The only reason why antivirals like hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, Remdesivir, and Kaletra were declared ineffective is because the majority of the clinical trials for those drugs enrolled late-stage COVID-19 patients for whom the treatment was fundamentally futile.
After more than one year of the COVID-19 pandemic, antiviral treatment options against SARS-CoV-2 are still severely limited. High hopes that had initially been placed on antiviral drugs like remdesivir have so far not been fulfilled. While individual case reports provide striking evidence for...
www.mdpi.com
They did not test prophylaxis. They shoved antivirals into people who no longer had any viral load or replication and said "whoops, I guess antivirals don't work, time for a vaccine".
Sapan Desai, the Surgisphere scam artist whose team consisted of a science fiction author and an adult model, published a paper in the Lancet that said that HCQ caused cardiac abnormalities. The paper had to be retracted because the whole thing was a garbage meta-analysis based on datasets they refused to publish.
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
From the very beginning, antivirals were sabotaged by bad science, and that bad science drove bad policy. Moreover, there are disturbing patterns of intentional fraud that need to be investigated, and there absolutely needs to be criminal prosecution for all of this.