Ultraviolet Irradiation of Blood: “The Cure That Time Forgot”? (2018)
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
It is incredibly strange and scary to me that not everyone is on the same page here. If you want to be generous you could say that the president was fatigued and had a 'brain fart' conflating the two. But this wasn't an issue with being articulate or not, or off the cuff or not, or how prescriptive he was. The man clearly thought that disinfecting surfaces relates to treating people. I find it terrifying that our leader could make such a mistake, especially at this stage of the pandemic.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/494519-trump-say...
'It was just a joke, bro' has to be the lamest excuse.
As an european citizen, I find it terrifying that the leader who is responsible for preserving NATO, and thus is the guardian of the Free World, shows such a poor lack of judgement.
https://www.mediaite.com/news/trump-claims-his-comments-on-i...
The man showcased profound misunderstanding, but he didn't prescribe lysol injections.
“I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute! And is there a way we can do something by an injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs... so it’d be interesting to check that.”
How are you going to check that injecting disinfectant into people won’t work against COVID-19 without injecting disinfectant into people?
He didn’t prescribe Lysol injections because he’s not a medical doctor and therefore not allowed to prescribe anything to anyone.
[1] https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nyc-poison-control-cal...
I've also got to admit (at the risk of getting caught up in all of these political posts) that I find it strange that the parent article is on the front page. When I read the title (note: I didn't know about the Trump press conference at the time and had to look it up after seeing the comments in this thread) I actual thought to myself: "that sounds like a quack cure, you can't disinfect blood". Interestingly there does seem to be some effectiveness to the therapy, although for different reasons than disinfection.
Now that I know the political connection, however, what is upsetting to me is that the reason this post appears to be on the front page isn't because of some genuine evidence based interest in this therapy option, but instead to cover for the president's strange assertions about sterilizing blood. This includes quotes such as using "tremendous ultraviolet" or "just very powerful light" inside the body to kill the virus. It's the selective focus on the this one section of a speech that verbatim included advocacy for taking disinfectants internally (again, regardless of intention that's how people read it).
Research doesn't mean pulling out the one article that supports what you want to believe. It means putting in the time and effort to understand the ensemble of views on a subject and it's pretty clear that this UV therapy, although interesting, is some far out on left field technique. Even though it has some some efficacy, just as stuff like acupuncture and chiropractic therapy is evidence based, it's use for something like Covid-19 seems questionable.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-us-canada-52411706
[3] https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...
[4] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/trump-my-idea-to-inj...
[1] https://health.wusf.usf.edu/post/despite-skeptics-alternativ...
In that way it's good that submissions only contain the article URLs, as the merit of the article is discussed, not the submission.
When I was teaching 1st graders about programming, I had to simplify many concepts and using physical objects to explain abstract ideas.
Look at how he talks about the wall on the Southern border. I cannot say for certain what was meant here.
Its really hard to know what the intent is without being able to read someone's mind.
Also, in a crisis situation like this, it is deeply irresponsible to be even slightly confusing.
And now, we have this: https://twitter.com/MDMEMA/status/1253721510570844162
They're saying that the benefits are not due to any germicidal effects, but in response to the oxidative stress it imposes, which is generally considered to be detrimental at higher levels.
To put it perhaps over-simply, it exercises the blood.
Unclear how large of an effect is has, probably less than removing blood and irradiating it, since that process doesn’t have to balance against eye damage.
However I think the major difference is going to be the intensity of the dose. Cells get through the retina and sclera pretty quickly, less then a second, and UV from sunlight isn't actually that intense on the ground (3mW/cm^2 [0]). Dosing in the paper ranges from .1W/cm^ to 200W/cm^2 for anywhere from 10 seconds to 30 minutes. In the minimum case this is ~5 orders of magnitude more UV.
On a side note, I really dislike the default layout of NIH reports. I always have to pick the classic or PDF to be able to read them.
[0] - https://ag.tennessee.edu/solar/Pages/What%20Is%20Solar%20Ene...
"Vitamin D deficiency is worldwide a prevalent health problem and has health impacts on about one billion people. Deficiency or insuffciency of vitamin D is common in the US population, mainly because of inadequate dietary intake, sedentary lifestyles, and reduced sun exposure"
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292995237_Vitamin_D...
and similar conclusions in many other academic publications.
Useless for stuff that lives in the tissues, like SARS-CoV-2. Tough to irradiate the lungs.
The blood isn't just red blood cells and water. It's filled with proteins, other types of cells, antibodies, and myriad of things - many of which we don't even understand yet.
