Covid-19 News

Quote from DAK2

Jed,

I have not been following this forum lately. Can you provide a quick link to Mizuno's recent results?

Question to the members:

Assume that a vaccine is 100% effective. Also assume COVID-19 kills 1% of those that are infected (it may be 3% in the US). However, the vaccine kills 1 in 1000 individuals. Would you take it? If it kills 1 in 10K, would you take it? What level of safety is necessary for you to accept the vaccine? The MERS vaccine had issues in animal testing and I am told by reliable sources that it had problems in some human early trials that caused substantial health problems. In that case, MERS disappeared but was about 10% fatal so a vaccine was important.

Statistically, anything less than a 1% death rate would be taking the vaccine is the best bet. The difference in many minds is that getting a disease is never 100% (for COVID19 is will likely be in the high 80s) and unknown but the risk of a vaccination is known and voluntary (or should be). You can play with the numbers of risk of disease vs. vaccination vs. efficacity and decide when you get the vaccine or take the risk of the disease. Always remember you have about a 1% chance of dying in a traffic accident by commuting to work by car over a 40 year period.

BTW: Some military vaccines are labeled "experimental" as they are not FDA cleared "approved" and I think they are mandatory (there were court cases on this aspect).

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The bar for vaccine safety is very high indeed. 1 in 1000 would be completely unacceptable for any vaccine. Serious adverse events are on the order of 2 per million (anaphylactic shock, live influenza vaccine). And that is not the same as deaths.

As for what society might tolerate in a rushed through COVID vaccine - 1 in 100,000 severe adverse event causally linked? I doubt very much the vaccine companies will apply for approval with anything higher than that, even though politicians will want it.

What would I personally be comfortable with? The thing about COVID is that 50% of those serious enough to be hospitalised have continuing effects after 6 months, so you need to add to the low death rate the "long-term effect" rate when considering the perils of COVID. That is maybe 5X higher - we cannot yet tell. The cytokine storm (sure, rename it bradykinin deregulation) bit is very nasty throughout the body, much worse than Flu.

I am in a fortunate position where I can live and work with a very low COVID risk with little inconvenience and maintaining good social connections. Where I to go to work I'd estimate my chance of getting COVID over the next 12 months as 5% - but it depends entirely on the epidemic rate in London - difficult to tell what that will be, maybe it will stay low. At my age (the consequences are highly age dependent) I'd put death chances from COVID at 1% and nasty long-term effect chances at 5%. So that is 1 in 400 chances of something nasty without vaccine. Moving to 1 in 1000 chances of something nasty if aI take a 60% effective vaccine (maybe a significantly better because a vaccine can reduce severity even when you still catch COVID). So on those figures it is strongly in favour for even a 1 in 10,000 adverse event vaccine.

Remember though that the population has severe adverse events anyway at higher levels than that even without COVID.

Quote from Navid

and that is without proper standard treatments like HCQ and more

Do you have any figures on how much HCQ reduces or increases mortality as hospital treatment? I'll give you 50% mortality reduction from other standard treatments though. But, as in my last e-m, you need also to consider permanent damage to heart, brain, other organs due to leaking blood vessels after severe non-fatal COVID. What figure to you add for that?

Lumping together 0-50 is the wrong calculation. If you are age 50 it will be about 10X higher, if under 30 it will be lower. Your post implies that at age 50 you bear that risk - untrue.

Quote from Navid

I think we can all understand this. Gates is a front man for a large system, just like Stalin had a large system of control and many who benefitted from him being the frontman. When Gates dies, you probably will be tearful -- and thinking he worked so hard to save humanity; meanwhile he is one of the most repugnant people in history

You are entitled to your view: it is weird and (thank God) held by a small minority of people. Such views: making extreme bogeymen of those who are famous or powerful, are however themselves dangerous, and have themselves led to repugnant actions.

(Sept-12) Professor Thomas Borody Interview - Part 1

- ivermectin works quickly and quite well on older patients

- early onset treatment recommended

- Good observational data rules out RCTs

Dr. John Campbell - Mostly good news

- very rapidly falling death rates

Quote from Lou Pagnucco

Good observational data rules out RCTs

A bit like a student who got good coursework grades (with help?) and then claims good coursework rules out exams.

More seriously - I understand how it goes. if physicians believe their treatment is good, they will feel they must give it to everyone. At which point they will never have any evidence of how good not giving the treatment would be.

Again and again we have seen that observational data is not reliable. You can even look at the way COVID works and understand how it is difficult to make such data reliable.

