The negative studies mentioned in this article using hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) are all in serious, later stage, hospitalised Covid19 patients
No known oral antiviral for outpatients works unless given early in disease eg oseltamivir/Tamiflu influenza; valacyclovir/Valtrex in herpes
Even remdesivir – a potent IV antiviral – didn’t achieve hoped for results in hospitalised patients
Later stage Covid19 patients are mostly suffering from the effects of hyperinflammation ( cytokine storm) and when viral titres are well beyond their peaks. Hyperinflammation can cause myocarditis which can certainly predispose to further cardiac toxicity
HCQ was also used in the negative studies without added zinc which could be a design for failure, as one of the main, but certainly not only, antiviral actions of HCQ is as a zinc ionophore ie it gets zinc to enter cells much more easily where it can exert its added and established antiviral actions
For early Covid19 the usually prescribed course is for 5 to 7 days which would not invoke the long term side effects mentioned so often by the politically correct – and very few toxicities are reported even in long term therapy for autoimmune disorders. Any arrhythmia concerns can be allayed by making sure of normal potassium blood levels
In the several thousands of outpatient Covid19 case reports published up to now , when used in early disease, there have been few if any major side effects noted.
HCQ is a cheap, easily made generically available drug – main manufacturers, like Novartis and Teva have donated billions of doses worldwide since the event of Covid19, so shortages for those taking it for malaria ( preventions or treatment) or for autoimmune diseases, like lupus or rheumatoid arthritis etc are highly unlikely
Here are some pertinent references for further reading on the question of HCQ plus zinc plus either doxycycline ( my preferred choice because it isn’t associated with further cardiac risk) or azithromycin
“it seems that 17% of people have had the disease, which works out as an infection fatality rate of about 0.5% ” one person in every 200 dying.” Wouldn’t it be helpful to say here that (I’m not sure of the statistics) 90% of those 200 people who died were over the age of 65? Otherwise someone reading that who is aged 25 will think “I have a one in 200 chance of dying if I get it”, which isn’t the case.
The ‘17% of people’ and ‘fatality rate of 0.5%’ – neither fact connects to the other. As far as I know, no-one really knows how many people in London have caught Covid. I think the 17% might be right based on the number of people who caught Covid on the Diamond Princess (20% of the passengers and crew), but so far virtually no-one seems to have used the evidence from that ship. It implies a large immunity in the general population.
Would have been nice where you got your figures from for clarity.
The underlining in Tom’s text means it is a link. If you click the link on the 17% figure, you’ll find that the source is Matt Hancock’s daily briefing. Hancock was reporting initial results of the UK serology survey. This has nothing to do with the Diamond Princess, not sure where you got that from. 17% is nowhere near enough for herd immunity.
0.5% connects to 17% percent because about 6000 people have died in hospital in London (https://www.london.gov.uk/c… ). The population is about 9 million (Google it). 17% of 9 million is the number of people who’ve had it, divide that 6000 by that and you get about 0.4% IFR. Possibly Tom got a better estimate from somewhere, hospital deaths will be an underestimate.
Richard Lustemberg
3 years ago
Another superficial article debunking some claim without doing a thorough homework.
Correct. Hydrochloriquine + zinc is being used on the frontline by many doctors. If taken early there is a 93% positive outcome. A NY doctor prescribes this to his elderly patients and has had a 100% positive rating. The issue with big pharma is that this is 10 cents a tablet so no money in it. No wonder that 12 big pharma companies signed up to do a hatchet job on Hydrochloroquine – and the media take it as gospel! It doesnt take rocket science to find this out. Unfortunately, people that pass as journalists do very little research and do not use any logic.
Journalists : ask the doctors on the frontline who do not necessarily have a financial and political interest.
Besides, any laymen can read the papers disavowing hydroxychloroquine and notice that their methodology is even worse that what they are criticising. Basically just meta-analysis from big data
But what does a “positive outcome” mean in this context? Do you mean they recover? Far more than that recover without medication at all. If that’s not what you mean, please define the terms you are using. And what does “early” mean? Sorry to be picky but proper science IS picky. That’s how it avoids error. When it does.
