'Sorry to burst the magic bubble' says Florida lawmaker of hydroxychloroquine as he battles COVID-19

 

The U.S. has a low level of science literacy, which is why many people think that a single case "proves" something. Eg., is someone takes hydroxychloroquine for Covid and eventually recovers, we don't know if they would have recovered w/o it. For all we know, they would have recovered sooner w/o it. We need investigations comparing people who did and didn't take it to compare the results.

And even for a treatment which is shown to be effective for many people, there may be people for whom it does not work. Eg., many people are cured of cancer by chemotherapy, but it doesn't cure everybody.

https://news.yahoo.com/sorry-burst-magic-bubble-says-180317285.html

Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon, Florida Today

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USA TODAY•August 4, 2020

After two weeks battling COVID-19, State Rep. Randy Fine (R-Palm Bay) posted on Facebook that he needed his lungs X-rayed as his symptoms now included a recurring fever and a hacking chest cough. He remarked that the hydroxychloroquine therapy he had been on proved ineffective.

“I’ve had a cold who knows how many times. I have never had to deal with anything like this. And for those who want to believe that (hydroxychloroquine) is some kind of magic solution, I’ve been taking that too (I don’t oppose it, but I am tired of people pretending it is magic),” he wrote in the post.

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On Jul. 22 the highly-respected journal Nature published a first of it's kind study that looked at live human lung cells and found definitively that chloroquine had no anti-viral properties when it came to the virus that causes COVID-19.

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Fine, for his part, thinks it's a matter of people needing to feel comforted during a difficult time.

"I think perhaps some people are clinging to this to psychologically manage their anxiety over the disease." he continued, adding "because if some pill can magically make it go away who has to worry?"