Quote:
Originally Posted by pmax
China's withholding trial data from the WHO.
Why ? To buy enough for themselves first is one plausible explanation. 100B is a lot of pills.
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China is the world’s largest supplier of pharma API and Chinese companies make hydroxychloroquine. It is a small molecule and probably pretty straightforward to make and to ramp up capacity. They don’t need to buy it from other countries. They might simply need to not export it.
An actual randomized and blinded trial in China, albeit small (n=30), found no effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine vs control. A Wall Street analyst dug this up with some good research, the Chinese weren’t actively publicizing it. Larger trials are under way and will help answer the question. Both the small Chinese trials and the even smaller French not-actually-a-trial appear to have been in mild cases, as the control groups recovered fairly quickly too.