The narrative was never that the drug was good or bad. What people were upset about was that a politician stept in and started pushing for treatments. It makes no difference what so ever if a politician turns out to be correct, it's an absolutely unthinkable thing to do regardless.
Now, you could argue that people wanted the politician to be right or wrong (depending on views) and that this muddled the reporting, and that's probably right.
But it doesn't change the fact that everyone should be upset when their politician starts doing experts' jobs (poorly).
What happens when a national medical board of the world's most densely populated nation adopts HCQ formally as a preventive and treatment measure for Covid 19 ?
According to American media, there should be hundreds of thousands of people dying of HCQ by now...
> Multiple prominent journalists came out saying this like: "if you take HCQ, you will die."
Any good journalist said "might". A dangerous drug is one that might be bad.
Even if the drug has zero positive effect for Covid and only the known side effects of HCQ, it's a bad drug.
A non-expert pushing it as a cure or even a potential cure is dangerous because it risks hoarding, shortages.
Basically: no one really cares whether the drug works or not. I don't care whether journalists did a bad job, or whether there was a terrible fraudulent article from some scientists or a company.
I very much do care whether politicians are doing their job and not acting like experts, however.
I didn't say a good journalist, I said a prominent one. My measure of "good" journalists would be people who only commented on the science behind this stuff, and didn't offer their usually useless take.
Democrats were also writing various versions of New study shows Trump is racking up a second body count with his claims about hydroxychloroquine[1] based on this study.
>But it doesn't change the fact that everyone should be upset when their politician starts doing experts' jobs
The experts were mostly using the drug already as an experimental treatment for Covid-19 all over the world at that point. As was their job, while Trump's was to give people hope.
Now, you could argue that people wanted the politician to be right or wrong (depending on views) and that this muddled the reporting, and that's probably right.
But it doesn't change the fact that everyone should be upset when their politician starts doing experts' jobs (poorly).