Robert Harneis
3 years ago
‘…last week, a huge and much better study ” 96,000 patients, almost 15,000 of whom received hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine ” was published by the Lancet.’ A much better studty!?! Hardly – it in no way produces a reasonable comparison with the recommended treatment. It is a typical hatchet job in the anti hydroxychloroquine campaing and has been severely criticised as the writer would know if he was paying attention.
David Bell
3 years ago
I stopped reading this about half way for one simple reason. The chances are we will not see a vaccine or anti viral for Covid 19 for some time and we need to learn to live with that basic premise. Holding on to lonkdown while we wait for trail results is not a workable solution.
runfred
3 years ago
While drugs and vaccines occupy pharmaceutical and vaccine manufacturers and the academic scientific community, I suggest we study low cost, less risky, non-pharmacological interventions (NPIs). Over a decade ago I proposed a simple, three-step maneuver to decrease the risk of small and large droplets emanating from coughs, sneezes or speech from impacting on the face and being inhaled (1). Simply put, if you hear or sees a person cough, sneeze or speak loudly within 6 feet, you should: 1) EXHALE to minimize inhalation of droplets into the upper and lower airways; and 2) TURN YOUR HEAD away to minimize larger droplets from impacting on your face; and 3) WALK AWAY to minimize the inhalation of smaller droplets that have remained airborne. While these three maneuvers have not been tested in sequence or individually, I believe scientific experiments could be constructed to study them. For example, a mannequin with a primitive upper and lower airway could be programmed to exhale, rotate and move laterally when faced with droplet particles of a human sneeze, cough or loudly spoken phrase (2). Subsequently, the facial surface of the mannequin and the upper and lower airways could be assessed for various size droplets or other markers. We need to study these maneuvers so we can expand our social distancing toolbox while we search for effective drugs and vaccines with minimal adverse side effects.
(1) Sherman FT. Learning to exhale: don’t catch the flu this season. Geriatrics 2008;63,10,2-3(October) (2) https://doi.org/10.5281/zen…
All these years and I didn’t know my immune system doesn’t work so that nice man, Bill Gates, has kindly come along to ‘fix’ it ……… every year. This reminds me of when you get a new computer (human body) and you load up Microsoft version? (chipping jab) and it needs regular updates (annual booster jabs) to keep up with technology.
Derek M
3 years ago
I’m not sure describing a scientist you disagree with as an “Asterix character lookalike” really gives your piece the air of gravitas and seriousness you would presumably aspire to as a “science writer”
Robert Forde
3 years ago
Unfortunately, as I pointed out in my book “Bad Psychology”, the peer-review system has many faults, and many peer-reviewed articles are published which should not be. There are now some “open” journals online which will publish without peer-review, but invite comments from professional peers. If the original author refuses to answer the comments, the article is taken down. Time will tell whether this is a better system, but editors still allow inadequately peer-reviewed studies to be published which prove nothing but contribute to the hysteresis effect even so. Chief culprits, IMO, are inadequately controlled experiments and meta-analyses of studies which themselves are poor (“garbage in, garbage out” as our IT colleagues say).
I used to be a peer-reviewer on the editorial board of an academic journal, and found that articles which I had panned mercilessly for basic errors still got published, presumably because they had been more gently reviewed by others. This doesn’t help the reputation of science. But in academia the rule is publish OR be damned, so there is great pressure to churn ’em out.
susienevis
3 years ago
HOSPITAL RESTRICTS PROMINENT DOCTOR FROM TREATING COVID WITH HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE The infectious-disease specialist who briefed President Trump last month on the safety and effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine will no longer be allowed to prescribe the drug to patients at the New York City-area hospital where he has admitting privileges unless it’s done in a clinical trial. Now, he said, the hospital is inhibiting the use of a protocol he and many physicians have found to be effective and is backed by controlled studies worldwide, including a French study. Conflicting studies cited by media, he argues, vary widely in dosage and many other factors, making comparisons impossible. It’s never happened before,” he said of the new hospital policy. “It’s a bad sign for medicine going forward. People have doubled down on the toxicity of a drug that is not toxic,” he said. They’ve gone around and told everybody it’s killing people. It’s not. There’s just a craziness out there, and I don’t know how to correct it, Smith said. The truth doesn’t matter any more. It’s a game-changer. An absolute game-changer.” But resistance has only intensified”¦” Art Moore https://www.wnd.com/2020/05…
“Which he has found to be effective”? Snuff was once “found to be effective” for respiratory disorders (they didn’t find it caused cancer) and radioactive drinks once recommended as health-promoting (ditto). Personal opinion based on clinical experience is rarely worth a damn. That’s why so many dud therapies proliferate in psychology (my own field). Science doesn’t progress by personal opinion.