It does not stop people from wanting a cure, and wanting certainty. Such is human nature. If you want more than hope you need the science - not the speculation and anecdote.

Just remember - early therapy => almost everyone given it would recover fine if not given it. And chances of something bad scale with age extraordinarily - doubling every +6 years.

See the problem?

THH

THHuxleynew wrote -

"Again and again we have seen that observational data is not reliable."

Yes. Medical science has leapt to the conclusion that smoking causes lung cancer

- while never considering that cancer-prone people may be more likely to smoke.

Also, insurance companies and the courts have perhaps unjustifiably punished

drunk drivers - never testing the alternative hypothesis that accident-prone drivers

just are more likely to drink. Cause and effect are easily confused. No?

Quote from Lou Pagnucco

THHuxleynew wrote -

"Again and again we have seen that observational data is not reliable."

Yes. Medical science has leapt to the conclusion that smoking causes lung cancer

- while never considering that cancer-prone people may be more likely to smoke.

Also, insurance companies and the courts have perhaps unjustifiably punished

drunk drivers - never testing the alternative hypothesis that accident-prone drivers

just are more likely to drink. Cause and effect are easily confused. No?

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What?????

Pencils make mistakes?

Guns kill people?

Cars drive drunk!

Spoons make people fat?

Somewhere along the line, people have to take responsibility for their own actions.

Don’t smoke, don’t drive drunk, don’t speed,

don’t take narcotics,

don’t run naked thru traffic.

Perhaps of interest --

Ketogenesis restrains aging-induced exacerbation of COVID in a mouse model

https://www.biorxiv.org/conten…0.09.11.294363v1.full.pdf

Conclusion: "Finally, our results suggest that acutely switching infected or at-risk elderly

patients to a KD may ameliorate COVID-19 and, therefore, is a relatively accessible and

affordable intervention that can be promptly applied in most clinical settings. "

- Possibly also ketogenesis could be induced by betahydroxybutyrate supplements

(keto salts) available as nutraceuticals.

The Effect of Early Hydroxychloroquine-based Therapy in COVID-19 Patients in

Ambulatory Care Settings: A Nationwide Prospective Cohort Study

https://www.medrxiv.org/conten…09.09.20184143v1.full.pdf

more information on vitamin D and covid

https://www.medpagetoday.com/meetingcoverage/asbmr/88586

HCQ lowers risk of death by 75% according the following world wide covering study!

https://hcqtrial.com/

Vitamin D helps regulate t- cell response. I posted those studies in previous posts.

Now science is looking into a Bradykinin storm in covid 19 . Good research last week by THH brought this to my attention

https://www.thailandmedical.ne…ng-already-approved-drugs

Quote from Wyttenbach

HCQ lowers risk of death by 75% according the following world wide covering study!

https://hcqtrial.com/

If true,

“Group Think Blue” is not gonna be happy

Quote from Roseland67

If true,

“Group Think Blue” is not gonna be happy

They have stolen trillions from people, have them locked in creating perhaps a depression greater than 2009, created wars of conquest across the middle east...there is no accountability. The story will go like this in the NY Times "HCQ - the challenges of doing science in a pandemic" or "Why healthcare needs an overhaul - their inability to respond to new therapies like Hydroxychloroquine in a pandemic." Everything will be spun. I'm not so good but we know some board members are solid at this artful dodging...

OK: just to put this stuff in perspective.

HCQ: people keep on posting non-evidence as though it is data. E.g. - Africa has much lower COVID mortality than the UK, and uses HCQ. Therefore HCQ is a good treatment? WRONG - Africa has lower mortality because its population is younger. That is just the most obvious effect, there are many others. it is not easy to get good data out of observational comparisons between countries. Even within one country it is not at all easy to make good observational comparisons. If anyone thinks it is - stick up here your 9decently written) COVID preprint with killer observational data, saying why you think it shows HCQ reduces mortality rates.

I can't say HCQ does not reduce mortality rates if used at very early stage - but that is because v early stage data is so difficult to get in a form which can be properly compared with "best available treatment". And, in general, if a drug only works early stage it is not very useful, except as prophylaxis.

it would not harm anyone to look seriously at the observational data, consider the ways it can go wrong, present data that is least likely to go wrong. Some suggestions: make sure the study uses multivariate logistic regression with age as continuous variable. Make sure as many as possible of confounders are accurately captured. Make sure the study is large enough so it can have statistical power even after deconfounding age and other obvious confounders. Make sure it is registered with results stipulated before it is done, so we do not get cherry-picking the specific result that looks good. Make sure the data used is collected systematically and according to clearly stated methodology (again to avoid cherry picking).

