Examine, a free weekly newsletter covering science with a sceptical, evidence-based eye, is sent every Tuesday. Below is an excerpt – sign up to get the whole newsletter in your inbox.
In March 2020, in the embryonic days of the pandemic-that-would-change-everything, then-US president Donald Trump took to the stage to introduce the world to a “game changing” new drug: hydroxychloroquine.
There was no evidence the drug worked to treat COVID-19, his exasperated chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci was forced to note. But Trump said he had a “good feeling about it”. After all, “if things don’t go as planned, it’s not going to kill anybody”. (He was wrong.)
Trump quickly soured on medical expert Anthony Fauci.Credit:AP
Hype, hopelessness, misinformation, madness. It seems a lifetime ago, doesn’t it? Yet for millions who suffer from long COVID, that time has never ended.
We don’t fully understand what causes the debilitating condition and we don’t know how to treat it. Patients have taken to testing treatments on themselves and sharing the results online.
“We’re at the hydroxychloroquine stage with long COVID – the stage where people come up with unproven and crazy ideas,” Professor Steven Faux, co-lead of the long COVID clinic at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital, tells me. It’s a sign of the times, I suspect, that many patients are gravitating to ivermectin.
But doctors can’t offer their patients nothing while they wait for trials to be done. So, many clinics are using a treatment already deeply controversial in the myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) community: graded exercise therapy.
A patient at St Vincent’s long COVID Clinic, March 2022.Credit:Louise Kennerley
We’re in the hydroxychloroquine era of long COVID
Examine, a free weekly newsletter covering science with a sceptical, evidence-based eye, is sent every Tuesday. Below is an excerpt – sign up to get the whole newsletter in your inbox.
In March 2020, in the embryonic days of the pandemic-that-would-change-everything, then-US president Donald Trump took to the stage to introduce the world to a “game changing” new drug: hydroxychloroquine.
There was no evidence the drug........
© The Sydney Morning Herald
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