Author: Art Diamond

When the Highly Restrictive Enrollment Criteria for Clinical Trials Steal Hope from the Innocently Desperate, It “Just Feels Unjust”

Muscular dystrophy is sometimes called “Duchenne.” The full name of the disease is “Duchenne muscular dystrophy.” When I was a student at Monroe elementary school a classmate named Frank Goldsberry played on the basketball team. In high school he was in a wheel chair with muscular dystrophy. When the high school principle, Howard Crouch, proposed to do away with the academic honor of valedictorian on the ground that there was some arbitrariness in who received it, I argued that to do would be to diminish the honor given to academic achievement. Crouch relented. It turned out that our valedictorian was Frank Goldsberry. He died a few years later in his early 20s. Frank’s father told my mother that Frank was grateful to me for speaking up. Howard Crouch had a point, but I am glad that after working hard under dire circumstances, Frank received the award.

The F.D.A. should stop mandating randomized double-blind clinical trials (RCTs) so that those who have muscular dystrophy can seek any therapy that they, their parents, and their physicians believe has promise. Not everyone will be cured, but we will learn what works through a Bayesian process of trial and error. More parents and boys will be allowed to hold on to hope.

(p. D1) Lucas was 5 before his parents, Bill and Marci Barton of Grand Haven, Mich., finally got an explanation for his difficulties standing up or climbing stairs. The diagnosis: muscular dystrophy.

Mr. Barton turned to Google.

“The first thing I read was, ‘no cure, in a wheelchair in their teens, pass in their 20s,” Mr. Barton said. “I stopped. I couldn’t read any more. I couldn’t handle it.”

Then he found a reason to hope. For the first time ever, there are clinical trials — nearly two dozen — testing treatments that might actually stop the disease.

The problem, as Mr. Barton soon discovered, is that the enrollment criteria are so restrictive that very few children qualify. As a result, families like the Bartons often are turned away.

. . .

Ryan and Brooke Saalman know how hard it can be to know what to do. “We did a lot of praying,” said Ms. Saalman, mother of two boys with Duchenne in Columbus, Ga.

They decided to enroll their oldest son, Jacob, 6, in a trial of a highly experimental drug.

. . .

. . . they discovered that gene therapy may be irreversible. And if it didn’t work, Ja-(p. D3)cob would be ineligible for an even more promising approach in the future: gene editing, to snip out the deadly mutation that causes Duchenne, an effort now in preclinical development.

. . .

The Bartons found out about a gene-therapy trial at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, testing a treatment by Sarepta Therapeutics.

They watched a miraculous video of a little boy struggling to walk up a flight of stairs before treatment — and then doing it easily afterward.

“This was what we were hoping for,” Mr. Barton said.

Lucas was the right age, and he seemed to qualify. But testing showed that he carries antibodies to the virus used to deliver the treatment. It would not work for him.

The Bartons were drained, devastated. And for now, there is no other trial that Lucas qualifies for.

“I had my put my hopes into this,” Mr. Barton said. “It was the miracle.”

Dr. Jeffrey Bigelow, a neurologist, and his wife, Alexis Bigelow, of Millcreek, Utah, hoped against hope that their son Henri, 8, would qualify for the only gene therapy trial that will accept boys his age.

Then the Bigelows found out that enrollees of Henri’s age have to be able to lie down and then stand up with their hands at their sides in less than 10 seconds.

It took Henri 10 seconds to do that last spring, when he was evaluated for another trial. Now it would probably take him 20 seconds, his father said.

“It feels like Henri is being punished for losing the ability to stand up from the ground too soon,” Dr. Bigelow said.

He also worries about older boys with Duchenne who are lucky enough to still walk. They are shut out from the trial because they are not yet in wheelchairs. And other trials won’t accept boys that old.

“These are boys who, like Henri, desperately need the treatment, and if they don’t get it in the next one to two years, likely will be confined to a wheelchair, to never walk again,” Dr. Bigelow said.

