The reason people will always "see what they want to see" with HCQ is that:

If it must be administered at the precise point in infection in which 95-98% or more patients showing symptoms recover regardless of treatment, the "margin of error" in any study is simply off the charts.

That means even studies of 500 people would only be looking for differences in 10 people (20 at the most)?

The chance that you as a doctor/researcher may have 10 or 15 of those with another factor which heightens the danger of Covid whereas another researcher may have only 3 or 4 in their group would seem more the rule than exception.
We don't even have a grasp on all the reasons some people fight this, up and down, for 6 weeks whereas others just get over it in 2 days to consider those in the studies.

Many doctors have dealt with 200 Covid hospitalizations and have had 198 patients survive, regardless of treatment.

"Observationally" all those doctors can easily observe that whatever they did worked better...

On the other hand, many other doctors have observed 15 of 200 patients die with the exact same treatment as the doctor above simply due to a different draw of the 200 infected.

Here in the US, politics distorts the picture even more with this specific drug. For that reason, if I'm trying to get the most objective picture, I'd mainly look to other first world countries about this specific drug where politics only plays a normal instead of hyper-driven role.
Seems that even without the overzealous politics in those places, "maybe it does a little something - maybe it does nothing" isn't really a question that has much of a definitive answer.

Certainly not worth the amount of hoopla it engenders here in either direction.

At least until further research may define specifically that it "works like a charm in patients with existing T cells from a previous coronavirus common cold who do not have hypertension if administered before the onset of high fever but does not work well in others".

This post was edited on 7/30/20 at 1:39 pm