The Playground

    Having a meltdown there jed? Blaming everyone but the obvious! The vaccine failed them, get them some black seed oil and raw honey along with vitamin d vitamin c

    Two Years into Pandemic - U of MN to Study Ivermectin & Other Drugs for COVID Treatment


    Two Years into Pandemic - U of MN to Study Ivermectin & Other Drugs for COVID Treatment
    Expanding Individual Freedoms by Reducing Government Control
    www.action4liberty.com


    As we approach the two year mark of the COVID-19 Pandemic, major medical organizations still do not have a standard protocol on how to treat COVID at home. Typical advice from doctors is to monitor and call if conditions worsen. People in higher risk categories, end up in the hospital because they don't get on top of treating the virus in advance. However, some medical professionals have developed their own protocol which includes repurposed drugs like Ivermectin.


    Now the University of Minnesota wants to study it.

    Ivermectin is a controversial drug in the world of the corporate media and Medical Establishment. CNN accused famed podcast Joe Rogan of taking "horse dewormer" medicine when he treated his infection with Ivermectin. However, Rogan took a human drug that has been administered over a billion times and his condition improved within days (amongst other treatments).


    According to the University of Minnesota's website, the purpose of the study is to "understand if [Ivermectin, Metformin and Fluvoxamin] prevent severe Covid and long-Covid symptoms." Because "COVID-19 increases inflammation in the body", scientists are interested in studying the medications that "are known to decrease inflammatory proteins" and "also appear to possibly stop the proteins inside cells that help viruses reproduce and spread."


    The study will observe participants for 14 days taking either the studied drugs twice a day or a placebo pill, assigned randomly. Participants are needed who have a positive COVID test and are between the ages 30 to 85 years.




    Why are these drugs being studied now after nearly two years of the Pandemic? The Biden Administration, Governor Walz and the Medical Establishment have pushed a "vaccination only" approach. Utility of drugs like Ivermectin have been known since early in the Pandemic. U.S. Senate Committee testimony by Dr. Pierre Kory about Ivermectin was given in 2020, but was removed by YouTube censorship. The Wall Street Journal published an article yesterday on how studies have shown Fluvoxamine is effective at preventing hospitalizations.


    If the study finds these drugs to be effective, politicians like Governor Walz and public health officials need to be held accountable. Many deaths and hospitalizations could have been avoided if effective treatments were studied earlier. Some people suspect that they weren't studied because public health officials and the Medical Establishment preferred money-making treatments like the vaccines over off-patent drugs like Ivermectin. This could be one of the great crimes of the century if true.

    Quote from Fm1

    Why are these drugs being studied now after nearly two years of the Pandemic?

    I am afraid this is typical antivaxxer misinformation.


    Ivermectin has been the subject of numerous mainstream trials, also metformin and fluvoxamine


    metformin TOGETHER (negative)

    ivermectin Activ-6 (ongoing) PRINCIPLE (ongoing) TOGETHER (not obviously positive)

    fluvoxamine TOGETHER (unclear https://www.the-scientist.com/…voxamine-trial-data-69369)


    They are being studied, still, because any cheap repurposed drug would be valuable and although none have been positive so far people go on trying where there is hope. The info on metformin and fluvoxamine is unclear, and although ivermectin has been studied to death no-one wants those social media death threats so lets do it again (anyway it might have some small positive effect).

    Doctor Submits Fluvoxamine EUA Application to FDA

    — Group of physician-scientists believes data support authorization for treating COVID-19


    Doctor Submits Fluvoxamine EUA Application to FDA
    Group of physician-scientists believes data support authorization for treating COVID-19
    www.medpagetoday.com

    Quote from Gregory Byron Goble

    Plenty of sites carry these 'one side of the fence or the other' conversations. This one seems particularly toxic to me and off topic... LENR Forum No?


    Anyone else agree?

    Yes it is, but it acts like a pressure relief valve for our members, so that when they leave here for the other threads, they focus on the science, not their hostilities. Or at least, I think it works that way.

    I'm Curious? So I took a look see.... the first comment on this thread, from 2016.

    I've been reading... 200+ pages... long ways to go.

    Good read. A few gems. Lots of sifting to do.

    Quote from Rigel

    ....moderator --- maybe some rules would be helpful. Is this thread moderated or not? If so, how will it be cut off if someone breaks from the dialog? I assume that you can talk about anything in the playground without being heard by adults. So what is the purpose exactly? And how many posts that are contrary before the thread is closed? I noticed on several sites that the conversation has been cut short. Where are the fences?
    A lot of people do not want to be slinging poop. And are only interested with the debate. The science of LENR. Are you guys sure about this?

