The fact that the first half of the article is spent complaining about political matters and seeming almost gleeful that a therapy that was backed by a political opponent has not proven effective, despite the fact that the end result is continued suffering and death. This doesn't give me a ton of faith that the author went out of their way to present the most neutral view of the studies that have been done so far.
Preface: I have no opinion about whether the drug works or not, and whether the evidence provided here is good.
Wow - where are you finding any "glee" in this article? The only hint of any kind of emotion I can find are very tame reminders of instances of irrational support for the drug, and how important it is to remain objective about things like this. Of course, that's frustration - any glee, if present, would come in the places where the author talks about the evidence to the contrary, but the writing in those places seems very straight forward. Ironically, I think you may be injecting emotion that isn't there due to the intrinsic sociopolitical nature of the story. Emotion the author may indeed have! But it's not in the article, as far as I can tell (again, I'm talking about petty glee, not frustration).
And even giving you the benefit of the doubt - that there is something you could at least describe as happiness - it would make sense, since strong evidence either way would be cause for happiness. If the author is happy, it could easily be because something good happened: Evidence against something dangerous (irrational support for a drug). I would hope they would also be even more happy if the opposite, even-better case happened (strong evidence that it works), and I totally understand being skeptical that they would indeed express that attitude, but it's irrelevant since the article is about the opposite case.
Here is the first study[0] which correctly looked at the combination of HCQ with zinc sulfate ionophore, as per the original theory, which originated from a Dutch researcher who predicted the mechanism by which HCQ was shown to be in vitro effective against SARS and/or MERS. Further, this is the first study I've seen which gave the trial drugs early as recommended based on the mechanism of action.
HCQ cocktail was floating around the internet long before Trump tweeted about it and the media politicized the treatment by bending over backwards to prove Trump wrong, even at the possible expense of passing up a promising treatment.
Every single study before this linked NYU study either administered HCQ alone, and/or waited until patients were critical - but none of that stopped the smugness and eagerness with which the trials were reported on as proof that HCQ doesn't work.
If literally anyone other than Trump mentioned the drug in the public eye it would have been correctly treated as a promising avenue - but because it's even vaguely associated with Trump suddenly everyone wants to see it fail.
This HCQ fiasco is a manifestation of further anti-right bias and the fact that this behavior is not just implicitly condoned, but eagerly supported and simultaneously denied by the majority media and majority of commenters online makes it very difficult to have a presence as an independent on the internet. The bottom line is that we have a cheap, safe drug, in common use for decades, with a direct known and proven (in vitro and not in vivo) mechanism, and people are content to ignore all of this or worse, embellish the dangers and downplay the efficacy, just to stick it to Trump. The collective pettiness is unbelievable.
> Historical controls are used in many previous studies in medicine. In this respect, the safety of Hydroxychloroquine is well documented. When the safe use of this drug is projected against its apparent effect of decreasing the progression of early cases to ventilator use, it is difficult to understand the reluctance of the authorities in charge of U.S. pandemic management to recommend its use in early COVID-19 cases. The effects of the chloroquines were first outlined 15 years ago by the CDC’s own Special Pathogens Unit.
TL;DR (my opinion): arrogant French doctor said this was the cure, but his methodology is wonky, he excluded 1 test patient who died.
The last 2 paragraphs indicate he's starting to doubt himself too. But googling his name, it seems his ego has made a comeback, and now he's back attacking people who doubt him as being wrong themselves.
Meanwhile it seems he's become the hero of the nutjob wing of the world, who scream the "deep state" or whoever are conspiring against the truth-teller...
