Hydroxychloroquine: A Morality Tale

 https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/hydroxychloroquine-morality-tale

Raoult is the most highly cited microbiologist in Europe, recognized for having identified 468 novel species of bacteria, most in humans, and for his team having discovered the largest virus ever documented at the time (so large it had been mistaken for an intracellular bacterium). He has boldly asserted that viruses—which had been classified as nonliving—are alive. He has published over 2,000 papers, many of them through the IHU, with him as a contributing or lead author. He has been given major awards, the French Legion d’honneur, and perhaps the most important one for a microbiologist, having a bacteria genus, “Raoutella,” named in his honor.

Raoult is a fascinating, eccentric, theatrical figure. He couldn’t be more colorful—a maverick who delights in opposing conventional thinking, his peers, and followership in science. He has hair to his shoulders, a long, pointed beard, and looks like a medieval knight in a lab coat. He loves a fight. At 68 years of age, he rides a Harley to work. He still treats patients. He sees himself as more like a philosopher or anthropologist than a typical French scientist, and teaches epistemology, the study of how we know that we know things, to his lab scientists, He believes an ever-increasing homogeneity is ruining scientific thought. He told Paris Match:

 Trump’s political base cheered for HCQ and his opponents booed and accused him of practicing medicine without a license—and began dredging up any evidence, or “experts,” they could find, who might emphasize that HCQ was dangerous, or useless, or both, and thus they responded to his hyperbole with their own, and then some. As Risch observed in Newsweek, for many HCQ became “viewed as a marker of political identity, on both sides of the political spectrum.”

 So this story is twofold. It’s about the discussion that unfolded (and is still unfolding) around hydroxychloroquine, but if you’re here for a definitive answer to a narrow question about one specific drug (“does hydroxychloroquine work?”), you will be disappointed. Because what our tale is really concerned with is the perilous state of vulnerability of our scientific discourse, models, and institutions—which is arguably a much bigger, and more urgent problem, since there are other drugs that must be tested for safety and effectiveness (most complex illnesses like COVID-19 often require a group of medications) as well as vaccines, which would be slated to be given to billions of people. “This misbegotten episode regarding hydroxychloroquine will be studied by sociologists of medicine as a classic example of how extra-scientific factors overrode clear-cut medical evidence,” Yale professor of epidemiology Harvey A. Risch recently argued. Why not start studying it now?