    Beginning to agree with Shane...


    The Playground will return to 'normal' in its own time, its own way...

    Quote from Shane D.

    it acts like a pressure relief valve for our members, so that when they leave here for the other threads, they focus on the science, not their hostilities. Or at least, I think it works that way.

    My understanding is that it's un-moderated.

    BUT (hope) : if anyone is disruptive you can appeal to a moderator.

    I'm already de-platformed on covid, and soon-to-be-rossi ... but hope to find this place a haven. (Ecat-world isn't rossi-skeptic-friendly: maybe vortex where I came from)

    Alan Fletcher


    This thread is moderated, but gently, and valid complaints are always dealt with by the team. Nobody has been 'de-platformed' (perhaps 'de-pixelled' would be a better term) since the entirety of the old Covid thread was moved here and is still active. We just felt ihat Covid shouldn't be 'front and center' here, and feel the same way about Rossi.


    If you or anyone else lays their hands on a Rossi device to test we will re-open the Rossi topic(s) immediately

    Quote from Gregory Byron Goble

    Plenty of sites carry these 'one side of the fence or the other' conversations. This one seems particularly toxic to me and off topic... LENR Forum No?


    Anyone else agree?

    There is plenty of interesting real science in this topic - and where that exists, there are some here who are interested in it whatever side of whatever fence they happen to be on.


    AFAIK no-one here admits to being an antivaxxer - and antivaxxers are not interested in the process of science - which is one of weighing uncertainty and putting single data points into context. Unfortunately quite a lot of stuff is posted here which is antivaxxer-friendly opinion disguised as scientific comment. It is worth calling that out.


    One or two people here are not polite - and do not engage in serious discussion - so it is difficult to tell what side they are on. You can always just block them.


    There is also politics - how much should we lock down in response to COVID. Most of the real energy has gone out of that now because the current crop of vaccines are good enough for developed countries to survive COVID waves with health systems mostly intact - which was the only reason for governments locking down.


    At least that is what the UK hopes. We have recommissioned our emergency "Nightingale hospital" covid beds. The real problem though is staff not beds - so we will see what happens. Maybe the extra space can help things be handled more efficiently.


    As for fences - there is no real fence on the topics here:

    • Lockdown - it is a trade-off. Difficult to judge because how people respond to a pandemic - with or without lockdown - is not easy to know. And that determines outcomes for the economy and the course of a pandemic wave. If you don't lockdown free media + doctors mean that scary pictures of overloaded hospitals get propagated everywhere, and people care.
    • Vaccine risk vs benefit - a trade-off - and if the antivaxxers were willing to weigh both sides rather than using provably false arguments they could be on the "be more careful about vaccines" side.
    • How do you weight individual good and collective common good? - interesting politically and philosophically. Again, practically, a trade off. If there are people who see only one side of these issues then that is up to them.
    • Politics - I agree with you that politically tribal discussions of how given US politicians are stupid are not very edifying. But you can avoid that.


    THH

    Quote from Alan Smith

    If you or anyone else lays their hands on a Rossi device to test we will re-open the Rossi topic(s) immediately

    Maybe Rossi will decide his flirtation with LENR scams has run its course and move on to something else. Reactionless thrust? He was doing other scams (the fake TEG stuff) before he claimed LENR, and technically I think he now claims no LENR. Or maybe he will now just retire.

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    Maybe Rossi will decide his flirtation with LENR scams has run its course and move on to something else. Reactionless thrust? He was doing other scams (the fake TEG stuff) before he claimed LENR, and technically I think he now claims no LENR. Or maybe he will now just retire.

    Maybe indeed, though I think you underestimate his work ethic and stamina. But it's all just speculation and pretty pointless.

    Quote from RobertBryant

    Danish Omicron vs Delta ..unvaccinated and booster cf vaccinated w/o booster.

    In Dk the booster is either Moderna of Pfizer

    https://www.medrxiv.org/conten…12.27.21268278v1.full.pdf

    https://www.sst.dk/en/English/…ID-19-vaccines-in-Denmark

    That looks about right, and is better for omicron than one might have feared. At least for household transmission the UK policy of "booster everyone" looks like it would reduce R by a factor of 2. A big deal.


