People took interest because the idea was seductive. COVID anxiety dominated the news cycle and made everyone feel hopeless. HCQ arrived on the scene as a purported miracle solution. Everyone wanted to believe it was the antidote to the COVID problems.

> For the HN audience it would be like people taking an almost tribal approach to go-lang vs rust, debating it on national television, without any of them knowing what a loop is.

In the business world, this happens far too often. Usually a non-technical manager reads hyperbolic internet chatter about how Rust is the only way to write secure code or that Node.js will boost productivity by allowing your front-end devs to write back-end code, then they assume their understanding is superior to that of the actual programmers.

Once the non-technical people start having strong opinions on technical decisions that disagree with the experts, it’s not a good sign for the company. Likewise, once the president started advocating for medications that weren’t supported by evidence, it was obvious that this administration had no idea what they were doing with their response.