4 ms·

Seems like your wait is over. From the second half of [0]: > Hydroxychloroquine treatment for coronavirus does not work. It is not beneficial, and in fact appe

Seems like your wait is over. From the second half of [0]: > Hydroxychloroquine treatment for coronavirus does not work. It is not beneficial, and in fact appears to be actively harmful. As far as I’m concerned, administering it to infected patients now constitutes medical malpractice. Check the linked article for reference to the study. 0: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/10/09/hard-data https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/10/09/ha...

roenxi 6y ago
One of my favourite posts on HN was some gentleman telling me that masks didn't help against COVID, that the science was in, and that I was endangering lives by even suggesting something so stupid when either the WHO or CDC or Fauci had debunked the idea. I think that was back around April. My current policy is to wait until the evidence is older than a week. That is one open label study on patients that were already in hospital - strong evidence, but not a final word. Maybe they missed something, maybe they made a mistake. Science is hard.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  I think you're making false equivalences. To be clear, there has never been good scientific evidence that masks are ineffective against respiratory viruses. I think WHO, CDC and Fauci made grave errors at the time by making the argument that mask-wearing by the general public "doesn't work". The clear (and quite understandable) fear was that there would be a run on masks by the general public, so instead of telling the truth ("we need the masks for healthcare workers") they made broader and confusing statements about the effectiveness of masks that were not supported by the underlying science. This had the terrible effect, as your post shows, of making people even more wary of scientific pronouncements. Mine is not an isolated viewpoint. There was a good opinion article in the Washington Post at the time by an influential researcher where she argued the same thing. Contrarily, the good studies that have come out about HCQ have nearly uniformly shown their potential danger. There is simply no equivalence between the scientific data that HCQ is harmful and the data (that never existed mind you) that mask-wearing is ineffective.
  - hef19898 6y ago
    Yeah, the mask thing was one gigantic communications failure. I#ll give them the benfit of doubt, so, and asume they really believed COVID-19 was mostly transmitted through surfaces and less through droplets. Which would make masks less effecitive. Regardless, it was a gamble, one that didn't pay off considering all the rediculous discussions about masks right now. But then I am almost sure we would have the same discussions about other things, or even masks, if communication had been done differently.
- em500 6y ago
  > My current policy is to wait until the evidence is older than a week. That is one open label study on patients that were already in hospital - strong evidence, but not a final word. Maybe they missed something, maybe they made a mistake. Science is hard. Indeed: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971220321755 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122... I'd say it's not conclusively settled yet.
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    The truth of the efficacy of hydroxy chloroquine to treat covid may not be settled. But what is settled is that there is not enough conclusive evidence right now to use it as a treatment. In medicine, when confronted with low degrees of certainty, the default is to -not- administer to treatment until proven otherwise. As a side note, notice that it appears Trump did not receive HCQ as part of his treatment regiment.
gridlockd 6y ago
"As far as I’m concerned, administering it to infected patients now constitutes medical malpractice. I have no interest in goalpost-moving efforts to say that they didn’t administer zinc or azithromycin, or they picked the wrong patients or the wrong loading dose or whatever. No." The original treatment protocol included zinc, so it's nonsense to say that adding in zinc is "moving the goalpost". Not testing in combination with zinc is moving the goalpost. The interaction between zinc and HCQ is key. Azithromycin is just to prevent potential secondary bacterial infection, which isn't necessarily a big factor in COVID mortality. "This is special pleading, and it is not backed up by any hard data." Here's a study that showed adding zinc to HCQ reduced mortality by 50%: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32930657/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32930657/ Unfortunately, that study didn't test zinc without HCQ, but the hypothesis is that HCQ acts as an ionophore and is therefore beneficial.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  > The original treatment protocol included zinc Eh? No, it didn't. People started talking about zinc when it became clear that Raoult's results weren't reproducible.
  - gridlockd 6y ago
    You're right about Raoult not mentioning zinc, but Zelenko used zinc from the beginning. Also, significant reduction in mortality using HCQ alone early during the treatment has been reproduced: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.09.20184143v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.09.20184143v... The earlier trials weren't testing prophylactic treatment.
    - Izkata 6y ago
      Switzerland accidentally performed such an experiment on their population as well - also showing HCQ saves lives: http://www.francesoir.fr/sites/francesoir/files/20200713_fs_hcq_preuve_final_sw_1.jpg http://www.francesoir.fr/sites/francesoir/files/20200713_fs_... Image from http://www.francesoir.fr/societe-sante/covid-19-hydroxychloroquine-works-irrefutable-proof http://www.francesoir.fr/societe-sante/covid-19-hydroxychlor...

