Yale Epidemiologist: Hydroxychloroquine Should Be Used As Standard COVID-19 Treatment Despite Being Potentially Harmful

https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/25885/20200601/yale-epidemiologist-hydroxychloroquine-used-standard-covid-19-treatment-despite-being-harmful.htm

 Basically says why not use it until it has been proven either worthless or harmful since it is better to do something than nothing. Hardly a strong endorsement. I think we should wear garlic around our necks and smell bleach several times a day until it can be shown to be worthless or harmful.

Dr. Harvey Risch, an epidemiologist at Yale, disputes that hydroxychloroquine should be "widely available and promoted for prescription by physicians". In an article published by Oxford University Press, aided by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, he explains why it is essential that scientists shouldn't only "stand by" while knowing the drug's efficacy and potential.

All treatments have costs and benefits. In an ideal world, randomized double-blinded controlled clinical trials establish evidence for the relative degree of benefit, and if large enough, for estimatesof the frequenciesof adverse events. These trials take time to conduct: to get formal approval, to get funding, to enroll enough eligible patients, to wait for the outcomes to occur, and to analyze the data. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, we are presently averaging about 10,000 deaths per weekin the US, under moderately strong isolation policies that have put more than 36million people out of work. Results of currently ongoing or planned randomized trials for use of a number of outpatient medications are many weeks or months off, and there are no guarantees that the results for these agents, even if statistically significant, will show sufficient magnitudes of effectiveness to be useful clinically. We are rapidly reaching a breaking point in the ability to maintain the status quo;states have begun the process of lifting their restrictions, and we thus need to evaluate what evidence we do have for promising outpatient treatments.Review of Evidence Based on laboratory and other preliminary evidenceto-date,among many others, two candidate medication regimens have been widely discussed for outpatient treatment: remdesivir(Gilead Sciences, Inc., Foster City, California),and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) plus azithromycin (AZ). Remdesivir has been studied extensively in laboratory work and in animals (8) and for other viral diseases and has good biological properties,suggesting utilityfor SARS-CoV-2infection. In a study of remdesivir compassionate use in 53 hospitalized patients with severe disease (9), 13% died, which appear slower than what might have been expectedwithout treatment, though greater than the deaths in the placebo arm of the Adaptive COVID-19 

 In this context, we cannot afford the luxury of perfect knowledge and must evaluate, now and on an ongoing basis, the evidence for benefit and risk of these medications(23). Available evidence of efficacy of HCQ+AZhas been repeatedly described in the media as “anecdotal,” but most certainly is not. The evidence is not perfect either.

 There is a small chance that it may not work. But the urgency demands that we at least start to take that risk and evaluate what happens, and if our situation does not improve we can stop it, but we will know that we did everything that we could instead of sitting by and letting hundreds of thousands die because we did not have the courage to act according to our rational calculations