“This just feels unjust.”

For the full story see:

Gina Kolata. “One Shot To Qualify For Hope.” The New York Times (Tuesday, March 26, 2019 [sic]): D1 & D3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 25, 2019 [sic], and has the title “For Many Boys With Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, Bright Hope Lies Just Beyond Reach.”)

Rigid Guidelines Don’t Allow for Individualizing Treatment and Discount the Doctor’s Clinical Judgment

The criticism of the Clovers sepsis clinical trial is that the the treatment and placebo arms of the trial each require rigid adherence to a protocol, and such adherence rules out personalizing individual treatment based on individual differences among patients and doctors’ clinical judgment based on past experiences. That criticism seems plausible and also seems to apply, not just to the Clovers sepsis clinical trial, but to all< randomized double-blind clinical trials.

(p. D1) A large government trial comparing treatments for a life-threatening condition called sepsis is putting participants at risk of organ failure and even death, critics charge, and should be immediately shut down.

A detailed analysis of the trial design prepared by senior investigators at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Md., concluded that the study “places seriously ill patients at risk without the possibility of gaining information that can provide benefits either to the subjects or to future patients.”

In a letter to the federal Office for Human Research Protection, representatives of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group compared the study, called Clovers, to “an experiment that would be conducted on laboratory animals.”

“The human subjects of the Clovers trial, as designed and currently conducted, are unwitting guinea pigs in a physiology experiment,” Dr. Michael Carome and Dr. Sidney M. Wolfe wrote in their letter.

Begun in March, Clovers is funded by the N.I.H. — despite the criticism of its own investigators — and aims to enroll 2,320 pa-(p. D3)tients at 44 hospitals around the country.

. . .

At issue is whether patients participating in Clovers are being given treatment that deviates from usual care — so much so that lives may be endangered by the research.  . . .

When patients experience septic shock, current guidelines call for raising blood pressure by administering fluids within the first three hours of care, and then administering vasopressors within the first six hours if patients do not respond to fluids.

Vasopressors can be administered early on, during or after the infusion of fluids; a new treatment guideline for hospitals says the drugs should be started within the first hour if patients aren’t responding to intravenous fluids.

Many physicians have been critical of rigid guidelines like this one because they don’t allow for individualizing treatment and appear to discount the doctor’s clinical judgment.

Both fluids in large amounts and vasopressors can cause serious complications, but when a patient’s condition continues to deteriorate, doctors use both interventions, adjusting them depending on the severity of illness.

They generally start with fluids, which in small amounts are considered less toxic than vasopressors.

But participants in Clovers are randomly assigned to a “liberal fluids” group who receive large infusions of fluids in a very short time but limits the use of vasopressors, or to a “restrictive fluids” group in which fluids are minimized and drug treatment begun earlier.

For the full story see:

Roni Caryn Rabin. “Critics Demand Halt of a Sepsis Trial.” The New York Times (Tuesday, September 25, 2018 [sic]): D1 & D3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 24, 2018 [sic], and has the title “Trial by Fire: Critics Demand That a Huge Sepsis Study Be Stopped.”)

The Number of Alzheimer’s Patients Is Too Few to Populate the Many Promising Clinical Trials

When the F.D.A. mandates randomized double-blind clinical trials (RCTs) be successfully performed before allowing the use of a new drug, it also mandates that diverse promising drugs will never be tested. Some of those drugs might help or even cure Alzheimer’s. The reason that some diverse promising drugs will never be tested, as explained by Gina Kolata in the passage quoted below, is that there are too few diagnosed and willing Alzheimer’s patients to conduct the number and kind of RCTs that the government mandates, for all the promising drugs under development. What is the alternative to mandated RCTs? Allow physicians to prescribe drugs that have a promising rationale. If their patients benefit the physicians will continue to prescribe the drug and they will tell their colleagues.

