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Comment by lonelappde | Hacker News Reader

Because it's become an arbitrary political football to separate "left" vs "right"

Honestly, if this were not linked so tightly at this point to a certain U.S. politician, then I doubt that it would receive much media attention at all. And it would probably be the sort of thing that HN and Reddit would view favorably.

It would be same as Remdesivir, nitric oxide, and favipiravir. They all have clinical trials going on and anecdotal evidence of efficacy . Most people have never heard of any of these treatments. Like most drug trials, they will probably show a limited or no improvement over the control group. We can get our hopes up, but we should be planning that there will be no effective and/or viable treatment deployed before a vaccine is released.

The difference of course is that HCQ is part of the existing treatment plan of SK, France, and other countries. At the very least we’ll have a large sample size in the next few months.

So far, the results are not looking good: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/miracle-cure-testimonials-a...

As insane as that is.

And how funny is it (at least to me) that this is only because Trump came down on one side initially. If he had come out saying exactly the opposite, that HCQ was bad and we should be skeptical, everyone hoping it doesn’t work now would be looking for the 10 person studies saying it totally works and defending its use.

It’s almost beyond reason how hyper partisan this specific issue is.

This isn't left vs right; it's an unqualified politician vs pretty much all of the scientific community.

This is not accurate and kind of exposes your own bias.

If you listen to virologist podcast, TWIV, they talk about the effectiveness of HCQ. They aren't all "it's amazing!", but they do not make the claim that it doesn't work.

Maybe we run in different circles but the two main sides I've seen are "This drug is a miracle cure" and "Maybe let's wait for some evidence". If the first side flipped to "This drug is terrible" then the other side would still be saying "Maybe let's wait for some evidence". I haven't seen very many people actively hoping the drug doesn't work just to spite the president.

For some issues there's plenty of partisan hackery to go around, but in this instance there is clearly one person to blame for turning this into a partisan issue. Politicians should not be offering their opinions on drug efficacy, full stop.

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