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Rational CoViD-19 Discussion Thread: Science vs. Politics

When I was oh twenty two years old, I worked in a research lab practically around the clock, and used a Merck index for a pillow as I slumped onto the desk....

I read every damn entry, and observed that every chemical in the most complete chemical index, done by Germans, was also in the Merck. I still believe that no chemical known to man has not been hustled by our Medical hoaxsters as a cure for something..... or as a cure for everything we can imagine, for that matter. Some of the longest, most extensive runs were the ones listing Arsenic in some compound.

As I see it, OB sincerely believes that Big Insurance is somehow a counterweight to Big Pharma or Big Care. I see no balancing going on but the uniform fleecing of the patients all around, just as it is with Big Tax and Spend Government.

This is a case of wolves meeting in the cloakrooms of Congress deciding what to do for more money all around, what to have for dinner, so to speak.

Did you never think twice how a Pelosi can pull a out a two Trillion dollar package deal over a weekend? She's got every political interest angle in her pocket, and they write jup proposals for her, and with a wink and a nod, she gives them everything they can dream of. And with the media howling at his heels, Trump just signs it to get what he's told is needed for the Pandemic, at about ten cents on the dollar.

I know Huntsman, the UT gov who cut a deal with NV Reid to drain the groundwater of western Utah, got his call from Obama to be the ambassador to China, and then from Trump to be ambassador to Russia, from corrupt actions in line with Joe Bidens payola scams that have fleeced Americans of everything they have, and now their jobs and liberties as well. Romney is just as corrupt, but he will not be touched because, like Huntsman, he's in on the deal.

So while I'm not set to swallow every pill hawked by the modern medicine men, and I'll also think it over before pouring any chemical down my gullet..... considering it's like pouring salt into a gas tank, I will look at the reports and claims being made.


There is no reason we should have an FDA doing long studies on medicines, having personnel rotating between big cartel corporates and the supposed gov regulators. The government..... especially our Congress..... but not leaving out our courts, our Senate, our Pres (and the Executive Branch goliath elites....the SESers, or our State or any other political contrivance, that has power to regulate what a person does with chemicals, in any health crisis. I'm just enough Darwinist I really believe we need to thin the herd......

But my criteria for thinning the herd is to let people make their own decisions. Far less people die from their own decisions than die from governance, however elite, however expert, however experienced.

If anyone has anything they think, or believe, to say about a health choice, by all means, I believe in free speech and free choice.

As I said above, Insurance companies can set their criteria for treatment of insured risks, and that is entirely the right place to start when dealing with health questions. Probably because their bottom line still has at least a little dependence on the insured doing the best thing we can know. Use a treatment off thei insurers policy if you want, at your own risk.

quinine, chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine were all in the Merck, and off-patent for a decade, in 1975. Not something I'd use for seasoning or supplement in everyday life, for sure.

It's not curative in malaria, just beneficial. People with malaria will use it probably many times over a few seasons. With Lupus and inflammatory rheumatism, it's not something you take once and are cured, either. It's something that helps maintain a tolerable life for a while.

Tamiflu might be as effective in corona virus, and some of the other new-fangled patentable treatments.

I will want to see any stats on the incidence of Covid with people who have been on HCQ, or anything else for that matter. Anything whose action is exerted somehow on stimulating the immune system will not be a "cure" directly. If your immune system, or your basic health, is shot already, you will be a negative in the statistics.
 
So we now have reach 2M reported/claimed Covid cases worldwide, with 0.5 M "recovered", and 0.125 M deaths. In the USA we have now tested over 3M people, with almost all "serious" cases or symptomatic cases having been among the 3M tests. I have heard reports from heavily impacted areas that the antibody tests, now being done, score about 10% positive. These tests, in fact diagnostic tests, are being prioritized in the heavily impacted areas, so here in Utah we are getting our share because we make the tests here, I believe. IHC and the UofU hospital have just that much connection to ARUP.

20% of caregivers now test positive with the antibody.

What I see in these numbers is that we have overstated the %symptomatic population systematically. Although we have tested only 3M, less than 1%, we likely have perhaps as much as 5% overall who are now immune and beyond risk, and maybe as many as 5M others who are not showing the antibodies but have the virus and can spread it. If we were not hunkering down, we would have had nearly the original predicted cases and deaths, and seriously affected lungers needing oxygen assistance the rest of their lives.

