Was there a lot of controversy among the scientific community ? The experts seemed to all say pretty much the same thing - masks indoors, social distance, get vaccinated, etc.
All sorts of places, including some unlikely ones. California, Massachusetts, Maine, and Texas all pulled licenses for refusing to uphold the narrative.
Washington, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and Arizona all threatened to do so, though I have been unable to determine whether any licenses were actually pulled.
California threatened criminal charges, though I have no evidence that any were ever actually filed.
HCQ was an interesting thought in early March 2020 (my brother as an ICU doc was considering getting some for our parents). But the data was very quickly available that it was essentially worthless, and certainly nowhere near as useful as some other cheap, off patent medication such as steroids which was rapidly demonstrated to be highly effective at cutting mortality by the UK’s medical industrial complex.
People who acted in bad faith on data that was demonstrably bad were rightly defenestrated by the medical and scientific community. However many of those same people found themselves right at home in a new cheer squad of people who are more than happy to invest in beliefs over data. The mop up on the shitty evidence is drawing to a conclusion, with events such as the recent NEJM publishing of the ivermectin study. But stupid knows no bounds and the scientific method is going to be mopping up the damage from this one for a long time
People suggesting ivermectin ought to be interesting were not wrong. It could plausibly have had some effect, based on the biochemistry.
It just turned out not to work. I don't know of any evidence that trying it, when we had literally nothing else, did anybody any harm. All the harm came from people using it instead of, later, doing the things that did turn out to actually work. Probably a few people even cleared up a chronic worm infection they didn't know about.
What I did not see, and expected to see, was a study of relative infection rates in people already on ivermectin for an on-label use vs. people who were not. These came out pretty early vis a vis chloroquines, showing that people who had been taking that got COVID-19 just like anybody else. Maybe periodic ivermectin doses wasn't a thing...
Noone was going after researchers running proper studies with informed consent on e.g. ivermectin impact on Covid. However, doctors randomly prescribing stuff because they believe in it is quite different from a medical study - we have good historical reasons why we regulate medical experiments on humans, why we don't allow the medical and pharmaceutical industry to "just try it" unless certain conditions are met.
Which doctors specifically are you referring to? There really wasn't any scientific controversy about the effectiveness of these drugs, it was mostly social media controversy by non-scientists.
