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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

> The parameters within which HCQ is thought to work have been clearly stated.

A lot of this HCQ stuff feels like God of the Gaps Theory at this point; as potential use cases are conclusively eliminated, so is the field of where it is "thought to work". Thought by whom, precisely?

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The popular, layman's discussion of HCQ has been buzzwords and watered down, and that's where the idea of HCQ by itself comes from. Far as I know, the experts who think HCQ is viable have been pretty forthcoming from early on with the idea it should be used in combination with zinc & azithromycin.

The HCQ thing started, as far as I know, with Raoult, who advocated HCQ and azithromycin (but not zinc) (well, it was _used_ before that; some hospitals were throwing all sorts of things at the wall in the early days. But he seems to have been the first to claim evidence). The zinc thing seemed to emerge after initial attempts to reproduce his protocol didn't work. Who are these experts advocating zinc?

Experts that actually advocate zinc? That's overstating it. The question is whether or not HCQ was the original theory, and zinc and azithromycin were added on later. So here's a collection of studies and trials conceived early on that involved at least both HCQ and zinc. As far as going back in time is possible, that seems pretty reasonable as an indication that the theorized parameters haven't been changed.

March 30: https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04326725?cond=COV...

March 30: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04326725?term=zinc&co...

April 6: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04334512?term=zinc&co...

May 8: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.02.20080036v...

May 1: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04370782?term=zinc&co...

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