I don’t see how your point holds. The 2005 trial found CQ as tested to be highly effective against SARS:
“Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1232869/
The March 2020 China study claimed CQ and HCQ to be effective against SARS-2. They believed it to be working in the fashion that they used it, zinc supplement or not.
“Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as available weapons to fight COVID-19”
The problem is that others weren’t getting the same results when they attempted it. In 2020 there were no known remedies and everyone wanted it to work.
The 2005 trial was on Green Monkey tissue in the lab and it’s not unusual to find that doesn’t transfer to in vivo.
China claimed success in their 2020 test but that also appears to be another Green Monkey tissue trial; footnote #3 in Table 1.
Baloney. They CDC had material on their website lauding HCQ as extremely safe and beneficial and what side effects there were only were observed over very long durations of administration of the drug, like years of continuous use. Then as word that HCQ was claimed to be effective but there were no studies yet those links got buried and we got a message from all sides that HCQ is a deadly poison that will almost certainly give you a heart attack or make you blind. They had their mind made up with zero evidence.