“Not even if someone takes a baguette of chloroquine will it be enough”

reflections on the sciences of Hydroxychloroquine in the pandemic Covid-19

Abstract

The main objective of this article is to reflect on the State of biomedicalization project in the pandemic from a group of researchers who investigated Hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of Covid-19. I interviewed 26 scientists between September 2022 and February 2023. Most of the researchers are medical graduates, white men over 40 years old and who had carried out clinical trials on the use of drugs to treat Covid-19. For the scientists interviewed, the medicines studied were already in use by hospitals before their research, which made it necessary to carry out studies to confirm or not the effectiveness of these treatments. However, for other scientists, strictly speaking, Hydroxychloroquine would not need a clinical trial to prove its ineffectiveness, since the pre-clinical studies showed that the treatment would not bring the expected results of improvements in patients diagnosed with Covid-19.