Did you know hydroxychloroquine wasn't ever scientifically serious?

[goaded]

Study on hydroxychloroquine by Didier Raoult and colleagues gets pulled on ethical and scientific grounds.

https://www.science.org/content/article/infamous-paper-popularized-unproven-covid-19-treatment-finally-retracted

"Elisabeth Bik noted on her blog that six patients who were treated with hydroxychloroquine had been dropped from the study—one of whom had died, and three of whom had transferred to intensive care—which potentially skewed the results in the drug’s favor. Larger, more rigorous trials carried out later in 2020 showed hydroxychloroquine did not benefit COVID-19 patients."

Updates

1 y

Yeah, I've never posted anything under "Holidays".

[Maybe_Maybe_not]

Could we send this guy back to oblivion, just like any other lone wolves convinced they've found the holy grail. Like, please lol, this chapter was embarrassing

[msc545]

It didn't do snything for Covid patients but Trump liked it so people used it - stupidly.

[goaded]

Ironically, "Trump's" vaccines did, and they avoided them.

[MrOracle]

No one ever claimed that hydroxychloroquine was some well-researched, approved solution for COVID. COVID was a brand new, "novel" virus strain and there was no existing treatment protocol for it. Doctors were trying things - experimenting - to see what helped and what didn't. Hydroxychloroquine was something that SEEMED to help in some cases early on, dealing with the original COVID strain. And that's important, because the original strain was only around for a limited time before it either killed their victims or people developed immunity to it because they survived it. After 5-6 months, a new strain was going around, followed later by several other strains.

Perhaps hydroxychloroquine was helpful with the original strain, and perhaps it wasn't. Some doctors felt like they got some success with it, but perhaps even if it was successful to some degree with the original strain, it may have been ineffective with later strains.

These kinds of things are completely normal and to be expected in any situation where you have a brand new illness - doctors have to experiment with treatments, and treatments that show promise go to further, more formal study. It often takes 5-10 years or more to have a solid answer as to whether a treatment is effective and reasonably safe. But people were dying, or suffering from long-term symptoms, so doctors needed to do SOMETHING to help, and that's going to mean that sometimes they'll try something that isn't going to work. They could only do their best.

Let's talk about the official "vaccines" (which are not even vaccines in the traditional sense) - the government made very specific claims about what the vax would do, and were later forced to admit that multiple of those claims were untrue and intentionally exaggerated. They also significantly downplayed the potential side effects that the vax was known to have in some people. The official government position was to tell the American people whatever it took (including outright lies), and to enact illegal restrictions and even destroy businesses and careers, to get everyone vaxxed. It was also the official government position to prohibit ALL discussions of any alternatives and to even deny natural herd immunity. Anything that went against the official narrative was to be quashed. THAT is what most of America finds absolutely unacceptable.

People who took hydroxychloroquine at worst took a medicine that was unhelpful for their condition, but they weren't otherwise harmed, and they harmed no one else. What the government did caused great harm to millions of people and potentially has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths because of vax complications, and because of isolation and masking restrictions that were literally, in Fauci's own words, made up on the spot because they sounded good.

How about the fact that Fauci was responsible for clandestinely funding gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab in order to get around legal restrictions on doing that kind of research in the west. Effectively, Fauci is significantly responsible for COVID in the first place, so he was desperate to cover it up and make it go away and he was willing to stop on our liberties to do that, at any cost to us.

Compared to all that, the hydroxychloroquine issue is completely irrelevant.

[goaded]

Well, yes, they did claim "that hydroxychloroquine was some well-researched, approved solution for COVID". That's the paper from March 2020 that's been retracted.

Here's the original paper: https://archive.is/uF635

"Background
Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine have been found to be efficient on SARS-CoV-2, and reported to be efficient in Chinese COV-19 patients...

Conclusion
Despite its small sample size our survey shows that hydroxychloroquine treatment is significantly associated with viral load reduction/disappearance in COVID-19 patients and its effect is reinforced by azithromycin."

Here's the retraction: www.sciencedirect.com/.../S0924857920300996

[MrOracle]

COVID was only recognized in October of 2019, and wasn't known to be in the US until the end of January of 2020. Remember how I said it takes 5-10 years for a treatment to be researched and approved? That obviously didn't happen between January and March.

That document you are talking about wasn't even a formal study, it was a PAPER. A paper is the FIRST of many steps on the process of an approved treatment. A paper merely outlines an idea and early observations from the field. The idea is for other doctors to take a look, provide feedback, and even try it in the field and report back observations. You need a bunch of positive feedback before you can even START a formal study.

Did a few doctors exaggerate the importance of this paper? Probably. But that's mostly because they were told to ignore anything that wasn't the official government narrative, and that's NOT how science works. And for damn good reason: the government was completely lying and making up whatever they felt sounded good and supported their narrative - which was really just Fauci trying to cover his own ass. We now know it was a mountain of lies.

This paper admits it's a single survey with a very small sample size, which means any conclusions are questionable. It was never a definitive answer - it was merely one of many avenues to explore. Maybe it made a significant improvement to the original strain, and maybe not - but that's irrelevant now anyway, because that strain is gone. It doesn't seem to be effective on later strains. Good to know.

But the whole thing is a tiny and insignificant issue, especially compared to the abhorrent behavior of the government regarding COVID. Why are you focused on a grain of sand and ignoring the mountain?

[goaded]

"Did a few doctors exaggerate the importance of this paper?"
A few doctors are not important. What was and is important is that Republican politicians up to and including Trump, right-wing influencers, etc. did. They're the people who led the charge. Anything to pretend that they had things under control, even while being told that they didn't.

The people who knew what they were talking about said it wasn't an effective treatment from the get-go. That paper made claims their own data didn't support. The paper was written to support the assertion, not to test it.

By the way, the "official government narrative" was Trump's "official government narrative".

[goaded]

Oh, and making those unfounded claims killed people who needed the drug for what it works on.

[MrOracle]

It was Fauci's "official government narrative" and he was not being honest or following the science - he was covering his own ass. Trump inherited Fauci, he didn't choose him. Unfortunately, many people in the goverment during his first term were lying to him or withholding information from him, and many had their own agendas. Trump should have replaced more people, but he had advisors telling him not to - because those advisors also had their own agenda.

Anyway, all of this is old news, and the hydroxychloroquine issue is a very minor footnote. The big issue is the many, many ways the government broke the law, violated people's rights, and lied to the public, all of which directly led to the deaths of American citizens.

[goaded]

Why should we ignore that these scientists were lying and they clearly caught the eye of the entire right wing all the way up to the president (giving them a veneer of respectability)?

There's a distinct pattern here, where lies are told, the truth comes out, and then it's dismissed as "old news".