They can wait until the scientific evidence is overwhelming. No hurry, there are a lot of studies starting to come due. Bodies are complex and maybe something is going on that hasn't been thought of yet.
EDIT Thanks swebs for the HCL->HCQ correction.
> 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.
Check the linked article for reference to the study.
0: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/10/09/ha...
My current policy is to wait until the evidence is older than a week. That is one open label study on patients that were already in hospital - strong evidence, but not a final word. Maybe they missed something, maybe they made a mistake. Science is hard.
To be clear, there has never been good scientific evidence that masks are ineffective against respiratory viruses. I think WHO, CDC and Fauci made grave errors at the time by making the argument that mask-wearing by the general public "doesn't work". The clear (and quite understandable) fear was that there would be a run on masks by the general public, so instead of telling the truth ("we need the masks for healthcare workers") they made broader and confusing statements about the effectiveness of masks that were not supported by the underlying science. This had the terrible effect, as your post shows, of making people even more wary of scientific pronouncements. Mine is not an isolated viewpoint. There was a good opinion article in the Washington Post at the time by an influential researcher where she argued the same thing.
Contrarily, the good studies that have come out about HCQ have nearly uniformly shown their potential danger. There is simply no equivalence between the scientific data that HCQ is harmful and the data (that never existed mind you) that mask-wearing is ineffective.
Indeed: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122...
I'd say it's not conclusively settled yet.
But what is settled is that there is not enough conclusive evidence right now to use it as a treatment.
In medicine, when confronted with low degrees of certainty, the default is to -not- administer to treatment until proven otherwise.
As a side note, notice that it appears Trump did not receive HCQ as part of his treatment regiment.
The original treatment protocol included zinc, so it's nonsense to say that adding in zinc is "moving the goalpost". Not testing in combination with zinc is moving the goalpost. The interaction between zinc and HCQ is key. Azithromycin is just to prevent potential secondary bacterial infection, which isn't necessarily a big factor in COVID mortality.
"This is special pleading, and it is not backed up by any hard data."
Here's a study that showed adding zinc to HCQ reduced mortality by 50%:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32930657/
Unfortunately, that study didn't test zinc without HCQ, but the hypothesis is that HCQ acts as an ionophore and is therefore beneficial.
Eh? No, it didn't. People started talking about zinc when it became clear that Raoult's results weren't reproducible.
Also, significant reduction in mortality using HCQ alone early during the treatment has been reproduced:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.09.20184143v...
The earlier trials weren't testing prophylactic treatment.
Image from http://www.francesoir.fr/societe-sante/covid-19-hydroxychlor...
https://www.boston25news.com/news/trending/trump-coronavirus...
Having said that, giving somebody "experimental treatment" and "knowing what one is doing" is contradictory. According to Trump, he asked for the experimental antibody therapy himself. As his doctor, you then have the choice of playing the odds or putting "got fired by Trump" on your resume.