Hydroxychloroquine Hopscotch

Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx, and the WHO keep saying emphatically that there is no evidence that hydroxychloroquine works.

Yet at the same time, we keep getting reports that it does.


What is going on here? We who are not scientists; how are we to judge?

It may be true that there are no double-blind controlled studies that show hydroxychloroquine works; but at the same time it seems odd that, with time at a premium, nobody seems to have actually studied the combination that has been reported as working from the earliest days of the virus outbreak, hydroxychloroquine plus zinc plus azithromycin, administered at first symptoms. Instead, they seem to have been studying everything else but. How does this make sense?

Scott Adams makes an interesting argument. Given that we know hydroxychloroquine to be by and large a safe drug, what is the problem? If government authorities promote it, and it does not work, what is lost? Any doctor should know that the placebo effect is a real effect: people are likely to be helped anyway. For a cost of only about $20 per treatment. If, on the other hand, government authorities suppress it, and it turns out it does work, they are responsible for the needless deaths of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands.

Yet it really does look as though any suggestion that hydroxychloroquine works is being suppressed. When a group of “front-line doctors” recently put out a video saying it did, the video was taken down by YouTube and Twitter. Fauci more recently testified that a Henry Ford study showing the hydroxychloroquine treatment worked was not valid, because it did not account for the concurrent use of steroids on the same patients. Yet apparently it did.

“Never attribute to malice,” it is said, “what can adequately be explained by ordinary human incompetence.”

But it is not hard to guess at a motive: there is no money in hydroxychloroquine for drug companies. While Fauci, Birx, and doctors generally are not drug companies, their interests tend to converge: the entire business of the average doctor is the prescribing of pills, and the drug companies spend a lot of money on perks to keep them happy and on the team.

“We are men of science” can easily be the last refuge of a scoundrel. It is a line that the Marxists have long used. Or the Scientologists.