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Comment by treeman79 | Hacker News Reader

It’s a prescription medication. Dosage is monitored. Side effects are monitored.

Personal experience 200mg and my rashes stop. My joint pain goes away. Lymph nodes stop swelling. My energy increases. Organ damage slows down.

400mg my hair gets really dry, and my blood pressure gets too high. Unless I skip caffeine.

Yearly eye tests are a thing. Some people go decades on it. Have to stop. And immediately all the old symptoms come back. “a flare”

This is a risk vs reward decision.

One issue is that its not a take a pill, cured tomorrow. It builds up in the system over time. It’s changing immune system behavior... slowly...

I was 30 days in before I noticed anything. 3 months until I was sure it was working. Doctor was shocked by my turn around after six months.

Lots of people say a year for full effectiveness.

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The principle difference here is you are taking it for an autoimmune disease. Where the relative benefits outweigh the risks.

Equating that to using it “off label” for covid, either as a preventative (Like the president did)or treatment post infection, where there is little, if any, evidence of its effectiveness/benefits (but still with the same risks, and possibly more depending on the patient and their history) are two entirely different things.

They are in no way equal

Covid is an autoimmune disease. The Over active immune response is what is killing people.

The virus is a trigger. It also attacks exact same receptor that hydroxychloroquine targets. I think it’s complete nonsense that has no effect.

Maybe the effect is trivial. Maybe it’s too little too late. But it is way too early to shutdown talk on it down.

I desperately wanna see studies on Covid death rates for people that have been taking it long term.

> Covid is an autoimmune disease. The Over active immune response is what is killing people.

The virus triggers an acute immune response. This is not the same as an autoimmune disease, it may be the opposite. Also, people with certain blood types that have better clotting ability seem to be at a disadvantage.

Glad to hear everyone in this thread is a doctor, instead of investigators curious to look at potential solutions to covid besides a miracle vaccine (which no one is doubting the side effects of that by the way).

Including yourself, it seems, flippantly denouncing a potential vaccine.

While I would not trust someone posting here on HN about medical advice, I would trust doctors from around the world who have stated that, for example, hydroxychloroquine is not recommended for use against SARS-CoV-2, and I would absolutely trust them over any poster here and any politician.

More to your point: there may be potential solutions that are not a vaccine but I'll trust researchers and doctors to find those solutions, rather than doing the investigation myself, as they are much more highly trained than I ever will be on the subject.

No, that is just wrong.

SARS-COV-2 is a virus. It is not an autoimmune disease. Your immune system is not reacting to your own tissues. It is reacting to the virus, just like an immune system is supposed to. Immunology is very clear about this, though I admit that the details can be confusing at first. The lines get 'blurry' at the molecular level, Ship of Theseus, all that jazz.

Look, we all want hydroxychloroquine to work with covid-19. It would save a lot of lives, potentially. That's a great thing. If it works.

But we cannot administer it without good proof. Currently, the evidence seems to say that it does not work. It may change over time and with more research, but we can only go off of what we know today.

Actually, even in viral illnesses, the immune response can be a big cause of mortality and morbidity.

For example, in the 1918 flu pandemic, research has indicated the the immune response that it provoked was one of the reasons it was so deadly[0].

With SARS-COV-2 one of the treatments that has studies that show reduction in mortality is dexamethasone which is a steroid that reduces the inflammatory response (which is an immune response)[1].

So it is not unreasonable to think that an immune system modulating drug may help with SARS-COV-2. Whether or not hydroxychloroquinine specifically does is a different story, but it would not be surprising for something in this class to have a beneficial effect.

0. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/09/060927201707.h...

1. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2021436

Isn’t that the entire point of vaccines though. To essentially give a small amount of exposure to your immune system so that it

A) knows how to deal with the pathogen specifically

B) doesn’t go wild and kill the host in its own right whilst trying to figure out how to properly deal with the pathogen

My understanding is that without exposure you body kinda throws a lot of different types of t-cells at the issue. Once it kinda knows how to handle it, it just throws the specific variant of t-cells needed.

T-cells work kinda like that, but as is typical in biology, the devil is in the details.

https://askabiologist.asu.edu/t-cell

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