3 ms·

> For those down-voting me, my guess is you were not reading papers back in early February from China and South Korea as I was about early drugs worth trialing.

> For those down-voting me, my guess is you were not reading papers back in early February from China and South Korea as I was about early drugs worth trialing. If your expectations of a given drug's efficacy was informed by political tweets you weren't paying attention to the trial pipeline. This is, kind of exactly how snake oil works? It's not even the typical South Park / "2. ????" plan. It's "1. Take a treatment that people are already credulous towards." "2. Sell it for lots of money while pretending it's a sure thing." "3. Run away with lots of money before anyone catches on that it's not actually worthwhile." The thing with snake oil and real science based medicine is that they both start with that first step, of grabbing a bunch of things that seem plausible. The difference is that science based medicine first tests to see if it works before selling it for lots of money to lots of people as a cure, instead of after (or never). The initial ideas and plausibility are only occasionally different; science is a tool for finding a lot of things that don't work, and a very few that do.

gfodor 6y ago
I have no idea what you're talking about. There were medical papers published out of SK in February indicating preliminary signs that some drugs were worth investigating. The investigations happened. The results were published. If you were sitting through that process feeling like you knew which way it was going to go one way or the other based upon political tweets then you'd describe it as "snake oil" as the author did, when in fact it was just the normal, albeit accelerated, clinical research process with a lot of noise from the bleachers. My own assessment is any scenarios where preliminary data was less than ideal (eg due to non-randomization) was published in the interest of sharing information due to the urgency of the crisis to help guide further controlled trial development. And look, it worked, most of the drugs who had early papers published with clinical patient data pointing in a positive direction did in fact get into trials. Unfortunately so far there have been no home runs but some solid base hits. The reality is that most of these kinds of things like using the term "snake oil" to describe HCQ are an obvious "tell" on the part of people who consider themselves immune to cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias to be anything but.

gfodor 6y ago

I have no idea what you're talking about. There were medical papers published out of SK in February indicating preliminary signs that some drugs were worth investigating. The investigations happened. The results were published. If you were sitting through that process feeling like you knew which way it was going to go one way or the other based upon political tweets then you'd describe it as "snake oil" as the author did, when in fact it was just the normal, albeit accelerated, clinical research process with a lot of noise from the bleachers. My own assessment is any scenarios where preliminary data was less than ideal (eg due to non-randomization) was published in the interest of sharing information due to the urgency of the crisis to help guide further controlled trial development. And look, it worked, most of the drugs who had early papers published with clinical patient data pointing in a positive direction did in fact get into trials. Unfortunately so far there have been no home runs but some solid base hits. The reality is that most of these kinds of things like using the term "snake oil" to describe HCQ are an obvious "tell" on the part of people who consider themselves immune to cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias to be anything but.