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Comment by war1025 | Hacker News Reader

> I don’t think anyone is debating the possibility of it being beneficial.

There definitely were people actively hoping that it wouldn't work.

A couple months ago, there was a post about HCQ where I commented that the evidence I'd seen so far led me to the opinion that if I personally caught Coronavirus, I would be seeking out HCQ.

That post was met with a downvote brigade and multiple comments about how the drug was actively harmful and anyone thinking otherwise was an idiot.

I agree that we should let doctors do the studies and figure things out, but especially at the height of the media / political press against HCQ, even the idea that someone might personally be willing to bet on the drug's efficacy was met with a lot of disdain.

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I'm still surprised it was so politicized on places like Twitter. Colbert, Trevor Noah, Seth Meyers, and others all roasted him for it and called the drug dangerous[0]. Meanwhile some center-left leaning places like the Hill were actually defending trump for it[1].

Drugs should not be politicized. The right should not have been so blindly faithful in HCQ, and the left should not have been so pessimistic about it. I'm sure both sides have done this in the past and I'm sure both sides will do it again in the future - but we need to work on this, because wanting a drug to be ineffective for political reasons is dangerous for society.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpSK_IKm4eM

[1]: https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/491665-if-only-hydrox...

As someone with a PhD in pharmacology and worked in the pharmaceutical industry: pessimism and skepticism are the right attitudes in drug discovery, most things don't work.

I have dim memories of alternative medicine hippy types pushing hydroxychloroquine and zinc as cures or prophylactics for flu and colds. Which set off my bullshit detector big time. The other thing is for a drug to be a game changer it'd need to reduce mortality by 90% and if that were the case with hydroxychloroquine the Chinese would have seen that in January. But that's exactly what people were claiming. Yeah no dice.

100% agree. I have been really exasperated how every goddamn thing in this pandemic, whether it's HCQ or masks or lockdowns has to have one team come out in favor, and then the other team reflexively comes out against it.

HCQ is one of those "scissor" issues, in that the data makes it almost maximally divisive. It is just very unclear whether it works or not.

There have been numerous retrospective associational studies that have largely shown some benefit. There have been two RCTs, one of which was for serious patients, and one was as prophylaxis. Both returned negative results. The WHO is also running the Solidarity RCT, and the HCQ arm was dropped early due to non-efficacy.

HCQ's proponents are now saying that you have to take it early in the disease process, augmented with either Azithromicyn or Zinc. No one has run this RCT and released data.

My personal feeling at this point is that it probably doesn't work. Given that they've terminated the HCQ arm of the Solidarity trial, I wish they'd release the data and resolve the question.

> The right should not have been so blindly faithful in HCQ, and the left should not have been so pessimistic about it.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I can tell, the right did not politicize it. It came out that Trump had been taking it prophylactically under the supervision of his doctor. He was asked about it at a press conference and was open about the fact that he was using it. The media took this as an opportunity to attack him.

FYI: we're about to learn that Remdesivir "doesn't work" either. The Trump administration bought half a million doses of it in case it does work. So now watch for the "studies" to come out that say you'd be better off dying.

Studies to peruse in the meanwhile: https://c19study.com/

That site is rather... biased. And for all of its pretense of being scientific, the page with country data fails to provide usable sources for its graphs (the tweet doesn't seem to exist anymore).

Also, at https://c19study.com/boulware.html, a study where the authors themselves say that they found to prevention of COVID-19 cases, the site tries very hard to spin the paper into positive results nonetheless. Some of the numbers cited, especially the primary claim that "COVID cases are reduced by [49%, 29%, 16%] respectively when taken within [2+, 3+, 4+] days of exposure.", are not sourced or explained properly. I can't see any data in the paper regarding the effects of interventions taken within 2 days of exposure, so I find it hard to believe that this is somehow derived from the paper's data and the authors just missed it.

I didn't look at all the other studies, but if most of the "positive" ones are similar, then I trust HCQ and its supporters even less than I did before.

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