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Comment by freejazz | Hacker News Reader

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The original person who suggest HCQ, and pushed for its use was this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didier_Raoult

Are you saying he's a legitimate doctor and researcher?

Because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didier_Raoult#Controversies has him being censured for falsifying diagrams, being credibly accused of "ethical, procedural, and methodological problems" in his HCQ trial, and conducting illegal clinical trials on people who could not legally consent.

I mean, sure, he might be credible but his track record suggests otherwise.

Who has been well-known in France for his hot takes in media about how sun rays don't cause skin cancer or how alcohol is more beneficial than harmful. He was also involved in an long list of academic malpractices (including faking data in research papers, but that's mostly related to the fact that he has put his name way too many papers from people in his lab to review them all).

He's basically a former good scientist with excellent political skills which helped him climb to the top and has been slowly been corrupted by his own hubris.

You're moving the goalposts here.

The fact is that the original claims about HCQ weren't coming from politicians, they were coming from doctors. You might not like the doctors, those doctors might have heterodox ideas, but that is okay.

My issue was the "might". HCQ wasn't being sold as a 'maybe'. Maybe, that's what that Dr's science said... but we'd be fooling ourselves if we said that HCQ in the public discourse was being sold as a 'maybe'. It was being sold as an alternative to a vaccine. The discourse was 'why are we not exploring HCQ and instead telling everyone to take vaccines. Don't take vaccines, take HCQ' when, at the time, there was no science supporting that hcq would be effective treatment for covid (when someone didn't already have worms...) let alone it was comparable to the vaccines in any way. The poster is trying to downplay this distinction, and it's completely dishonest.

The claim was that they were "legitimate doctors and researchers". He clearly was not considered a legitimate researcher anymore.

Look at the guys career history, awards won, research published etc. Yeah, he was wrong about HCQ, but the idea that he is just some fake doctor, or not legitimate in some way is as disinformative as the idea that some mysterious "they" is hiding HCQ from everybody.

This is a no true Scotsman fallacy, just like "no true implementation of socialism has ever failed" is.

Didier Raoult was the original person who received western popular media coverage for it.

It had been part of the scientific conversation for over a month before his involvement (an eternity in 2020 time), eg https://www.nature.com/articles/s41422-020-0282-0

The use of ivermectin and hcq were started because doctors were trying to develop a protocol to help with treating Covid in 2020 and there was anecdotal evidence that it worked.

Spray and pray drug therapies work. That's how the best drugs have been invented. The fact that Doctors would rather just let a patient die then try a few known drugs was very sad. It was known in April that ventilators didn't really work. Tons of doctors on youtube blowing the whistle.

If you don't accept that statement how about providing some evidence for the contrary. 'You can't be serious' says nothing.

It definitely doesn't say nothing. It says that I don't believe the poster can be serious. I don't. It's not my burden to disprove unreasonable assertions.

To be fair, providing evidence of no evidence, is not worth the effort.

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