    Caveats:

    • Workplace and school transmission is maybe different, and overall more significant
    • This shows unvax susceptibility less for omicron than delta. This is probably related to the fact that:
      • Omicron allows more milder illness
      • Illness indistinguishable from mild cold will often not be picked up as COVID
      • Omicron is otherwise not as easily caught???? Seems counterintuitive
      • On reflection - we need to look at how exactly they are calculating these susceptibility odds ratios, and whether they are sensitive to temporal effects - omicron is definitely not static.
    • That also makes sense of the greater booster susceptibility for omicron, since it will depress symptoms further

    There is a tower of uncertainty when measuring how well vaccines work:


    Most certain

    • efficacy against severe disease and death
    • efficacy against infection
    • efficacy against transmission

    Least certain


    From the above you can see the transmission one is complex, because it includes the likelihood of those who are infectious realising they are infectious, and that is behavioural and not much about the vaccine. And I do not trust conclusions from that data, nice though they look.


    We will get better info, eventually, about household transmission from the random sample ONS data in the UK, which is very high quality and detailed. I am in one of the surveyed households currently - have been for the last 3 months...


    THH

    Two Years into Pandemic - U of MN to Study Ivermectin & Other Drugs for COVID Treatment
    Expanding Individual Freedoms by Reducing Government Control
    www.action4liberty.com


    Just a point about this website. I commented before on the inaccuracy of its claim that those 3 drugs were only now being considered as therapeutics.


    AFAIK US is the same as the UK and we have been working to find repurposed and new therapeutics since day 1.


    We found dexamethasone (repurposed, v cheap, now used everywhere with other corticosteroids), and a whole load of other stuff. The NICE guidelines give recommendations. Some are conditional (remdesivir) some are research only (ivermectin) some are unconditional (dexamethasone), some are not recommended. And these recommendations change over time in response to research. We can hope that metaformin or fluvoxamine get added, but I remember in both cases the initial small numbers RCTs were dissappointing - it will take a while to get evidence from much bigger trials.


    My fave? The blood thinners taken at any early stage - prophylactic anticoagulation - which had some (observational and not very reliable) good evidence and a sensible mechanism - e.g. they reduce blood clots made by COVID that cause a whole load of other problems. That is currently recommended by NICE for anyone who needs oxygen in hospital and does not have increased bleeding risk.


    Early initiation of prophylactic anticoagulation for prevention of coronavirus disease 2019 mortality in patients admitted to hospital in the United States: cohort study
    Objective To evaluate whether early initiation of prophylactic anticoagulation compared with no anticoagulation was associated with decreased risk of death…
    www.bmj.com



    I love the title of this analysis of Berenson's work:


    Correcting Berenson's optimally wrong take on vaccination and hospitalization risk from JAMA study


    The Berenson title: "Vaccines don't stop covid hospitalisations or deaths"



    Correcting Berenson's optimally wrong take on vaccination and hospitalization risk from JAMA study
    Alex Berenson is again misinterpreting/misrepresenting scientific data, this time saying this JAMA study shows vaccines “don’t stop Covid hospitalizations and…
    www.covid-datascience.com


    He is talking about this very nice cohort study published this week in JAMA Internal Medicine from the N3C network looking at ~665k patients given at least one dose of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine between December 2020 and September 2021 based on electronic medical record (EMR) data from a large health system network.


    They also also looked at proportion of hospitalized infections that were outpatient, inpatient, and severe and found significantly higher proportion of immunocompromised were inpatient or severe.
    They did this comparison both for the 17,262 breakthrough infections (1837 in immunocompromised) among the 665k vaccinated, as well as for 2,737,963 prevaccination COVID-19 cases (71,220 in immunocompromised) in the N3C network.


    In all, 148 of the 600,000 vaccinated people had what the study’s authors called “serious” outcomes from Covid, including ventilation or death, in the first six months after full vaccination.

    The study does not reveal how many people were infected or hospitalized for Covid after the first dose or less than two weeks after the second, when rates of infection, hospitalization, and death are known to be even higher.


    The stunning figures are buried in a supplemental table of the study, which focused on the post-vaccination risk to a small group of people who have serious immune complications. The paper’s researchers compared infection, hospitalization, and death rates in about 35,000 immune-compromised people with about 570,000 who did not.


    Somewhat surprisingly, the researchers found immune-compromised people had only a slight extra risk of SARS-Cov-2 infection, though they had about three times the risk of dying from Covid as people without immune disorders.


    But by far the most interesting figures in the study are contained in a single small table in an appendix.


    It compares the outcomes of the roughly 18,000 vaccinated and infected people seem at the medical centers with a much larger group of Covid patients - about 2.5 million people - who were not vaccinated and visited the same centers at any point during the epidemic.


    About 84 percent of the vaccinated patients were seen as outpatients, while 16 percent required hospitalization.


    In comparison, about 77 percent of unvaccinated patients were seen as outpatients, while 23 percent were hospitalized.


    Almost 1 percent of the vaccinated patients had serious outcomes, including death, compared to just over 2 percent of the unvaccinated patients.

