>It's simply amazing how the American mainstream media has chosen to report on hydrochloriquine as a bad, dangerous, potentially harmful drug prematurely, before any real testing has been completed.
It's simply amazing that people that are intelligent continue to push this narrative.
We have long known the risks of HCL. There's nothing special about CV19 or anything else that takes our scientific understanding of HCL usage in humans and the potential side effects that invalidates that. Quite simply: HCL is generally harmless, but in a subset of the population, it can have serious, up to fatal, side effects.
Regardless of whether or not we find HCL to be beneficial in fighting CV19, it was never wrong for the media to caution against its use while we had no significant studies showing efficacy in treating it in humans. Because we know, even though the risk is small, it can kill people. And if you have millions of people infected and being treated with it, there will be people that suffer severe side effects from it. For a drug that you have no empirical evidence of helping.
>The results in this particular study may not hold up in wider testing, but they certainly might.
Unlikely. This trial has a whole host of flaws with it. Subjects were not randomized, and they selected to only use HCL on people without cardiac risk factors - yet we know that cardiac risk factors are a huge co-morbidity for CV19! They also left out results of nearly 10% of the people being treated with HCL because they were still hospitalized despite ongoing treatment - people at the highest risk of dying. They're also using non-HCL results from early on in the pandemic, where we understood less about treating CV19 patients in general which resulted in a higher mortality rate. We may yet find HCL is beneficial, but this study is trash - the methodology is flawed to the point where you could have replaced HCL with placebo and we could be reasonable certain that the results would stay the same. Exclude some of the sickest people you've given the placebo to, only give the placebo to people lacking one of the major co-morbidities of the disease, and include in the non-placebo group all the initial patients from when the disease was at it's least understood while active in America, and I'd bet you the placebo group will outperform the non-placebo just as it did here.
>How do these media members plan to reverse course if in fact, hydrochloriquine becomes a widely recommended treatment for Covid 19?
There's no need to reverse course if HCL becomes a widely recommend treatment for CV19. The media hasn't been saying it's impossible that HCL helps - they've been saying that it's a drug with the potential to kill you, and we don't currently know that it does anything whatsoever for CV19. Those are both true statements. If we find out that HCL is good for CV19, it's still a dangerous drug that might kill you - but in that hypothetical we at least know that there is a benefit and the risks can be weighed against each other to determine what is the right option for those with serious infections. Right now we can't know that and we can't weigh the risks, which means no one can make an informed decision, which means that recommending it to people is batshit bonkers reckless.