john.mchugh02
3 years ago
The best scenario would be to go to the world’s top person on immunity and microbiology. That would be Professor Dolores Cahill, an Irish lady that has the ear of the EU, the White House, etc. etc? It seems that she is shunned by the main stream media on this occasion. Now why would that be?
matthewcfrost
3 years ago
HCQ has to be taken with zinc to be effective – apparently. Did the 96,000 study do that ?
Mike Hughes
3 years ago
“We’re living in a strange and frightening time, and we’re relying heavily on medical science to save us from it.”
UTTER GARBAGE. Over hundreds of millions of years we, and most of creation, have developed superb immune systems that have protected us from millions of viruses. The present one is no different.
Robert Harneis
3 years ago
“a huge and much better study ” 96,000 patients, almost 15,000 of whom received hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine ” was published by the Lancet.” Is it not time to withdraw this article with its embarrassing statement about the disgraceful Lancet study?
olivps
3 years ago
Great article. So far to my knowledge only one human viral disease (Hepatitis C) has proved to be controlled or even cured with direct anti-viral drugs. For all others everything else is as good as tap water!
I had shingles once and that was very well handled by an antiviral drug (Zovirax I think). Shingles gone in a week. So that makes 2 viruses that can be controlled by an antivirus drug. And what about AIDS – that’s 3.
Not being an expert, it looks like lots of viruses are controlled by antivirus drugs. Otherwise, why do antivirus drugs exist?
Three different aspects: one is eradication of the vÃrus (that has been achieved for Hepatitis C); the second is the use of antiviral agents that have so far not been validated to be truly beneficial like Zovirax and Tamiflu that one can take but probably will not interfere with the evolution of the disease (your own immune system do it); the third is the drugs for AIDS that allow you to have almost a normal life span in spite still having the virus. One thing that we need to have in mind is that around 10% of our genome has integration of genetic material from virus. This mean that our species have found a way to live for longtime with virus.
Please stop writing about statistics, about R0, prevalence, incidence and risk. In corona time it started with counting the deaths caused by corona. Hence it is determined that one died of corona or exclusively not. Even that can’t be done quite well. It seems to be easy, but it isn’t.
runfred
3 years ago
While drugs and vaccines occupy pharmaceutical and vaccine manufacturers and the academic scientific community, I suggest we study low cost, less risky, non-pharmacological interventions (NPIs). Over a decade ago I proposed a simple, three-step maneuver to decrease the risk of small and large droplets emanating from coughs, sneezes or speech from impacting on the face and being inhaled. (1) Simply put, if you hear or sees a person cough, sneeze or speak loudly within 6 feet, you should: 1) Exhale to minimize inhalation of droplets into the upper and lower airways; 2) Turn your head away to minimize larger droplets from impacting on your face; and 3) Walk away to minimize the inhalation of smaller droplets that have remained airborne. While these three maneuvers have not been tested in sequence or individually, I believe scientific experiments could be constructed to study them. For example, a mannequin with a primitive upper and lower airway, could be programmed to exhale, rotate and move laterally when faced with droplet particles of a human sneeze, cough or loudly spoken phrase (2). Subsequently, the facial surface of the mannequin and the upper and lower airways could be sampled for various size droplets or other markers. We need to study this low cost, low risk three-step maneuver so we can expand our social distancing toolbox while we search for effective drugs and vaccines with minimal adverse side effects. 1) Sherman FT. Learning to exhale: don’t catch the flu this season. Geriatrics 2008;63,10,2-3(October) (2) https://doi.org/10.5281/zen…
roslynross3
3 years ago
If vaccines categorically cannot trigger Autism then why have some kids with Autism received compensation for vaccines as the cause?
