Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

I don't know what the complex, fast-paced effort to study hydroxychloroquine will ultimately conclude about its efficacy, but I continue to be freaked out by the politicization of a legitimate drug. Insofar as it's preventing physicians from exercising their own judgment, yikes.https://twitter.com/robbystarbuck/status/1287945512054853633 …

I think it's frankly incredible that any journalist is this certain that they're right about hydroxychloroquine. It's much easier for me to condemn that than to condemn a doctor whose patients seem to be defying expected mortality rates, even if that turns out to be good luck.

Good luck is nothing more than that. Unless you have an RCT and show a drug with a plausible mechanism actually works, it is less than meaningless. Any result due to good luck tells you nothing about whether to give the drug to your next patient.

We've been working on treatments for this for little more than half a year. I think people would be a lot more cautious about drawing conclusions in either direction than the current political mood seems to facilitate. This is just not the sort of timeline for medical science.

In the face of a raging pandemic it most certainly is the timeline. Best available evidence indicates HCQ is worse than worthless. We hardly have the luxury of saying let's wait a year, and current indications are HCQ kills you at a nonzero rate with no benefit.