Hydroxychloroquine and Authoritarian Science | City Journal
Imperial County, California, a poor, largely Hispanic agricultural region in the southeastern corner of the state, has been hit hard by Covid-19. By the end of January, according to the New York Times s Covid-19 database, Imperial County had suffered 845 Covid deaths, or 4.7 per thousand inhabitants a rate almost 80 percent higher than the U.S. average. The case fatality rate in Imperial County is 1.44 percent, the second-highest in California and was significantly higher, 2.10 percent, at the end of October 2021 before the Omicron wave.
Two doctors in Imperial County, though George Fareed and Brian Tyson, who run the All Valley Urgent Care network of medical centers claim to have done far better with their Covid-19 patients. In fact, they claim near-perfect success: in a book that they published last January, they claim to have seen more than 7,000 patients and had only three deaths, all among patients who began treatment in later disease stages. A statistical analysis of part of their results by the statistician Mathew Crawford, included in their book, counts only seven hospitalizations and three deaths among 4,376 patients seen up through March 13, 2021 a reduction in hospitalization risk of well over 90 percent from the county average, even after (admittedly imperfect) statistical adjustments for differences in age between Fareed and Tyson s patients and the general population.
According to prevailing medical views, Fareed and Tyson s claimed results should be impossible. The doctors first protocol was based around hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), a repurposed anti-malarial drug, with other drugs such as ivermectin as more recent additions. Received opinion on the drugs is that ivermectin is at best unproven in treating Covid-19 (the Food and Drug Administration maintains an official webpage warning against using it as a treatment for the virus), and that HCQ has been actively disproved: early optimism from laboratory experiments and small clinical studies did not hold up in larger, more rigorous trials.
Such opinions have influenced not just news coverage but also the moderation policies of social media platforms, which have imposed ever-stricter rules against misinformation (meaning, in practice, contradicting American public health authorities). After Fareed and Tyson spoke by invitation at a meeting of the Imperial County Board of Supervisors, the Los Angeles Times ran an article noting that the Imperial County Medical Society had urged supervisors to not contribute to the dissemination of false or misleading information by legitimizing unproven treatments. The paper also quoted an executive at an Imperial County hospital, saying, We need to stick with what we know is approved by the FDA for COVID-19 treatments. . . . Misinformation itself ought to be stopped. In December, Twitter also suspended Tyson s account for breaking its policies against Covid misinformation.
The dismissal of hydroxychloroquine as a possible Covid-19 treatment, however, was never based on solid science. The Los Angeles Times article reveals a fundamentally authoritarian worldview: medical claims are unproven, and dangerous for the public to discuss, until some official body endorses them an approach that threatens public health and science alike.