And since no independent study has ever been done looking at Autism rates in fully, partially and non-vaccinated children, how on earth is it possible to make the claim that vaccines can never cause Autism?
Under the US court system, awards are decided by juries. These tend to make awards to people like themselves, regardless of the facts (I assume that your report of successful cases is correct). That’s pretty much it. Don’t forget that Wakefield’s original scaremongering was based on 8 cases with no control group. And he was struck off. Studies since than have not found any such effect, nor a mechanism by which it could operate. The latter is crucial: people can always cherry-pick data, but science needs to do more than just find statistical effects. It also needs to elucidate HOW things happen. If it can’t, that does suggest a spurious effect.
jpmrwb9
3 years ago
All I want to see is a picture of the virus Corvid-19.
jpmrwb9
3 years ago
I am from the old school and I look at scientifically-sound evidence and this evidence has never been provided, even though it’s as easy as taking a sample of patient blood and isolating one of these viruses, in a purified form with its complete genetic material (genome) and virus shell, directly from it, and then imaging it with an electron microscope. Have these critical steps been done with Corvid-19? Have they been done with H5N1(avian flu), the so-called hepatitis C virus, HIV, and numerous other particles that are officially called viruses and depicted as attack-crazy beasts. I wonder how it can be continually claimed that this or that virus exists and has potential to trigger diseases through contagion. An important aspect in this context is that some time ago, mainstream virus-science left the road of direct observation of nature, and decided to go with so-called indirect “proof” with procedures such as antibody and PCR tests. These methods lead to results which have little or no meaning. So to accept this, the existence of this so-called “killer virus” CORVID-19 must first be proven based on the scientifically sound evidence as indicated above.
michaelbish
3 years ago
Though Chivers offered some qualifications at publication time, I think he would want to revise his coverage of The Lancet study, which has come under extreme scrutiny. https://www.tctmd.com/news/…
Russ Littler
3 years ago
.and this guy’s a science writer?…really? This article is a mass of misinformation, half truths, and just plain damn lies. I can only question his allegiances. It certainly isn’t truth, that’s for sure.
The negative studies mentioned in this article using hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) are all in serious, later stage, hospitalised Covid19 patients
No known oral antiviral for outpatients works unless given early in disease eg oseltamivir/Tamiflu influenza; valacyclovir/Valtrex in herpes
Even remdesivir – a potent IV antiviral – didn’t achieve hoped for results in hospitalised patients
Later stage Covid19 patients are mostly suffering from the effects of hyperinflammation ( cytokine storm) and when viral titres are well beyond their peaks. Hyperinflammation can cause myocarditis which can certainly predispose to further cardiac toxicity
HCQ was also used in the negative studies without added zinc which could be a design for failure, as one of the main, but certainly not only, antiviral actions of HCQ is as a zinc ionophore ie it gets zinc to enter cells much more easily where it can exert its added and established antiviral actions
For early Covid19 the usually prescribed course is for 5 to 7 days which would not invoke the long term side effects mentioned so often by the politically correct – and very few toxicities are reported even in long term therapy for autoimmune disorders. Any arrhythmia concerns can be allayed by making sure of normal potassium blood levels
In the several thousands of outpatient Covid19 case reports published up to now , when used in early disease, there have been few if any major side effects noted.
HCQ is a cheap, easily made generically available drug – main manufacturers, like Novartis and Teva have donated billions of doses worldwide since the event of Covid19, so shortages for those taking it for malaria ( preventions or treatment) or for autoimmune diseases, like lupus or rheumatoid arthritis etc are highly unlikely
Here are some pertinent references for further reading on the question of HCQ plus zinc plus either doxycycline ( my preferred choice because it isn’t associated with further cardiac risk) or azithromycin
https://aapsonline.org/hcq-…
https://www.medrxiv.org/con…
https://www.preprints.org/m…
https://www.evms.edu/media/…
https://pjmedia.com/news-an…
https://www.medrxiv.org/con…
https://www.medrxiv.org/con…
“it seems that 17% of people have had the disease, which works out as an infection fatality rate of about 0.5% ” one person in every 200 dying.” Wouldn’t it be helpful to say here that (I’m not sure of the statistics) 90% of those 200 people who died were over the age of 65? Otherwise someone reading that who is aged 25 will think “I have a one in 200 chance of dying if I get it”, which isn’t the case.
