In vitro is not in vivo. I still want to know about the patients we have had right now. The data is there. Where is the paper?
What is that - about a half hour from now?
Again, you have a right to ask whatever academic questions you feel like asking, and doing as much investigating as you possibly can in your own time.
But it won’t slow the good judgment or decisive actions of great leaders like President Trump, or anyone else with solid intuition about treating COVID-19 with hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin.
Science is hard.
Let's start by defining the problem. The problem is that the increasing rate of infection coupled with the necessity of putting a considerable percentage on ventilators ( a percentage that may be 2%) will result in running out of ventilators and will double the death rate.
If the nation has 100,000 ventilators, then at most we can tolerate 5 million infected patients before running out of ventilators. If 10 million are infected, then we will have a need for 200,000 ventilators and we will have probably 150,000 deaths; one-third solely due to the lack of ventilators.
If 50 million are infected at one time, then nearly one million will die due to lack of ventilators. That is the problem that must be solved.
The French study claimed that 6 out of 6 patients receiving the Trump pills were cured. It also said that another six patients were dropped from the treatment group. I think it also said three of them were critical.
If those three had been kept in the study and died, then the death rate of the treated patients would have been 3 out of 30, or 10%. The French study is not only "anecdotal" it could very well be what we in the science biz call "wrong".
As for the guy who successfully treated 350 patients, there is no control group. Where is the population equivalent to his treatment group to show that his results are superior. Did I read that his patients were all treated outside a hospital? Doesn't that strike anybody as an important detail? Would that not be a way to get a wrong answer to the problem?
The assumption that those eager to pursue this "cure" are making is that there is no cost to being wrong. I would submit that the resources put on a wrong solution are potentially very costly.
In my life, when faced with a problem that must be solved, I would very often try to do EVERYTHING that might contribute to the solution. Rarely would I have the resources of time or money to do that. Choices have to be made.
It may well be that Trump's pills are the best choice right now. But the damage that I described above will not be mitigated if that choice is wrong. The intuition is strong on this one. The science is not yet as strong.