You know what really doesn’t play well? Refrigerated trucks full of dead bodies leaving hospitals in mid-sized and small towns across the South and Midwest.
I think Trump Land can tune out Dr. Fauci - seems like they’re already doing just that. But they can’t tune out corpses of their neighbors. That’s when it hits home.
WD-40 was designed to be an anti-rust coat for rocket missiles, like a varnish. Ergo, it won’t be effective in any other role in the world?
If you want to use the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine against SARS as a comparison point, that’s probably fair since it’s a related disease with similar properties.
While I’m not a doctor, I’m skeptical that there’s a large reason to think that the effectiveness of a thing against parasites would be relevant to its effectiveness against viruses.
I personally don’t think hydroxychloroquine is going to do very much for coronavirus patients. I don’t think it is responsible for the president to recommend it. He does so because it makes him look like a medical expert and that he is physically capable of sitting down, reading and evaluating the research and forming a considered opinion.
Is it a win? I don’t follow political bubbles and prefer my news as unfiltered as possible. Whatever he does will be perceived as a win by much of the right, as he has stated all of the opinions so some of them are right. Whatever he does will be perceived as ineffectual by the left and by the sensible moderate. Neither side will do a reasoned review of his advice once we know more about the efficacy of these treatments.
Apparently, the hydroxychloroquine treatment is supposed to be administered in conjunction with azithromycin. Leave aside the question of whether it works or not for a second - what’s the theoretical benefit? What possible benefit can an antibiotic have against a virus?
It’s more to prevent opportunistic bacterial infections.
No, that’s when they’ll blame the media et al because they stopped Trump from giving them the miracle cure.
I’m not down on hydroxychloroquine because of Trump.
I’m down on it because IT HAS BEEN STUDIED AS A POTENTIAL ANTI-VIRAL FOR OVER 40 YEARS AND IT HAS BEEN CONSISTENTLY AND REPEATEDLY SHOWN TO BE COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY UNEFFECTIVE. Sorry for yelling.
I spent several years trying to save people like you from themselves - People that ran through their life savings in pursuit of miracle cures and left their families destitute. People that left their families in the last days of their lives to live in a crappy motel in Mexico or a rundown 3rd world clinic because they believed a few sketchy preliminary studies.
VIRAL DISEASES IN GENERAL ARE STILL UNCURABLE. That is why we place so much emphasis on prevention and vaccine.
There is no cure for the common cold. There is no cure for the flu. The best available treatments might sometimes make the symptoms less severe, that’s all. I’ll concede that it’s possible that a proven anti-viral might mitigate coronavirus symptoms. At least there’s a proven mechanism of action that makes sense.
But Hydroxychloroquine isn’t even an anti-viral.
I’m seeing “there isn’t time for studies!” elsewhere as well. It’s frightening and frustrating.
Let’s see… what else might work, since there isn’t time for studies?
Quick, give everyone Viagra!
Let’s shoot 'em full of insulin!
I think mega doses of penicillin will help!
(All of which would kill a bunch of people, but hey, there isn’t time to think!)
I say we all take forsythia. It’s growing all over the place right now. WHAT DO WE HAVE TO LOSE, PEOPLE!!
They already are. Millions of Trumpists are totally convinced it’s a legitimate and proven medical cure, and that the media and Deep State are conspiring against it to an effort to impose socialism. I am not in any way exaggerating.
Holistic micro-dosing is key.
Abating symptoms is not a cure nor a preventive. And there had sure as shit better be a study, or millions could die. Also, despite what is being said and printed, chloroquine is NOT the most effective malaria prophylactic. People are confusing chloroquine with mefloquine, which is what is usually issued to people traveling or living in malarial areas, as it is effective across most varieties of malaria, including those resistant to quinine and chloroquine. I was unable to take it, so took doxycyline for three years, which was also an effective prophylactic.
It’s maddening. It’s frightening. It’s just not an effective anti-viral. It’s not a new idea, it’s an old idea that resurfaces every so often and it has never panned out.
But there will continue to be anecdotal reports of success because in most cases the disease is self-limited. Most untreated patients will start getting better at some point. And if they are taking that drug, they will attribute it to that drug.
What is frightening is not the idea of widespread use. It does seem to be reasonably safe for most people and the retinal side effects that can cause blindness seem to be a side effect of long term use in most cases.
What’s frightening is they are looking to fast track a thumbs up on this drug in order to end social distancing rules and reopen the economy. I cannot finish this paragraph without breaking the rules of this forum.
I’m not a doctor or epidemiologist or anyone useful, and I hate Trump with the fire of a thousand suns. But have skimmed through the first page of Google results on hydroxychloroquine, and I took doxycycline for a year, and I like vodka tonics. So now that I’ve stated my qualifications: it sounds like there is some very thin, anecdotal evidence that it has helped some people who have taken it, there are lab studies that it can prevent the virus from attacking cells, it is used by people suffering from auto-immune disorders to quiet their own immune auto-response (which does seem to be a problem with covid-19), and there are decades of evidence on safety with people taking it for malaria prophylaxis, though that is no longer recommended due to malaria-resistance.
So while Ann Hedonia’s nightmare scenario of everyone taking it and going back to work and baseball games seems … premature, to say the least, it does seem like there’s enough reason to ramp up production enough to distribute the drug widely and start to actually gather real data. Am I wrong?
As a non-doctor but as a person who does have a grasp on how poor people are at working with statistics and probabilities, I would say that it makes sense to perform testing on novel cures and treatments in some cases and for some possible therapies.
Whether a composite of hydroxychloroquine paired with some other medication has hit a high enough bar that it should be part of any sizable study, when you could use those same patients to test alternative potentials, I couldn’t say. You shouldn’t put all of your eggs in a single basket. But you also need to ensure that you’re including enough patients in each study that you can actually get real numbers out of the result. Where the correct trade-off point is, I don’t know. But the way to find that answer is to crunch numbers, not to blare one thing or another on the media.
There are people who can do math who are involved in the medical industry. I don’t need to have an opinion and nor do you need to have one. The math will turn out a relatively objective answer on it, and that should be the only thing that matters in terms of what gets included in national testing and how many people are put under the study.
Yes.
Poster/username combo.
Indeed.
Based on what evidence?
I’m not trying to be flippant or dismiss the possibility of a useful thing, but jumping into broad clinical trials because a moron on TV heard about a thing one guy said he did doesn’t strike me as being an effective use of limited resources.
Drug companies ARE looking into this… in limited early phase work, as they should be.