(p. D1) The task facing Eli Lilly, the giant pharmaceutical company, sounds simple enough: Find 375 people with early Alzheimer’s disease for a bold new clinical trial aiming to slow or stop memory loss.

There are 5.4 million Alzheimer’s patients in the United States. You’d think it would be easy to find that many participants for a trial like this one.

But it’s not. And the problem has enormous implications for treatment of a disease that terrifies older Americans and has strained families in numbers too great to count.

The Global Alzheimer’s Platform Foundation, which is helping recruit participants for the Lilly trial, estimates that to begin finding participants, it will have to inform 15,000 to 18,000 people in the right age groups about the effort.

Of these, nearly 2,000 must pass the initial screening to be selected for further tests to see if they qualify.

Just 20 percent will meet the criteria to enroll in Lilly’s trial: They must be aged 60 to 89, have mild but progressive memory loss for at least six months, and have two types of brain scans showing Alzheimer’s is underway.

Yet an 80 percent screening failure rate is typical for Alzheimer’s trials, said John Dwyer, president of the foundation. There is just no good way to quickly diagnose the disease.

The onerous process of locating just 375 patients illustrates a grim truth: finding patients on whom to test new Alzheimer’s treatments is becoming an insurmountable obstacle — no matter how promising the trial.

With brain scans, lab tests and memory tests, the cost per diagnosis alone is daunting — as much as $100,000 for each person who ends up enrolled in a trial, Mr. Dwyer said — even before they begin the experimental treatment.

Complicating the problem, the number of trials has exploded in recent years. There (p. D4) are more than 100 Alzheimer’s studies looking for a whopping 25,000 participants, Mr. Dwyer said.

To begin filling them all, 37.5 million patients in the right age group would first have to be informed. Ten percent would be referred to a trial site for screening.

Just 4 percent will move forward with an evaluation, and of these, just over 17 percent will drop out, given the current rate, leaving roughly 125,000 to be screened. And with an 80 percent screening failure rate, that leaves 25,000 participants of the 37.5 million who were first informed.

The numbers make it clear: There’s no way scientists are going to find 25,000 participants for all of the Alzheimer’s trials that have been approved.

“The irony is that the science has never been more promising,” Mr. Dwyer said. “How many promising drugs will be abandoned or their evaluation seriously delayed? Some good science is going to be left on cutting-room floor.”

For the full story see:

Gina Kolata. “Alzheimer’s Trials Hit a Roadblock.” The New York Times (Tuesday, July 24, 2018 [sic]): D1 & D4.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 23, 2018 [sic], and has the title “For Scientists Racing to Cure Alzheimer’s, the Math Is Getting Ugly.”)

F.D.A. Chief Sets Low Bar for Cancer Progress–Three Months of Longer Life Is “A Major Therapeutic Advance”

F.D.A. regulations have slowed progress toward curing cancer. Rather than reduce regulations, the head of the F.D.A. redefines “progress” as occurring when a new drug increases average lifespan by a mere three months.

(p. D3) Was there a moment when you realized a new era had begun?

It was a gradual thing. I wish I could say I had an “a-ha” moment.

I remember though, one of our first approvals of a PD-1 drug (a drug that unleashes the immune system to fight cancer). A division director sent me an email with a survival curve for patients in a study. It was a Friday afternoon. I saw it and I nearly fell off my seat. It was such a positive study for these patients with squamous cell lung cancer. They lived an average of six months with standard chemotherapy. With the new drug they lived 9.2 months.

I called the division director and said, “What are we going to do to expedite this?”

We had to get a submission from the drug company and that can take several months. Sometimes it takes six months and sometimes up to a year because of the voluminous amount of material that must be provided.

We got the submission in a couple of months. Nivolumab was approved in March of 2015.

It was a major therapeutic advance. These were people who heretofore had few therapeutic options.

. . .

