Look at this thread: everyone has their “one weird trick” (substance) which they believe is the silver bullet. Including garlic.
I doubt that these people have financial stake in any of these products. Sometimes, the substance might be relevant to some opinion they hold dear. The guy recommending garlic might consider all modern medicine a conspiracy of the pharmaceutical industry. A significant number of people on HN and reddit have also been really into cytokines for the last few years, the reason for which eludes me (maybe it’s the one bit of biology they heard of at some point and they are still enamored by their smartitude and want everyone to take notice).
Quinine and similar might have just been popular for the funny Gin&Tonic tie-in. Then, the US president read about, called it “the biggest discovery in medicine” or similar on Twitter, and now the alt-right has a stake in its success.
It is the one treatment that is cheap, already manufactured in large scale, and not in control of any single entity. Of course people are rooting for it.
People who need it for medical conditions are finding it impossible to find. Not sure how large the production is.
Any treatment that is found to actually be effective in real studies is pretty clearly going to be nationalized, recreated by countries around the globe, and mass produced overnight.
I think the patents on chloroquine are long expired so won’t yield large profits for the pharmaceutical industry. Given the regulatory capture of the FDA in the US, my cynical side would not be surprised if lobbyists find a way to twist things toward the favor of more profitable drugs.
There are always vested interests and people with a financial stake, though I was talking about something much lower-level.
A number of zero-medical-experience personalities have become mini-celebrities with their boosting of it. For those who saw the movie "Contagion", their behavior is shockingly similar to the Jude Law character and its boosting of Forsythia. Some of these people are active on HN, and it's amazing how often absolute trash science is heralded like it's some suppressed truth.
A few days back Trump was retweeting one such huckster. A guy who has repeatedly tried to recreate his own Wikipedia page (to be deleted again for non-notability). Who has a pretty standard hustler-and-exploiter bio. Now he's claiming that he's at the forefront of "working with companies" to get this magical treatment to the streets. It is deplorable.
I mean...it seems likely that some of the boosters who have been astroturfing it do actually have a stake.