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Comment by rPlayer6554 | Hacker News Reader

Has it been fully proven that Hydroxychloroquine was not effective? The top result on Google seems to say otherwise.[0]

I don't know if this study proves it is or it isn't. I'm making the point that there is at least some proof that it is. Why should YouTube be the arbiter of health information? This seems like another example of big tech censorship.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7534595/#:~:tex....

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Proving a negative is difficult.

Not an expert but from what I understand;

Hydroxychloroquine suppresses the immune system which is apparently beneficial if covid-19 causes an overreaction or cytokine swarm in your body.

But steroids, specifically dextramethasone also do that and are much safer with less side effects.

Does chloroquine provide additional medical benefits that the steroids don't? I don't know and wonder as well.

it seems to have antiviral properties which reduce the virus load in a patient ( if taken soon enough). I recommend the ihu marseille videos on youtube from mid/late 2020 at the time when the debate was heating over his protocol.

Warning : the main guy has a huge ego and likes to be contrarian, but the institute does legitimate science on real patients, together with other professors in his team.

It's one thing to give a drug as part of a cocktail/protocol because it "might just work as well" when the risk/benefit is kind of even.

It's a whole other thing to prove HDQ is effective in a randomized controlled trial. As far as I know the group has not published a RTC and in general there is no RTC showing a clear benefit of HDQ in treating Covid. On the contrary there are several RTCs showing no effect, e.g. in preventing Covid [1].

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2016638

problem with rct on covid is that mortality rates are so low that in order to proove anything, you would have to rely on a huge number of patients not a lot of institution have acess to.

We had one attempt in europe at trying out various drugs on a sufficient scale but it failed miserably to reach any conclusions due to lack of patient (and used absurd quantities for HCQ, 6 times the maximum dose, which made a few people think the guy organizing the thing weren't that good anyway).

Yes and no. Yes, mortality is low generally, but grows exponentially with age, so pretty high for older people (1-10+ %).

And you don't have to choose death as your trial end point, you can take something else that is clinically meaningful, e.g. duration of stay in the hospital (not an expert).

What seems to make things difficult with Covid (according to a German virologist working on treatment options) is that we more and more believe Covid is a conglomerate of several different "sub-diseases" (can't remember the correct medical term), i.e. the virus can trigger qualitatively different physiological reactions in different people, and it's not clear at all why.

Interesting you mention old people, because one of the most striking results IHU team claimed to have with HCQ was on EPAD (old people house). Unfortunately, their trial was stopped by the health authority (probably at the time HCQ was thought to be toxic based on a now retracted fraudulent study).

I know i start to sound like a zealot, but i've been followed this team's work for more than a year now, and i'm absolutely stunned their work isn't more valued, at least in their country. I'm not a health expert, but i've worked for a long enough time to feel when someone's during serious work (not to mention the fact that they've often been very informative on the virus itself, which made me less surprised by the evolution of the pandemic).

That's not even the point. In particular, the article is more of a opinion piece since the author goes out of his way to judge. Anyway, the point is big tech now thinks they're the ones up to decide what is truth or not based on whatever criteria they label as "scientific".

Unfortunately we are past the point where the deliberate spread of misinformation can be ignored. Unfortunately social media, as facilitated by big tech, does have serious negative externalities.

I wish it didn't and social media does have a lot of benefits in general, but we have to agree that the current spread of misinformation is costing lives, eroding trust in science, in society and democracy.

That's no comment on what to do - I'm simply saying that doing nothing already has significant negative cost.

Bolsonaro defends that hydroxychloroquine should be used even in cases without symptoms and should be administered, among other means, through nebulization. There's a bunch of other drugs he affirms can cure or prevent COVID too.

Yes. It has been.

Citation would be helpful. "Fully proven" is a pretty high bar.

No citations are findable. All indexes (search engines) prevent finding said data, all videos are missing, all forums/boards are purged, and discussing over zoom/voice results in a disconnect.

Also, now Google, Facebook and others have tagged you as a conspiracy nut, just for hitting a flagged term.

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