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The med cram guy from the link posted here does indicate as well that you need a double blind study

and there is this comment that I Have no ability to understand as I am not a science person (but i am still going to do zinc lozenges):

“Thank you for this great video. Now allow a science rant:
Please stop hyping this Zn+ PlosOne study. Consider two (serious) caveats of the study:
a) Zink reduces activity of RdRP... HOWEVER any other molecule/ion may do that too (e.g. a strong toxin!). The key point is, it does so WITHOUT AFFECTING NORMAL CELLULAR FUNCTION IN A MAJOR WAY . Naively, this could be assessed by: Use Zn+ and the Zn+ transporter, increase both independently, scatter survival of cells XY.

HOWEVER this is not what authors did. In fact they DID NOT measure cell viabilty with high concentration of Zn AND the transporter at all ! (b) Further, consider that just the Zn transporter (WITHOUT adding Zn!) already decreased RdRP. THIS GOES WITHOUT ANY EXPLANATION.

IMHO this study should be retracted immediately since the red flags this raises are skyhigh.

Please correct me if I’m wrong with anything in this factually.”

What is a reasonable estimate for the fastest possible double blind clinical study of hydroxychloroquine on COVID19 patients? Does anyone believe that will be done in a month?
Please recognize that such a study means giving half the patients...nothing that helps.

But the gaussian function tells us that in 1 month it is highly probable that we will have on the order of a million infected in the USA. Somewhere around 1 to 1.3 million, likely every hospital bed in the country will be full. And there will be no doctors available to see the next patient. Realistic numbers estimate many millions of infected Americans again looking simply at the realities of the exponential climb. That isn’t doom-saying - its math.

So while you wait for 4 weeks? 5? 10? for your double blind study, you are going to have one million plus infected, 200,000 in need of care, filled up hospitals, and 20,000 dead.

Please note that there are already multiple papers of measurements of the effectiveness of this drug, and thousands of papers defining the safety.

So you have a drug that is known-safe, known to have some anti-viral properties, is supported by multiple peer reviewed papers, and 20,000 people headed into the grave, and the response is “No. You should not give it except to a tiny number of people, and half of that number should receive a sugar pill, and we should wait weeks in this condition to see the results before we allow many people to have the drug.”

Sorry. That’s not saving lives. That’s worshipping rules in a time of crisis where the rules are not sufficiently helping at life saving.

the reason you put so much effort into double-blind is that in peacetime when you want to get the maximum amount of information and optimize the best dosing and eliminate noise in the data, you have this luxury. But this is Pearl harbor. we are being bombed out of existence. You have act and react on the schedule of the exponential function - not on the schedule of some fastidious ideal that only has application when you don’t have a nuclear bomb going off in your living room.