Covid-19 News

    Quote from Wyttenbach

    Please show us a serious correct study that gave this result with HCQ,Zinc plus Doxycycline??


    That exact combination I don't have RCT evidence for. But if you require that - you also lose all the anecdotal positive evidence!


    For example this one does not include Zinc.


    A total of 11% (n=6) patients were transferred to acute care hospitals due to clinical deterioration and 6% (n=3) patients died in the facilities. Naive Indirect Comparison suggests these data were significantly better outcomes than the data reported in MMWR (reported on March 26, 2020) from a long-term care facility in King County, Washington where 57% patients were hospitalized, and 22% patients died. Conclusion: The clinical experience of this case series indicates DOXY-HCQ treatment in high-risk COVID-19 patients is associated with a reduction in clinical recovery, decreased transfer to hospital and decreased mortality were observed after treatment with DOXY-HCQ.


    And my point, well justified by factual evidence and theory - is that Naive Indirect Comparison is a very poor way - effectively useless - to judge a treatment.

    Quote from Wyttenbach

    When will you sue the British doctors that administered deadly HCQ doses that is the base for your FUD you continue to post???


    All active drugs are deadly - to some people.


    Doctors put together clinical trials to work out what works, and what does not.


    The "deadliness" of HCQ in the RECOVERY trial was only apparent after a large number of patients had been treated - not at all evident a priori. And, when it was statistically significant, that arm of the trial was stopped, as the RECOVERY Protocol mandates.

    @cvid analysis keeps a record of all HCQ studies.... 72 so far

    https://c19study.com/

    https://c19study.com/recovery.html

    the Oxford Recovery Trial


    Late treatment study

    Horby et al., medRxiv, 7/15/2020, doi:10.1101/2020.07.15.20151852 (press release 6/5) (Preprint)

    Effect of Hydroxychloroquine in Hospitalized Patients with COVID-19: Preliminary results from a multi-centre, randomized, controlled trial


    RECOVERY trial reports no significant benefit seen for very late stage very sick patients. Results may be due to the unusually high dosage used [1, 2].


    Patients were extremely sick (average of 9 days post symptoms, 60% requiring oxygen and an additional 17% requiring ventilation/ECMO),

    and unusually high death rate was seen in both arms. 1,561 HCQ patients, 3,155 SOC.


    A secondary analysis has found several inconsistencies in the data [3],

    and found evidence of excess mortaliy within the first few days that could be due to overdose.[1] twitter.com/JamesTodaroMD/status/1272661099985481733
    [2] twitter.com/JamesTodaroMD/status/1276245669372723200
    [3] francesoir.fr/politique-monde/oxford-etude-recovery-ou-sont-les-morts

    Quote from Wyttenbach

    Are you joking?? There are databases for LD50 factors never heard of this??


    Have you worked out the pharmokinetics of HCQ, or seen it modelled, like the guy from London Centre of Tropical Diseases (I think) who modelled the dose regime they chose?


    Give me evidence (not Wyttenfact) that the RECOVERY dose was anywhere near LD50 for a one-off dose. And, preferably, think before you type.


    THH

    Quote from Wyttenbach

    Most people (>80%) are immune


    This is a fascinating topic.


    We have:


    1. symptomatic (and antibody positive)

    2. asymptomatic (and antibody positive)

    3. symptomatic (and antibody negative)

    4. asymptomatic (and antibody negative)


    3,4 are where T-cell response (possibly from past infections) fights off the virus.


    My guess is that by "immune" you mean 4 and possibly 3. T-cell response to the infection fights it off when relatively mild, before antibody production starts.


    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z


    Notably, we detected SARS-CoV-2-specific IFNγ responses in 19 out of 37 unexposed donors (Fig. 4a, b). The cumulative proportion of all studied individuals who responded to peptides covering the N protein and the ORF1-encoded...


    That looks like 50% have some T-cell immunity, not as you say 80%? it will vary with population, so maybe some places have 80%? Give details, or admit to Wyttenfacting.


    Also worth noting somone who has done the correct calculation for herd immunity - the immumologists who used the figure for vaccination always annoyed me. More socially active people have more contacts and are also more likely to catch the disease and become immune, so the realistic herd immunity figure is more like 43% from https://www.sciencedaily.com/r…/2020/06/200623111329.htm


    Putting these two things together, you might hope to achieve herd immunity when seropositivity is quite low. Difficult to know how low, since the social contact dependent effect does not apply to the T-cell immunity.


    THH

    Quote from RobertBryant

    A secondary analysis has found several inconsistencies in the data [3],

    and found evidence of excess mortaliy within the first few days that could be due to overdose.[1] twitter.com/JamesTodaroMD/status/1272661099985481733


    I'd be interested in this if the secondary analysis were written up as a proper preprint, rather than a political (HCQ is political in US and France) interview?


    Twitter is not a reliable source of info.

