Good Morning to you Mahgister. Thank you for your welcome and well intentioned interaction. While I would normally agree with your comment about name calling, Millercarbon is about the worst offender I have seen on this forum in this regard so I have relaxed my normally high standards. In addition, his ironic utilization of the Einstein avatar would imply a level of comfort with this particular moniker.
I appreciate the link you provided. It is a very large summary of a wide range of alternative Covid-19 treatment regimes. There is a lot to digest here, so I selected the Hydroxychloroquine related group of publications to have a look at initially. There are limits to the amount of time I can spend on this stuff, so I decided to take a closer look at the 10 most recent studies (of the total 290 publications) in this HCQ subset list that they analyzed since they would seem to have the benefit of earlier knowledge with regard to HCQ treatment parameters. Sound fair? I think so.
Six of the most recent 10 HCQ publications showed summaries that stated no significant differences were found and I will not dwell on them. Statistical significance in data is a hallmark of modern science. The Civriz-Bozdag publication actually shows an increase in mortality in the HCQ treated group. The Accinelli paper studies groups that were only treated with HCQ and Azithromycin (no control groups) and concludes that the patients whose treatment with HCQ/AZT earlier in the course of the disease (0 to 3 days) do not have as poor an outcome as those whose treatment was started later in the course of their disease. With the known dangerous side effects of hydroxychloroquine, an untreated control group may well have shown even less mortality than any of the groups treated with (challenged by?) HCQ. We do not know since it was not included in the study. They also state that “there was no apparent protection among the 558 patients that received these drugs when they were already hospitalized”.
The Sawanpanyalert publication shows lower risk of a poor outcome with the antiviral Favipiravir, but also shows that Favipiravir with HCQ treatment shows a trend towards lower risk that does not meet the parameters for significance. HCQ seems to diminish the positive effect of the antiviral drug.
Finally, the first one on the list is actually a preprint of this very analysis of the 290 the papers in the list making it sort of a nested loop of data. I will not comment on it because of this, but will note that they make the comment that “While many treatments have some level of efficacy, they do not replace vaccines”
So, once again, my choice 100 times out of 100 is to get vaccinated.