Its wrong and dangerous.
Things get stupidly politicized sometimes.
For whatever reason, President Trump was an early endorser of hydroxychloroquine as an experimental treatment for COVID-19.
After that, the drug started popping up in conspiracy theories.
Big Pharma is trying to hide it, or whatever.
(I wish I were joking, but that one is a surprisingly wide-reaching belief.
Whats true in the video, and whats not?
The speaker, Stella Immanuel, says that she is a doctor and that she practiced in Nigeria.
You dont need masks, she says.
This is wrong; masks are imperfect butextremely helpful in protecting usfrom giving the coronavirus to each other.
She continues: …There is a cure.
There is no cure.
What do we know about hydroxychloroquine?
Immanuel claims that a paper about hiccups proves that the NIH knows hydroxychloroquine cures COVID-19.
Butthe paperis no proof of a cure.
The truth is that hydroxychloroquine has been useda lotin the last few months.
Its (normally) an easily available drug, with known side effects that are often mild to manageable.
You canread here about which experimental treatments are showing promise and which are not.
Hydroxychloroquine lands squarely in the not promising category.
So why is this doctor telling us hydroxychloroquine is a cure, if its not a cure?
I cant tell you whats going on in Stella Immanuels head.
Maybe she really did have good results with 350 patients; maybe not.
In April, she was stilladvisingpeople to wear masks.
Later that month, she begantaggingpeople like the President and Tucker Carlson in her tweets about the pandemic.
Immanuel was at the Supreme Court with a group called Americas Frontline Doctors.
The groupswebsitedisappeared sometime between when I first loaded it this morning and just now as I am writing.
The video itselfhas since been deletedfrom Facebook and YouTube, although people are still re-uploading it.
I found several posts of the video in private groups today, includingthis onethat is still up.
Whatever happens to the video, the myths in it will continue to circulate because they are attractive.
This is all clearly, obviously false, and these myths were circulating long before this specific video.
Theyre still as wrong as ever.