    • Official Post


    Then there is cross-over immunity, where there are anti-bodies from another coronavirus infection that protect against COVID, but are not detected with the COVID-19 specific anti-body test. Maybe even such mundane factors as O-neg blood may play into this also.


    Put it all together, and it may be that 80% are immune like Wyttenbaxh says. At this stage though, it is all guessing.


    I am not trying to be provocative here.... I sincerely want your personal opinion which you have not given. If you do not want to give it fine, simply please state it.


    So you are advocating "doing nothing" as far as prophylactic treatment because there have been no RCT's? A straight forward question.


    That "doing nothing" is better than taking PROVEN harmless drugs (taken under doctors administration), that have a working theory behind them, that have a huge observational evidence base, is also being approved my several nations and has a large support from front line practitioners. One cannot answer that "standard treatment" is better because there is NO standard treatment. (If so, please provide the protocols) There is no standard prophylactic treatment. If so, please provide as I am extremely interested in them.


    So you again, are you advocating "doing nothing" as far as prophylactic treatment because there have been no RCT's? A straight forward question. That absence of some useful but certainly not perfect test system (RCT) should require one to ignore all the above evidence I listed above and do nothing?


    Or do you have some other prophylactic medicine in mind?

    Thank you.

    Quote from Bob#2

    I am not trying to be provocative here.... I sincerely want your personal opinion which you have not given. If you do not want to give it fine, simply please state it.


    So you are advocating "doing nothing" as far as prophylactic treatment because there have been no RCT's? A straight forward question.


    There have been RCTs - with marginal results. Prophylaxis is the most difficult thing to judge because:


    Any adverse effects will hit the 95% of people who never get covid symptoms

    It maybe must be continued for a long period, so side effects over time can be an issue

    Proving that anything works as prophylaxis is difficult because you need a large number of patients on the trial to get statistically significant results.


    I would advocate using prophylaxis if any drugs seemed to benefit me on a risk/reward basis. Obviously that is a lower bar if I reckon I am at high risk of catching COVID.


    I'd also take anything that is so GRAS the risk of side effects is minimal, where there is a plausible possibility it might help.


    Zinc, Vit D - sure, take them in relatively low doses (high doses they both have nasty side effects). I am doing this.


    Quercetin - a bit marginal because it does have a few side effects but does not seem troublesome and any way it present in a lot of food. I'd be careful about possible ODing on it - given it has side effects and you might have a large amount in food.


    HCQ, Ivermectin - they are both active substances with real side effects. HCQ in particular has a long time it stays in the body, and it is active in the immune system. So if as seems likely from current RCT evidence it makes severe COVID a bit worse, it would need to be a good prophylactic. I'd very much like to see a test of this - there are some ongoing RCTs so let us hope we get this. The small RCT that has some evidence has to be reinterpreted so much to provide this that I don't trust it, but do see it as cause for hope. In that case if you watch out for sight loss and heart problems, you could take HCQ on the possibility it is an effective anti-viral. I would not, given the medical evidence against this. Ivermectin - I just don't have much evidence on this. I might take it if I had researched side effects carefully and they seemed to me irrelevant.



    There is 200 dead more than a normal year due to HCQ this spring in USA and at the same time there was about 1 million extra prescriptoins of HCQ or so. This means that if all people take HCQ we are talking about around 200x350 > 60 000 dead. This is too much. On the other hand if we concentrate the prescriptions to those with a high mortality rate in COVID then it might be better. So a lot of care needs to be taken to implement this on large scale and you will understand the choices made and that it is not based on some idea to avoid cheap medicaments. I'm very skeptical to the power of HCQ as when I mention it here in Sweden to friends that are doctors they roll their eyes and tell me there is no benefit of taking that drug and this stance is not something that is controversial or political, just a scientific standpoint and the doctors here are top notch. So they do not prescribe any HCQ. you may say they are fooled into this belief and bad doctors but still I think that Sweden focus on the right thing as only 1 out of 20 dies in the ICU's now. And there is a lot of efforts towards making a good cure. I also think that randomized trials are the king and are a bit skeptical to other kinds of studies, not randomizing. I've seen first hand the danger of not doing proper randomization and using proper statistics. I see that you can't avoid people and needs something to prevent it and belongs to a risk group. Then I agree that you could try improve the odds and should have help from your doctor, but for god sake do not think that you are safe and work as if you still are at risk. There is usually a lot of things that you can do to improve the odds without taking medicine. Also make sure that you try all those possibilities as well. That's what I see here. People in Sweden have gone to work if they can't stay at home and the whole society have adapted with a myriad of actions in the companies to limit the spread. You may say we have a lot of deaths, but that's because we got a shitload of infected people in the beginning of the spread and the progression after the initial increase has been pretty much like UK or Denmark although they closed down more.

    Quote from Shane D.

