Administrators, bureaucrats, government owned media, heads of departments in governments and universities, and officials at UN agencies are all united in opposition to HCQ claiming it is unsafe and ineffective.
2. Medics running independent clinics treating CCP19 sufferers are adamant that HCQ is safe and works.

Who to believe?

Consider group 1. Because Trump? Generally true.
Apply the follow the money rule- strong evidence here, the massive size of the pharma business, their sponsorships, advertising, grants, employment, vast marketing, the protection of the industry by governments, all this depends on the sale of drugs with high markups rather than generics.
Of course markups on new drugs are needed to cover development costs, but is every specific drug worthwhile, and must hysteria about competing products be believed?
Other motivations are respectability and credentialism. Professionals need to be regarded as trustworthy so they follow the herd- or rather the leadership and obey what the top says.

Consider group 2. Courage is needed here, as soon as un-popular evidence is published teams of agitators (some are paid) swarm on the mass media, wikipedia, and social media to discredit, de-platform, and name-call the new pioneers.

As for safety, HCQ and CQ have been in widespread use for 65 years. The effect on heart rhythm instability does exist, but very few patients have been advised against using HCQ because of this up until the recent scare, at least one recent study confirmed the effect and said it was not large enough to discontinue use of HCQ in any patient. Some recent studies are clearly fake, setup to fail, for example by overdosing, "the poison is in the dose".

One of the requirements for getting proper health care is to cut/reduce the close ties and mutual cooperation between government, its regulatory agencies, and the pharma industry.

The first study of HCQ+AZ (24) was controlled but not randomized or blinded, and involved 42 patients in Marseilles, France. This study showed a 50-fold benefit of HCQ+AZ vs standard-of-care, with P-value=.0007. In the study, six patients progressed, stopped medication use and left the trial before the day-6 planned outcome measure of swabsampled nasopharyngeal viral clearance. Reanalysis of the raw study data elsewhere (25) and by myself shows that including these six patients does not much change the 50-fold benefit. What does change the magnitude of benefit is presentation with asymptomatic or upper respiratory tract infection, vs lower respiratory-tract infection, the latter cutting the efficacy in half, 25-fold vs standard-of-care. This shows that the sooner these medications are used, the better their effectiveness, as would be expected for viral early respiratory disease. The average start date of medication use in this study was day-4 of symptoms. This study has been criticized on various grounds that are not germane to the science, but the most salient criticism is the lack of randomization into the control and treatment groups. This is a valid general scientific criticism, but does not represent epidemiologic experience in this instance. If the study had shown a 2-fold or perhaps 3-fold benefit, that magnitude of result could be postulated to have occurred because of subject-group differences from lack of randomization. However, the 25-fold or 50-fold benefit found in this study is not amenable to lack of randomization as the sole reason for such a huge magnitude of benefit. Further, the study showed a significant, 7-fold benefit of taking HCQ+AZ over HCQ alone, P-value=.035, which cannot be explained by differential characteristics of the controls, since it compares one treatment group to the other, and the treated subjects who received AZ had more progressed pneumonia than the treated subjects receiving HCQ alone, which should otherwise have led to worse outcomes. The study has also been described as “small,” but that criticism only applies to studies not finding statistical significance… page 8 ,9

A second study of the Marseilles group (27) involved 1061 patients tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 and treated with HCQ+AZ for at least 3 days and followed for at least 9 days. The authors state “No cardiac toxicity was observed.” Good clinical outcome and virological cure were seen in 973 patients (92%). Five patients died, and the remainder were in various stages of recovery.

See Page 8 of https://academic.oup.com/aje/advance-...