“5 times the normal dosage”. This is a new treatment. You are advocating giving it en masse after only minimal testing.
How do you - or how does anyone else - know what the “normal” dosage is?
Typically, the results of whatever studies lead doctors to believe that the drug was an effective treatment also give them some clue as to what an effective dose might be. Then there are a series of clinical trials ( you know, those tests that everyone is now convinced are nothing but red tape ) to determine the minimum effective dosage and how much wiggle room there is between that and the lethal dose. Many treatments fail early testing not because they are ineffective, but because there is little or no variance between the effective dose and the lethal dose.
Yes, when they use Hydroxychloroquine as a treatment against COVID they do use much higher doses than they do when using it for an autoimmune disease treatment. They are not doing this because they want the testing to fail.
They are doing this because even in a test tube, the observed anti-viral effects only occur when the drug reaches much higher concentrations - between 4.5 and 17 times than the concentrations that make the drug effective against autoimmune diseases.
Itvlooks like the Brazilian study was using the lowest possible dosage that could be expected to be effective, 5x the dose for autoimmune diseases. You are right that at this dose the side effects could be expected to be more severe. But there is absolutely no theoretical reason to suspect that the drug would’ve have any effect against COVID at the lower dosages.
This is why it is dangerous to push the widespread use of untested drugs. While the VA study can’t be used to draw conclusions because of the lack of a randomized control group - the anecdotal evidence drawn from that study would be that the drug killed a whole bunch of people that would’ve survived otherwise.
I read something disturbing in a link promoting another last ditch treatment.
It said that Hydroxychloroquine had become the New “standard of care” in NY City, so much that they couldn’t find a test group for this new treatment, they had to test the drug in combination with Hydroxychloroquine.
Then when I go online and look at the death numbers next to the numbers of diagnosed cases and see how much higher that percentage is in NY…well, I hope someone REALLY looks hard at this. It looks to me like these untested “treatments“ could be killing people.