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Comment by alyx | Hacker News Reader

It is ironic that vitamins are okay to recommend. But when practicing physicians got together to recommend HCQ, that advice was labeled as misinformation and promptly removed from everywhere.

Clearly vitamins are better than a drug that has been in use for decades with a proven safety record AND while being recommended by physicians bound to the hippocratic oath.

Why can't there be validity to both vitamins and certain existing drugs? (AND vs OR)

It as though we actively do not want to admit that we may already have something out there that can help us.

PS: Vitamins is a friendly name for often synthetic or derived compounds, not necessarily in the exact same chemical structure as found naturally in organic matter. Not to mention there are also various chemistries that affect absorption etc.

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HCQ is a prescription medication with side effects. There was some concern that HCQ’s known heart-related side effects might interact poorly with COVID-19’s known heart-related side effects, although other than the retracted study based on Surgisphere data it seems like that has proved unfounded.

Vitamin C and D are over the counter, or easily obtained from diet (citrus fruits and milk).

Moreover, HCQ was promoted by political entities as “100% effective” for COVID-19 (viral Charlie Kirk tweet, quoted by Rudy Giuliani, deleted by twitter). There was no clear scientific evidence of this and it was studied extensively and the best scientific trials (RCTs) of HCQ have shown no effect on the disease progression.

A big part of the concern with HCQ is that it was promoted as a cure alongside the claim that all other efforts to fight the virus could be discontinued, since HCQ would cure the disease.

Vitamins are something already required by the body, and with these two taking slightly too much rarely causes an problems.

HCQ is a drug that most people will never consume, can have adverse effects and cause allergic reactions, and was often recommended at doses more likely to cause side effects. Taking it is better than having malaria, but taking it without a proven benefit is a dangerous choice.

The problem with HCQ is:

* it still has had no good RCTs backing it up

* it has significant negative side effects

But I have been eating zinc and quercetin rich foods, like spinach and kale (respectively). Quercetin is a zinc ionophore like HCQ but without the side effects.

I don't understand what your problem with vitamin C and D supplements is. People have taken supplements for a long time, and those vitamins have been a part of the human diet for much longer than HCQ has existed.

A mask has far more effectiveness than vitamins and has none of the side effects associated with anti-malarial drugs

It's a bit off topic, but the seeming "conspiracy" to suppress HCQ has been an eye opener for me. I think the press wants so badly for Trump to be wrong about that, that they're independently all refraining from publishing anything to the contrary. But we heard all about the very flawed or in one case outright fraudulent studies that showed it in a negative light. Meanwhile YouTube has censored videos from doctors talking about the subject. So blatantly partisan and it is costing lives.

I also find it amusing that I get down voted on HN whenever I bring it up. Sheep.

If you ignore the press and go to the science, you'll see that the RCTs done in other countries failed to show any effect.

Plus, your theory doesn't have any legs because it makes no sense for other countries to ruin their economies and lockdown themselves just to make Trump look bad. If it was a magic cure then countries like India wouldn't give a flying fuck about Trump or whatever your pet theory is.

It's not a magic cure and had nothing to do with lockdown. There are 53 studies that show positive results of HCQ in covid19 infections. 14 studies with neutral and negative results, but of those 10 were in late stage patients where it doesn't seem to be beneficial, and two were the flawed Brazil paper and the fraudulent Lancet paper which was retracted. You seem to think the science shows the opposite, perhaps your view was informed by the media on this topic.

It does seem to be a valid treatment option and most countries that temporarily stopped using it soon reinstated it as their mortality rates spiked.

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