Wiki says that "Hydroxychloroquine is being studied to prevent and treat coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‑19), but all clinical trials conducted during 2020 found it is ineffective and may cause dangerous side effects."
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/three-big-studies-di...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1l6y3L_KGb1ilMW0FaP4VZsd7WvX...
But it's awfully irresponsible to pretend it's good for society to spread it.
Not everyone has the scientific knowledge necessary to understand p-values and what they mean for research like this. It's a lot to ask that everyone know the standard for publishing in medicine is a p-value < 0.05, which corresponds to a 5% chance of the study's results being wrong. It's a lot to ask that everyone be aware that there were 130 different studies on hydroxychloroquine and to do the math from there to determine that we'd expect 6 or 7 of them to be wrong.
It's much better to say "just because it's not illegal doesn't mean it's a good idea" and just not share such thoroughly bad information.
Millions more take HCQ as a malaria treatment. It is generally recognized as safe, if you do not have a heart condition (and even then a short course is unlikely to yield adverse outcomes).
There are no safe drugs for a patient admitted to intensive care. We should not start administering anything in large scale just because most healthy people can tolerate it well.
COVID-19 can infect the heart and damage it. As safe as HCQ might be on its own, here it's adding extra load to a system that's already under stress.
Sadly, this is political.
This is not one. This is a political subject. Wikipedia is a complete disaster for anything that even remotely touches upon modern politics. There are teams of people paid to impose an opinion on Wikipedia, relentlessly wearing down any neutral editor with 24x7 edits and every kind of bureaucratic fight. The people who edit for free are also pulled from a highly-biased population, with strong overrepresentation by unemployed single people with non-STEM degrees.
Simply put, "ineffective and may cause dangerous side effects" is a purely political attack on the US president.
Last year, the drug was handed out freely, with very little worry, to anybody claiming that they would visit a country with malaria. In many places it is non-prescription. Clearly, the "dangerous side effects" aren't such a big deal. You can get deadly "dangerous side effects" from aspirin (Reye syndrome) and from Tylenol/paracetamol/acetaminophen (complete liver failure).
Dangerous on an individual level, not really. But at a population level if hundreds of millions of people start taking it, you're going to have high absolute numbers of bad side effects.
> is a purely political attack on the US president.
As for ineffective, there isn't one single national health agency that recommends taking it for covid. Surely the entire globe isn't killing scores of their citizens by preventing the use of an effective treatment just to make the US President look bad.
Since it's ineffective in this case, there's no benefit to outweigh the downsides of "dangerous side effects" like their is with aspirin or Tylenol.
Not true:
https://www.mohfw.gov.in/pdf/AdvisoryontheuseofHydroxychloro...
Of course, it's controversial because the WHO recommended against it and most health agencies just follow suit.
Also, American politics don't end at the border. There are countries that favor Trump, India being one of them.
Most countries' health authorities don't take into account public opinion about Important Orange Personages when setting policy, astonishingly.
Trump has poisoned the well. If you bring up HCQ, you are immediately under suspicion of being an anti-science Trump-supporting conspiracy theorist. Guilt by association, reductio ad hitlerum, etc.
As for using HCQ as a prophylactic: That was the whole point right from the beginning. Didier Raoult can be credited with starting the HCQ hype, he has been prescribing HCQ+zinc as a prophylactic for at-risk groups. That's not as outlandish as you make it sound, HCQ has been used as prophylactic for malaria for the longest time and that is considered safe.
The studies that tested HCQ at a late stage (ICU) or without zinc are missing the point. HCQ without zinc doesn't work, zinc without HCQ is at least less effective, because the HCQ works as an ionophore, but if you already have a severe case of COVID, none of it is going to work. It's too late.
There are several studies that suggest that this prophylactic treatment works. There are no big RCTs that show it works, but neither are there big RCTs that disprove that it works.
See also this protocol for prophylaxis of COVID-19:
https://www.evms.edu/media/evms_public/departments/internal_...
It includes zinc and quercetin as an ionophore and is thus politically uncontroversial. However, it's unknown to what extent quercetin really works as an ionophore in vivo.
How incredibly self centered must it be to think that everything relates to you, your country, your awful president.
Please.
Any sufficiently intense argument anywhere in the world risks corrupting a wikipedia page.
Well, for a start, no it wasn't (many if not most malarial areas mostly have resistant strains, and other drugs are more appropriate there). But anyone who was given it was warned beforehand (or at least should have been). It's not a safe drug. It is, however, safer than getting malaria, so you should probably take it if you're going to an area where it will be effective.
What you should probably not do is take it because a weird French doctor and some people on the internet said to.