Those of us who live in the world of reality need to realize the only way to fight this "demon haunted world" is to make a scarier demon, not try to fight with facts.
31 years in India and I've never even heard of it!
Europeans were extra stupid to try it as treatment. If you read the early original Chinese reports they always mentioned that it worked as prevention, Lupus patients had an advantage.
And those two disliked presidents always promoted its usage as prevention, not treatment. But reading is apparently a rare skill.
Irrational behavior in both directions is indefensible.
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.02.20080036v...
Agreed that any political side is capable of false narratives, but that's hardly what's going on here. Nobody with the fundamental desire for a treatment for themselves and those they care about should they fall severely ill would want any proven effective treatment to be dismissed for political reasons, whether that is hydroxychloroquine or anything else.
The problem is that what should have been left as an investigation into a medication with no political colors was turned into a political wedge by the US president who seemingly aspired to use it to regain relevance during this crisis.
The same thing has also happened for the various promotions of very preliminary vaccines, or of a fictional nationally deployed testing website that was claimed by POTUS to be under development by Google. This follows the basic principle guiding this administration and its leader that there is no such thing as bad publicity. And to a certain extent, they might even be right. Time will tell.
If you look at the experts, they're still designing studies to test it, and there are some papers suggesting it does work. The jury is very much still out on this subject.
I'd like nothing more than for hydroxychloroquine to be an effective treatment, so we can end this crisis. It should continue to be explored and investigated. At the very least we might learn something new that will help with its known effective use in treating malaria or autoimmune diseases like lupus.
But it should never have been turned into a political football, and the person responsible for that is unmistakably the POTUS.
To people who believe the current political rhetoric promoting hydroxychloroquine, a study in a medical journal doesn't change anything, as their interest in it was never based its medical efficacy, but rather as a symbol used to rally around their leader and their movement. Just look at the anti-vaccination movement, which continues despite being debunked for years.
And we shouldn't so quickly dismiss this phenomenon. We underestimate the power of that kind of fictional narrative group-think to our peril. The only way to fight falsehood based narrative is truth based narrative. The dry statistical or scientifically derived truth that eggheads like most of us wish would prevail is largely powerless. Stories are what ultimately wins.