I don't blame people for taking an interest, it's the tribalism of it that I find so weird and fascinating, I'd be concerned if in the future, drug-discovery efforts for things other than coronavirus get so political and emotional to people.

Yes, low quality papers indicating that existing drug X may be effective in disease Y get published all the time, probably several a day. Fortunately most of these are left to pad academic's CVs and don't really influence the pharmaceutical industry.