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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> That’s not what is going on. News broadcasters are denouncing it as dangerous,

It is dangerous, it has significant side effects. It is worth it for things where it has therapeutic utility, but clinical trials for it in COVID-19 keep coming back showing no benefit.

> A drug with a 10-50% success rate will still save a lot of lives.

It would. But one with no measurable benefit won't.

> This drug already saves millions of lives.

Perhaps; it is certainly useful for treating certain conditions that aren't COVID-19, and it should continue to go to people who need it for things it is effective in treating. No one is saying it's a bad drug, just that the evidence is that it's not a useful drug for treating COVID-19.

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> no measurable benefit won't

Then I guess you're not talking about hydroxychloroquine, because there is evidence of a reduction in mortality rate.

https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)30534-8/ful...

That's not a clinical trial.

The actual clinical trials keep finding no benefit.

That's because the clinical trials aren't studying hydroxychloroquine in conjunction with azithromycin, which is where the effect is noticable. They have to actually study the thing that was indicated to work, if they're going to show it doesn't work.

This is one trial looking at both, and it didn't find any effect:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2019014?query=fe...

I'm pretty sure there are more.

> That's because the clinical trials aren't studying hydroxychloroquine in conjunction with azithromycin, which is where the effect is noticable.

Wrong. See, e.g., https://medcitynews.com/2020/07/hydroxychloroquine-flunks-ph...

“Results of the randomized, controlled, open-label Phase III trial, which took place at more than two dozen sites in Brazil, were published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday. The study randomized 667 patients to receive hydroxychloroquine or the drug plus the antibiotic azithromycin on top of standard of care or standard of care alone. When patients were measured on the seven-point ordinal scale of improvement in disease, those in the two hydroxychloroquine groups showed no improvement compared with patients who received standard of care alone. Moreover, those receiving hydroxychloroquine more frequently experienced Qt prolongation and elevation of liver enzymes.”

The specific circumstances where the drugs are effective aren't being met. I didn't look up the details before.

https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/doi/10.1093/aje/kwaa093....

> Evidence about use of hydroxychloroquine alone, or of hydroxychloroquine+azithromycin in inpatients, is irrelevant concerning efficacy of the pair in early high-risk outpatient disease. Five studies, including two controlled clinical trials, have demonstrated significant major outpatient treatment efficacy.

ICYMI lots of issues with that study, https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/doi/10.1093/aje/kwaa155... https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/doi/10.1093/aje/kwaa156...

I'm really sorry, I linked the wrong article. The quote in my comment is from the abstract of this [1] study. It's a meta-analysis by a professor of epidemiology at Yale. He also wrote an op-ed that ran in Newsweek. [2]

[1] https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/doi/10.1093/aje/kwaa093...

[2] https://www.newsweek.com/key-defeating-covid-19-already-exis...

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