Fauci on March 20th, 2020 regarding hydroxychloroquine (HCQ): Anecdotal evidence

Press conference on March 20th, 2020.

TRANSCRIPT OF FAUCI'S RESPONSE TO THE QUESTION ABOUT HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE AS A POTENTIAL THERAPY OR PROPHYLAXIS AGAINST COVID-19
"No, the answer is no. The evidence that you're talking about, John, is anecdotal evidence. So as the commissioner of FDA and the president mentioned yesterday, we're trying to strike a balance between making something with a potential of an effect to the American people available. At the same that we do it under the auspices of a protocol that would give us information to determine if it's truly safe and truly effective. But the information that you're referring to is anecdotal. It was not done in a controlled clinical trial, so you really can't make any definitive statement about it."

NOTES
We do not need a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) to determine whether hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) is safe, because six decades of use and many, many billions of doses have proven that beyond a shadow of a doubt. There has never been any indication that HCQ, provided in normal therapeutic doses, would be dangerous in COVID.

ALL decision should be made on the basis of a risk-benefit analysis. It is very bad to wait for 'perfect' scientific evidence when there is an emergency. You go to war with the information and tools that you have at your disposal NOW. You don't wait for the information and tools that you want to have, because by then it will be too late.

Since HCQ had already proven to be perfectly safe, only a minimal signal of benefit should be sufficient to recommend it for COVID patients, especially for the high risk group. Fauci is correct that, especially in March 2020, you can't make a "definitive statement" about HCQ, but this is not required as I've just explained.

Instead of recommending it, the authorities suppressed its use in early treatment.

HCQ is both safe and very effective for treating COVID as long as it's used (1) early (within 5 days after symptom onset), (2) in combination with zinc and (3) in normal therapeutic doses. See https://hcqmeta.com/ and publications by drs. Peter McCullough, Harvey Risch, Brian Tyson and many others.

HCQ is incredibly dangerous to the profit margins of Big Pharma and to any Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for experimental (and highly profitable) jabs or other products, because the law specifically prohibits an EUA if there is safe and effective prophylaxis and/or therapy.

Fauci and other RCT fundamentalists are engaged in black and white thinking, where large RCTs are 'perfect' evidence and all other evidence is junk. Instead of 'junk', they use the word 'anecdote' as a euphemism. Even if there are hundreds of millions of 'anecdotes', to them it's still anecdotes and not data.

The Cochrane Collaboration has already in shown in 2014 that large observational studies tend to come to the exact same conclusion as RCTs. See https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.MR000034.pub2/full So large observational studies can be used instead of RCTs.

RCTs are supposed to be without confounders, but there are also huge confounders in large RCTs, for instance the well known confounders of fraud, manipulation and misleading. This makes observational studies not only equal to RCTs, but better.

Fauci keeps on harping about RCTs, because his *real* main job is to develop and promote highly profitable drugs and vaccines. He knows that huge RCTs can only be afforded by Big Pharma. So the required RCTs function as a huge barrier to entry, so cheap repurposed drugs cannot compete against highly profitable patented drugs.

Besides, it's very common to use drugs off-label, which means for a different indication than for which they have been originally approved. No kind of authorization is required to do such a thing.

We have already seen that large RCTs for repurposed drugs are not sufficient. For instance, we now have the required RCT on budesonide, fluvoxamine, colchicine and other products and treatments, but the authorities still won't recommend or even acknowledge them. This is just one example of the huge double standards. For the highly profitable and toxic drug remdesivir, Fauci needed no proof of efficacy or safety. See https://rumble.com/vpqlyq-fauci-toxic-ineffective-remdesivir-to-be-standard-of-care-based-on-proof-of.html

SOURCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaDLya6j7jI