6 ms·

A lot of people got hung up in the politics of this issue. A prominent politician endorsed using hydroxycholoroquine. Bill Maher recently made a good point: "

A lot of people got hung up in the politics of this issue. A prominent politician endorsed using hydroxycholoroquine. Bill Maher recently made a good point: "Liberals are falling into lionizing someone because because they are the anti-Trump. Even before the virus America had a far too chronically sick population which is one reason we've lost so many now. We need to demand something better than how the entrenched medical establishment manages symptoms but cures and heals far too little". I guess pushing "the narrative" was more important than the science.

jtbayly 6y ago
This. People are so desperate to attack Trump that they're willing to accept any result that paints him as doing something stupid. And if they can blame him for people dying, all the better. In the meantime, ignoring the science and falling for the politics means that people may well die since the science may not be able to happen now.
- belltaco 6y ago
  Why is a politician endorsing an unproven drug? Oh it's because he's "getting great calls about it" from Fox News personas who are not doctors themselves, and instead fell for bad studies from a questionable French doctor.
  - notaharvardmba 6y ago
    Also insider trading
    - javagram 6y ago
      The insider trading argument was proven to be nonsense. He had a <$5000 interest in a mutual fund that fractionally owns the drug manufacturer . For multi-millionaire to care about this would be like dumpster diving for pennies. If anything the drug magically curing coronavirus would make the entire stock market, and his re-election chances, go up dramatically, so there is no need to look for an insider trading argument when plain old wishful thinking/stupidity explains it all.
      - hajile 6y ago
        This is the issue with front-page lies and 9th page retractions.
        javagram 6y ago
        More like an issue with social media I think. What front page carried an accusation of “insider trading” over the HCQ? It appears to have been a story spread by twitter and facebook posts. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/09/facebook-posts/trump-has-tiny-financial-stake-company-manufacture/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/09/facebook-p... Using the “Front page” of a newspaper or reliable news source is much more likely to get real news than social media...
  - lenkite 6y ago
    This fallacy that HCQ is unproven is utterly astounding. I am truly sorry, but Americans have just been completely brainwashed by their media. You have been owned by your medical overlords who do not want generic medicine to work.
    - y-c-o-m-b 6y ago
      Unproven to treat COVID-19. Leaving out that last part is the debate. If you're not going to discuss the whole context, then you're being disingenuous and just trying to work people up into a political fight.
      - lenkite 6y ago
        https://docs.google.com/document/d/1545C_dJWMIAgqeLEsfo2U8Kq5WprDuARXrJl6N1aDjY/mobilebasic https://docs.google.com/document/d/1545C_dJWMIAgqeLEsfo2U8Kq...
      - lenkite 6y ago
        Also statement from American Journal of Epidemiology, https://academic.oup.com/aje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/aje/kwaa093/5847586 https://academic.oup.com/aje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/aje... Backing news article https://medicine.yale.edu/yigh/news-article/25085/ https://medicine.yale.edu/yigh/news-article/25085/
      - lenkite 6y ago
        It is not an all-out, miracle cure but it definitely helps. Not trying to work anyone into a political fight, but I do firmly believe the US medical industry is doing active propaganda to prevent use of HCQ for Covid-19. https://medicine.yale.edu/yigh/news-article/25085/ https://medicine.yale.edu/yigh/news-article/25085/
        y-c-o-m-b 6y ago