I think, un-mitigated, we would have had nearly 6M symptomatic cases in the USA, with maybe 200K deaths. I think that we have crossed the peak now, and that our treatment has greatly improved, and we'll be saving most patients, except the marginal death's doorstep cases who wouldn't died anyway this year.

The political fallout will be quarreled over for decades. My opinion is that the officious sticklers for not trying hopeful remedies until they are studied are costing us almost all our losses now.
 
I suppose we are all......humans..... but maybe not cats or dogs or cows...… lost in our own conceits.

I theorize that the higher the capacity for abstraction, the more susceptible to delusion.....

Indeed. The The smartest people are the most vulnerable to intellectual hubris.
 
Weed!


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You are in fact absolutely correct here. And why have you been hiding your credentials as a Ph. D. in Medicinal Chemistry. CBD oil probably does in fact explain why in Washington State there was absolutely no exponential conflagration of the disease, and for California's fairly tepid outbreak.

We need to do a double blind 1000 patient each in five clinical cohorts to determine just how effective weed is on Covid. I bet you could get some liberals to voting to fund..... and participate in, this epic test.

BTW, ethanol in the levels I believe you use, should absolutely kill any Covid you catch. (j/k)

I wonder if we could recruit any volunteer capitalist home brewers we know to help in our new business.... a home brew named "Covid Proof"

Other friends of mine have been exhilarated when I told them the cure for Covid was two or three daily sessions in a well-chlorinated jacuzzi.

disclaimer.... Covid is, scientifically proven as a Corona virus, to be killed by solvents like ethanol and oxidizing chemicals like chlorine.

THC and CBC..... I'd have to study up, or consult my weed scholar friend, who moved outta state and got married. So probably I'd better just study up.
 
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A research paper (not peer reviewed) was released yesterday on the benefits of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.10.20060558v1

No direct benefit and more side effects (though mostly mild).

Looks like it has an ancillary benefit as an anti-inflammatory - as we all know there are other more proven traditional treatments for that condition.

So the preprint didn't show the data.

As I understand it, HCQ dosage was pretty much about 3X the dosage used in other, more positive reports(anecdotal, still), and pretty much did not include some of the measures really needed to "see" the effect most often attributed to HCQ. Anti-inflammatory effects are in Covid one of the leading effects needed to treat the patient in ARDS condition. There were other things being used, which could rationally be expect to mask the HCQ effect..... doing the same job in one respect, and saving the patient's life and reducing the ravages of the virus.

The thinking about HCQ which most "advocates" or positive claimants are yowling about is the effect of opening the Zn transport, which with the zinc supplement, exerts antiaviral effects. This study is not relevant to that claim.
 
So the stats on worlometer today worldwide show a 4% rate increase day-to-day, with closing cases +20%. (80k new cases, 25k closed).

Trump today said Abbot Labs.... and others.... are now producing the antibody tests (ELISA tests like I used to create in my lab work) which will be prodigiously available soon.... some 30M. This was my big question, why weren't we geared up to produce millions of tests like this within one week of knowing we needed them. All the reagents on hand, test kits, everything but the antigen or antibody needed to activate the color reaction. That should have been something the CDC had already done for use in any viral or bacterial pandemic) Less than a billion dollars, and we could have had it in January.

This test will radically change our options. As soon as we have these tests, we can go back to work full time.

And as rabidly "conservative" as I am, I note that countries that used cell phone tracking and alerts to nearby cell phones really shut it down fast..... identify. isolate. treat. done. The idea of Google or Facebook helping track and alert their customers ought to be viewed as a public service. Every new case, new positive, could be quickly tracked and all the exposed people located and tested.
 
On the medicinal chemistry front..... there are quite a few candidate treatment substances noted for immunomodulatory/stimulating effects. Such things are not properly understood as "cures" but as modes of specific assistance to the patients' immune systems. Some are known mostly for subduing an overactive damaging autoimmune disease, others are known for strengthening the patients' immune systems. The big thing with ARDS patients suffering Covid in the alveoli is the infection, the cytokines, the spreading of toxic materials via the blood to other vital organs. I have read some speculative observations of HCQ calming these processes and preventing death from toxic shock or organ failure. It would take a very good clinician to evaluate this subset of the Covid patients. Pretty sure just massing all the patients would mask and prevent clearly identifying this beneficial action.

