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I wanted to say something snarky about Dr. Immanuel's little speech, but the reality of the situation is the vast majority of Americans do not understand how good research is performed and validated. There are reasons we hesitate to label certain meds as good treatments.
I could find 100 people who had virus like symptoms and went to their local physician. I could give them all daily pepto-bismol. 99 of these people could get better in under a week. This does not mean that pepto-bismol should be propped up as the cure for said virus. Why not?
There are multiple factors to consider, things we call "bias" in academia. For example, if they are going to their local doctor and not an ER, chances are they have a milder form of the virus and would get better on their own anyway. This is called "selection bias".
Selection bias is the reason why Dr. Immanuel's 300 person self study shouldn't be considered. The 300 people she sees in her clinic are not representative of the entire population of people, some of whom have much more severe forms of COVID-19.
Observer bias also factors in here. This is when the researcher injects personal hopes into the data, focusing on numbers that support what they want to see to get the most sensational outcome.
The best studies to determine if a drug works are not retrospective (looking back). Ideally they are prospective (looking forward) and have test subjects who are representative of the entire study population. You also want to limit as many confounding variables as possible.
The ORCHID trial does this. And essentially what they determined is that giving HCQ doesn't necessarily hurt COVID patients, but it doesnt help them either. It's basically the same effect as taking Pepto-Bismol for Covid.
It's easy to point to lack of discernment for folks who want to believe Dr. Immanuel's claim that HCQ is the cure, but it's not that simple. There's a real lack of trust in physicians particularly from African-Americans. This HCQ debacle plays right into that unfortunately.
If anyone's still reading, it's not just that most doctors want Trump to be wrong. There are multiple trials testing various drugs. Tocilizumab, a drug not sponsored by him, was recently shown to have no effect on clinical improvement or mortality. We carry on. This is science.