        That is a single person. Have those been peer reviewed and scrutinized by the wider medical community? If you open the study, you'll see there are open-labeled non-randomized trials he is referencing. It's been a handful of months since COVID-19 grasped the globe. Too early to take things as gospel. As we are finding out in this thread, these types of studies are open to bias and rife with mistakes or misinterpretations. If we are to take the desired lesson from this thread, it's that data surrounding these medical journals need to be highly scrutinized before we can take them in as evidence.
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    > Why is a politician endorsing an unproven drug? Why do we pretend like we've never met Trump when we talk about him? He's endorsing it because one of his friends mentioned it to him. That doesn't give everybody else an excuse to be as irresponsible as he is. The reason he's listened to is because he's the president of the US, the reason scientists are listened to is because of a perception of high standards and integrity. If scientific institutions play the Trump game, afterwards he'll still be President, but they'll have nothing.
  - jtbayly 6y ago
    Why are politicians making medical decisions to quarantine whole states, based on unproven medical data? Give me a break. The initial data in an emergency is all we have to go on, and it looked likely that the drug could be helpful. It's still unknown. Same as Vitamin D, which all kinds of people are promoting. If Trump refused to promote it, you'd have people here up in arms that he refused to let people know about it, blaming him for untold deaths if people had simply been informed. Meanwhile, initial data made it look like lockdowns would save lives, too. The jury is still out on that, too, but it's looking like it didn't do nearly as much as people thought it would.
alkonaut 6y ago
The narrative was never that the drug was good or bad. What people were upset about was that a politician stept in and started pushing for treatments. It makes no difference what so ever if a politician turns out to be correct, it's an absolutely unthinkable thing to do regardless. Now, you could argue that people wanted the politician to be right or wrong (depending on views) and that this muddled the reporting, and that's probably right. But it doesn't change the fact that everyone should be upset when their politician starts doing experts' jobs (poorly).
- leereeves 6y ago
  Democrats were also writing various versions of New study shows Trump is racking up a second body count with his claims about hydroxychloroquine[1] based on this study. 1: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/5/22/1946903/-Donald-Trump-isn-t-just-killing-people-with-COVID-19-he-s-killing-then-with-hydroxychloroquine https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/5/22/1946903/-Donald-T...
- lazyjones 6y ago
  >But it doesn't change the fact that everyone should be upset when their politician starts doing experts' jobs The experts were mostly using the drug already as an experimental treatment for Covid-19 all over the world at that point. As was their job, while Trump's was to give people hope.
- blhack 6y ago
  >The narrative was never that the drug was good or bad. Multiple prominent journalists came out saying this like: "if you take HCQ, you will die." Thousands of headlines were written saying "Donald Trump pushing dangerous drug" etc. The narrative from the left was that the drug was bad. The narrative from the right was that it is a miracle cure. NEITHER of them are correct yet.
  - belltaco 6y ago
    >Multiple prominent journalists came out saying this like: "if you take HCQ, you will die." Huh? Can you point to some of those claims?
y-c-o-m-b 6y ago
I think you're simplifying it to fit your own narrative and paint the entire thing as a political issue when the science was at question all along. Dr. Anthony Fauci made the issue very clear from the beginning. It is irresponsible to push hydroxycholoroquine as a viable treatment based off of anecdotal information and without more legitimate studies. Trump is not a medical professional and has no business telling the public something can treat COVID-19, especially without support from the majority of the medical profession. Plain and simple.