Most importantly, early detection and early treatment is likely what we should go for as a means for opening up our economies.
 
Picking up with @One Brow on his point about his belief in the objective science produced in university research. It is my belief that almost all "chairs" of university disciplinary departments involved in any way with medicine have been endowed and with continuing granting from corporate players in pharmaceutical, or any other medical provider imaginable, including artificial products replacing natural human anatomical functions. Corporates give their money for consideration, and essentially buy a "favorable press". Our medical establishment is ingrown, inbred, and dysfunctional generally. This includes the publications we respect most, the important and esteemed journals.

When I worked for, for example, one of the board members of JAMA, I had a close look at the process of peer review. I was sorta like a Court clerk doing the footwork and getting the materials in order for the professor to efficiently study...… I studied it all. I never got fired from that job, well, or any job at all, but I saw how the business was done and kept my mouth shut.... Still, since it's all we have really, to rely on, everybody has to rely on it.....

I like to get off the beaten track and look for the lone voices crying in the wilderness..... crackpots mostly, I know..... but to give them the same chance to be heard, at least in my own mind, and try to understand what, if anything, they have to offer.

I do believe it is wrong, and unscientific, to bestow reflexive credulity on peer reviewed articles..... You really have to get closer to the issue than that, and do some thinking beyond the context, out of the box, to get a better understanding than the bought-and-paid-for Press.

Besides, when I was sitting in or graduate seminars, it was the fashion to really question the lecturer and his results.

But, honestly, it just isn't done in that society, to bite the hand that feeds you.
 
Picking up with @One Brow on his point about his belief in the objective science produced in university research. It is my belief that almost all "chairs" of university disciplinary departments involved in any way with medicine have been endowed and with continuing granting from corporate players in pharmaceutical, or any other medical provider imaginable, including artificial products replacing natural human anatomical functions.

It is a relatively inexpensive way of getting test subjects in a rigorously controlled experiment. Both corporations and the government use it, and more funding comes from teh government than from corporations.

Corporates give their money for consideration, and essentially buy a "favorable press". Our medical establishment is ingrown, inbred, and dysfunctional generally. This includes the publications we respect most, the important and esteemed journals.

They are buy resources to recruit patients, pay patients directly, monitor patients, and perform statistics. They also buy the right to publish or bury a study. We don't do publicity for corporate studies.

I do believe it is wrong, and unscientific, to bestow reflexive credulity on peer reviewed articles.....

I agree.
 
In my opinion, the research on a lot of unpatentable "remedies" is done to diss the cheap competition for patented, advertised, and legally-protected prescriptive products.

If anyone goes wild..... and touts something for anything..... the FDA is there to shut them down. The FDA does not do any studies on such remedies claimed by non-players, by "Outsiders" who are not thoroughly in bed with the revolving door culture. Certainly, not objective studies. We just don't fund such studies, period.

I get a bit @Eenie-Meenie here, maybe off the rails in the view of staunch Establishmentarians like the bulk of JFC hardcore progressives, but people just need to be free. Today we need some kind of Underground Railroad to Choice in Medical Care. The Right to Life, the Right to Medical Choice, the Right to Competitive, pre-purchase Medical Shopping. I do think people will benefit a lot from the emerging resources online for medical information or even consultation.

There are a lot of products that are believed by some to be helpful somehow, where the benefit, if real, comes from a complex natural set of circumstances. A bit off-topic, but lets look at Chlorophyll. There are variant chlorophylls and variant complex chloroplast factors. Photosynthesis is not a simple reaction with just Chlorophyll, Magnesium, and Sunlight. There are whole assemblages of factors localized around the Chlorophyll that capture, and transfer, energy the Chlorophyll molecule just can't get. I think it is like that with many "natural remedies", or close analogs of a natural effective substance, like hydroxychloroquine is to quinine. Our scientists take a natural remedy, and look for something close to it that works better, but we hardly know how to isolate all the relevant cofactors, or create in the lab the complete circumstantial conditions needed.

