Hydroxychloroquine

Hydroxychloroquine (or Chloroquine) showed great early results in some prelim studies and some top international epidemiologists and field doctors were touting its success. So President Trump cautiously mentioned it as a promising treatment. The OrangeMan=Bad media and their allies, lost it -- and claimed:

• he was foisting unproven treatments on a gullible public
• leftist politicians restricted or banned it's use for COVID (even though it was proven harmless in 40 years of use)
• FakeNews outlets touted the dangers of it (and used a case where a wife murdered her partner with fish tank cleaner, as an example)
• and a few leftist scientists created junk studies to sabotage it's reputation.

It's sad the measure people will go either to prevent hope or to hurt Trump.

In the end, there are some studies that show it might help if used early in disease progression... and conflicting evidence that it helps/hurts later on. But that's not really the point -- the point was that when it was brought up, it was being touted by top epidemiologist in France, China and other countries -- and Trump was right to offer people hope that it was one of many potential treatments coming on line.

Positive Benefit

• Jan/Feb - Chinese, Italian Studies - highly effective in reducing severity/duration. (Best data at the time, since refuted)
• March - Original peer reviewed French Study (Didier Raoult) - highly effective in reducing severity/duration. (Best data at the time, since debated)
• July - Henry Ford Medical Group: Hydroxychloroquine lowered death rate. (OK data)

No Benefit

• July - University of Minnesota - no effect on symptoms or severity (if issues early in hospitalization) w or w/o Zinc (Good data)
• June - Oxford University study - no effect.

Negative Benefit

• June - UK’s RECOVERY project: no difference in death, but worse on progression (if issues early in hospitalization). (Good data)

Conclusion

The data is swaying me that the benefits of Hydroxychloroquine as a treatment are in question (but still unknown if it is a preventative -- however that seems unlikely). But that doesn't change that in March when Trump made his statements, it was the most promising treatment he had, and what he said was not even vaguely out of line with common sense -- and those attacking him for it, wanted people to die and the economy to collapse more than they wanted to give a political win to someone they despised.

📚 References Wikipedia: Hydroxychloroquine Coronavirus treatment There are a lot of positives for various treatments around COVID: Existing Drugs • Vaccines • FakeNews While the term goes back 100 years, the history is summed up well in a Sharyl Attkisson TedTalk on FakeNews. While our media has always had false narratives and bad stories that are Fake News (exampled include: Edward R. Murrow's "See it now" McCarthy'ing Joe McCarthy (1954), Richard Jewel story (1996), story about a plane crashing into Camp David after 9/11 (2001), Duke LeCross Rape Case (2014), Michael Brown and 'hands up, don't shoot' narrative (2014), and so on). We didn't use the term "Fake News", just liberal media bias or incompetence, but it's been around since the first liberal got sloppy or partisan at a newspaper, somewhere back in Roman times. Then on September 13, 2016 Hillary Clinton supporters Google and Eric Schmidt, used a shell charity (a non-profit called "First Draft,") to start seeding the term to attack right wing websites ("to tackle malicious hoaxes and fake news reports"). Hillary Clinton and her surrogate David Brock of Media Matters admitted in a campaign letter that they pressured Facebook to join the effort. Google warned Conservative websites to remove stories that Google didn't like, or they'd take away their ad revenue. And Barack Obama and the liberal media followed along, regurgitating what they were told: none were going to let this opportunity (to curate what information we could see) go to waste, all in the name of protecting free speech. All coincidentally done at the same time, in what could only be a coordinated campaign attack. Unfortunately for them, it backfired when people noticed that the mainstream liberal media made more errors and was less honest, and started throwing it back in their face. Fake News applied more to the News, Google, Facebook, Obama and other curators and finger pointers than their victims. Donald Trump used that to hijack the term and use it back against them. The left tried to change the narrative and pretend that Trump had created the term, and they wanted to stop using it and claimed it was a hateful term and an attack on free press to point out the Presses bias or errors. And that's where we are today.