you’re good at grandstanding, but you have yet to meaningfully engage with the numerous methodological critiques of Raoult’s work which, if unaddressed, make his result unethical and inappropriate for use as approval to act. There have been blinded trials of chloroquine; they have their issues too, but didn’t show an effect.
the side effects of chloroquine are nontrivial, at least one person has died in an attempt at self-medication by ingesting a substance that had a similar looking word in it, and pre-existing patients who do need the drug are being deprived of it as hucksters run rampant.
Keeping an even keel in a crisis and knowing when to make informed decisions on limited data and when not to are skills we develop and must have the strength to use as practicing scientists. Especially when it feels tempting not to.
Give me a break...twice. The guy who ingested fish tank cleaner was a tried and true moron. And when you have a crisis of this extent you do what you have to do and relax the, ah, formalisms a little.
"Tolerating scientific fraud" is not. This doctor has previously come very close to scientific fraud. That means that for us to trust him again, his work needs to be impeccable. It isn't.
This potential treatment is promising enough that it is worthy of study, and in lieu of better solutions, administering to patients. These are drugs that have a known safety record for human use. But if you stop and think this is any form of "cure", you are deceiving yourself and endangering lives. It's pretty clear that chloroquine/azithromycin probably doesn't make COVID-19 any worse (in general). But it's not clear yet that it's actually a good treatment, and if we stop the search now, that is to our own detriment.
- the couple who ingested fish tank cleaner were, first and foremost, people.
- when you have a crisis like this, doing what you have to do involves doing things as clearly as possible to extract the most information you can from limited data and report it honestly and completely. That is not what's happened here.
the side effects of chloroquine are nontrivial, at least one person has died in an attempt at self-medication by ingesting a substance that had a similar looking word in it, and pre-existing patients who do need the drug are being deprived of it as hucksters run rampant.
Keeping an even keel in a crisis and knowing when to make informed decisions on limited data and when not to are skills we develop and must have the strength to use as practicing scientists. Especially when it feels tempting not to.