Our system for testing a drug in a living being is vastly inadequate because mostly we don't really know how, or can't afford, to do the testing in the right way. In Vitro trials, Petri dishes or culture bottles, are one way to check, efficiently, a whole lot of things that seem promising.

In vivo tests are the next thing to do.... in free living organisms. Hundreds of thousands of dollars for every study, and that's cheap.

Then there are the various stages of clinical trials.

Nobody is just gonna spend that kind of money on an unpatentable prospect, available from natural sources or cheap to make, that any enterprising fellow with a tank and some commercially available reactants can make under a coconut tree...... And that is why hydroxychloroquine doesn't have a lot more studies in the books, in the journals. Until now.
 
You are in fact absolutely correct here. And why have you been hiding your credentials as a Ph. D. in Medicinal Chemistry. CBD oil probably does in fact explain why in Washington State there was absolutely no exponential conflagration of the disease, and for California's fairly tepid outbreak.

We need to do a double blind 1000 patient each in five clinical cohorts to determine just how effective weed is on Covid. I bet you could get some liberals to voting to fund..... and participate in, this epic test.

BTW, ethanol in the levels I believe you use, should absolutely kill any Covid you catch. (j/k)

I wonder if we could recruit any volunteer capitalist home brewers we know to help in our new business.... a home brew named "Covid Proof"

Other friends of mine have been exhilarated when I told them the cure for Covid was two or three daily sessions in a well-chlorinated jacuzzi.

disclaimer.... Covid is, scientifically proven as a Corona virus, to be killed by solvents like ethanol and oxidizing chemicals like chlorine.

THC and CBC..... I'd have to study up, or consult my weed scholar friend, who moved outta state and got married. So probably I'd better just study up.
You make a lot of assumptions about what other people consume and in what quantities.
 
In my opinion, the research on a lot of unpatentable "remedies" is done to diss the cheap competition for patented, advertised, and legally-protected prescriptive products.

You're ignoring the patent process. If the protocol worked, one of the big Pharma companies cold patent a combination of HCQ and some other drug that had not been patented before. While hospitals might not buy it, they could sell it to pharmacies and get doctors to prescribe it, then cash in. They do this all the time with medications whose patents are about to expire.
 
You're ignoring the patent process. If the protocol worked, one of the big Pharma companies cold patent a combination of HCQ and some other drug that had not been patented before. While hospitals might not buy it, they could sell it to pharmacies and get doctors to prescribe it, then cash in. They do this all the time with medications whose patents are about to expire.
I don’t think this setting by lends very well to this strategy, though, as the combo would have to have an FDA indication (or the two individually would need indications, like with Janumet or lisinopril-HCTZ) and all the other combo meds make money because they’re chronic meds. But for every Janumet and lisinopril-HCTZ, you’ve got dumbass meds like Symbyax (which I question if anyone has ever really prescribed). Of course, perhaps in a primary care realm where there are so many meds that you may not look at cost as much those things can be prescribed more frequently (relatively), but often the insurance is going to spit it back and require a prior authorization, or the patient calls from the pharmacy when they find out it’s going to cost $300.

The real money is in unique medications. And chronic meds. There’s no money in short-duration meds, which is why you don’t see a ton of development in antibiotics relative to everything else.
 
You make a lot of assumptions about what other people consume and in what quantities.

I assume nothing.

what I do is try to tease some of the JFC folks who need to learn to laugh at themselves, just a little.

I made a science project outta brewing alcohol once upon a time, and then distilled it. I have always used absolute ethanol when called for in my lab procedure. You know, the stuff that comes with the Utah State tax seal. My most revered great grandfather did some fine wines from grapes, and one of my other great grandfathers, and several generations before him, kept a fine pub in London, about a block from Parliament, that was known as the Pub. As in the place.

I love grapes, and grape juice. I have developed my own variety of concord grapes that does well in Salt Lake City. I can't eat them all, some get pretty ripe. Like in December, I'm still picking grapes off the vines, whuile the leaves are almost completely brown and gone. I think they get about as good as beer.

Who knows, maybe I'll develop my own little niche brewery. Pretty sure Jesus didn't drink orange juice.

