11-27-2020, 05:14 PM
Didier Raoult had a reasonable scientific hypothesis and found some promising initial data. Here is his initial paper:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32205204/
The scientific literature is littered with promising therapies that don't work. The generic PTS (probability of technical success) for a drug entering clinic making it all the way to approval is about 15%. A substantial majority of drugs don't make it, despite drug companies hiring very smart people and investing a lot of time and effort to try to focus on the ones with a strong scientific hypothesis and promising initial data.
Alas, the gold standard for whether a drug works or not is a randomized, blinded, placebo controlled clinical study where patients come into the study and have the same chance to get the active drug as the placebo, and nobody knows what the patient got until the very end. This way, you can ensure that the patients who got the active drug weren't treated differently from those who didn't, and you can compare a relevant endpoint (like mortality) between those patients who got the active drug to those who got placebo.
And, it turns out that when hydroxychloroquine was looked at under those circumstances, time and again patients who got hydroxychloroquine did no better than those who got placebo. That's not an attempt to suppress the truth; it's just the way science works. Hydroxychloroquine doesn't work as Raoult thought it would and many of us hoped it would. It's not an indictment of Raoult; there's no shame in advancing a hypothesis that doesn't pan out, and it is not evidence that the press is under undue influence from mysterious forces that harbor an unexplained antipathy towards hydroxychloroquine (but not, apparently, to dexamethasone). In fact, to the extent there is a complaint out there it is that hydroxychloroquine has been given too much coverage, and dexamethasone, which has been shown to reduce mortality in hospitalized patients with COVID-19, hasn't been given enough.
BC
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32205204/
The scientific literature is littered with promising therapies that don't work. The generic PTS (probability of technical success) for a drug entering clinic making it all the way to approval is about 15%. A substantial majority of drugs don't make it, despite drug companies hiring very smart people and investing a lot of time and effort to try to focus on the ones with a strong scientific hypothesis and promising initial data.
Alas, the gold standard for whether a drug works or not is a randomized, blinded, placebo controlled clinical study where patients come into the study and have the same chance to get the active drug as the placebo, and nobody knows what the patient got until the very end. This way, you can ensure that the patients who got the active drug weren't treated differently from those who didn't, and you can compare a relevant endpoint (like mortality) between those patients who got the active drug to those who got placebo.
And, it turns out that when hydroxychloroquine was looked at under those circumstances, time and again patients who got hydroxychloroquine did no better than those who got placebo. That's not an attempt to suppress the truth; it's just the way science works. Hydroxychloroquine doesn't work as Raoult thought it would and many of us hoped it would. It's not an indictment of Raoult; there's no shame in advancing a hypothesis that doesn't pan out, and it is not evidence that the press is under undue influence from mysterious forces that harbor an unexplained antipathy towards hydroxychloroquine (but not, apparently, to dexamethasone). In fact, to the extent there is a complaint out there it is that hydroxychloroquine has been given too much coverage, and dexamethasone, which has been shown to reduce mortality in hospitalized patients with COVID-19, hasn't been given enough.
BC