Weak evidence for and against. It's no problem knocking that the VA trial was retrospective. Docs were using it, and they looked back to see if there were trends it worked. The didn't. But they did find harm. That's a concern and shouldn't be dismissed.
The original studies out of China never had data attached. French study is viral shedding in a classroom sized patient cohort. No one was complaining about zinc or anything else as these studies were overstated. Nor did the French use Zinc in their claims of efficacy.
Only a couple of studies are even patient focused. Most are bench top or non patient focused outcomes.
There are larger more comprehensive trials underway but of course that takes time. Cautious optimism remains the name of the game on this one. There is reason to believe it works in a certain cohort of patients and there's lots of reason to believe its not a panacea.
But again, just as the president and others is WAY overstating this med, the media has tossed it out just as fast with incomplete studies.
I think you're missing the media narrative here, which has been fairly consistent across sources. In sum, it's been "public figures should not tout unproven claims."
Weirdly the conversation has shifted to the efficacy of the drugs when the initial concern was about science communication more generally. There have been similar vexing problems in the way science has been presented (see e.g. stem cells and test tube babies for the most famous cases). The media story from the outset has been how is scientific discovery about treatment protocols being dispensed from officials. We've mostly heard mixed messages with health experts urging caution and political figures urging haste. In this case, we're not talking about efficacy, we're talking about risk. And further, how a science communication failure can lead to a public health disaster and, just as significantly, to reprisals in the administrative state, as we've seen with the developing story that Trump reassigned a staffer who tried to insist on resources not being diverted to the drugs on what was essentially an over-eager policy whim.
Even here in this thread, people are retorting about peer review from institutional sources while not even addressing the advocacy actions, which we can see more clearly why they could potentially be a mis-step. These are rhetorical choices people are making, largely based on media cultivation. The conversation is not about efficacy. It's about a lack of messaging discipline on how treatment and prevention protocols are being developed.
In part it's a function of a media hungry for novel developments and clear political incentives to give people hope, which is easy to understand, but there's something more fundamental at play here, which is the broad gap between the public understanding of science and how science is actually done. In a crisis or panic, officials are generally encouraged to apply the precautionary principle, but here we've seen the opposite.
