The FDA cleared off label use, doctors have been prescribing it for emergency use. Anecdotally, there are very few who vouch for its efficacy. Observational studies and now clinical studies are raising similar questions. You can poke holes in the data all you want but without any evidence to go on and only a couple crackpots alleging a vast conspiracy, this theory isn't convincing.
I casually looked into two of the biggest local hospitals (these are renowned institutions,) and they will only allow using HCQ for hospitalized patients, if at all. This is at least about one week too late to have any effect, according to my estimates based on Martenson's progression timetable. Also, HCQ is merely the delivery vehicle for zinc which is really the antiviral drug, and there's no mention of zinc on the treatment strategy pages of the hospitals. I believe the FDA only allows the use of HCQ for, as you say, emergency use only. This is too late. It must be started with zinc as soon as possible after symptoms appear, where in most cases patients stay home for the time being.
I have three links in the OP that help 'vouch for its efficacy.' There are also studies in China and Brazil that I didn't include. In addition, Indian doctors are generally in favor of it.
I don't understand why conspiracy theorists are so invested in hydroxychloroquine being a silver bullet, as if the most effective treatment was likely to be stumbled upon on Day 1. Remdesivir has similarly been a huge disappointment.
There's no need to speculate like this when you have so much data in support of HCQ. We are where we are, by luck or whatever. Of course, nothing is good enough for the US political establishment and media, who demand formalized (and apparently slow) studies. And guess what, the next major US HCQ studies, just as the last two, don't take into account time of treatment and zinc, i.e. they're designed to fail. In fact, the Lancet study doesn't allow the public to review its raw data, to independently verify there is no cherry-picking of patients, etc.
I have not seen a rebuttal of the arguments by Martenson and Raoult.
You're appealing to their authority and taking their words as gospel. I can't waste any more time watching this Martenson guy's videos where he surfs the internet, makes ridiculous unfounded conclusions based on random Medium articles, and acts like it's evidence of a vast conspiracy. You can't rebut that, which is why nobody bothers.
What we get from Martenson's videos are pages from the reports of 'mainstream' studies. He highlights the text he finds interesting, including sometimes the study's own indirect admission of its limitations. He has a doctorate in pathology and is well placed to understand these studies in detail. I don't take anyone's words as gospel, but when you have a set of published mainstream studies (which are more than well publicized by the media), and he is able to dive into them and show you how they're really invalid, you really would have to go into his reporting and show how he's wrong.
To me, it really is pretty simple. It doesn't take a genius to understand that if a study doesn't compare HCQ, as administered properly, vs non-HCQ approaches, it's invalid for its purpose. (In the VA study the patients tend to receive their HCQ too late, and the Lancet study openly refuses to release their raw data. Raoult claims there are funny patterns in the published data of that study that arouse suspicion. Also, the alleged adverse effects on the heart by HCQ seem possible to be explained by the late-stage status of the HCQ patients, whose hearts had already been damaged by the virus.)
No 'random Medium articles' are needed. Agreed?
This picture you're trying to paint where the entire medical industry can be controlled like puppets on strings also just isn't believable.
This much seems clear at this point: all it takes to stifle HCQ in the US is to author a couple of hit-piece studies, and for the FDA to approve HCQ for emergency use only (at least in the case of hospitals.) By the time 'emergency' happens, the patient is too far along for HCQ to help. Therefore, no well-publicized data of its efficacy and safety.
Raoult's open letter is co-signed by several pages' worth of names-institutions of physicians across the world. These are just doctors who are aware of him. So you're right, it's impossible to control the entire medical profession. I'm confident that HCQ-zinc will eventually emerge at least as one of the major treatments. Unfortunately, many will have died unnecessarily and, if my theory is right, the elites will have had time for their financial reset.
It's just like when a flat earther claims NASA satellite images must be photoshopped and that they alone have the authority to decide the veracity of their claims, and that these allegedly photoshopped images are proof that the earth is flat. It's totally circular logic with no proof involved.
We need more than a couple crackpots asking some unanswered questions and speculating.
There's no need to 'allege' photoshopping when the images themselves tell you they're photoshopped.
Ultimately, how do you decide whose word is closer to the truth? The Western establishment, including the media? Or independent and/or anti-establishment voices? Let's take a peek at the tip of an iceberg.
It's not disputable that Martenson came out in late January to say this virus will cause huge death tolls. Let's not forget this was a time when the entire Western world of governments, plus China and Japan, were minimizing the problem as much as possible, and when the entire mainstream media repeated their misinformation as is. ("5 cases in the US" when testing was almost totally missing in action, for example.)
Going back just a little further, when Syria's President Assad openly defied the US-led global order, the US started a war that ended up killing half a million Syrians. If we are to believe the mainstream media, high-minded idealists such as Hillary Clinton and John Brennan were happy to spend enormous time, effort, budget and political capital simply to realize the dream of freedom and democracy in the Middle East, where rebels had spontaneously sprung up against Assad, initially armed with nothing but their courage.
Later in the conflict, leaked documents from the OPCW itself showed that its own investigators in one incident found Assad did not use chemical weapons, as claimed by the West. The Western media immediately suffered a severe case of silence.
Going back further, when the US helped Saddam Hussein use chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war, the mainstream media was silent. (After Saddam turned from friend to enemy, every time a chemical-weapon accusation was leveled at him by the US, it was always with the addendum 'on his own people.' I always wondered why, but I now see!)
Going way back to the immediate postwar era, if you read 'Confessions of An Economic Hit Man,' you'll see that small, weak, and poor countries were forced, yes forced, to borrow US dollars in amounts that the US knew they could never repay. Once they incurred the debt, their entire populations would become an artificially cheap source of labor for the US (to help boost the value of the dollar,) their economies subject to severe boom-bust cycles, and their governments forced to toe the US line. If it were not for a book written by a former insider, you think we would still be informed by something like a CNN investigative report?
Let's just say, it's not certain that the Western mainstream media should be trusted by default.
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