jtbayly 6y ago

This. People are so desperate to attack Trump that they're willing to accept any result that paints him as doing something stupid. And if they can blame him for people dying, all the better. In the meantime, ignoring the science and falling for the politics means that people may well die since the science may not be able to happen now.

belltaco 6y ago
Why is a politician endorsing an unproven drug? Oh it's because he's "getting great calls about it" from Fox News personas who are not doctors themselves, and instead fell for bad studies from a questionable French doctor.
- notaharvardmba 6y ago
  Also insider trading
  - javagram 6y ago
    The insider trading argument was proven to be nonsense. He had a <$5000 interest in a mutual fund that fractionally owns the drug manufacturer . For multi-millionaire to care about this would be like dumpster diving for pennies. If anything the drug magically curing coronavirus would make the entire stock market, and his re-election chances, go up dramatically, so there is no need to look for an insider trading argument when plain old wishful thinking/stupidity explains it all.
    - hajile 6y ago
      This is the issue with front-page lies and 9th page retractions.
      - javagram 6y ago
        More like an issue with social media I think. What front page carried an accusation of “insider trading” over the HCQ? It appears to have been a story spread by twitter and facebook posts. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/09/facebook-posts/trump-has-tiny-financial-stake-company-manufacture/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/09/facebook-p... Using the “Front page” of a newspaper or reliable news source is much more likely to get real news than social media...
- lenkite 6y ago
  This fallacy that HCQ is unproven is utterly astounding. I am truly sorry, but Americans have just been completely brainwashed by their media. You have been owned by your medical overlords who do not want generic medicine to work.
  - y-c-o-m-b 6y ago
    Unproven to treat COVID-19. Leaving out that last part is the debate. If you're not going to discuss the whole context, then you're being disingenuous and just trying to work people up into a political fight.
    - lenkite 6y ago
      https://docs.google.com/document/d/1545C_dJWMIAgqeLEsfo2U8Kq5WprDuARXrJl6N1aDjY/mobilebasic https://docs.google.com/document/d/1545C_dJWMIAgqeLEsfo2U8Kq...
    - lenkite 6y ago
      Also statement from American Journal of Epidemiology, https://academic.oup.com/aje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/aje/kwaa093/5847586 https://academic.oup.com/aje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/aje... Backing news article https://medicine.yale.edu/yigh/news-article/25085/ https://medicine.yale.edu/yigh/news-article/25085/
    - lenkite 6y ago
      It is not an all-out, miracle cure but it definitely helps. Not trying to work anyone into a political fight, but I do firmly believe the US medical industry is doing active propaganda to prevent use of HCQ for Covid-19. https://medicine.yale.edu/yigh/news-article/25085/ https://medicine.yale.edu/yigh/news-article/25085/
      - y-c-o-m-b 6y ago
        That is a single person. Have those been peer reviewed and scrutinized by the wider medical community? If you open the study, you'll see there are open-labeled non-randomized trials he is referencing. It's been a handful of months since COVID-19 grasped the globe. Too early to take things as gospel. As we are finding out in this thread, these types of studies are open to bias and rife with mistakes or misinterpretations. If we are to take the desired lesson from this thread, it's that data surrounding these medical journals need to be highly scrutinized before we can take them in as evidence.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  > Why is a politician endorsing an unproven drug? Why do we pretend like we've never met Trump when we talk about him? He's endorsing it because one of his friends mentioned it to him. That doesn't give everybody else an excuse to be as irresponsible as he is. The reason he's listened to is because he's the president of the US, the reason scientists are listened to is because of a perception of high standards and integrity. If scientific institutions play the Trump game, afterwards he'll still be President, but they'll have nothing.
- jtbayly 6y ago
  Why are politicians making medical decisions to quarantine whole states, based on unproven medical data? Give me a break. The initial data in an emergency is all we have to go on, and it looked likely that the drug could be helpful. It's still unknown. Same as Vitamin D, which all kinds of people are promoting. If Trump refused to promote it, you'd have people here up in arms that he refused to let people know about it, blaming him for untold deaths if people had simply been informed. Meanwhile, initial data made it look like lockdowns would save lives, too. The jury is still out on that, too, but it's looking like it didn't do nearly as much as people thought it would.

alkonaut 6y ago

The narrative was never that the drug was good or bad. What people were upset about was that a politician stept in and started pushing for treatments. It makes no difference what so ever if a politician turns out to be correct, it's an absolutely unthinkable thing to do regardless. Now, you could argue that people wanted the politician to be right or wrong (depending on views) and that this muddled the reporting, and that's probably right. But it doesn't change the fact that everyone should be upset when their politician starts doing experts' jobs (poorly).

leereeves 6y ago
Democrats were also writing various versions of New study shows Trump is racking up a second body count with his claims about hydroxychloroquine[1] based on this study. 1: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/5/22/1946903/-Donald-Trump-isn-t-just-killing-people-with-COVID-19-he-s-killing-then-with-hydroxychloroquine https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/5/22/1946903/-Donald-T...
lazyjones 6y ago
>But it doesn't change the fact that everyone should be upset when their politician starts doing experts' jobs The experts were mostly using the drug already as an experimental treatment for Covid-19 all over the world at that point. As was their job, while Trump's was to give people hope.
blhack 6y ago
>The narrative was never that the drug was good or bad. Multiple prominent journalists came out saying this like: "if you take HCQ, you will die." Thousands of headlines were written saying "Donald Trump pushing dangerous drug" etc. The narrative from the left was that the drug was bad. The narrative from the right was that it is a miracle cure. NEITHER of them are correct yet.
- belltaco 6y ago
  >Multiple prominent journalists came out saying this like: "if you take HCQ, you will die." Huh? Can you point to some of those claims?

y-c-o-m-b 6y ago

I think you're simplifying it to fit your own narrative and paint the entire thing as a political issue when the science was at question all along. Dr. Anthony Fauci made the issue very clear from the beginning. It is irresponsible to push hydroxycholoroquine as a viable treatment based off of anecdotal information and without more legitimate studies. Trump is not a medical professional and has no business telling the public something can treat COVID-19, especially without support from the majority of the medical profession. Plain and simple.