Destroying the Data

A few days ago we watched the interview by Dr John Campbell with our Professor Wendy Hoy, regarding the potential destruction of the samples from the QoVAX study.

Professor Hoy is one of Australia’s great physician scientists. She specialises in kidney disease. The citation upon her election to the Australian Academy of Science reads:

Professor Wendy Hoy is recognised internationally for her multidisciplinary research on kidney and related chronic disease and for the scientific rigour she applied to Aboriginal health research. Her work has transformed Aboriginal health services in Australia, saved lives, reduced the need for dialysis and supported development of early intervention programs globally. Wendy’s studies demonstrated the contribution the number of functioning nephrons at birth makes to an individual’s susceptibility to kidney disease and her work has underpinned new kidney imaging technologies.

John Campbell notes she has the Order of Australia, which equates to damehood in the UK.

I have been fortunate to meet Wendy and get to know her through the covid period. She has an intense passion for improving the health of Australians. Her career history is fascinating. Her wikipedia profile gives some sense of her achievements. It doesn’t mention much about her early career, where she left Australia to work in America for 20 years with native American indigenous communities in her specialty field of renal medicine. Indigenous communities bear a disproportionate burden of health for kidney disease. She was coaxed back to Australia to lead research and has done important work with our own indigenous communities.

Wendy was a Professor at University of Queensland at the time when the decision to stop the QoVAX study was made in 2023. I recall she knew the investigators were stunned by the decision at the time.

Dr Phillip Altman did a write up earlier this week following the Dr John interview. Philip includes in his post the letter sent to the participants of the QoVAX study. I had a read of it. Rebekah Barnett also wrote an important piece on the termination of the QoVAX study including that letter. This paragraph is astounding:

One local area health service has decided “for a range of reasons”, not specified, that there is no longer a scientific and public health need to retain the biological samples for future study. They do give one reason, that they are OK to share, which is “the many mutations of the virus”.

What?

I thought that would be exactly the reason to keep the samples. The confounding virus that we still don’t understand. Then the rest of the sentence doesn’t make sense “and similar studies from Australia and worldwide”. It is nonsense language written by an idiot from a local area health service. Perhaps written under duress.

In this age of big data one would think that data related to a disease that turned the world upside down would be critical to maintain. Once the specimens are destroyed they are gone forever. It’s not like other diseases where participants could be recruited again to study other chronic diseases which continue in the same fashion.

I don’t know what the total cost of covid to the Australian economy was. Many, many billions. Last week I wrote about the antivirals that increasingly are agreed to have little effect and we have spent a billion dollars on them alone.

It’s clear that the reason for destruction is that the data might show information that certain people do not want known.

Former barrister Julian Gillespie got on to the case rapidly and legal notice was served to halt the destruction. He summarises actions behind the scenes in his post here. He includes the letter from solicitors PJ O’Brien & Associates in the post. It ends:

As I understand it the destruction of samples is on hold. There is also a petition to the Queensland parliament.

If it weren’t for people like Professor Wendy Hoy and the others, who have been working to halt the destruction it would have happened unnoticed. The public would know nothing about it. Were there to be a Royal Commission in the years to come, further study of this data may be pivotal.