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Comment by landryraccoon | Hacker News Reader

> The pro-HCQ

This term alone makes me highly skeptical. Honest researchers shouldn't be "pro" or "anti" anything. Coronavirus doesn't have an opinion on HCQ. It is a virus that either responds biologically to HCQ in vivo or it doesn't. Pro or anti are political terms that change the conversation from scientific to propaganda based.

If the research indicates that HCQ has a powerful prophylactic effect against Coronavirus in a double blind study, then let the data speak for itself.

However saying that you're "pro-HCQ" or "anti-HCQ" immediately discredits you in my eyes because viral pandemics don't have emotions and therefore can't care whether you are pro or anti anything.

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Any clinical intervention is going to have advocates. Same as any non-generic drug trial. It's a complete distortion of how science and medical research actually works to suggest people don't have a hoped for outcome. The French scientist who is one of the main proponents of HCQ obviously wants it to succeed. The American media establishment and some of its scientific community obviously want it to fail. To pretend like they do otherwise is to engage in a different form of bias that attempts to conceal itself by denying its existence.

> Any clinical intervention is going to have advocates.

Honestly I don't really get this at all. Not even a little bit. Why? Anyone who actually has a motive (like a company trying to make money) should be kept far away from the regulators that oversee the study, and the whole point of double blind trials is to keep self interested bias away from the result of a study where lives are literally at stake.

Isn't the point of a clinical intervention to save lives? Either the intervention saves lives or it doesn't. The researchers should be selected from people who can maintain a neutral viewpoint. If that is impossible their neutrality should still be maximized and biases should be eliminated as much as humanly possible.

Simply accepting that bias as a matter of course is imo the worst way to approach it.

>> Any clinical intervention is going to have advocates.

> Honestly I don't really get this at all. Not even a little bit.

It's ok for scientists to think something's true before they have all the evidence lined up - especially in a predominantly empirical field like medicine. That's how new ideas happen.

Have you ever encountered someone who is motivated by altruism? Someone who is motivated by getting the truth out there?

Lots of QAnon advocates see themselves as altruistic truth seekers.

Doctors and scientists need to be objective. Advocating a treatment before the data is there, or cherry picking results is not science.

I think that it's important to distinguish between thinking "X is true" is probably true and being "pro-X". Especially when we are talking about medical treatments that can affect the decisions someone will make with respect to their health and possibly even risk their lives.

Certainly a scientist can say "I very much hope that HCQ is an effective cure for Coronavirus" but that is very, very different from being "Pro-HCQ".

When I hear "Pro-HCQ" that implies to me a very strong suggestion of treatment, i.e. - "You should take HCQ as a treatment for Coronavirus infection", which is extremely different from, "I hope that the research shows that HCQ will be an effective treatment for Coronavirus, and I am doing a study with the goal of showing that this is the case".

Does that make sense?

I think you're leaving out a middle option, which is what I see when I read 'pro-HCQ' - a scientist who thinks we should further investigate HCQ (etc.) as a treatment option. Not someone who thinks it should be used as treatment, not someone who hopes the particular treatment turns out to be effective.

I think that middle option is actually how a scientist would interpret the phrase. I can see why a layman would read it otherwise, though.

> Anyone who actually has a motive (like a company trying to make money) should be kept far away from the regulators that oversee the study

> Isn't the point of a clinical intervention to save lives?

Why do you think saving lives can't be the motive? If you do a study, and conclude based on that study that a treatment works, you're supposed to remain "neutral"?

Let me put it this way, I wouldn't want to receive treatment from a healthcare provider who is "neutral" about the surgery they are about to give me, I want them to have a positive informed opinion based on experience, studies, etc.

Your doctor should not be acting as a researcher with you as a laboratory. They are taking a biased position in favor of you as a patient and should provide the best possible standard of care.

A scientific researcher is trying to answer an unanswered question dispassionately. I don’t see how taking a bias in testing a scientific hypothesis can possibly determine the truth of a scientific fact.

Are researchers who say that applying leeches won’t cure cancer bad for cancer patients? Why shouldn’t they be hopeful that leeches cure terminal cancer, rather than being downers? The answer is that cancer is the enemy, not people who oppose medical treatments that don’t work.

Who the heck wouldn't want every treatment to succeed? Scientists would be thrilled with literally any and all success stories killing this thing.

It's not political, we're trying to find something that works.

I wish it wasn't political, but somehow it seems to have gotten that way.

It's political because people are involved.

By this rationale, would you also conclude that the author of the original article is firmly in the “anti-HCQ” camp, and is therefore to be discredited?

I found the tone in this last paragraph to be a little off-putting in its finality and unwillingness to consider further studies:

> I’m not in a mood to be subtle. Hydroxychloroquine treatment for coronavirus does not work. It is not beneficial, and in fact appears to be actively harmful. As far as I’m concerned, administering it to infected patients now constitutes medical malpractice. I have no interest in goalpost-moving efforts to say that they didn’t administer zinc or azithromycin, or they picked the wrong patients or the wrong loading dose or whatever. No. This is special pleading, and it is not backed up by any hard data. None of the countries or regions where HCQ was enthusiastically adopted, with or without the addition of zinc, azithromycin or what have you have seen discernable benefits. It. Does. Not. Work. Give it up.

If you’re going to quote that, at least link the article. Now you’re taking the paragraph out of context to prove your own point.

Depending on the other paragraphs in the article it could go both ways.

> If you’re going to quote that, at least link the article.

It's the article this entire discussion thread is about.

The discussion on HCQ was fairly reasonable and scientific until the current president weighed in whereupon it became weirdly polarised.

Your skepticism here might be based on a logical fallacy that assumes that term has a certain connotation or is even used by the researchers themselves. For all you know the term was just created now by the parent commenter to label a group of individuals in his/her own definition.

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