    Then there is cross-over immunity, where there are anti-bodies from another coronavirus infection that protect against COVID,

    Put it all together, and it may be that 80% are immune like Wyttenbaxh says. At this stage though, it is all guessing.



    The problem is cross-over effects cut both ways. The near matches can prevent normal antibodies forming but provide no protection. So we don't know this effect.


    There has been enough evidence to show the T-cell effect - and we know COVID is unusual in stimulating T-cells - they seem much more important in successfully fighting it than for other diseases.


    The Diamond Princess gives us a limit (for that population) on immunity: 3000 people, 712 cases => At MOST 77% immune. that assumes that everyone on the ship was exposed enough to catch the virus - unlikely.


    In addition, when we talk about immunity, we probably mean partial immunity. A small dose infection might be fought off, when a larger dose would not be so.


    Another reason to think immunity is not so very high is just the high R0 numbers. If only 20% of contacts can catch it the high reproduction rate it has ben showing seems unlikely?


    A lot of uncertainty because previous exposure immunity could be very variable across populations. The best prophylatic probably is a few CV colds - difficult though to get them right.


    THH

    Quote from Deleo

    I think if the implication is that Gates somehow engineered Covid then that's a pretty big conspiracy going on there.


    It is not just a big conspiracy, it is ridiculous. Anyone who knows the first thing about philanthropic foundations knows it makes no sense. The report is that the company the Gates Foundation invested in has risen in the stock market. A couple of things about that seem to escape the understanding of conspiracy theorists:


    1. The Foundation is the not the Gates themselves. It is a separate entity. They have no ownership in it, any more than members of the Ford family own the Ford Foundation. If the Gates Foundation makes money in this investment, the Gates get zero dollars from that. Foundations do not pay dividends. It is possible the Gates themselves also invested, but you cannot tell from this report.


    2. Any company the Gates Foundation invests in will probably appreciate in value, because other investors assume the Foundation is well run and makes wise choices. Also, any company working on a COVID vaccine is likely to rise in value. There is a great deal of competition developing a vaccine, but if the Gates Foundation invested in this company, Wall Street will assume it is one of the promising candidates.

    Anyone who understands how foundations work can see that conspiracy theory is absurd. The other conspiracy theories posted here that I have taken notice of are equally absurd. People who understand how the U.S. legal system works can see that. I have not responded to this nonsense, but I think it has become too prevalent here, and a response is called for. For example, someone here claimed that the Gardasil vaccine, made by Merck, is causing terrible damage and killing many of the people inoculated with it. This is out of the question. It simply could not be happening, for reasons that any newspaper reader will know, as follows:


    It is true that on rare occasions, pharmaceutical companies sell products that cause harm. The FDA and other agencies are very strict, and they demand multiple tests, but even so, sometimes dangerous drug make it into the market. However, these companies are not all-powerful. They do not "get away" with doing this. The FDA orders them to stop as soon as it becomes clear there is a problem, and it is very much in the interests of the companies to stop. If they do not stop, they will be ruined.


    Many of the people who are inoculated with Gardasil are wealthy. They may be wealthier than average, because this is used by families with good health care and some knowledge of cancer and risk factors. Such families are well informed. They have excellent doctors and good lawyers. If, as the conspiracy theory holds, many of the patients were adversely affected and even killed, these families would find out. You could not possibly hide the fact from them that many people have been harmed. They would quickly come together and file a class action lawsuit. There are large, powerful law firms that specialize in gigantic, billion-dollar class action lawsuits. In the courts, they are as powerful as any corporation, pharmaceutical or in any other business. They have staying power. They can keep coming back filing motions for years. They often win. Merck & Co. makes $42 billion per year, so they would be a fat target. Even if the lawsuit cost the law firm $1 billion to pursue, it would be worth it, and the payout would be gigantic. The law firm would share in the payout, with some money going to the families, and some to the law firm. It would clobber the market value of Merck. Maybe not bankrupt it, but it would cost the company and the stockholders a huge amount. The company's reputation would suffer. Patients and doctors would not longer trust it. It would have difficulty selling new drugs. The repercussions and the loss of profits would continue for years.


    I suppose the management at Merck are conscientious, upstanding citizens who would never harm their customers intentionally. Maybe not, though. Maybe they are the dark, scheming villains portrayed by the conspiracy theorists, happy to kill people off for profits . . . all-powerful, defiant! I wouldn't know what sort people they are. But here is something I do know. The managers at large corporations would never run the risk of losing billions of dollars by killing off customers. I cannot say whether they care about their customers' lives, but I am certain they care about profits. If they did what this conspiracy claims, they would be shredding their profits for a long time. Any manager associated with this, however remotely, would be fired without a pension, and might end up paying criminal damages or going to jail. These people are salaried employees. They will not wreck their lives and lose their personal fortunes to benefit the corporation.


    In short, this is real life, not a potboiler airport thriller or a Q-anon fantasy.

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