[imagesource: Gallo Images / Foto24 / Loanna Hoffmann]

Unless you’re a doctor reading this, neither you nor I are medical experts.

Professor Tim Noakes, however, does have a very impressive resume, although he did admit in a recent radio interview that he is not a virus expert.

That interview, with local radio station CCFM last week, has not been well received, which has been the case with much of what ‘the Prof’ has had to say in recent years.

Writing for GroundUp, Nathan Geffen says the interview contained “elementary errors”, as well as “false and misleading statements”.

The first bone of contention comes when Noakes describes the coronavirus as a DNA virus, with Geffen pointing out that it’s an RNA virus, and “any doctor speaking publicly about the virus should know this”.

From there on out, it gets worse:

Noakes then puts forward a theory that appears to have originally been proposed on the blog site Medium, but Noakes doesn’t credit the originator. The Medium blog (apparently now deleted) was titled “Covid-19 had us all fooled, but now we might have finally found its secret”. The theory claims the virus works by attacking red blood cells and depleting haemoglobin. I’m not a molecular biologist so I won’t even attempt to explain this theory or why it’s wrong. But Matthew Amdahl is a doctor with a PhD in Bioengineering and has written an excellent piece debunking this theory. Please read it.

Noakes proposes the theory with supreme confidence. Despite admitting that he has no expertise in virology, there’s no caution and no caveats. This is not the way an ethical scientist should talk to the general public. He also talks in a semi-conspiratorial tone, with the implication that he and a few others have it right while the vast majority of doctors and scientists are too stubborn to see it their way.

Much of what Noakes says these days has conspiratorial tones. A look at his Twitter account shows some rather, um, ‘interesting’ retweets.

What is this?

Ah yes, the classic ‘upwards of 90% of the world’s scientists are wrong because of this single, anecdotal image’ take on climate change.

He also retweeted Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who recently had to remove a tweet because it broke rules against coronavirus misinformation.

There’s more worth pointing out from his feed, but let’s stick to the radio interview:

Then comes the most dangerous part of the interview. Noakes punts hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the virus. He says there is good evidence for the drug. He also suggests that there is resistance to its use by the medical community because Donald Trump promoted it.

This is nonsense. Hydroxychloroquine is a candidate drug for the treatment of Covid-19. There is some evidence from a French study that it may benefit patients, but the study was highly flawed…

We don’t know if hydroxychloroquine will work; there isn’t enough data. We also don’t know what dose should be used. Only further research can discover this. It is a drug that can have severe, even fatal side effects, and it’s highly irresponsible and unethical for Noakes to be promoting its use to the general public.

I would imagine that if you’re someone who relies on hydroxychloroquine as part of your treatment regime for diseases where it is proven to work, and you were experiencing a shortage as a result of it being punted as a treatment for COVID-19, you’d be especially miffed.

For every link you can provide showing the potential (and still unproven benefits) of hydroxychloroquine, another link can be provided rebutting it. At this stage, we just don’t know.

Bhekisisa published a two-minute video regarding facts about chloroquine earlier today, which is also worth a look.

The Prof seems to have gone off the deep end on Twitter (much like another South African sullying her decades of noble work on the social media platform), and many in the medical profession have long warned about his hot takes.

I’ll take this doctor’s advice when it comes to that radio interview…

[source:groundup]