic questions:
How many trials were there?
Who is responsible for each trial?
Why were large phase III trials (e.g. M76001, NAIA 3002) not published?
Who was responsible for the decision not to publish studies in which humans were randomised?
What were the harms and benefits of NIs?
Why were trials published ten years after their completion?"
They persisted for a few more years, and went through thousands of documents finally released through FOIA requests, and found that the adverse effects were worse than the benefits.
https://trusttheevidence.substack.com/p/the-story-of-influenza-antivirals-6ce
It’s actually a pretty big study, because they just followed people in STI clinics, but they cut it off after three years, I think when Covid shut everything down. I’ll report back with a full analysis soon. But yes, the lack of sexual transmission in Padian (and others) casts all the figures and numbers they come up with into serious doubt.
My understanding is that relative risk reduction is the trick used to make things look really favorable. So you're studying say, 5000 people, and the control group has 2 incidence of whatever you're measuring, and the studied group has 1, and they call that a 50% reduction without reporting the actual numbers. I wonder if that's also something going on here.
If only 1% of people who test positive for HIV ever get "AIDS" anyway, then ANY "prophylactic" preparation, even daily orange juice, will be 99% effective, according to statistics. And medical "efficacy" is always based on statistics, never on actual experiments to test hypotheses.
Rebecca - have you seen this; patents for AIDS etc ... some dispute:
D
@Diddzed
"Just started checking, this is not an AIDS patent; rather, it is a patent from the 1990s for tetrasilver tetroxide molecular crystal devices that the patent applicants had hoped would be able to effectively cure AIDS . It has now expired"
- https://twitter.com/bambkb/status/1734603484312576143?s=20