Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Hydroxychloroquine is only controversial because Trump championed it. Otherwise it would be a detail of interest only to doctors treating COVID and researchers evaluating the success of these treatments.

Political hyper-polarization and social media amplification of divisive content to drive "engagement" is making us all collectively lose our damn minds.

If Trump says the sky is blue, his followers mindlessly believe it and everyone else will mindlessly decide the sky must instead be green. If Trump says the sky is green, his followers will mindlessly believe it and everyone else will mindlessly revert to thinking the sky is blue. The effect of a personality like Trump and how people react to him is quite possibly worse than Trump himself.

Either HCQ works or it doesn't. Deciding that and deciding how best to use it if it does work is a job for scientists and doctors. If you are not a scientist, doctor, or otherwise guided by real data that you are qualified to evaluate, your opinion on this issue is not valid and you need to shut up. What Trump or some other media whoring ass clown does or does not believe is irrelevant and will probably change next week anyway. Neither Trump nor his detractors have a valid opinion on this issue (unless they are actual professionals).

/rant over

I disagree. I think the anti-Trump crowd would've happily been on board with HCQ if Trump had said it was helpful and then scientific studies then also concluded it was helpful and that was the end of it.

Instead, the FDA publicly retracted it's authorization for the use of HCQ and said it did more harm than good, and so public sentiment solidified behind the idea that it was stupid all along. If the FDA hadn't done that and the treatment continued to prove effective, I think we would all generally be on board with it.

There are a lot of ways in which it turns out anti-Trumpers are exactly the same as Trump supporters, but the anti-science bent isn't one of them.

The treatment is continuing to prove effective when administered in the correct dosages at the appropriate times and in conjunction with Zinc and Azithromycin.

Unfortunately a lot of people were biased against it precisely because Trump supported it. The studies showing it didn't work or was dangerous were poorly designed but people happily accepted their results because they made Trump look like a fool.

It's time we put politics aside and reverse course on HCQ.

> Unfortunately a lot of people were biased against it precisely because Trump supported it.

If someone says "you should take this", based on “[they] feel good about it. That’s all it is, just a feeling, you know, smart guy. [They] feel good about it.”, with no strong medical support, then rejecting the drug is the proper course of action.

The medical community can continue to perform tests, and if there later is support for the drug, then policies can change. But that doesn't alter the fact that rejecting the drug was the correct policy.

Except that's not "all it is". Trump only said it should be taken based on research that had been done showing it may be effective, research which has been replicated in numerous studies in numerous countries.

Subsequent poorly designed studies got bad results precisely because they were poorly designed, yet they continue to influence attitudes on HCQ treatment.

> Instead, the FDA publicly retracted it's authorization for the use of HCQ and said it did more harm than good,

Why? Are the data that the FDA relied upon for this determination public?

There is a great deal of internal politics at play within the federal government. I see this as the grain of truth behind the "deep state" allegations. Without knowing more about the FDA's justification, it seems completely reasonable to suspect that they may have acted out of their own personal and institutional biases.

I was interested in hydroxychloroquine long before Trump started talking about it. It was being administered both as a treatment and prophylaxis in Italy, and was showing promising results - it didn't look like it was going to be a panacea, but it seemed likely that it would be a good first-line treatment until something better came along. It also had the added benefit of an existing production capability that was already in place and easily scaled further.

Then Trump started talking about it, and it became effectively impossible to sort out reliable information about its use. Papers started coming out either strongly in favor or strongly opposed to its use, where before there was cautious optimism.

> If the FDA hadn't done that and the treatment continued to prove effective, I think we would all generally be on board with it.

That's an interesting statement. I read that as "because the FDA retracted their authorization, the effectiveness of the treatment is not relevant". The only other way I can wrap my head around it is a more charitable reading of "it's unlikely/impossible to be proven effective because the FDA retracted their authorization" - that reasoning is so at odds with my worldview that I'm not confident that others would consider it reasonable.

Trump-haters supported the retraction of the bogus study showing HCQ increased death rates.

Outside of that, the science has been pretty mixed. There are no gold-standard studies proving effectiveness yet. The Trump-haters are correct to be ambivalent about HCQ.

Why do we need a gold standard study when the medicine is 60 years old and Africa and Indian have been using it forever to fight malaria and it seems to be helping those areas of the world already? Who acts like that as people are dying around them, "Well we need one more study to prove its effective." Why not just let doctors and people take it and make up there own minds. Humans are NOT a bunch of idiots, they can think for themselves.

> Why do we need a gold standard study

Because it involves millions of human lives.

> when the medicine is 60 years old and Africa and Indian have been using it forever to fight malaria and it seems to be helping those areas of the world already?

Malaria is not Covid-19. It's not even a virus. By your logic, any random flu drug should be used to treat Covid-19, because flu is much closer (both in terms of pathology and symptoms) than malaria is.

Africa and India have absolutely not been using HCQ "forever" to fight this illness that has only existed for ~8 months.

> Who acts like that as people are dying around them, "Well we need one more study to prove its effective."

People who have learned from history that treating people with the wrong drug can kill them or permanently damage their bodies.

> Why not just let doctors and people take it and make up there own minds. Humans are NOT a bunch of idiots, they can think for themselves.

Individual doctors have no visibility into whether a drug is safe or not. Anecdotes, hunches, and uncontrolled trials kill people. They killed people for hundreds of years before medicine advanced and started to require randomized, controlled trials.

Just because someone doesn't know whether HCQ works doesn't make them an idiot. No one is treating someone like an idiot by refusing them an experimental treatment. The entire point of having doctors is so that people don't have to make up their own minds, because it requires years of education to have any idea what you're doing when treating something as complex as a human being.

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