You wrote a very good summary of the entire sordid episode.
“We had the most ignorant and partisan people in the country (big media/tech) and the deep state health bureaucracy/big pharma dictating what doctors could and could not do.”
Add to that Pharmacists & Pharmacies. They refused to fill prescriptions of HCQ for various reasons. I had a pharmacist at Walgreens refuse to fill my HCQ prescription UNLESS I had an active and documented case of COVID.
Because of medical malpractice lawsuits (ambulance chasing attorney’s) corporate medical practitioners to include pharmacists were not protected from lawsuits because all the authorities said these treatments were bad.
In the next year we are going to witness the media backtrack on most of what they told us about this virus along with their willing deep state bureaucrat hacks.