The most infuriating offenders are the media, who have been irresponsible with the presentation of clinical study results. They'll take the results of an observational study and herald it as some revolutionary insight, when in reality the doctors, nurses, and pharmacists interpreting these results are saying "hmm okay, well let's be cautious in our approach and wait for other studies to be done".
Clinical practice should never change, and has never changed (to my knowledge) from the whims of a single OBSERVATIONAL study. But outside medical circles, people will see the results they want to see, and never look past the first 10 words of a headline.
That's been going on for a while, it reminds me of this: https://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com/
Epidemiologists appear to frequently take un-reviewed, un-published papers straight to the press and politicians specifically to change government policy.
Actual doctors, not so much.
What's the difference between an expert in infectious diseases and an expert in treatment of infectious diseases, to the layman? Hardly any.
The media plays a part. Journalists routinely conflate doctors, academics and political activists under the rubric of "experts". Sometimes this is deliberate and overt. Guido Fawkes has had a long running campaign where they expose TV news presenting left-wing activists as neutral experts, without telling anyone about the interviewees backgrounds. As can be seen in this particular incident, that campaign has started to have a small effect, but some journalists don't like being exposed that way!
https://order-order.com/2020/05/22/sky-news-gets-there-event...
For people to get better at interpreting studies the first step must be to de-conflate different kinds of "expert". In particular academics need to be referred to as such and separated from the type of practical expert who practices their craft in the real world every day.
Don't we know to a first approximation that it doesn't work? This because it has been widely tried and there wasn't an "Awakenings" experience where the patients obviously got better. So if it works at all, it only does so at the margin. So hard to tell that it's necessary to gather a large statistical sample to know one way or the other.
I was trying to keep objective when writing that, there simply wasn't any really well-designed trial yet. Though from what I read just an hour ago or so there is a new trial that is said to be randomized and well-designed that hasn't found an effect, but I haven't looked beyond the headlines there yet.
As for the malaria drugs, these were not in routine use, at least not prior to the current epidemic. Moreover, recently Russia seems to place its bets on a Japanese broad-spectrum antiviral drug Favipiravir [1].
[1]: https://www.trialsitenews.com/russia-ministry-of-health-appr...
We still have no idea whether hydroxychloroquine works or not for COVID19. And the hype is rather harmful and misleading as even if it did work, it is exceedingly unlikely to be a game changer but a small incremental improvement.
This is also certainly a failure of peer review. Though that has always been rather weak for cases of outright fraud and scientific misconduct, it still relies on the researchers to be honest about the data they represent.