Covid-19 had us all fooled, but now we might have finally found its secret | Hacker News Reader

Covid-19 had us all fooled, but now we might have finally found its secret

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18 pointsg3e037 comments

I tried googling the author's username and found this:

https://thedonald.win/p/4FWoXTT/so-why-are-we-being-whipped-...

"It escaped the Wuhan BL4 facility and was likely a bug/bio weapon Chinese were working on in that facility using our tax & trade deficit dollars"

Seems a reliable source!

EDIT: Also from the user's post history:

"I'm not an academic so fuck all that citation waste of time"

I'm surprised you didn't just call the author a racist or some other slander. If you wish to debunk his theory, by all means do so. Use research and make your points. Attacking his character and accusing him of a conspiracy theory is not very convincing to those of us who use critical thinking.

The top OP has zero sources and then says "fuck all those citation [sic]."

OP above you is merely revealing this non-reliability.

Top OP might be correct but zero sources makes me immediately question every single argument. Dude can't be bothered to name ONE SOURCE! One! A paper. A Person. An organization....anything. Nope! Nada. Zilch.

It seems that your problem is with the content of the article, not the lack of sources. Would you be objecting to the article if it said the drug was ineffective? Doubtful.

Yes, we would be doubting everything the article said when it was an argument cast by a lunatic spouting numerous other conspiracy theories like Covid-19 is a bioengineered virus that escaped a bioresearch lab.

I'm with "Be aware that the author has low trust factor and may have put the piece together from other sources without having a clue what he was writing about." until I see credentials.

http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2020/04/05/wuhan-f...

"All that hilariously misguided and counterproductive criticism the media piled on chloroquine (purely for political reasons) as a viable treatment will now go down as the biggest Fake News blunder to rule them all. The media actively engaged their activism to fight ‘bad orange man’ at the cost of thousands of lives. Shame on them."

The media critique part reads more like a political rant than scientific discourse.

Never mind the author's credentials, there isn't even any citation for the statements of fact, particularly the premise of the essay, that the mechanism causing death has been misidentified.

> [The evidence is] not only piling up but now leading to a general field-level consensus backed up by a few previously little-known studies that we’ve had it all wrong the whole time.

Pardon my French, but name the studies or GTFO.

If his methodology is not on point, his hypothesis should be waaaay off point, and very easy to debunk.

If that is the case, why are you attacking his lack of credentials and politics instead of his hypothesis?

edit: here is an actual paper saying the same thing the medium post is

https://chemrxiv.org/ndownloader/files/22129965

Thank you for your argument... Seems we are losing our freedom of speech and expression...

Why not get your information from someone who cites their sources correctly instead of a crank who doesn't and mixes conspiracy theories in for good measure?

linked an academic paper... 33 citations... every actual MD I've shared it with has responded with something along the lines of "very interesting" or "compelling" or "explains what some of the nurses are seeing"

if a crank takes the theory of relativity to heart, does that invalidate it?

strong pedants aren't necessarily strong thinkers

This is more hearsay to lend support to a crank conspiracy theorist.

Yes, we can not have a discussion spawned from a crank conspiracy theorist about general relativity even if his ideas are sound.

> if a crank takes the theory of relativity to heart, does that invalidate it?

Absolutely not. Reread my comment. There are experts who describe the theory of relativity and link to papers supporting it. It is far better to link to articles from those experts than to articles from cranks who happen to get relativity correct but intersperse their articles with conspiracy theories.

A Flat Earther might write an article about geometry where the geometry is valid and then mix in unsubstantiated claims about the shape of the Earth. Would you say that is a good article about geometry? No. You would link to an article about geometry that sticks to just the facts.

"Why not get YOUR information from..."

I got my information from the academic article (https://chemrxiv.org/ndownloader/files/22129965). Then I saw this submission on HN that I felt was an OK summary of it. Then I saw your ilk flag it.

An interesting hypothesis is an interesting hypothesis--even when it does not come from our pill-pushing, astroturfing, tell-us-more-about-harry-and-meghan-while-the-bombs-are-falling mainstream media.

Nobody here is advocating upvoting articles about Harry and Meghan. Your error in reasoning is almost as bad as saying we shouldn't upvote Medium articles at all because a lot of articles on Medium are about frivolous hobbies.

You are advocating upvoting articles from blithering conspiracy theorists just because part of the article has something that is based in science. You should have just submitted the actual science article instead.

How about responding to the words I wrote instead of the ones you imagined? I did not advocate "upvoting articles from blithering conspiracy theorists."

I have advocated two things:

1. Not flagging/censoring/de-platforming people for their screwy opinions. Most people aren't stupid, and can assess statements well enough without your assistance. If you downvoted him because you disagree, great! That's what votes are for. However, flagging this is an abuse. His synopsis was mostly consistent with the research, and there was nothing uncivil in his "blithering."

2. If an idea is incorrect, attack the idea, not the person. Going after the guy's politics and his (lack of) credentials is just a lazy, thinly-veiled, ad hominem when the idea is of an objective nature.

And if you are going to ding him on credentials (not that you should), what exactly are yours?

Where did I ding him on credentials or politics, and where did I say that the post should be flagged?

I just said that it's a low quality article. There are many high quality articles on hydroxychloroquine with azithromycin treatment (https://lmgtfy.com/?q=hydroxychloroquine+azithromycin), some of which discuss additional treatments that are also undergoing testing based on the blood disease hypothesis, so there is no reason to upvote this one.