roenxi 6y ago

One of my favourite posts on HN was some gentleman telling me that masks didn't help against COVID, that the science was in, and that I was endangering lives by even suggesting something so stupid when either the WHO or CDC or Fauci had debunked the idea. I think that was back around April. My current policy is to wait until the evidence is older than a week. That is one open label study on patients that were already in hospital - strong evidence, but not a final word. Maybe they missed something, maybe they made a mistake. Science is hard.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
I think you're making false equivalences. To be clear, there has never been good scientific evidence that masks are ineffective against respiratory viruses. I think WHO, CDC and Fauci made grave errors at the time by making the argument that mask-wearing by the general public "doesn't work". The clear (and quite understandable) fear was that there would be a run on masks by the general public, so instead of telling the truth ("we need the masks for healthcare workers") they made broader and confusing statements about the effectiveness of masks that were not supported by the underlying science. This had the terrible effect, as your post shows, of making people even more wary of scientific pronouncements. Mine is not an isolated viewpoint. There was a good opinion article in the Washington Post at the time by an influential researcher where she argued the same thing. Contrarily, the good studies that have come out about HCQ have nearly uniformly shown their potential danger. There is simply no equivalence between the scientific data that HCQ is harmful and the data (that never existed mind you) that mask-wearing is ineffective.
- hef19898 6y ago
  Yeah, the mask thing was one gigantic communications failure. I#ll give them the benfit of doubt, so, and asume they really believed COVID-19 was mostly transmitted through surfaces and less through droplets. Which would make masks less effecitive. Regardless, it was a gamble, one that didn't pay off considering all the rediculous discussions about masks right now. But then I am almost sure we would have the same discussions about other things, or even masks, if communication had been done differently.
em500 6y ago
> My current policy is to wait until the evidence is older than a week. That is one open label study on patients that were already in hospital - strong evidence, but not a final word. Maybe they missed something, maybe they made a mistake. Science is hard. Indeed: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971220321755 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122... I'd say it's not conclusively settled yet.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  The truth of the efficacy of hydroxy chloroquine to treat covid may not be settled. But what is settled is that there is not enough conclusive evidence right now to use it as a treatment. In medicine, when confronted with low degrees of certainty, the default is to -not- administer to treatment until proven otherwise. As a side note, notice that it appears Trump did not receive HCQ as part of his treatment regiment.

gridlockd 6y ago

"As far as I’m concerned, administering it to infected patients now constitutes medical malpractice. I have no interest in goalpost-moving efforts to say that they didn’t administer zinc or azithromycin, or they picked the wrong patients or the wrong loading dose or whatever. No." The original treatment protocol included zinc, so it's nonsense to say that adding in zinc is "moving the goalpost". Not testing in combination with zinc is moving the goalpost. The interaction between zinc and HCQ is key. Azithromycin is just to prevent potential secondary bacterial infection, which isn't necessarily a big factor in COVID mortality. "This is special pleading, and it is not backed up by any hard data." Here's a study that showed adding zinc to HCQ reduced mortality by 50%: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32930657/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32930657/ Unfortunately, that study didn't test zinc without HCQ, but the hypothesis is that HCQ acts as an ionophore and is therefore beneficial.

rsynnott 6y ago
> The original treatment protocol included zinc Eh? No, it didn't. People started talking about zinc when it became clear that Raoult's results weren't reproducible.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  You're right about Raoult not mentioning zinc, but Zelenko used zinc from the beginning. Also, significant reduction in mortality using HCQ alone early during the treatment has been reproduced: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.09.20184143v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.09.20184143v... The earlier trials weren't testing prophylactic treatment.
  - Izkata 6y ago
    Switzerland accidentally performed such an experiment on their population as well - also showing HCQ saves lives: http://www.francesoir.fr/sites/francesoir/files/20200713_fs_hcq_preuve_final_sw_1.jpg http://www.francesoir.fr/sites/francesoir/files/20200713_fs_... Image from http://www.francesoir.fr/societe-sante/covid-19-hydroxychloroquine-works-irrefutable-proof http://www.francesoir.fr/societe-sante/covid-19-hydroxychlor...