Most of what was said regarding efficacy was true at the time it was said. Problem was that we had no idea how quickly or how much the virus would mutate and it was quick and significant. The good news of rapid mutation is that it becane much less virulent. The bad news was that it made what was said seem like lies.
The background of scientific debates that usually takes years and is limited to scientists happened in real time with the public involved. The public doesnt understand how it works.
In March 2020 we knew almost nothing about COVID-2019. We had a faculty meeting on Tuesday and our university president said that we were going to continue with classes as planned. On Wednesday the governor of Ohio, a Republican, had a meeting with all university presidents in the state. On Thursday our president said we were sending our students home on Friday and to prepare to start teaching classes via Zoom on Monday. I had class at 0800 on Monday morning, which meant I had to learn out to teach via Zoom over the weekend.
When I was in pharmacy school in the mid-late 80s it was considered contraindicated to give patients with heart failure beta-blockers. The thinking was that the negative inotropic and chronotropic effects would worsen heart failure and kill patients. We were told it was malpractice. Now we not only know this to be untrue, beta-blockers are considered to be first line therapy for heart failure with reduced ejection fraction and are known to improve five-year survival rates with HFrEF. Science changes as we learn new stuff.
You and I, steross, are used to seeing the science change like it did with beta blockers and HFrEF (and I can think of a few others within my expertise such as how we dose statins and the targets for blood pressure and what hyperinsulinemia means). However, this process generally takes decades and the public is unaware of the changes. I have never seen the science develop, change, and result in public policy as rapidly and publicly as it did with COVID-19. It was difficult for me to keep up with and I'm a freaking published scientist, though infectious disease, immunology, and epidemiology aren't my fields I'm still not a lay-person with a lay-person's understanding of them. It is small wonder that it was bewildering to lay-people. At the beginning of the pandemic we were putting everyone on ventilators and we found that was doing more harm than good and we stopped doing that and people were like "aha! They lied to us about ventilators!" No, we didn't know. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but as we gained more knowledge we found otherwise.
People talked about the rapidity with which the SARS-Cov-2 vaccine was developed, but it wasn't that rapid at all. The vaccine began development in the early 2000s with SARS-Cov-1. It wasn't at all like they started working on the COVID-19 vaccine in the summer of 2020 and developed it de novo at that point.
Some of the mitigation strategies in retrospect were unnecessary. But we could not act in April 2020 based on what we know in December 2024. We could only act in April 2020 based on what we knew in April 2020 which was almost nothing. The fascinating part is how political the debate became. I found myself being called "a bleeding heart liberal commie pinko".
There are still people who want to claim a benefit for HCQ and ivermectin despite there never having been any clinical trial data showing benefit. I was in a discussion the other day with a nurse practitioner whose counter-argument for HCQ was "where is the harm?" First, HCQ does have adverse effects and you're exposing people to excess adverse effects without possibility of benefit, and second, there was a massive run on HCQ causing a shortage which meant that people who actually needed it rheumatic diseases couldn't get it. The ivermectin hoax was started by a company that tried to corner the market on invermectin and drive up the price.
