https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump-s-rhetoric-un...
You got it entirely backwards.
The drug has been pushed hard politically as a covid19 silver bullet although there were zero evidence and zero scientific studies on the subject.
In response the scientific community responded by pointing the elephant in the room, and warning the public of the dangers of swallowing an unknown drug with known dangerous side-effects without any knowledge of its effectiveness other than political propaganda by an anti-intellectual political group.
Let's not forget that so far there have been scientific studies that demonstrate that hydroxichloroquine has no observable effect on covid19 death rates. Yet, the drug keeps being pushed as political propaganda, this time around to also fuel conspiracy theories.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/three-big-studies-di...
All I'm saying is that the media planted its flag well before any conclusions could be made. Some politicians did as well (Trump, mostly), sure, but they never claim to be "objective."
that was insane.
Everything that followed makes sense...of course the entire scientific and medical world fell over itself to stop people trying to use it.....until it was tested and proven effective and safe for the purpose.
* incidentally, I have no idea why a US President would ever endorse any drug at all, let alone one that was untested.
It's simply amazing that people that are intelligent continue to push this narrative.
We have long known the risks of HCL. There's nothing special about CV19 or anything else that takes our scientific understanding of HCL usage in humans and the potential side effects that invalidates that. Quite simply: HCL is generally harmless, but in a subset of the population, it can have serious, up to fatal, side effects.
Regardless of whether or not we find HCL to be beneficial in fighting CV19, it was never wrong for the media to caution against its use while we had no significant studies showing efficacy in treating it in humans. Because we know, even though the risk is small, it can kill people. And if you have millions of people infected and being treated with it, there will be people that suffer severe side effects from it. For a drug that you have no empirical evidence of helping.
>The results in this particular study may not hold up in wider testing, but they certainly might.
Unlikely. This trial has a whole host of flaws with it. Subjects were not randomized, and they selected to only use HCL on people without cardiac risk factors - yet we know that cardiac risk factors are a huge co-morbidity for CV19! They also left out results of nearly 10% of the people being treated with HCL because they were still hospitalized despite ongoing treatment - people at the highest risk of dying. They're also using non-HCL results from early on in the pandemic, where we understood less about treating CV19 patients in general which resulted in a higher mortality rate. We may yet find HCL is beneficial, but this study is trash - the methodology is flawed to the point where you could have replaced HCL with placebo and we could be reasonable certain that the results would stay the same. Exclude some of the sickest people you've given the placebo to, only give the placebo to people lacking one of the major co-morbidities of the disease, and include in the non-placebo group all the initial patients from when the disease was at it's least understood while active in America, and I'd bet you the placebo group will outperform the non-placebo just as it did here.
>How do these media members plan to reverse course if in fact, hydrochloriquine becomes a widely recommended treatment for Covid 19?
There's no need to reverse course if HCL becomes a widely recommend treatment for CV19. The media hasn't been saying it's impossible that HCL helps - they've been saying that it's a drug with the potential to kill you, and we don't currently know that it does anything whatsoever for CV19. Those are both true statements. If we find out that HCL is good for CV19, it's still a dangerous drug that might kill you - but in that hypothetical we at least know that there is a benefit and the risks can be weighed against each other to determine what is the right option for those with serious infections. Right now we can't know that and we can't weigh the risks, which means no one can make an informed decision, which means that recommending it to people is batshit bonkers reckless.
https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)30534-8/ful...
* Overall in-hospital mortality was 18.1% (95% CI:16.6%-19.7%);
by treatment:
* hydroxychloroquine + azithromycin, 157/783 (20.1% [95% CI: 17.3%-23.0%]),
* hydroxychloroquine alone, 162/1202 (13.5% [95% CI: 11.6%-15.5%]),
* azithromycin alone, 33/147 (22.4% [95% CI: 16.0%-30.1%]),
* and neither drug, 108/409 (26.4% [95% CI: 22.2%-31.0%]) .
And the conclusion:
> In this multi-hospital assessment, when controlling for COVID-19 risk factors, treatment with hydroxychloroquine alone and in combination with azithromycin was associated with reduction in COVID-19 associated mortality. Prospective trials are needed to examine this impact.
The medical establishment is conservative for good reason. You don't just pick a drug and start touting it as a cure all. And you certainly don't publicly propose it with little to no evidence.
From what I have seen in the media, they have correctly reported that the drug was being recommended by non-doctors and with little evidence. They may have gone too on the other side but given a lack of evidence the default assumption should always be that a drug is harmful until proven otherwise.
>The combination of hydroxychloroquine + azithromycin was reserved for selected patients with severe COVID-19 and with minimal cardiac risk factors.
This group still saw improvement over no treatment, which is a huge plus(unless cardiac function is correlated with covid susceptibility).
Chronic heart disease is a factor associated with higher risk of COVID-19-related hospital death, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20092999v... gives a hazard ratio of 1.27 adjusted for all the many other factors they looked at.
So yes, it looks to me like at least some of what this Ford study measured was indeed that difference between people with pre-existing conditions dying at a higher rate than people without.