It was. Long before the bulk of the studies even processed, the media had flipped right over to "hcq is the devil and a hoax". This, from what I observed, was essentially independent of any actual scientific research or result.
If someone says "Take this magical cure, maybe it could work... but I don't have any evidence of it yet", it's not so terrible to start from a position of skepticism. Could hcq work? Maybe, although with every randomized trial it seems less likely. But the people who initially pushed it did so from a position of wishful thinking, not actual science. This might have been a hoax of ignorance not evil, but in the end, I say it's still a hoax.
At that time, the only responsible answer, and the answer that any biomedical scientist with integrity would give is: "Early results show X, though further follow up studies would be needed to replicate these results to confirm their validity"
But that's not what we got. What we got was a binary split between miracle cure and worse than homeopathy, depending on which side of the political divide you were on.
Now that some monthes have passed, at least five peer-reviewed RCTs were conducted. In each of them hydroxychloroquine is ineffective.
I argue that when someone declares, without evidence, that "X works", that is a hoax and should be criticized. Even if later evidence shows it works! Because it's easy to make a random guess, and it's hard to fight the collateral damage that wrong guess can cause.
There are a million things that might be the covid miracle cure (colloidal silver? high protein diet? grapeseed extract? etc, etc, etc). If I pick one of these on a hunch and start pushing it as a cure, I would rightly deserve to be called out.
No, there were Chinese, French and other reports and observational studies during the pandemic that supported use of HCQ:
>"Wuhan was the epicenter, and the Chinese physicians at the People’s Hospital of Wuhan University told their Western counterparts that they got the idea of using HCQ because none of the 178 patients they had admitted for COVID-19 had lupus—a surprise, since lupus is an immune disease, and some thought it might have made these patients especially vulnerable. They wondered why this might be, and whether HCQ, which these patients had been taking for this preexisting condition, might in some way be protecting them against COVID-19."<
taken from "Hydroxychloroquine: A Morality Tale":
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/hydroxyc...
Trump isn't pushing sound science.
He's hoping to buffalo people (like you) into thinking he's on to something. AND THE MEDIA IS SO AGAINST HIM. EVEN THO IT REALLY HELPS THE FAKE NEWS JUST WANTS TO HURT HIM. BECAUSE THEY LOVE HILLARY