Monday, March 30, 2020

Drugs against coronavirus

I see a lot of people strongly urging doctors to use the drug hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin as a remedy against the coronavirus or Covid-19. I guess that's in large part because Pres. Trump has been pushing the same drug quite a bit. However:

1. The evidence for the drug in human beings - not in vitro ("test tubes"), nor in vivo in animals (e.g. mice), but in human beings - is still predominantly anecdotal or low quality studies (e.g. here).

Sure, there may seem to be hundreds of coronavirus sufferers who have dramatically improved thanks to this drug combination, but one could say similar things for homeopathy, Chinese medicines, chiropractic manipulation, and so on.

At best, at this point, hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin may indeed be promising, and perhaps it will be proven to be safe and effective in treating Covid-19 in the near future, but there remains much work to be done in order to demonstrate these hypotheses.

2. I realize people are demanding a fix stat. It looks like governments have fast-tracked a lot of the trials. Indeed, it seems to me like we're moving about as fast as we can. However, there are limits to how fast trials can move. We can't time travel.

3. Suppose we have several friends who are badly injured and need to go to the emergency department. So we get them into a car and drive them to the ED as quickly as we can. Suppose we speed, run red lights, and zigzag through traffic to do all we can to get our friends to the ED as soon as possible.

Nevertheless if we're decent people then I presume we wouldn't attempt to run over pedestrians or drive through stores with people shopping or anything like that. As much as we wish to save our friends, all things equal, we wouldn't necessarily want to endanger other people's lives in order to do so.

I realize the analogy is not entirely analogous, but dropping the analogy my point is simply that we may believe this drug will save our friends and family. However, in this case, we wouldn't (or shouldn't) wish to endanger the lives of others in case it doesn't work in other coronavirus patients even if it works in the ones we happen to know.

(Of course, I'm sure we could concoct hypotheticals where it might be morally licit to risk the lives of others in order to save our loved ones.)

4. Finally, as I mentioned in a previous post, there are about 40 other coronavirus therapies doctors and scientists are currently working on spread out across approximately 200 trials. So I don't understand why the focus on this one particular drug when we have about 40 other coronavirus drugs or therapies we are trying. It's not as if this drug hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin is head and shoulders better proven than several of the other drugs or therapies (e.g. here).

No comments:

Post a Comment