    The study contained no information about post-vaccine side effects.


    The findings run contrary to the endlessly repeated promises of Covid vaccine advocates that even if vaccines fail to prevent infection, they are necessary to keep hospitals from being overrun. They also help bring American hospitalization data - which is both fragmented and hopelessly politicized in a desperate effort to prove vaccine efficacy - more in line with figures from the United Kingdom and other countries.

    Quote from Dr Richard*

    You missed out Zn, Avigan and HCQ which were in our original Anti-Bat formulation. The Russians have found a positive effect with favivipir or Avivivipir on its own according to @Fm1's previous posting. Told you so!! :) :)

    Since some people have found positive effects for everything under the sun I will wait and see re faviripir (especially since the noise seems to be made mainly by the manufacturer).


    HCQ has negative results - so I don't think anyone is using it


    Zn does not seem to have a positive effect:

    Effect of Zinc and Ascorbic Acid on Symptom Length Among Patients With SARS-CoV-2
    This randomized clinical trial examines whether high-dose zinc and/or high-dose ascorbic acid reduces the severity or duration of symptoms compared with usual…
    jamanetwork.com


    You can always argue: A, B do not work, but A+B does work. You can see there is a problem with such arguments in that the number of possible gets to be very large indeed. Normally, if two drugs work together, each works on its own at least a bit. There are good biological reasons for that - human variability.


    THH

    Another Untold Story of Human Experiments in the United States


    Another Untold Story of Human Experiments in the United States
    In October of this year, The New York Times reported on “vaccine hesitancy” among African Americans. The article maintains some of the hesitancy has
    trialsitenews.com


    In October of this year, The New York Times reported on “vaccine hesitancy” among African Americans. The article maintains some of the hesitancy has reversed, but distrust remains between African Americans and the United States Government, and various proxies regarding vaccines and the medical establishment, and much of it is well-founded. The Times points to perhaps the most infamous abuse of African American men in the U.S. known as the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” which was an experiment where African American men were injected with Syphilis from 1932 until 1972. It was stopped only after being exposed in the press. Even after penicillin was discovered as a treatment for the disease, most of the subjects injected with syphilis were not given the antibiotic.


    Even though this is one of the most notorious stories of the government’s exploitation of a community, it is certainly not the only one. Given the history of race relations in the United States, it’s easy to assume experimentation on a poor and minority population would take place in the South. Like what happened in Tuskegee. But that isn’t the case as one major unethical study happened right in the Big Apple.


    It seems race isn’t the only factor. Apparently, vulnerability also offers benefits to the unethical. In 2004, the BBC produced a film called “Guinea Pig Kids.” The documentary doesn’t take place in the deep South but in the urban landscape of New York City. The primary focus of the film is NYC’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS). ACS has been under scrutiny since the agency’s powers were expanded in the 90’s under then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The BBC article does mention some of the claims in the film are “misleading,” but the movie did cause an investigation to be launched in 2005.


    The film alleged that New York City children, who were diagnosed with HIV or AIDS and were in the care of ACS, were given experimental drugs which caused the children to become ill and suffer side effects from the medication. The children, mostly ethnic and racial minorities such as African Americans and Latinos, also were cared for by parents who were addicted to illicit substances.


    Remarkably, no family permission was granted for subjecting the children to the “experiment.” As the film points out, all of this unfolds in a civilized nation—the United States. And it happened in the liberal, highly educated city of New York. All of this was done under the jurisdiction of the ACS, which is supposed to take care of children. According to Vera Sherav, a spokesperson for the Alliance for Human Research Protection, “they tested these highly experimental drugs. Why didn’t they provide these children with the current best care? That’s the question.” The fallout from the film led to among other things over 23,000 children in foster care.


    Again, it’s not unusual for children to be the subject of experiments in this country. The film “Three Identical Strangers” chronicles the separation of identical triplets and how they were the subject of an “experiment” to determine their development in separate households under different circumstances. When the triplets were united years later, the results were tragic.


    To be fair, the BBC walked back some of what was aired on “Guinea Pig Kids.” But this was after complaints by prominent AIDS scientists over the way they were portrayed.


    TrialSite News has authored several articles regarding medical ethics during the time of COVID-19. This is a period of crisis. But shouldn’t it also be a time of caution and most importantly consent, especially when working with society’s most vulnerable

Subscribe to our newsletter

It's sent once a month, you can unsubscribe at anytime!

View archive of previous newsletters

* indicates required

Your email address will be used to send you email newsletters only. See our Privacy Policy for more information.

Our Partners

Supporting researchers for over 20 years
Want to Advertise or Sponsor LENR Forum?
CLICK HERE to contact us.