Why? Are the data that the FDA relied upon for this determination public?
There is a great deal of internal politics at play within the federal government. I see this as the grain of truth behind the "deep state" allegations. Without knowing more about the FDA's justification, it seems completely reasonable to suspect that they may have acted out of their own personal and institutional biases.
I was interested in hydroxychloroquine long before Trump started talking about it. It was being administered both as a treatment and prophylaxis in Italy, and was showing promising results - it didn't look like it was going to be a panacea, but it seemed likely that it would be a good first-line treatment until something better came along. It also had the added benefit of an existing production capability that was already in place and easily scaled further.
Then Trump started talking about it, and it became effectively impossible to sort out reliable information about its use. Papers started coming out either strongly in favor or strongly opposed to its use, where before there was cautious optimism.
> If the FDA hadn't done that and the treatment continued to prove effective, I think we would all generally be on board with it.
That's an interesting statement. I read that as "because the FDA retracted their authorization, the effectiveness of the treatment is not relevant". The only other way I can wrap my head around it is a more charitable reading of "it's unlikely/impossible to be proven effective because the FDA retracted their authorization" - that reasoning is so at odds with my worldview that I'm not confident that others would consider it reasonable.
Unfortunately a lot of people were biased against it precisely because Trump supported it. The studies showing it didn't work or was dangerous were poorly designed but people happily accepted their results because they made Trump look like a fool.
It's time we put politics aside and reverse course on HCQ.
If someone says "you should take this", based on “[they] feel good about it. That’s all it is, just a feeling, you know, smart guy. [They] feel good about it.”, with no strong medical support, then rejecting the drug is the proper course of action.
The medical community can continue to perform tests, and if there later is support for the drug, then policies can change. But that doesn't alter the fact that rejecting the drug was the correct policy.
Subsequent poorly designed studies got bad results precisely because they were poorly designed, yet they continue to influence attitudes on HCQ treatment.
Instead, the FDA publicly retracted it's authorization for the use of HCQ and said it did more harm than good, and so public sentiment solidified behind the idea that it was stupid all along. If the FDA hadn't done that and the treatment continued to prove effective, I think we would all generally be on board with it.
There are a lot of ways in which it turns out anti-Trumpers are exactly the same as Trump supporters, but the anti-science bent isn't one of them.