But to your point, there was a bit of chatter between two or three of the JFC folks, and it has long been know that you sometimes do a brew of your own.

Someone, at the outbreak of the Covid Panic, remarked to Fish to be careful not to drink too much. Now, as a matter of fact, for all I know, Fish is a Mormon choir boy who has never tasted a drop of alcohol, and who never will. But when the subject is how to be safe from Covid, or other Corona viruses, what is known is that they have, under their glycoproteind arms, a lipid membrane, almost like a cell has, and the glycoprotein arm has a little hook at the end, sorta nestled iin a shallow cup of more stable protein, of some lipophilic amino acids. Because of the lipid surfaces, Corona viruses generally have pretty good "binding coefficients", meaning they stick pretty tightd to cell membranes, and sorta suck themselves inside by rearranging the cell membrane around the virus.

Alcohol, at stdrengths good enough to affect a neuron, will kill a corona virus...…. Not entirely sure just what that graph would look like, but pretty sure it would be on that scale. So people who dreink pretty good might be protecting themselves from Covid.

I have not done the experiment in a research setting, so this is just anecdotal, OK.

My father used to swear by the antiviral properties of red grapes. So do I.

I believe that our statistics for THE GREAT COVID PANIC of 2020, Americans, while staying at home took up drinking alcohol, almost doubled the normal consumption. And it is my understanding that all my friends in California were delighted with my advice. Do a well-chlorinarted Jacussi session three times a day, with plenty of wine.

We should do a study to see if heavy drinkers still caught Covid, I suppose.

Until then, please understand that I love to tell stories, and all my evidence is anecdotal, and I sincerely believed some good drinking would wash the Covid down almost as good as soap, while tasting a whole lot better.
 
You're ignoring the patent process. If the protocol worked, one of the big Pharma companies cold patent a combination of HCQ and some other drug that had not been patented before. While hospitals might not buy it, they could sell it to pharmacies and get doctors to prescribe it, then cash in. They do this all the time with medications whose patents are about to expire.

In my experience, I have learned to ignore the patent process. When you're trying to fly a kite, stay away from the airport takeoff/landing areas just off the runway. A small business lacking the moolah to hire a top tier law firm to defend a patent, is often better off flying low, off the radar, and way outta the way of the big birds.

If you don't have such legal help, and the moolah it takes to feed them, a patent is virtually an advertisement that reads something like..... Here's a gold mine. Just kick me, and it's yours.

In my own mind, I was looking at HCQ as a remedy that has been patented, somewhere, sometime, across 100 years or so, for every malady ever imagined by our most dedicated hypochondriacs across five generations.....

Besides, it is about as simple as aspirin, maybe even easier to make. You could look it up in Beilstein. Pretty sure the German chemists have several synthesis schema, involving about two steps from benzene. But why the hell even start there, lots of better starting points refined outta crude oil by the ton, or practically the price of diesel fuel or jet fuel

I thjink it would be one step if you started with vanilla.

It takes years to get a patent approved. I don't think anyone wants to do that.
 
Here's the latest Covid charts from Worldometer. Pretty sure the data is being distorted on purpose now. Way too slow calling a patient recovered, way too heavy calling the symptoms "Covid", and labeling deaths as due to Covid.

I think the reality is now that we have, the world over, about half the active cases, and about half the deaths properly attributed.

I mean, I really get tired of being worked about something when it takes abject falsification to make the case.

But who the hell am I?

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

OK. Here's my reasoning. Most infective carriers of Covid have a run of maybe ten days being capable of passing the virus, less than 14 is pretty much 99% of the cases. Given it takes about two or three days to establish itself in any noticeable degree, and that a good immune defense will show up a few days later, and the illness is almost always over in two weeks, except for the ARDS subset... Most of them, 80%, die in f few days even on the breathing assistance.

This site isn't calling a case "closed" until a month is run, unless the patient dies. The US doctors are required to report every case with any sign of Covid, a covid death. I mean, you're rushed to the hospital with a heart attack and die with the defibrillator, but you had a temp of 101 F. Damnit, it was Covid that caused it all.

Somehow, also, the flu season ended suddenly this year when we discovered the new virus. No more flu deaths since Feb. 1. Do me a favor. look it up.
 
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