All the above is difficult to get right. For first cut look carefully and age and sex ratios - remember that average age matching is not enough, the dependence is nonlinear and large so you need a multivariate logistic model to deconfound effect of age in one study or between several. (Why logistic? it give you the exponential relationship you need).

The same applies to Ivermectin - and Vitamin D. The study I liked did use logistic multivariable regression, and was randomised and masked (though not fully masked). It had small numbers though so the results could be a statistical fluke.

Vitamin D:

Indeed what I find fascinating is the possibility that it helps modulate bradykinin and therefore reduces COVID severity (we know that in later stage COVID HCQ does not help, and probably makes things worse). There are quite a number of other drugs that might do this same thing, and I think trialling these, working out doages etc of those which are effective as a combo, is what in the end will turn COVID into a treatable mild disease as long as you diagnose it before the disease has got all over the body: e.g. for people with clear symptoms but not yet in ICU. And it would also reduce mortality for those in ICU even if given late - as will sometimes be the case when patients do not go to hospital till O2 levels drop.

Of course, if Vitamin D works really well for this it would be wonderful. Chances of that are low but still real. We have no negative evidence about Vitamin D and COVID. (Is that true?). And quite a bit of indirect positive evidence. I want to stress though that most of the positive evidence is exceptionally low quality - Vitamin D levels seem designed to be correlated with health regardless of anything else, so working out when high Vit D is causes good health is difficult.

For those thinking of home dosing it is worth remembering that high levels of Vitamin D get buffered by the body and the levels of the active product (from liver metabolism of Vitamin D) do not go up linearly with Vitamin D intake. Whereas the active product (calcifediol) can be used directly and this allows much higher levels from direct intake of it, rather than using vitamin D. That is what the interesting Spanish trial did. Nevertheless it is obviously a good idea to keep your normal blood levels of Vitamin D up at high end of recommended.

Try this Thh another study on vitamin D yes only observational but eye opening

https://academic.oup.com/advances/article/3/4/517/4591501

Or this

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn/2013/246737/

Quote from DAK2

Can you provide a quick link to Mizuno's recent results?

There is nothing new after the two papers I uploaded:

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MizunoTincreasede.pdf

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MizunoTsupplement.pdf

Quote from DAK2

However, the vaccine kills 1 in 1000 individuals.

Vaccines kill fewer than 1 in 10 million. You should post this kind of nonsense here. If that were true, hundreds of thousands of children would die every year from vaccinations, along with several hundred thousand adults. We would notice that. It would be in the news.

The mortality rate from vaccines is so low, you cannot even measure it. Sample populations tend to have lower death rates after vaccinations, from all causes. See:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4599698/

On the face of it, that means getting a vaccine for anything protects you from automobile accidents and heart attacks. That's preposterous. That is like my earlier observation that eating hotdogs reduces lung cancer. My guess is that this means people who get vaccinated tend to more careful about other things such as driving and overeating, so they are more healthy, so their overall mortality rate is lower.

Quote from Alan Smith

Border Controls?

To enter Italy I had to fill in a 3 page paper document (A 'declaration')

Border controls in Japan consist of giving every person who comes in a rapid test for COVID-19, and holding them in quarantine until they get a negative result. Or putting them in a hospital if it is positive. They have intercepted 342 people at ports of entry doing this.

They can do that because the whole country is shut down, so there are very few people coming into international airports. You can only fly in if you are a Japanese citizen. Even people married to a Japanese citizens, or having children, spouse or families there have been barred from entry. That's scandalous.

Quote from Fm1

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn/2013/246737/

There is an excellant point in thismpapern we should remember:

Why did epidemics in previous ages spread so rapidlydespite the lack of modern transportation? Influenzais embedded in the population and only erupts when impairments in innate immunity create a susceptible subpopulation, and thus it only appears to be spread-ing. The occurrence of influenza in large segments ofthe population seasonally and almost simultaneouslymay respect the availability of good transmitters. The disease could actually spread as well, due to themovements of good transmitters.

In CoV-19 this sub-population is known to be the older with fewer classic corona contacts, less V-D due to indoor live, deficiencies of the old immune system etc.. Such people can develop extreme high level of virus what finally can infect a whole care home.

It will be interesting to see whether the infection of such targets is done by air transport and just depends on the environmental virus dose level. The Cov-19 virus can be transported by air over many miles what has been shown already in the early days of the pandemic - even Trump knew it...

Quote from JedRothwell

Vaccines kill fewer than 1 in 10 million.

You live in a dream world. I do not know how many bottles you need to invent such figures... May be you can tell us.