I'm out of the loop here: why would any political faction not want an alleged cure to work? What's the goal here?
Questioning the wisdom of that, given how little we knew, is seen as a partisan attack on Trump.
(I think this is quite irrational, but that's your answer.)
I didn't think testing drugs before giving them to people was considered "irrational" as you state, but I guess that is where we are now.
The efficacy picture on these drugs is quite confusing, and it's not out of the question that they will turn out to be crucially useful. Giving up on them without further investigation doesn't seem wise at this point.
Beyond that, sometimes being a leader means giving people hope, even if that might involve shading things. Trump may not be an Adama, but I do think he's pretty good at making people feel better, or at least distracting them from their troubles. And right now, that probably is saving lives.
Giving up on them without further investigation doesn't seem wise at this point.
I don't disagree with these ideas on the surface, but they seem largely strawmen-style arguments. I'm not convinced a significant number of people somehow "hate" hydroxychloroquine or are against research solely on the basis that Trump mentioned it.
Would you say it's irrational to oppose that idea? I mean it's not been proven to not work, so you gotta try anything you can, right? And he's giving people hope.
We were (and largely still are) dealing with a lot of unknowns. As far as I'm concerned, everything is on the table, as a possible improvement.
It could be! I mean, his ideas presumably don't come from taking a random issue of the National Enquirer at face value, but he has or had a widely reported close relationship with the publisher, so it seems entirely plausible he might have been influenced by, say, David Pecker's opinions.
Trump isn't much to watch, but he does end up being right on some of his wacky-sounding calls more than I would have thought. I wouldn't bet my money against him.
And yet on multiple occasions he's been seen tweeting and announcing policies in lockstep with segments on Fox News opinion shows.
At the time, who could say if his opinion was based on anything, he would be proven right, anyone would take it seriously, etc.? The public and media don't know these things.
I'm having a really hard time trying to abide by that rule in this case.
I will suggest that you may have cause and effect backwards in at least some cases. Some people may be bitterly opposed to him because of nonsense like this rather than thinking this is nonsense because they bitterly oppose him.
He has an obligation to look out for his people. This is not how you do that. This is the opposite of responsible behavior.
I'm quite upset about the whole thing, not because I'm anti Trump, but because it's a global pandemic. This isn't run of the mill, business as usual bullshit where political things like cronyism and glad handing make any sense whatsoever.
If you look at the charts of per-capita deaths in various countries, there's not much of a pattern, in terms of places we'd think of as having "good" government and/or public health versus "bad". Belgium, for example, is the worst right now (or among them), and many European countries are doing quite badly.
My personal suspicion is that in a case like this, there isn't really that much difference in in-the-moment governing across countries.
When I took archery in college, I was the only one in class who could consistently hit the bullseye. I also practiced up to two hours a day.
A classmate who didn't practice, who had terrible form and was holding the bow all wrong and who couldn't manage to hit the target at all snidely informed me one day that it was all luck. He completely dismissed the idea that either proper form or practice made any difference whatsoever.
I know that in complicated situations, it can be quite hard to determine what actually worked and why. This is why humanity has practices like deferring to experts with a solid track record of success as evidence that they know whereof they speak, even if it basically looks like stuff and nonsense to most of the rest of us because we don't all have a PhD in that subject and a zillion years of experience like them.
In general, I'm not particularly a fan of Trump, but I don't buy gibe that he's a lucky idiot. Nobody's luck is that good.
As to whether he's helped or hurt in this crisis, I hope someone evenhanded like Ken Burns will pick it apart later.
The left wants Trump to be wrong about everything, so wants this it to fail.
The right wants Trump to be right about everything, so wants it to work.
I understand wanting to chastise Trump for being exaggerated and reckless about an unproven treatment, but wanting it not to work? That can't be true.
Eh? Even if it did turn out to work, it would still have been an unfounded claim for Trump to claim it did without evidence, and a stupid and dangerous thing to do. That's what 'unfounded' means.
IMHO he was right to lean on the FDA to find out if its effective. Since it's already available, it would make sense for doctors to try it, but most are not trained in doing controlled trials so the results are all over the map.
Most noticable to me is that when referring to this issue/drug, the media always points out that HCQ is not approved for covid-19. They neglect to point out that there is no approved treatment at all. It seems like an attempt to make Trump look reckless and irresponsible.
Objectivity and politics dont mix.
Otherwise anyone can just claim anything whenever they want without any proof whatsoever.
We don't even hear about four-dimensional chess or "draining the swamp" anymore.
Source: married to a physician who usually has a 1,200 patient panel, with a diversity of conditions; said physician spouse was at one point recruited to run an RCT for a drug company and did a lot of work to prepare and then pulled out because spouse figured out they'd not be allowed the latitude to improve the study design, and felt that the study design was slanted inappropriately to supporting the efficacy of the drug (it was not being compared to standard of care but instead to a demonstrably inferior treatment, a previous standard of care).
Yeah, objectivity and politics don't mix. There are people who do RCTs and do them well, and they're not just random doctors kind of scattering drugs among their patient panel.
Absolutely. It wasn't a criticism, just the way things are. For example, one doctor is claiming HCQ + zinc + antibiotic has treated over 700 covid-19 patients without a single death. I think it would be appropriate for someone to audit his records to see if that's true (was it even covid? or just some cold going around in his area?). If another doctor wanted to replicate his alleged success, I could easily see them using a slightly different protocol (skipping the zinc, using a different antibiotic, changing when or how much to administer, etc) and then claiming he's wrong when it doesn't work for them. That's just how a lot of people behave unless they've been trained otherwise.