. . ., my regret? I won’t be here in 2049, my presumed 50th F.D.A. anniversary.

I would love to see what oncology looks like given the rapid changes in the past 25 years. Hang on tight. The velocity of innovation will only increase.

For the full interview see:

Gina Kolata, interviewer. “F.D.A.’s Cancer Chief Is Forward Focused.” The New York Times (Tuesday, November 19, 2024): D3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date Nov. 8, 2024, and has the title “He’s the F.D.A.’s Cancer Chief, Not a Fortune Teller.” The question is from the interviewer Gina Kolata. The rest of the words are quoted from the answers of Dr. Richard Pazdur.)

Peppermint at One Time Required a Prescription, While Strychnine Was Sold Over-the-Counter

I suspect I would not much like the Remaking the American Patient book–it seems to blame capitalism for all of the ills of the healthcare system. But it does include one compelling example of the limitations of government regulation of drugs: allowing strychnine while restricting peppermint.

(p. D3) Medical historians who focus on the conquest of dire diseases serve up narratives of progress and triumph. Not Ms. Tomes, a professor of history at Stony Brook University, who has chosen to examine instead the health care experience of average healthy citizens, the great silent majority whose lives are punctuated by a variety of minor ills and only the occasional major calamity.

. . .

Are you perplexed by our regulatory chaos, with layer upon layer of well-meaning but persistently ineffective efforts to guarantee the safety of medical services? It turns out we come from a long tradition of such inadequacy: Patient safety has been the holy grail for everyone, long sought, never achieved.

Drug regulatory efforts have been inconsistent and confusing. (At one point in the 1940s, peppermint drops were available by prescription, while strychnine could be freely purchased by anyone).

For the full review see:

Abigail Zuger, M.D. “When Patients Became Purchasers.” The New York Times (Tuesday, January 26, 2016 [sic]): D3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 23, 2016 [sic], and has the title “Review: ‘Remaking the American Patient’.”)

The book under review above is:

Tomes, Nancy. Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers, Studies in Social Medicine. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Scientists Invest Much Money and Time to Develop Machines Able to Sniff as Well as a Dog

Seven years have passed since the article quoted below predicted that sniffing devices would be available to clinicians in three to five years. I believe the prediction was premature. In the meantime, we should be making more and better use of dog noses to sniff out disease.

(p. D5) But not every physician’s nose is a precision instrument, and dogs, while adept at sniffing out cancer, get distracted. So researchers have been trying for decades to figure out how to build an inexpensive odor sensor for quick, reliable and noninvasive diagnoses.

. . .

“You’re seeing a convergence of technology now, so we can actually run large-scale clinical studies to get the data to prove odor analysis has real utility,” said Billy Boyle, co-founder and president of operations at Owlstone, a manufacturer of chemical sensors in Cambridge, England.

Mr. Boyle, an electronics engineer, formed the company with two friends in 2004 to develop sensors to detect chemical weapons and explosives for customers, including the United States government. But when Mr. Boyle’s girlfriend and eventual wife, Kate Gross, was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2012, his focus shifted to medical sensors, with an emphasis on cancer detection.

Ms. Gross died at the end of 2014. That she might still be alive if her cancer had been detected earlier, Mr. Boyle said, continues to be a “big motivator.”

. . .

A similar diagnostic technology is being developed by an Israeli chemical engineer, Hossam Haick, who was also touched by cancer.

“My college roommate had leukemia, and it made me want to see whether a sensor could be used for treatment,” said Mr. Haick, a professor at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. “But then I realized early diagnosis could be as important as treatment itself.”

. . .

In the United States, a team of researchers from the Monell Chemical Senses Center and the University of Pennsylvania received an $815,000 grant in February [2017] from the Kleberg Foundation to advance work on a prototype odor sensor that detects ovarian cancer in samples of blood plasma.

. . .