A family member is a nurse treating these patients at the hospital. She was relating how the blood of covid patients has a very different color. It is very dark. Is that related to this?

EDIT: She also noted that many of the patients were breathing fine, but their pulse ox would just drop and drop.

EDIT2: really? downvotes for asking a questions and seeking info?

I am not a doctor, but if true, that sounds completely consistent with this hypothesis (deoxygenated blood is darker, and being able to breathe won't help if your hemoglobin can't carry oxygen)

I would be fascinated to hear their take on this article.

I read this the other day (before it got blocked on Medium) and to my layman eyes it sounded plausible.

But I'm not a medical researcher and this is not medical research- it's more of a guess.

I'm looking forward to some expert comments here on whether this theory has any basis in reality.

This modern tendency to purge instead of rebut is very disturbing.

If the man is talking nonsense, it should be easy to refute him. It would also serve as a great "teaching moment" to help everyone sharpen their BS detectors.

To use an overused term, it's "cancel culture" in full swing.

It's not easy to refute when there are 10000x as many uneducated people as there are actual scientists who could be trusted to refute it.

This is how online communities work. Small number of moderators fighting off an endless stream of BS.

We can't encourage discussion on life or death matters when they are shared without even citing a single source! There is no debate, just emotional pandering.

>I read this the other day (before it got blocked on Medium)

Do you have a link you can share about medium blocking it? thanks!

https://medium.com/@agaiziunas/covid-19-had-us-all-fooled-bu...

I took care of a gentleman the other day in the icu and this seems plausible but am also cautious as he was the first young man I took care of who had(?) to be intubated due to a drop in SAO2 from little activity ....his recovery was very slow but he also didn’t appear to be in distress the way I thought he would. The doctors are proactively incubating to prevent an emergent or urgent intubation. I questioned as I would normally being an icu nurse. This information presented is interesting although there is no author or scientific data. 🧐

this aligns with the story as well. I cannot fathom why, when lives are on the line and the medical community does not have a sure-fire solution, that anyone would be so crass to shut down civil questions and speech. If you disagree, disagree, but don't downvote reasonable responses.

https://nypost.com/2020/04/06/nyc-doctor-says-coronavirus-ve...

https://www.the-hospitalist.org/hospitalist/article/220301/c...

Based on this paper. There seems to be merit to the argument.

Essentially these researchers claim that they modeled the corona virus surface proteins and found that they will bind to hemoglobin and cause it to release the iron atom - making it non-functional. This leads to the other symptoms of COVID-19. Given the severity of the outbreak it is certainly a hypothesis that others should test to validate or discredit. But based on scientific analysis, not just twitter snarking.

https://chemrxiv.org/articles/COVID-19_Disease_ORF8_and_Surf...

I am not a doctor... I am just a regular person who doesn’t understand why articles and posts similar to this including videos on YouTube, Facebook and other places are being removed.

I found this to be an interesting article and true or false Doesn’t it fall under the Freedom of Speech... I sent this link to several people I know that are in the medical industry one of which is a brilliant doctor on the front lines saving lives at NCH hospital in Naples Florida... but before she sees it it is no longer available...

I track this to this thread and see everyone debating everything from politics to science... yet why was this removed I. The first place? I’m sorry but when my mother raised me she was adamant about the point that we could say anything we wanted to anyone that we wanted and as long as it didn’t hurt anybody we were free to do so… Now I’m finding it very disturbing situation where information that I felt was important and needed to be looked at by people that I needed to trust to tell me if it was correct or not etc. etc. now it’s gone and I come to this group debating… And thank goodness I found out about this.

I understand and mostly agree with your concern about the censorship of messages these outlets disagree with. I must point out that while unethical, it is not a freedom of speech issue. The constitutional right to freedom of speech is in relationship to the government only. If Medium and other platforms were a government run then you would be correct. Thankfully, they are not. Pressure put on the censoring by platforms by you and I is the only way to change their mode of operation.

This was removed because it was half-conspiracy and half-maybe-useful. In any case you can't encourage people to "share and debate" half-biased articles.

Share the actual studies! Debate those. Don't encourage the very armchair scientists the author derides in his article.... The author of the article is one too!

You don't go to your friend and open a debate about how you should treat your cancer, you go to your doctor and start the conversation there.

You can read it at https://archive.is/ONUmi#selection-273.62-273.143

This is totally incorrect. First, the MOA of hydroxychloroquinoline (HCQ) in malaria is completely incorrect. It works through lysosomal function regarding the presentation of antigens to the immune system. Secondly, Covid-19 is not a DNA virus but an RNA virus, DNA is not involved nor is an interaction with hemoglobin involved in the anti-malaria activity of HCQ. There is nothing in the scientific/medical lit as of today about any interaction with hemoglobin and covid-19, nor any reason to think HCQ would interfere in such process. (WKJ, Professor of Pharmacology)

I believe this paper qualifies as scientific/medical lit:

COVID-19: Attacks the 1-Beta Chain of Hemoglobin and Captures the Porphyrin to Inhibit Human Heme Metabolism SOURCE: https://chemrxiv.org/articles/COVID-19_Disease_ORF8_and_Surf...

Let’s hope this is accurate! If we have a straightforward way to cope with dropping O2 values in blood, this is great.

Not sure of the OP’s credentials but this has been discussed often in /r/COVID19 and has some truth to it

https://nypost.com/2020/04/06/nyc-doctor-says-coronavirus-ve...

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