There are lies, damned lies and Covid-19 statistics…
And rather slapdash so called ‘science journalists’.
For the author – not Russel!
The ‘17% of people’ and ‘fatality rate of 0.5%’ – neither fact connects to the other. As far as I know, no-one really knows how many people in London have caught Covid. I think the 17% might be right based on the number of people who caught Covid on the Diamond Princess (20% of the passengers and crew), but so far virtually no-one seems to have used the evidence from that ship. It implies a large immunity in the general population.
Would have been nice where you got your figures from for clarity.
The underlining in Tom’s text means it is a link. If you click the link on the 17% figure, you’ll find that the source is Matt Hancock’s daily briefing. Hancock was reporting initial results of the UK serology survey. This has nothing to do with the Diamond Princess, not sure where you got that from. 17% is nowhere near enough for herd immunity.
0.5% connects to 17% percent because about 6000 people have died in hospital in London (https://www.london.gov.uk/c… ). The population is about 9 million (Google it). 17% of 9 million is the number of people who’ve had it, divide that 6000 by that and you get about 0.4% IFR. Possibly Tom got a better estimate from somewhere, hospital deaths will be an underestimate.
Another superficial article debunking some claim without doing a thorough homework.
Correct. Hydrochloriquine + zinc is being used on the frontline by many doctors. If taken early there is a 93% positive outcome.
A NY doctor prescribes this to his elderly patients and has had a 100% positive rating.
The issue with big pharma is that this is 10 cents a tablet so no money in it. No wonder that 12 big pharma companies signed up to do a hatchet job on Hydrochloroquine – and the media take it as gospel! It doesnt take rocket science to find this out. Unfortunately, people that pass as journalists do very little research and do not use any logic.
Journalists : ask the doctors on the frontline who do not necessarily have a financial and political interest.
Besides, any laymen can read the papers disavowing hydroxychloroquine and notice that their methodology is even worse that what they are criticising. Basically just meta-analysis from big data
But what does a “positive outcome” mean in this context? Do you mean they recover? Far more than that recover without medication at all. If that’s not what you mean, please define the terms you are using. And what does “early” mean? Sorry to be picky but proper science IS picky. That’s how it avoids error. When it does.
‘…last week, a huge and much better study ” 96,000 patients, almost 15,000 of whom received hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine ” was published by the Lancet.’
A much better studty!?! Hardly – it in no way produces a reasonable comparison with the recommended treatment. It is a typical hatchet job in the anti hydroxychloroquine campaing and has been severely criticised as the writer would know if he was paying attention.
I stopped reading this about half way for one simple reason. The chances are we will not see a vaccine or anti viral for Covid 19 for some time and we need to learn to live with that basic premise. Holding on to lonkdown while we wait for trail results is not a workable solution.
While drugs and vaccines occupy pharmaceutical and vaccine manufacturers and the academic scientific community, I suggest we study low cost, less risky, non-pharmacological interventions (NPIs). Over a decade ago I proposed a simple, three-step maneuver to decrease the risk of small and large droplets emanating from coughs, sneezes or speech from impacting on the face and being inhaled (1). Simply put, if you hear or sees a person cough, sneeze or speak loudly within 6 feet, you should:
1) EXHALE to minimize inhalation of droplets into the upper and lower airways; and
2) TURN YOUR HEAD away to minimize larger droplets from impacting on your face; and
3) WALK AWAY to minimize the inhalation of smaller droplets that have remained airborne.
While these three maneuvers have not been tested in sequence or individually, I believe scientific experiments could be constructed to study them. For example, a mannequin with a primitive upper and lower airway could be programmed to exhale, rotate and move laterally when faced with droplet particles of a human sneeze, cough or loudly spoken phrase (2). Subsequently, the facial surface of the mannequin and the upper and lower airways could be assessed for various size droplets or other markers. We need to study these maneuvers so we can expand our social distancing toolbox while we search for effective drugs and vaccines with minimal adverse side effects.
(1) Sherman FT. Learning to exhale: don’t catch the flu this season. Geriatrics 2008;63,10,2-3(October)
(2) https://doi.org/10.5281/zen…
Which is?