“We are trying to make the device work the way we understand mammalian olfaction works,” said Charlie Johnson, director of the Nano/Bio Interface Center at the University of Pennsylvania, who is leading the fabrication effort. “DNA gives unique characteristics for this process.”

In addition to these groups, teams in Austria, Switzerland and Japan also are developing odor sensors to diagnose disease.

“I think the fact that you’re seeing so much activity both in commercial and academic settings shows that we’re getting a lot closer,” said Cristina Davis, a biomedical engineer and professor at the University of California, Davis, who also is helping to develop an odor sensor to diagnose disease.

“My estimate is it’s a three- to five-year time frame” before such tools are available to clinicians, she added.

For the full story see:

Kate Murphy. “The Race to Sniff Out Disease.” The New York Times (Tuesday, May 2, 2017 [sic]): D5.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 1, 2017 [sic], and has the title “One Day, a Machine Will Smell Whether You’re Sick.”)

Some Mostly Useless Procedures “Enrich the Pockets of Medical Practitioners”

(p. D5) Many of the procedures people undergo to counter chronic knee pain in the hopes of avoiding a knee replacement have limited or no evidence to support them. Some enrich the pockets of medical practitioners while rarely benefiting patients for more than a few months.

I wish I had known that before I had succumbed to wishful thinking and tried them all.

. . .

Serious questions are now being raised about the benefits of the arthroscopic procedures that millions of people endure in hopes of delaying, if not avoiding, total knee replacements.

The latest challenge, published in May [2017] in BMJ by an expert panel that systematically reviewed 12 well-designed trials and 13 observational studies, concluded that arthroscopic surgery for degenerative knee arthritis and meniscal tears resulted in no lasting pain relief or improved function.

Three months after the procedure, fewer than 15 percent of patients experienced at best “a small or very small improvement in pain and function,” effects that disappeared completely within a year.

As with all invasive procedures, the surgery is not without risks, infection being the most common, though not the only, complication.

Furthermore, the panel added, “Most patients will experience an important improvement in pain and function without arthroscopy.”

For the full commentary see:

Jane E. Brody. “Personal Health; What I Wish I’d Known About My Knees.” The New York Times (Tuesday, July 4, 2017 [sic]): D5.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 3, 2017 [sic], and has the same title as the print version.)

The May 2017 BMJ academic review article mentioned above, is:

Siemieniuk, Reed A. C., Ian A. Harris, Thomas Agoritsas, Rudolf W. Poolman, Romina Brignardello-Petersen, Stijn Van de Velde, Rachelle Buchbinder, Martin Englund, Lyubov Lytvyn, Casey Quinlan, Lise Helsingen, Gunnar Knutsen, Nina Rydland Olsen, Helen Macdonald, Louise Hailey, Hazel M. Wilson, Anne Lydiatt, and Annette Kristiansen. “Arthroscopic Surgery for Degenerative Knee Arthritis and Meniscal Tears: A Clinical Practice Guideline.” BMJ 357 (May 10, 2017).

Ozempic Profits Poured into Massive Supercomputer Meant to Power AI for Future Drug Development

I think AI is currently being oversold. But I am very ignorant and could be wrong, so I favor a diversity of privately-funded bets on what will work to bring us future breakthrough innovations.

(p. B2) Two of the world’s most important companies are now in a partnership born from the success of their most revolutionary products. The supercomputer was built with technology from Nvidia—and money from the Novo Nordisk Foundation. The charitable organization has become supremely wealthy as the largest shareholder in Novo Nordisk, which means this project was made possible by the breakthrough drugs that have sent the Danish company’s stock price soaring.

To put it another way, it’s the first AI supercomputer funded by Ozempic.

It was named Gefion after the goddess of Norse mythology who turned her sons into oxen so they could plow the land that would become Denmark’s largest island.

. . .

Whatever you call it, Gefion is a beast. It is bigger than a basketball court. It weighs more than 30 tons. It took six months to manufacture and install. It also required an investment of $100 million.

