That hydroxychloroquine became that widely used was a big policy failure. The initial data was bad, maybe even fraudulent. And that was certainly noted by experts at the time. Doing some larger follow-up studies would have been sensible, and those did show that it wasn't useful. But what happened as well was that the hype derails other studies as HCQ became kind of the standard of care before it was properly evaluated.<p>And then there were all kinds of grifters and charlatans that promoted this drug, even far after the point where we knew for certain it was of no use. Though many of them switched to ivermectin then, which also didn't work (unless you also had the parasites it was designed to treat).