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Comment by BlueTemplar | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention that there's now a scientific and medical consensus about how a combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin (and zinc) is effective at preventing the virus from gaining foothold in the body when the first symptoms appear – but many of the governments and so-called "medical authorities" are in complete denial of this.

EDIT : and the GAFAMs (& Twitter) have been complicit of this censorship in preventing the doctors (= experimental scientists) from discussing their work on their platforms.

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Please provide peer-reviewed evidence for this claim.

It's pretty extraordinary, and you are essentially saying that the medical profession are engaged in a vast conspiracy to prevent lives being saved, which does not pass the sniff test (for me, at least).

Are these good enough for you ? https://hcqmeta.com/ https://hcqtrial.com/ (Note that their claim is even stronger than mine.)

OK, so I didn't look at every trial (as I do have a job), but I examined two of the studies for pre-exposure (for which most of the studies appear to be about).

The first one I looked at Arleo, hasn't been published, which is pretty concerning given that any CV paper with any kind of insight is getting published right now.

The second (chosen by sample(1:31, 1) from the 31 papers) was this one: https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid... which shows no significant effect of HCQ in a really large trial.

Note that this trial actually seems pretty well run as it's an RCT with a large sample size. I find it difficult to believe that if there's a non-significant result here then NCQ is effective in pre-exposure terms.

Additionally, there are standards for meta-analyses and systematic reviews, and the hcqmeta.com link doesn't mention them, which is very concerning (and lowers my prior that these results are correct).

Like actually, given that there's no search strategy for papers (making it impossible for anyone to check if they are actually including all papers, or just a biased sampling), I am gonna again reduce my prior on HCQ being correct.

Just as a final note, the likelihood of doctors not using the best available treatment during a global pandemic is incredibly low, and you do a disservice to medical professionals by suggesting that this is the case.

Are there any meta-analyses that we know for sure followed those standards ?

What about my second link ?

Some doctors do want to use these treatments in those countries that "banned" HCQ :

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/doctor-group-demands-biden...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexledsom/2020/11/02/hydroxych...

Hmm, finally managed to find some criticism of the 2nd link :

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/hcqtrial-com-astroturf-and-...

Ok, that doesn't look good… (Still, I would have preferred that doctors would be free to decide by themselves which drug to prescribe for a new disease. After all, they have skin in the game !)

That's a laudable idea (and to be fair, doctors do make decisions like this all the time), but the trouble is twofold: 1) placebo effects and 2) expectancy effects.

Humans are really bad at remembering both successes and failures, we tend to only remember the instances where something worked and forget the times it didn't.

Additionally, doctors belief in a treatment will cause them to over-interpret the successes of said treatment, and potentially change their interactions with patients who do and don't get the treatment.

Hence we have clinical trials, where the analysis is done by people not involved in the treatment, and neither patients nor practitioners know who got what treatment.

It’s better to do one of these:

(a) downvote and move on, the parent comment has a lot of hallmarks of not engaging in good faith discussion.

(b) steelman their argument, improve it for them and see what conclusions are or further predictions it would indicate

(c) look for evidence that confirms it first. Saying something like, “I tried to research your claim but I only found FOO, which does not include any reputable or credible sources. Meanwhile, reputable sources like BAR have said <whatever>,” is much gentler and diplomatic as well as adding new information for other participants.

Other people will see the comment and realize it has no supporting argument. Any rebutting comment that only says “citation needed, your claims are extreme” isn’t helpful no matter how obviously poor quality the original comment was.

My prior on this is that it's probably incorrect. However, it's possible that I am wrong, and the OP may provide sources that change my mind.

The most likely outcome is no reply, but that suits me fine as reasonable observers will conclude that there isn't any evidence.

Look - this is a direct evidence of time travel! BlueTemplar obviously came to this day straight from March or so - before all the big trials found no evidence that HCQ and AZ (plus zinc) help.

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