Hydroxychloroquine also treats lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. Amplifying it's unproven use for Covid has led to shortages for people using it to stay alive.

Remember Kaiser told one patient with lupus they wouldn't reup her prescription & thanked her for her "sacrifice."

This is what gets lost in the political back and forth between Trump said this and Fauci said that.

The fact that those early studies lack a control isn't minutiae. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tanyachen/kaiser-permanente-lupus-chloroquine

To understand why controls and these processes matter, let's talk cold medication.

Remember ~15 years ago, all of the good cold medication (I'm looking at you sudafed) got locked behind the pharmacists counter because turns out some people were using it to cook meth.

Well the companies that made those drugs freaked.

It suddenly meant that you couldn't get cold medication at the supermarket, or gas station, or convenience store - you could only get it at a drugstore that had a pharmacy.

Yes, there are drugstores without pharmacies.

The drug in cold medication that gives you that sweet sweet relief is pseudoephedrine.

It's also, apparently, great for cooking meth (IDK, I restrict my cooking to pasta mainly).

To keep cold medication on the shelf they swapped pseudoephedrine for phenylephrine.

If you're in the US and you buy a decongestant off a shelf or not in a drugstore it's usually phenylephrine.

Got it?

One small problem.

There's very strong evidence to suggest it doesn't work.

Anecdotally, it doesn't work for me. I tried it once mid-cold and immediately swore to only take the stuff behind the counter which is why I wound up wandering the French Quarter in search of a drugstore with a pharmacy 3 years before this study https://www.jwatch.org/na39054/2015/09/17/phenylephrine-no-more-effective-placebo-nasal-congestion

But what this means practically, is that for 13 years people have been subjecting themselves to this drug's side effects - and it was not tested in anywhere near the chaos of a pandemic - which can include dangerously high blood pressure without getting symptom relief.

Treating hydroxychloroquine as a panacea without adequate testing, is dangerous both because it has a long list of side effects that could endanger lives without providing relief, and because it's putting it out of the hands of people for whom it is *already* a life saving drug.

How this is not THE story instead of one side said this and the other side said that is boggling my mind.

There's like objective fact in all of this shit.