. . .

When it’s fully operational, the AI supercomputer will be available to entrepreneurs, academics and scientists inside companies like Novo Nordisk, which stands to benefit from its help with drug discovery, protein design and digital biology.

For the full commentary see:

Ben Cohen. “It’s a Giant New Supercomputer That Might Transform an Entire Country.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Nov. 2, 2024): B2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date November 1, 2024, and has the title “Science of Success; The Giant Supercomputer Built to Transform an Entire Country—and Paid For by Ozempic.”)

“Most Published Research Findings Are False”

(p. 10) How much of biomedical research is actually wrong? John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist and health-policy researcher at Stanford, was among the first to sound the alarm with a 2005 article in the journal PLOS Medicine. He showed that small sample sizes and bias in study design were chronic problems in the field and served to grossly overestimate positive results. His dramatic bottom line was that “most published research findings are false.”

The problem is especially acute in laboratory studies with animals, in which scientists often use just a few animals and fail to select them randomly. Such errors inevitably introduce bias. Large-scale human studies, of the sort used in drug testing, are less likely to be compromised in this way, but they have their own failings: It’s tempting for scientists (like everyone else) (p. C2) to see what they want to see in their findings, and data may be cherry-picked or massaged to arrive at a desired conclusion.

A paper published in February [2017] in the journal PLOS One by Estelle Dumas-Mallet and colleagues at the University of Bordeaux tracked 156 biomedical studies that had been the subject of stories in major English-language newspapers. Follow-up studies, they showed, overturned half of those initial positive results (though such disconfirmation rarely got follow-up news coverage). The studies dealt with a wide range of issues, including the biology of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, new breast-cancer susceptibility genes, a reported link between pesticide exposure and Parkinson’s disease, and the role of a virus in autism.

Reviews by pharmaceutical companies have delivered equally grim numbers. In 2011, scientists at Bayer published a paper in the journal Nature Reviews Drug Discovery showing that they could replicate only 25% of the findings of various studies. The following year, C. Glenn Begley, the head of cancer research at Amgen, reported in the journal Nature that he and his colleagues could reproduce only six of 53 seemingly promising studies, even after enlisting help from some of the original scientists.

With millions of dollars on the line, industry scientists overseeing clinical trials with human subjects have a stronger incentive to follow high standards. Such studies are often designed in cooperation with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which ultimately reviews the findings. Still, most clinical trials produce disappointing results, often because the lab studies on which they are based were themselves flawed.

For the full essay see:

Harris, Richard. “Dismal Science In the Search for Cures.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, April 8, 2017 [sic]): C1-C2.

(Note: bracketed year added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay was updated April 7, 2017 [sic], and has the title “The Breakdown in Biomedical Research.”)

The essay quoted above is adapted from Mr. Harris’s book:

Harris, Richard. Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

The 2005 paper by Ioannidis mentioned above is:

Ioannidis, John P. A. “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” PLoS Medicine 2, no. 8 (2005): 696-701.

Even With Quick Cheap Malaria Lab Tests, Dog Noses Can Still “Be Very Useful”

(p. D4) A small pilot study has shown that dogs can accurately identify socks worn overnight by children infected with malaria parasites — even when the children had cases so mild that they were not feverish.

The study, a collaboration between British and Gambian scientists and the British charity Medical Detection Dogs, was released last week at the annual convention of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

. . .

The new study, its authors said, does not mean that dogs will replace laboratories. Inexpensive rapid tests for malaria have been available for over a decade; more than 200 million people in dozens of countries are infected each year.

But for sorting through crowds, malaria-sniffing dogs could potentially be very useful.

Some countries and regions that have eliminated the disease share heavily trafficked borders with others that have not. For example, South Africa, Sri Lanka and the island of Zanzibar have no cases but get streams of visitors from Mozambique, India and mainland Tanzania.

