Good points, all correct. The difference here that is HCG is not an unknown. It has been around a couple decades. Side effects, if any, are known and treatable. It has been through double blind peer reviewed trials for Covid in several countries.
What we are witness to is the internecine ownership of our FDA by Big Pharma.
You’re right about most of that; and, let me be clear: if I were infected, I wouldn’t hesitate to take the treatment if it were offered. I’m in a high-risk group, and it becomes a question of the balance of risks.
However, there are still a lot of important and unanswered questions. Here are some that I think they’re trying to answer with the clinical trials:
1. Does it really work? It certainly seems to work — but, when fewer than 10% of cases are severe or fatal; it’s difficult to attribute a particular recovery to the medicine. Nine times out of ten, there would be a recovery without it.
2. What combination of drugs works best? It seems that cocktails of drugs work best — but, which drugs, and in which proportions?
3. What is the therapeutic dose? Too little won’t help, too much might produce undesirable side-effects (e.g. nausea and neurological problems are already known side effects).
4. When should these drugs be taken — as prophylaxis for everyone, at early stages of infection, when death is imminent, or all of the above? This is an important question. There’s already evidence that they don’t work very well, for patients suffering severe respiratory problems — because, by then, those problems have caused irreversible problems in the lungs. Even if the drugs can prevent anyone from catching the virus, it may be far better to let everyone catch the disease before treatment. That way, we’ll build up a herd immunity, and we won’t see this disease come back time and time again.
No doubt there are more research questions.
If these drugs work (I certainly hope so, and I even think it’s likely that they do), then restrictions can be lifted, and everything can get back to normal. However, if we lift all restrictions & later on find out that the drugs don’t work as well as we hoped — that could be disastrous.
Then there’s the (rather crass, but nonetheless important) political calculation — do you really want the Trump administration to go all-in on this potential cure? If it works; you know that he won’t be given any credit; and if it doesn’t, you know he’ll get all the blame for the epidemic.
As a middle ground; why not a two-track approach? Continue with the clinical trials, and allow physicians to prescribe the drugs to anyone infected who wants them. On the balance of risks, I do think we’re at the point where off-label prescriptions should be allowed, for infected people who want them. Meanwhile, clinical trials must be completed.
Do you recall the Thalidomide epidemic of the early 1960s? Perhaps you don’t; because Americans never experienced it — thanks to the head of the FDA at the time, who prohibited Thalidomide’s use in the USA. Meanwhile, here in Canada (among several other countries), it was used extensively as a treatment for morning sickness. As a result, many thousands of babies were born with horrific (literally horrific) birth defects. This was a huge tragedy and scandal in Canada, and I’m still haunted by the images of the birth defects. The US FDA director took a lot of heat for her decision to ban Thalidomide for pregnant women — right up until she was hailed as a hero for preventing tens of thousands of birth defects. Kennedy gave her an award, and the FDA even named an award after her.