Hydroxychloroquine: An Overview

Part III-1: Cardiac Arrhythmia, Media Hysteria, and Institutional Capture

Although my Substack has highlighted a lot of concerns about the way science has been conducted over the course of the pandemic, I wasn’t always this skeptical. For the first few months of the pandemic I went along with everything that the media and Dr. Fauci presented, even when some questioning things started appearing (Concerns about tracking COVID into your house on your shoes, or microwaving take out after receiving the food were a few...”weird” things).

Most notably was when then President Donald Trump indicated Hydroxychloroquine as a possible therapeutic against COVID, which lead to plenty of screeches from media pundits. Strange, I thought, that the mention of a possible therapeutic against a disease that ravaged the entire globe was met with such vitriol and disdain.

Irrespective of what your opinion of Donald Trump is, there’s no doubt that such a response to something that would otherwise seem like good news would raise plenty of concerns. Most shockingly, many reports at the time argued that mentioning Hydroxychloroquine was feeding “false hope” to many Americans.

Then The Lancet article appeared, casting the largest doubt on HCQ and essentially ended the conversation about its possible use. Of course, we now know that the study was completely discredited, but the damage still remained and the EUA approval for HCQ was rescinded.

It was at that moment I figured something was going on, that a mere utterance of something that may provide hope was not even allowed (how dare people be hopeful!). Of course, what finally made me skeptical was the way that the now debunked article was presented by my local news station.

Although I won’t post the actual video, I’ll provide a summary:

“A recent report in the highly reputable medical journal The Lancet indicated that the anti-malarial drug Hydroxychloroquine, touted by President Donald Trump, did not help against COVID. There were were also concerns about possible cardiac arrhythmias, and doctors are also concerned that using Hydroxychloroquine against COVID will lead to a shortage of the drug for people who have lupus or rheumatoid arthritis.”

It’s not quite exactly the quote, but it covers the same ideas. It was such a weird way of presenting the evidence and it seemed highly contradictory.

• “Highly reputable”: Right off the bat the report used an appeal to authority in claiming that The Lancet is “highly reputable”. Is it? It could be, but the concern here is not the reputation of the journal but in fact the evidence of the studies that are published. Such a statement only works as an appeal to authority; it tells the viewers that what comes next is absolutely true (we already told you they’re reputable!) and so they don’t have to question it. Strange then, that such a highly reputable journal would publish such a highly discredited study, one that should have tainted the journal’s reputation if we are to remain consistent with our thought processes.

• “Cardiac Arrhythmias”: This one is interesting, and we will definitely dive into the details about HCQ and cardiotoxity further on. What was interesting was that there did not seem to be substantial evidence at the time to suggest such a level of fear mongering, and the study published in The Lancet certainly does not add any credibility to the claim. Instead, this made me concerned about the possible fear mongering at play here, especially since it became the commonly used mantra by many people who couldn’t even be bothered to look up the drug in the first place.

• “Used as Treatment for Lupus and RA”: So on one hand I was told that taking HCQ may lead to cardiac arrhythmias, and yet I was also told that there would be concerns about shortages for people who have chronic diseases. This obvious cognitive dissonance was absolutely striking; how can they report that this drug, which has been widely used, and prescribed for chronic usage for chronic autoimmune diseases, somehow NOW may lead to cardiac arrhythmias?

The presentation was absolutely nonsensical, and it raised plenty of alarms that something sketchy was going on here.

From then on the entire conversation around HCQ became completely tainted, and no utterance of the drug was allowed in open discourse.