Thank you.
All these years and I didn’t know my immune system doesn’t work so that nice man, Bill Gates, has kindly come along to ‘fix’ it ……… every year.
This reminds me of when you get a new computer (human body) and you load up Microsoft version? (chipping jab) and it needs regular updates (annual booster jabs) to keep up with technology.
I’m not sure describing a scientist you disagree with as an “Asterix character lookalike” really gives your piece the air of gravitas and seriousness you would presumably aspire to as a “science writer”
Unfortunately, as I pointed out in my book “Bad Psychology”, the peer-review system has many faults, and many peer-reviewed articles are published which should not be. There are now some “open” journals online which will publish without peer-review, but invite comments from professional peers. If the original author refuses to answer the comments, the article is taken down. Time will tell whether this is a better system, but editors still allow inadequately peer-reviewed studies to be published which prove nothing but contribute to the hysteresis effect even so. Chief culprits, IMO, are inadequately controlled experiments and
meta-analyses of studies which themselves are poor (“garbage in, garbage
out” as our IT colleagues say).
I used to be a peer-reviewer on the editorial board of an academic journal, and found that articles which I had panned mercilessly for basic errors still got published, presumably because they had been more gently reviewed by others. This doesn’t help the reputation of science. But in academia the rule is publish OR be damned, so there is great pressure to churn ’em out.
HOSPITAL RESTRICTS PROMINENT DOCTOR FROM TREATING COVID WITH HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE
The infectious-disease specialist who briefed President Trump last month on the safety and effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine will no longer be allowed to prescribe the drug to patients at the New York City-area hospital where he has admitting privileges unless it’s done in a clinical trial. Now, he said, the hospital is inhibiting the use of a protocol he and many physicians have found to be effective and is backed by controlled studies worldwide, including a French study. Conflicting studies cited by media, he argues, vary widely in dosage and many other factors, making comparisons impossible. It’s never happened before,” he said of the new hospital policy. “It’s a bad sign for medicine going forward. People have doubled down on the toxicity of a drug that is not toxic,” he said. They’ve gone around and told everybody it’s killing people. It’s not. There’s just a craziness out there, and I don’t know how to correct it, Smith said. The truth doesn’t matter any more. It’s a game-changer. An absolute game-changer.” But resistance has only intensified”¦” Art Moore
https://www.wnd.com/2020/05…
“Which he has found to be effective”? Snuff was once “found to be effective” for respiratory disorders (they didn’t find it caused cancer) and radioactive drinks once recommended as health-promoting (ditto). Personal opinion based on clinical experience is rarely worth a damn. That’s why so many dud therapies proliferate in psychology (my own field). Science doesn’t progress by personal opinion.
The best scenario would be to go to the world’s top person on immunity and microbiology. That would be Professor Dolores Cahill, an Irish lady that has the ear of the EU, the White House, etc. etc?
It seems that she is shunned by the main stream media on this occasion. Now why would that be?
HCQ has to be taken with zinc to be effective – apparently. Did the 96,000 study do that ?
“We’re living in a strange and frightening time, and we’re relying heavily on medical science to save us from it.”
UTTER GARBAGE. Over hundreds of millions of years we, and most of creation, have developed superb immune systems that have protected us from millions of viruses. The present one is no different.
“a huge and much better study ” 96,000 patients, almost 15,000 of whom received hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine ” was published by the Lancet.”
Is it not time to withdraw this article with its embarrassing statement about the disgraceful Lancet study?
Great article. So far to my knowledge only one human viral disease (Hepatitis C) has proved to be controlled or even cured with direct anti-viral drugs. For all others everything else is as good as tap water!
I had shingles once and that was very well handled by an antiviral drug (Zovirax I think). Shingles gone in a week. So that makes 2 viruses that can be controlled by an antivirus drug. And what about AIDS – that’s 3.
Not being an expert, it looks like lots of viruses are controlled by antivirus drugs. Otherwise, why do antivirus drugs exist?
