Hydroxychloroquine Probably Doesn’t Work For COVID-19
It really doesn’t
There are some pieces that you never really expect to write. Whether it’s geophagy, or people literally eating dirt, drinking blood to prevent aging, or just the ongoing saga about whether meat is deadly or perfectly curative for health, there are a lot of topics that I’ve covered over the years that are, well, a bit strange.
And yet, in some ways this feels like the strangest. If you’d told me in 2019 that we’d be debating the benefits of an anti-malarial medication for pandemic disease despite a mountain of evidence that it didn’t work, I’d probably have giggled nervously and walked away.
Which brings us to hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). One of the strangest stories that I have ever written.
It probably doesn’t work for coronavirus. We knew that some time ago. But somehow, it’s still a debate to be had.
The Evidence
Back in the heady days of early 2020, before we had all locked down and politicized medications, HCQ was just another drug that people thought might be useful for COVID-19. There were dozens, even hundreds, of…
