That is not science. Science is when you give the treatment to some people and they live and you give the other group sugar pills and then they die. That’s science. Concern about withholding a treatment from someone who it would likely help is a violation of the Fauccian Creed. We need dead people, man!, or it isn’t science. We listen to the science. If people have to die for it, well that is science.
Generally speaking it is unethical to withhold an available treatment to the control arm of a new drug trial. It actually makes it very hard to develop new drugs. The “gold standard” of random, double blind clinical trials is not perfect. To enroll a clinical trial for HCQ would be nearly impossible since the drug can be obtained by anyone; and given the widespread nature of this disease you really couldn’t put many controls on the control group. The data would be at best very messy even assuming you could enroll one.
Harder still, in the case of HCQ, the evidence suggests it should be given as early as possible. So any trial of people who are already in the ICU or admitted to a hospital is already likely too sick to see much benefit from it. And the media and others just love to tell us about all the sick people who got the drugs too late to show any benefit, while ignoring all other data. The only plausible way to do this, given the time limitations and the immediate need, is to compare data sets. Compare the fatality rates, recovery rates/time to recovery, symptom severity, hospital admission and discharge rates/time among those given HCQ+ upon diagnosis to the historical data of those to whom it was denied. And leave it up to doctors and patients. Death rates seem to be falling from historic, and I wonder if some of that may indeed be do to more HCQ+ use and not just other ‘standard of care’ treatments or something to do with the virus mutating into less lethal forms. It certainly has nothing to do with the 40,000 ventilators Cuomo was crying about. 80% of people put on ventilators die. There is no “clinical trial” proving that this 20% survival rate has anything to do with ventilators.
The propaganda campaign against HCQ is mind boggling. I am no MD or pharmacist but I can’t think of any other drug that is barred by governors and pharmacy boards or the FDA from being prescribed “off label” to treat a disease that it wasn’t approved for. Lots of drugs are used “off label” because doctors see the evidence - and that evidence never came from a “controlled randomized clinical trial” it came from observing the results in the real world and from knowing the properties and mechanism of the drug. That is how the first few doctors started using HCQ - by knowing the disease and theorizing that the properties and mechanisms of HCQ+ would lessen symptoms and inflammation, prevent secondary infections, and inhibit viral replication. It’s at least sensible and it seems to work when used correctly.
HCQ+ may not be perfect, but it’s realistically the only thing we’ve got right now, and the evidence indicating its effectiveness is extensive and evident to anyone who looks at it. The media, bureaucrats and politicians are complicit in my view in a large number of premature and avoidable deaths; all for political reasons not “science” and certainly not out of care or kindness for their fellow human beings. And worse, they know it and many of them conspire precisely because they want to use virus deaths as a campaign issue and not give Trump a “win”. It’s total madness, and I think it won’t be long before a majority of the people figure it out. Trump was right to mention it 6 months ago, and everyone who poopoo’d it did so for the wrong and even malicious reasons. There was no logical reason to be so adamantly opposed to HCQ+ and the more we see of it the more it seems to be of benefit.