I don't know how people who have no medical training or experience who are actively trying to undermine their advisors with such experience determine which of these medicines they're going to place their bets on, but given the lack of good results in either, it seems like either bet is as bad as the other.
How would one even tell if any of the chloroquinine derivatives have been effective without a systematic study when 96 out of 100 people (at worst) would have recovered anyways? That's another thing that makes the 20 person French study which kicked off all this so much more ridiculous.
There was a 44% chance that they would have all recovered without any intervention. But it was probably higher for this group since they did have intervention, and they clearly had a high level of medical assistance.
That is mixing up IFR and CFR. We don't have any good way of knowing IFR yet, and it may be quite a while before we can get a good estimate. The denominator in CFR is confirmed cases, so Italy's inflated CFR could be (and probably is) entirely related to the lack of sufficient testing.
When you read 15% this might be the CFR, the case fatality rate. But only about a tenth is getting tested. So it means nothing. You can only look the death numbers, and after it settled down at the excess death rate. From there you get the real IFR. So far we are at an IFR of 0.3 - 0.6. A little bit higher than the flu, but in absolute numbes lower than a bad flu year.
My source for the CFR represents the totality of real information the world has presented us to date.
"A CFR can only be considered final when all the cases have been resolved (either died or recovered). The preliminary CFR, for example, during the course of an outbreak with a high daily increase and long resolution time would be substantially lower than the final CFR."
This is not semantics, interpreting clearly stated numbers and definitions of basic terms badly to get a mortality rate that's almost four times larger than the case is simply wrong, and much more harmful than stating lower but more accurate numbers. I have no idea where you got your definition of CFR from or how you interpreted it like that, but CFR does not measure deaths as a percentage of resolved cases, it measures deaths as a percentage of all cases so far during a given period of time (in this case since the pandemic started). This is how it has been widely understood in discussions of CFR per country among all affected countries and you can find these figures on many different serious websites, with the percentages of fatalities clearly stated as CFR numbers that are based off all cases so far in any given country (Italy or Spain, for example). If this is mistaken, someone please do correct me and show me where it's claimed otherwise. If im wrong then, for example, nobody would be talking about Italy's CFR of 10%, they'd be discussing a different and considerably higher percentage derived only from resolved cases in that country vs its total deaths to-date.
That's one factor. France and Britain have such extreme mortality rates vs case counts because of their very poor testing rates (which has been openly admitted by both nations, this isn't my opinion). Germany's mortality rate is so relatively low in part because of their vast testing program caught a lot more cases.
Britain has probably had between 5x-10x the positive cases that they've reported up to this point. They were only able to test 12,750 people per day as of a week ago. That's a minimum of 1/10th the rate they needed to be at. If the US has had 600,000 positive cases, it really has had 3+ million cases, given the poor rate of testing.
So they measured in the french study something that would always go down.
Another interesting point is China explicitly banned usage of macrolide antibiotics (which includes Azithromycin) together with chloroquine [2]. It was posted on Feb 26, 2020. I tried to use Wayback Machine to check whether they rewrote the history, but it seems like Wayback Machine only saved it recently. Another source (and with English translation) [3] indicate it is at least earlier than Mar 1 though. I did a Google search on key sentence "禁止同时使用喹诺酮类、大环内酯类抗生素及其他可能导致QT间期延长的药物" and found widespread reposting around March 1, so the date is likely genuine.
[1] http://www.scio.gov.cn/xwfbh/xwbfbh/wqfbh/42311/42568/xgbd42...
[2] http://www.nhc.gov.cn/yzygj/s7653p/202002/0293d017621941f6b2...
[3] https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/chloroquine-phosphate/