If people don't know this story, Todaro and Rigano published what looked like an academic paper as a Google doc, with academic qualifications that verge on fraudulent, if not crossing the line. The original Google doc has been taken down for TOS violation, but it is still accessible on archive.org [1].
To be clear, I decry the fact that HCQ has become a political soccer match (with apparently bad behavior on both sides), where what we really need is something that at least approximates an impartial, objective search for truth.
The fact that people are getting their information from this guy (even though he's actually right about the Lancet study being flawed) is strong evidence that we're living in a dystopian information nightmare.
It reads like a Muddy Waters (famous stock shorter) screed. Good stuff. Fair to say the data is made up. The question is, who would be incentivized to do such a thing? Things that make you go hmmm....
When such a large study is published in a big Journal, claiming that a drug might have a negative impact on lives of people in the trials, the authorities will be considered stupid not to pay attention to it at all and continue the trials. That is exactly what they did: They paused their trials temporarily to look at the evidence of this study, examined it and found that it was indeed controversial and lacked solid data. Now they have resumed the trials again.
The media sells it as a clickbait story "All trials STOPPED because of a flawed study" implying they were stopped PERMANENTLY to excite the general audience. For them it is entirely something that brings them huge revenue from ads when they write such "emotinally driven" stories, they do not care about the effects it has on the public in the long term by reducing faith in world health organizations.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23394357