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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

Giving a dangerous drug to healthy people (presumably thousands of them, to be statistically useful), on no real evidence of efficacy, would be ethically dubious, to say the least.

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There's plenty of evidence hydroxychloroquine works for SARS.

How would you justify giving hydroxychloroquine to hundreds of thousands of healthy people a year for malaria prophylaxis?

GP wasn’t suggesting prophylactic use on healthy people. The suggestion was to do this on diagnosed patients, maybe in risk groups, that haven’t progressed to a serious condition yet. But would be at great risk (>10%) to do so soon.

But this study is on outcomes where the treatment was administered within 48 hours of diagnosis.

48 hours after _diagnosis_ is pretty damned late. To rephrase that, it's "Two days after diagnosis"!

I'd expect the lungs to be fully invaded and serious damage done by the virus by that time. This is not an early, or even seriously prompt, treatment. Certainly if the patients were in a hospital setting this would be unacceptably slow treatment.

This appears to be yet another of several "studies" where HCQ was given late to patients that were already near death. Of course it had little effect.

The recommendation was always HCQ + AZITHROMYCIN + ZINC SULFATE given EARLY. Few, if any, studies have followed that recommendation.

This debate would be EASILY settled by doing real science like you suggest. Instead, we get these proud Trump debunkings that don’t answer the important question. Ok, HCQ doesn’t help critical patients. But we’ve already suspected that for two months.

I don’t get it. Just do a simple, proper frickin’ study where the cocktail you mention is used immediately after diagnosis, and compare outcomes with different treatments.

This seems so obvious that I wish someone could point out to me what obvious detail I’m not understanding. It’s as if proving Trump wrong is more important than answering the real and important yes/no question.

Thanks. That settles my question. It was administered much later than suggested by most doctors that have tentatively used it based on experiences with malaria and SARS.

So it’s sadly not very useful for drawing conclusions about that :(

As we would with any drug, we'd start with a small group and scale it to more as it was determined to be safe.

Excuse me. It is know to be safe for 70 years. It used widescale in the whole world. It is cheap and easily manifacturable (only India is doing it right now). It is known to be working as COVID-19 prophylaxe (not as treatment). There is no vaccination in sight.

https://www.icmr.gov.in/pdf/covid/techdoc/V5_Revised_advisor...

HCQ is given to millions in USA alone, since 1955.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxychloroquine

It is not a dangerous drug at all. Dangerous is CQ phosphat/Resochin, which was used only for a short time in history, until it was replaced by HCQ. In the 40ies already, at the German Africa campaign.

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