And when a region is close to eliminating malaria, dogs could sweep through villages, nosing out silent carriers — people who are not ill but have parasites in their blood that mosquitoes could pass on to others.

. . .

If just one chemical indicated cancer or malaria, “we’d have discovered it by now,” said Claire Guest, who founded Medical Detection Dogs in 2008 and oversaw dog training in the study. “It’s more like a tune of many notes, and the dogs can pick it up.”

For the full commentary see:

Donald G. McNeil Jr. “Global Health; Sniffing Out Malaria in Its Tracks.” The New York Times (Tuesday, November 6, 2018 [sic]): D4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Nov. 5, 2018 [sic], and has the title “Global Health; Dogs Can Detect Malaria. How Useful Is That?”)

A later-published version of the initial “small pilot study” discussed above is:

Guest, Claire, Margaret Pinder, Mark Doggett, Chelci Squires, Muna Affara, Balla Kandeh, Sarah Dewhirst, Steven V. Morant, Umberto D’Alessandro, James G. Logan, and Steve W. Lindsay. “Trained Dogs Identify People with Malaria Parasites by Their Odour.” The Lancet Infectious Diseases 19, no. 6 (June 2019): 578-80.

Democratic New York Department of Environmental Conservation Raids Home, Seizing and Killing P’Nut, Internet-Famous Orphan Pet Squirrel

(p. A15) . . . P’Nut was an internet-famous squirrel who was seized and euthanized by New York State wildlife agents last week . . .

. . .

. . . Elon Musk lionized the rodent as a Jedi martyr — more powerful in death than in life.

“RIP Peanut,” read a post on a Trump campaign’s official TikTok account on Sunday [Nov. 3, 2024]. “Needlessly murdered by Democrat bureaucrats in New York.”

. . .

P’Nut’s journey from cowboy-hat-wearing Instagram cutie to conservative lightning rod began on Oct. 30 [2024]. That was when New York State Department of Environmental Conservation officers, responding to what the agency said were anonymous complaints, arrived at the home of his owner, Mark Longo, in Pine City in Chemung County. In New York State, it is illegal to house animals considered wildlife without a special permit; Mr. Longo has said he was in the process of applying for one.

D.E.C. agents seized the squirrel, which Mr. Longo had cared for ever since its mother was hit by a car seven years ago. Agents also apprehended Fred the raccoon. At some point, the squirrel bit a person involved with the investigation, according to a statement put out by the agency, leading its officers to swiftly euthanize both animals to test for rabies.

In tearful online posts, Mr. Longo and his wife, Daniela, railed against tax dollars being spent to kill the animals they considered pets.

. . .

In Macon, Ga., Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia congresswoman, spoke at a Trump rally and compared Peanut’s fate to that of Laken Riley, a local woman who was killed by a Venezuelan man who had once lived in New York. She blamed Democrats in New York City, which is 200 miles from Pine City, for euthanizing P’Nut.

“Democrats in New York City went in and raided a home to kill a squirrel,” Ms. Greene said. “Yet it was the same State of New York that let the criminal illegal alien go that came to Georgia that murdered our very own Laken Riley.”

. . .

. . . the animals’ owner, Mr. Longo, 34, considers himself apolitical. He is not registered with any political party and said he has never voted in his life.

. . .

He has spent the past days grieving, he said, and when he found a stray almond that Peanut had sneaked into his pocket, he burst into tears. He was just grateful, he said, “that somebody is giving P’Nut a voice.”

“I don’t care if it was the blue side or the red side,” he added. “Somebody on this planet is fighting for my animals.”

For the full story see:

Sarah Maslin Nir. “Death of a Pet Squirrel Is a G.O.P. Rallying Cry.” The New York Times (Wednesday, November 6, 2024): A15.

(Note: ellipses, bracketed date, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 4, 2024, and has the title “How the Death of a Celebrity Squirrel Became a Republican Rallying Cry.”)