Is the culture war the thing where over 120 studies found it had no value over placebo? Weird name for it, but yeah. Hydroxy chloroquine was found to be totally ineffective in 95% of studies. That's exactly as you'd expect with a p < 0.05 publication threshold.
A few of the more highly touted studies I read even showed that early use of hcq by mildly sick individuals at home had better outcomes when compared against already hospitalized people who were already very ill sick with covid, regardless of their later treatment. But when larger studies were done that actually tried to compare apples-to-apples, they didn't show much effect. I agree, that is an odd thing to call a "culture war", unless he meant science against wishful thinking? And hcq perhaps may even have some effect, but just not one worth the cost of the drug and the risk from missing out on better treatments that are available.
I wonder why OP wants to believe in hcq, if they'd like to respond?
As a layman, my main observation with the link is they seem to be computing a statistical measures over the studies to get a meta-result. But that isn't necessarily a statistically valid methodology, for the following reason: it is like if someone gave you a bunch of grapes and and apple, and asked you to estimate the average size of apples. If you simply averaged all of the fruit given, you might end up claiming they are about the size of a quarter. But if you look closer, some of those samples might have larger significance and be more useful than the others.
That doesn't necessarily mean the site is invalid or its conclusions, and I don't personally care much which "side" is right. But does that analogy help explain why this can be a tricky problem, and why many here, including myself, defer to "experts" like the NIH (who ran one of the largest studies of hcq)?
