I'm not sure anybody's work is being ignored, so much as just being swamped by so much information on the internet. The gold standard of medical knowledge is the random double-blind trial peer-reviewed and then published in a major scientific journal. That all takes about as long as we have even known about the virus, much less how long it has actually been here in the US as a pandemic.
Considering the urgency, good and bad information is being published on pre-print servers, the internet, the TV and cable news, tweets, facebook, etc. Usually with no peer review, and often it's just hypothesis or based on in vitro experiments.
FDA has had a "compassionate use" program that permits the use of experimental unproven drugs for dying patients for years. They did authorize use for drugs like remdesivir and HCQ, but until a couple of months in nobody realized that giving antivirals to dying patients is useless. This is because nobody recognized that Covid-19 is actually two different diseases: The viral infection, and then the sometimes lethal autoimmune response to it.
So those early trials were designed around that compassionate-use idea that giving antiviral drugs to dying patients was reasonable. When they were done, they gave proof that the drug did not work! Because of the inherent selection bias of candidates who were sickest for the trials, it looked like HCQ was actually doing harm. Now we know that the autoimmune clots do the harm by blocking coronary arteries.
The trial process is like a supertanker: Huge momentum. It takes a lot of time and energy to get one going and they can't turn quickly.
