Randomized Controlled Trial In India Shows That Convalescent Plasma Not Effective In Treating COVID-19 Contrary To Fraudulent Studies In America

Convalescent Plasma: An open label phase II multicenter randomized controlled trial (PLACID Trial) of convalescent plasma in the management of moderate COVID-19 in 464 adults in India has showed that the treatment protocol does not does not reduce their chances of getting seriously ill or dying, in simple words, it is not effective in treating COVID-19.


 
The study findings were published in the peer-reviewed British Medical Journal. https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m3939
 
The study findings contradicts findings from studies in America that were just mere substandard observational studies most probably manipulated, and for which the Trump administration granted EUA or Emergency Usage Authorization for the usage of Convalescent Plasma to treat COVID-19
 
America is turning to be a country that is now churning out a lot of fraudulent studies to support the criminal causes of the Trump administration from the hydrochloroquine saga to remdesivir and convalescent plasma at the expense of the innocent and ignorant American citizens who are being treated worse than lab rats! We expect more inefffective therapies to be granted approval by the White House controlled FDA soon as Trump and his cronies need to make as much money before he ousted out of office.
 
The study findings are from one of the first clinical trials to report the effects of convalescent plasma, which has been given emergency approval in countries including India and the United States.
 
Initially touted as a potential treatment for patients with moderate COVID-19, particularly in places where laboratory capacity is limited, the study conducted across India and published in the medical journal BMJ Friday concluded that "convalescent plasma showed limited effectiveness".
 
However the study team said future studies could explore using only plasma with high levels of neutralizing antibodies to see if this might be more effective.
 
As a result of growing desperation and with few useful treatments and no cure or vaccine, nations are scrambling to find ways to blunt the severity of the new coronavirus.
 
Initially one idea has been to harvest recovered patients' antibodies, which float in plasma ie the liquid component of blood and then inject this into the blood of someone fighting infection.
 
This therapeutic based technique was first tried against diphtheria in 1892 and was shown to help speed recovery from Ebola and SARS, which is caused by the same family of pathogens as the novel coronavirus.
 
Substandard observational studies carried out in America suggested convalescent plasma could be beneficial as a result of political pressure.
 
However in a randomized clinical trial at dozens of public and private hospitals across India, researchers found that it failed to reduce mortality or stop progression to severe COVID-19 in moderately ill patients.
 
The clinical trial was funded by the Indian Council of Medical Research, enrolled 464 adult patients, with an average age of 52, between April and July and split them randomly into two groups.
 
For the trial, a control group of 229 was given the normal best standard of hospital care, while 235 people received two transfusions of convalescent plasma and were then given the best standard of hospital care.
 
It was found that after 28 days, 44 (19 percent) of the participants in the plasma group and 41 (18 percent) in the control group progressed to severe disease or died from any cause.
 
Interestingly when they restricted the comparison to patients who received plasma with detectable levels of antibodies, the results were the same, the researchers said.
 
The study team did however find that the use of convalescent plasma seemed to improve resolution of shortness of breath and fatigue and led to higher conversion to a negative result for the virus a sign of it being neutralized by antibodies after 7 days.
 
The clinical trial "was a rigorous randomized controlled study on a topic of enormous global importance" said public health scientist Dr Elizabeth Pathak in a separate commentary also published in the BMJ.
 
However the results were greeted with caution by a spokesman from Britain's National Health Service, which is also in the process of carrying out large, randomized control trials of convalescent plasma.
 
A media spokesman from the NHS blood and transplant department said that the Indian trial had used donations with antibody levels around six to 10 times lower than in Britain.
 
The study team further added, ”The early conversion to viral RNA negativity in the intervention arm aligns with published evidence and further supports the fundamental hypothesis that convalescent plasma exerts virus neutralizing effects. The goal of achieving better clinical outcomes in our study, however, remained elusive. We did not find evidence to support the immunomodulator functions of convalescent plasma as we could not show differences in the levels of inflammatory markers. This could potentially explain why convalescent plasma treatment made no difference to the primary outcome despite early negativity for SARS-CoV-2 RNA. Transfusion of convalescent plasma was deemed to be safe in our study as minimal non-life threatening adverse events were reported. Three deaths could possibly be related to transfusion, which is comparable to the other larger report on safety of convalescent plasma use to treat covid-19. In our study we defined a “possible” adverse event as a clinical event that occurred within six hours of convalescent plasma transfusion but could also be explained by worsening covid-19.”
 
The team concluded, “Although the use of convalescent plasma seemed to improve resolution of shortness of breath and fatigue in patients with moderate covid-19 and led to higher negative conversion of SARS-CoV-2 RNA on day 7 post-enrolment, this did not translate into a reduction in 28 day mortality or progression to severe disease. Areas of future research could include effectiveness of convalescent plasma among neutralizing antibody negative patients and the use of convalescent plasma with high neutralizing antibody titres. The challenge will be to find both suitable patients and suitable plasma donors. Additionally, this challenge could limit the use of convalescent plasma to a small subset of patients.”
 
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