Hydroxychloroquine use during Covid pandemic may have induced 17,000 deaths | Hacker News Reader

Hydroxychloroquine use during Covid pandemic may have induced 17,000 deaths

euronews.com

33 pointscrhulls23 comments

To suggest a harsh opinion on things here:

If you’re in a position of power, and not medically licensed, then giving authoritative medical advice to the public should be a crime - especially when such advice results in death.

That's absurd.

Can't we just make peace with the fact that freedom means freedom to do dumb shit?

Why is it absurd? It's already illegal. The only absurd thing is that said authorities or former authorities have faced no significant consequences for it.

I am sorry what? Speech does not become illegal simply because it is on medical topics or your position of power.

Speech may become illegal if your intent is to hide known risk, but most certainly not for being wrong, otherwise you better be pounding your fist to arrest a huge number more of people honest wrong.

It's obviously unworkable to restrict free speech like that. According to the article, we'd have to jail Trump and Macron.

Free speech issues aside, there were plenty of doctors who recommended Hydroxychloroquine. I know a (good) doctor who thought that Ivermectin probably had in vivo antivral properties (before studies showed that it didn't). Lots of doctors have weird fringe opinions.

> According to the article, we'd have to jail Trump and Macron.

Does that make it unworkable?

What freedom? You get locked up if you take certain drugs.

That are classified as restricted... marijuana isn't so restricted these days, but that used to be "considered" illegal at one time.

When will cigars, cigarettes, and alcohol be made illegal? - they're certainly not good for your health, and the evidence is everywhere.

And when the hospitals fill up and there’s no room for me?

Your freedom shouldn’t impede on my freedom.

If you want to start restricting people's freedom to improve healthcare, start by banning alcohol and tobacco.

It's worth considering why we don't do that.

i generally agree with the sentiment, yet sadly this topic has been politicized. we apply partisan blinders depending on which political faction is perceived to have promoted a concrete course of action.

for one example, while i have been out of the loop on this one for a while, iirc the use of mechanical ventilators in early stages of the pandemic, by medically licensed personnel was tantamount to medical malpractice. establishment will never admit it, at the very least for legal liability reasons.

via a cursory search, see eg https://www.practiceupdate.com/content/chest-2021-mechanical...

Doctors are going to get things wrong in a novel situation and the use of mechanical ventilators doesn't seem be unreasonable in the circumstances. It's only malpractice if it's obviously known to be harmful.

Not sure what the point you're trying to make is, but doctors always work with imperfect knowledge and mistakes are inevitable, but that doesn't detract from their utility overall.

So what if you are medically licensed? My recollection was that there was a pandemic, people were dying, and doctors were looking at all sorts of known drugs to treat a novel virus that have had some success in treating similar conditions.

I don’t blame doctors for trying things back then to save lives. I do blame governments and authorities for tying the hands of doctors from trying new things because of political reasons. My sense is that there are probably far more pandemic deaths attributable to political posturing than to HCQ use.

Something that might not be obvious if you don't listen to or watch far right media is that miracle/bogus cures are huge part of their advertising revenue. Not sure exactly why but this fits the pattern of behaviour.

This is the a good essay on the topic: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con

I don’t think it’s exactly a mystery.

It’s the exact same reason the Nigerian prince scam emails are filled with typos. If you’re going to push bullshit you’re actively looking to to find anyone who will accept what you present to them uncritically which is very much that audience who let’s say aren’t exactly known for embracing nuance.

Their entire world view is kind of predicated on experts are all wrong and that they have “secret knowledge” and “common sense” and are therefore really the smartest people in the room.

Something about finding a population that maybe fall on the short side of the curve of critical thinking skills.

Did anyone read the study that's cited in the article? (I didn't) While I think HCQ probably is dangerous, there are a ton of caveats and vague language in this summary of it. Tons.

AFAICT...

There was a slightly older study, that did a meta analysis and predicted additional mortality of 11% from HCQ.

The more recent study took that excess mortality rate and multiplied it by deaths of people who were treated with HCQ in hospital to get 17k.

Not sure why the calculation took so long, or why they use the same .11 odds ratio, when the overall mortality rate in countries varied between 4.5% - 30% for hospitalized covid patients exposed to HCQ

"May" - is far too vague in my opinion, and seems to suggest an incomplete argument

Unless these people were otherwise healthy individuals you have no useful correlation, other than outcome, to support the aleged causation - but that's just my opinion. :-)

“meta-analysis” are still taken seriously in the medical world?

Post truth lifestyles have a sad conclusion.

That hydroxychloroquine became that widely used was a big policy failure. The initial data was bad, maybe even fraudulent. And that was certainly noted by experts at the time. Doing some larger follow-up studies would have been sensible, and those did show that it wasn't useful. But what happened as well was that the hype derails other studies as HCQ became kind of the standard of care before it was properly evaluated.

And then there were all kinds of grifters and charlatans that promoted this drug, even far after the point where we knew for certain it was of no use. Though many of them switched to ivermectin then, which also didn't work (unless you also had the parasites it was designed to treat).

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