Three different aspects: one is eradication of the vÃrus (that has been achieved for Hepatitis C); the second is the use of antiviral agents that have so far not been validated to be truly beneficial like Zovirax and Tamiflu that one can take but probably will not interfere with the evolution of the disease (your own immune system do it); the third is the drugs for AIDS that allow you to have almost a normal life span in spite still having the virus. One thing that we need to have in mind is that around 10% of our genome has integration of genetic material from virus. This mean that our species have found a way to live for longtime with virus.
If you had taken aspirin for it, would you have assumed it was that? Or if you had taken vitamn C, or maybe Coca-Cola? Just curious.
https://www.thelancet.com/j…
Please stop writing about statistics, about R0, prevalence, incidence and risk. In corona time it started with counting the deaths caused by corona. Hence it is determined that one died of corona or exclusively not. Even that can’t be done quite well. It seems to be easy, but it isn’t.
While drugs and vaccines occupy pharmaceutical and vaccine manufacturers and the academic scientific community, I suggest we study low cost, less risky, non-pharmacological interventions (NPIs). Over a decade ago I proposed a simple, three-step maneuver to decrease the risk of small and large droplets emanating from coughs, sneezes or speech from impacting on the face and being inhaled. (1) Simply put, if you hear or sees a person cough, sneeze or speak loudly within 6 feet, you should:
1) Exhale to minimize inhalation of droplets into the upper and lower airways;
2) Turn your head away to minimize larger droplets from impacting on your face; and
3) Walk away to minimize the inhalation of smaller droplets that have remained airborne.
While these three maneuvers have not been tested in sequence or individually, I believe scientific experiments could be constructed to study them. For example, a mannequin with a primitive upper and lower airway, could be programmed to exhale, rotate and move laterally when faced with droplet particles of a human sneeze, cough or loudly spoken phrase (2). Subsequently, the facial surface of the mannequin and the upper and lower airways could be sampled for various size droplets or other markers. We need to study this low cost, low risk three-step maneuver so we can expand our social distancing toolbox while we search for effective drugs and vaccines with minimal adverse side effects.
1) Sherman FT. Learning to exhale: don’t catch the flu this season. Geriatrics 2008;63,10,2-3(October)
(2) https://doi.org/10.5281/zen…
If vaccines categorically cannot trigger Autism then why have some kids with Autism received compensation for vaccines as the cause?
And since no independent study has ever been done looking at Autism rates in fully, partially and non-vaccinated children, how on earth is it possible to make the claim that vaccines can never cause Autism?
Under the US court system, awards are decided by juries. These tend to make awards to people like themselves, regardless of the facts (I assume that your report of successful cases is correct). That’s pretty much it. Don’t forget that Wakefield’s original scaremongering was based on 8 cases with no control group. And he was struck off. Studies since than have not found any such effect, nor a mechanism by which it could operate. The latter is crucial: people can always cherry-pick data, but science needs to do more than just find statistical effects. It also needs to elucidate HOW things happen. If it can’t, that does suggest a spurious effect.
All I want to see is a picture of the virus Corvid-19.
I am from the old school and I look at scientifically-sound evidence and this evidence has never been provided, even though it’s as easy as taking a sample of patient blood and isolating one of these viruses, in a purified form with its complete genetic material (genome) and virus shell, directly from it, and then imaging it with an electron microscope. Have these critical steps been done with Corvid-19? Have they been done with H5N1(avian flu), the so-called hepatitis C virus, HIV, and numerous other particles that are officially called viruses and depicted as attack-crazy beasts.
I wonder how it can be continually claimed that this or that virus exists and has potential to trigger diseases through contagion. An important aspect in this context is that some time ago, mainstream virus-science left the road of direct observation of nature, and decided to go with so-called indirect “proof” with procedures such as antibody and PCR tests. These methods lead to results which have little or no meaning.
So to accept this, the existence of this so-called “killer virus” CORVID-19 must first be proven based on the scientifically sound evidence as indicated above.
Though Chivers offered some qualifications at publication time, I think he would want to revise his coverage of The Lancet study, which has come under extreme scrutiny. https://www.tctmd.com/news/…
.and this guy’s a science writer?…really? This article is a mass of misinformation, half truths, and just plain damn lies. I can only question his allegiances. It certainly isn’t truth, that’s for sure.
The article provides evidence. You do not. Why should we believe you?