mattam said...
So, a certain leader has announced he uses hydroxychloroquine. This will undoubtedly cause some people to harm themselves.
Where's Garry Trudeau when you need him? I used to love the tours he took inside Ronald Reagan's brain.
I'm not sure how confessing that your physician has prescribed a certain drug for you can lead to the harm of others. We can't get this drug (legally) unless a licensed physician agrees with us that the potential benefits outweigh the risk. And apparently there are a fair number of docs that feel just that.
I was just conversing with an old buddy of mine(on another forum) from GA who is still working as an anesthesiologist, and is thus at very high risk for getting it himself, since he would be placing breathing tubes in the airways of CV-19 patients. At first, he was responding with the opposite view against me after I had questioned the FDA's statement:""FDA cautions against use of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine for COVID-19 outside of the hospital setting or a clinical trial due to risk of heart rhythm problems
Does not affect FDA-approved uses for malaria, lupus, and rheumatoid arthritis ....................".
I had questioned that statement with this comment: "Notice that last line, which is the small print. Many people(I know some of them personally) are taking hydroxychloroquine outside of a hospital or clinical trial. It does not appear to be killing them in significant numbers. So why the caution from the FDA against taking it outside of a hospital or clinical trial? Haven't people been doing just that for well over 50 years since they approved the drug?.......".
So my buddy chimes in to remind us of the possible SEs of chloroquine, and the still possible but less/lower SEs of hydroxychloroquine. I agreed, and pointed out the obvious fact that virtually every drug he or I had ever given (spectacularly so regarding the anesthesia drugs that we gave every day) had potential side effects, often very serious. And that usually came down to a matter of risk versus benefit.
At which point, he came back with a somewhat surprising fact: he himself had been taking the hydroxychloroquine since the beginning of the plague. Though there was still no solid evidence, there was enough out there where it seemed to him that the benefit outweighs the risk. And indeed, he personally had had zero side effects. The only way that he knew that he was even taking the drug was because he had an empty drug packet. Of course, the normal cautions apply, since it is prescript
ion for a reason. Just like a thousand other prescript
ion drugs.
Also, I just went over the details on one of the recent studies that was publicized with the headline that hydroxychloroquine was useless against COVID-19 and indeed CV-19 patients did a bit worse if they took that drug. But not only was the study not the sort that is being demanded in order to approve use of this drug- i.e. a large randomized controlled trial- but it appeared to me that the group that was getting the drug had significantly higher lung damage at the beginning as well as a significantly higher CRP, so I'm not sure that the drug group were not in worse shape at the beginning of the study, in which case you would certainly expect a worse outcome unless the drug helped a good bit.
No don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating for or against this particular drug. And I agree we don't yet have the kind of strong evidence for or against it that we would like to see. On the other hand, there seems to be a fair number of doctors out there that think it might help some, especially if used with zinc, and it's not like they really have anything else as thousands are dying. (Not dissimilar to some of my arguments regarding certain vitamins). And there do seem to be some physicians out there who are seeing good results with it or at least claiming to. Considering the drug has been around for over 50 years, with large numbers of patients using the drug outside of a hospital setting( I know some personally), with apparently few serious side effects or deaths, maybe it is a reasonable gamble for the docs to give it a try? Of course, it is dirt cheap, at least unless they run out of supply, but no reason why they couldn't ramp up the production if needed. I think it's Brazil or some South American country that has done just that. They've been giving it for a years to their troops (but maybe it's the chloroquine version which has more side effects?), And their military actually produces it, and they have recently increased production by a factor of 10 or more.
But then again, obviously I think there are other non drug approaches they should have been looking into aggressively which would have quite possibly saved many thousands of lives, and at the very least would have caused no or minimal harm while being dirt cheap. But "they" seem to have zero interest in that.