Three simple facts:
(1) Harvey Risch is a CANCER specialist, not an infectious disease specialist. He has never conducted any study related to COVID-19.
(2) He has written one article about COVID-19, titled, "Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High-Risk Covid-19 Patients that Should be Ramped-Up Immediately as Key to the Pandemic Crisis." That title clearly conveys that this is not a scientific study, it's an OPINION piece.
(3) His piece in Newsweek is based on the above article. It was published in the OPINION section.
Hence his two opinion pieces only offer his personal interpretation of some studies on hydroxychloroquine. In order to judge the validity of his opinions you would need to pick apart questions like his expertise on this topic, which studies he chose to evaluate, what his criteria were for those choices, how the chosen studies fit in with all studies on HCQ, what aspects of the studies he chose to emphasize and why, whether his analysis holds up scientifically, and whether his past work and affiliations reveal anything about his personal values (scientific, political) that may have influenced his analysis. If you want to be thorough, you would then do the same for the studies that Risch chose: Are they valid? Peer reviewed? Etc. Unless you've done that I don't know how you could judge whether Risch's articles are valid.
Risch states in Newsweek, "I have authored over 300 peer-reviewed publications." This is only partially correct. His CV lists almost 400 publications. He was the primary author on only 25 of those (6%) and the sole author on only a few, in his younger days. He should have said, "I have coauthored." Why would he exaggerate his publication record?
I just spent the past hour reading about HCQ. All I was able to conclude was that there is a controversy surrounding HCQ that has both scientific and political aspects. I also noted that Yale University has not chosen to support Risch's opinion on HCQ. Thus far there hasn't been much response from scientists on his opinion pieces. As a nonscientist, I will need to wait to read more studies on HCQ and to hear from more scientists on whether it's an effective treatment for COVID-19. That seems like the logical thing to do for anyone who wants to know the truth about HCQ.
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