The hastily-assembled Surgisphere corporation of around six employees (including a science fiction author and an adult model) produced three manuscripts in 2020, but the most important was their paper claiming the hydroxychloroquine was not simply unhelpful, but was killing people stricken with COVID-19. While it is hard to believe that anyone following the evidence and research at the time—or who has a good sense of what the real data actually looks like—could have possibly believed the paper to be real, the result was major policy changes around the world, despite being retracted after only around two weeks.

To date, no legal authorities have spent one moment investigating the Surgisphere team, to any public knowledge. The paper continues to be cited in journals even though essentially nobody left in the scientific community who has bothered to read it doesn’t believe it to be a fraud in its entirety.

While frontline physicians like Italian doctor Luigi Cavanna or American doctors Brian Tyson and George Fareed were busy saving all of their COVID-19 patients treated early in disease progression outside of the hospital with early treatment regimens using antivirals, these results were called “anecdotal” and health authorities spent no resources at all tracking them down for documentation and publication. Instead, research on antivirals for patients with progressive COVID-19 illness were poorly documented and considered definitive due to being acknowledged in peer review.

This extremely shoddy meta-analysis once again targets an antiviral agent.

Of course, the absurdity is not just about the research itself, but also how it’s interpreted: