[jogundas]

Wiki says that "Hydroxychloroquine is being studied to prevent and treat coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‑19), but all clinical trials conducted during 2020 found it is ineffective and may cause dangerous side effects."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxychloroquine

[koboll]

Here's a good rundown from Science on why hydroxychloroquine has failed large RCTs:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/three-big-studies-di...

[LinuxBender]

That is mostly correct based on the studies I have been following. In most cases, by the time people are admitted to the hospital, the viral load is too high and their immune system has not been able to keep up. There is a whole lot more going on, all the way from interactions with ACE to VWF to clotting, that administering zinc ionophores late in the game may be a bit too late.

[narrator]

In the interest of free speech, here's a PDF with all the positive trials for HCQ:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1l6y3L_KGb1ilMW0FaP4VZsd7WvX...

[chowells]

I mean, I guess quackery is free speech.

But it's awfully irresponsible to pretend it's good for society to spread it.

Not everyone has the scientific knowledge necessary to understand p-values and what they mean for research like this. It's a lot to ask that everyone know the standard for publishing in medicine is a p-value < 0.05, which corresponds to a 5% chance of the study's results being wrong. It's a lot to ask that everyone be aware that there were 130 different studies on hydroxychloroquine and to do the math from there to determine that we'd expect 6 or 7 of them to be wrong.

It's much better to say "just because it's not illegal doesn't mean it's a good idea" and just not share such thoroughly bad information.

[viggity]

millions of people take HCQ on a daily basis for their lupus. Ask any rheumatologist, the danger of Torsades de Points is only a concern for HCQ if the patient already has a serious heart condition, or if the patient has been taking HCQ for years.

Millions more take HCQ as a malaria treatment. It is generally recognized as safe, if you do not have a heart condition (and even then a short course is unlikely to yield adverse outcomes).

[outworlder]

> It is generally recognized as safe

There are no safe drugs for a patient admitted to intensive care. We should not start administering anything in large scale just because most healthy people can tolerate it well.

[Filligree]

> Millions more take HCQ as a malaria treatment. It is generally recognized as safe, if you do not have a heart condition (and even then a short course is unlikely to yield adverse outcomes).

COVID-19 can infect the heart and damage it. As safe as HCQ might be on its own, here it's adding extra load to a system that's already under stress.

[aden1ne]

Covid has severe effects on the cardiovascular system, with myocardial injury being a frequent occurrence of those covid patients admitted to hospital.

[deelowe]

The dosages are different (much higher) for Covid-19.

[notadoc]

Wikipedia is not a reliable source for anything, let alone medical information or studies

[burfog]

It's pretty good for purely non-political things.

Sadly, this is political.

[burfog]

Wikipedia is pretty reliable for math, old computer hardware, and other dry technical subjects.

This is not one. This is a political subject. Wikipedia is a complete disaster for anything that even remotely touches upon modern politics. There are teams of people paid to impose an opinion on Wikipedia, relentlessly wearing down any neutral editor with 24x7 edits and every kind of bureaucratic fight. The people who edit for free are also pulled from a highly-biased population, with strong overrepresentation by unemployed single people with non-STEM degrees.

Simply put, "ineffective and may cause dangerous side effects" is a purely political attack on the US president.

Last year, the drug was handed out freely, with very little worry, to anybody claiming that they would visit a country with malaria. In many places it is non-prescription. Clearly, the "dangerous side effects" aren't such a big deal. You can get deadly "dangerous side effects" from aspirin (Reye syndrome) and from Tylenol/paracetamol/acetaminophen (complete liver failure).

[learc83]

>"ineffective and may cause dangerous side effects"

Dangerous on an individual level, not really. But at a population level if hundreds of millions of people start taking it, you're going to have high absolute numbers of bad side effects.

> is a purely political attack on the US president.

As for ineffective, there isn't one single national health agency that recommends taking it for covid. Surely the entire globe isn't killing scores of their citizens by preventing the use of an effective treatment just to make the US President look bad.

Since it's ineffective in this case, there's no benefit to outweigh the downsides of "dangerous side effects" like their is with aspirin or Tylenol.

[rsynnott]

> Last year, the drug was handed out freely, with very little worry, to anybody claiming that they would visit a country with malaria.

Well, for a start, no it wasn't (many if not most malarial areas mostly have resistant strains, and other drugs are more appropriate there). But anyone who was given it was warned beforehand (or at least should have been). It's not a safe drug. It is, however, safer than getting malaria, so you should probably take it if you're going to an area where it will be effective.

What you should probably not do is take it because a weird French doctor and some people on the internet said to.

[scrollaway]

Sometimes I feel like I have to remind americans that other countries exist.

How incredibly self centered must it be to think that everything relates to you, your country, your awful president.

Please.