It appears to boost the immune system, and the blood carries the immune system to every part of the body, including the lungs.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-suggests...
“ Is low dose radiation therapy a potential treatment for COVID-19 pneumonia?” — https://www.thegreenjournal.com/article/S0167-8140(20)30185-...
“ It was not uncommon in the early twentieth century to treat pneumonia with x-rays. A review showed low doses from kilovoltage x-rays reduced pneumonia mortality from roughly 30 percent to 10 percent on average.”
"Many people therefore assume that UBI must act by killing pathogens (bacteria, viruses or other microorganisms) circulating in the bloodstream. However there is no evidence that this is actually the case."
The benefits are then ascribed to homesis, much like how low-dose ionizing radiation actually seems to benefit the immune system.
(You need to filter your water before it hits the UV light, because if it is eg cloudy or has too many minerals in it, the water treatment salesman tells me, the UV light won't actually do anything.)
It's certainly interesting, but it's gonna be misused as a "see Trump was right!" bludgeon today by people who skip the conclusion ("use for drug-resistant bacterial sepsis").
The context leading up to that phrase puts the treatment in a different light (forgive the pun): "However the use of UBI (Ultraviolet blood irradiation) to treat septicemia cannot be solely due to UV-mediated killing of bacteria in the blood-stream, ...".
And UBI of course needs a machine hooked up to your arteries. It's not shining light in your body.
I collected a lot of papers about this modality and related ones. I can share them if anyone would like. I will not be able to comment on them and I am not a medical professional. Perhaps this was simply the placebo that appealed to me.
But the reason I sought out this treatment is that it is practiced by a doctor who was recommended to me by an MD PhD neurologist at Mayo Clinic. That doctor now does more with ozone gas than he does with ultraviolet blood irradiation. he considers it to be part of a class of "oxidative therapies" including very high doses of vitamin C.
Vielight systemic photobiomodulation technology is hypothesized to boost the immune system and increase blood oxygenation levels."
I'm not involved in coaching or competition. Just curious.
> These observations led to application of UBI in patients suffering from pneumonia. In a series of 75 cases in which the diagnoses of pneumonia were confirmed by X-rays, all patients responded well to UBI showing a rapid decrease in temperature, disappearance of cyanosis (often within 3–5 min), cessation of delirium if present, a marked reduction in pulse rate and a rapid resolution of pulmonary consolidation. A shortening of the time of hospitalizations and accelerated convalescence was regularly observed.
Of course I have no idea how this generalizes to the pneumonia you get from coronavirus...
It's likely there's good reason antibiotics supplanted it.
For starters, coronaviruses are enveloped, and rhinoviruses are naked.
I've received UVA and UVB phototherapies. To treat GVHD. Works great. Last I checked, no one really knows how or why.
UV is totally worth investigating.
It's totally inappropriate (dangerous) for the POTUS to speculate on TV during a pandemic. Especially while actively thwarting or malignecting actual proven useful treatments and mitigations.
Shame on media (and us) for the ongoing attempts to divine a coherent narrative from the blather of a madman.
He is not speculating. Lets face it. He is a crook and a total retard. Idiocracy happend.
This is kinda like saying "sodium is important in the body so it's fine to eat a chunk of it".
A speck of elemental sodium is not dangerous.
A hunk of elemental sodium could be (depending on how you handle it!)
As XKCD points out, a handgun kills cancer cells in vitro. https://xkcd.com/1217/
Unless you live in a hot sunny country or spend a lot of time outdoors in the winter, the chances are good you're somewhat deficient.
But this is easy to check, and easy to fix with supplements.
> In 1801 Johann Wilhelm Ritter, a Polish physicist working at the University of Jena in Germany discovered a form of light beyond the violet end of the spectrum that he called “Chemical Rays” and which later became “Ultraviolet” light
Chemical Rays
It says antibiotics. Is it me or UBI was used to treat bacterial infections or the OP is desperately correlating this study with the “effectiveness” of testing viruses with UBI? I feel like a lot of partisan users are getting the boot from Reddit and they are channeling out their frustrations here. Guys let’s keep HN pure with tech only posts.
"The web-site entitled 'Infections cured' (http://infectionscured.com) is also worth checking out."
1. You'd have to create a bunch of hemo-irradiators (which don't currently exist).
2. You'd have to train perfusionists or nurses to use them.
3. You'd have to place large-bore dialysis-style catheters into patients for the purpose of using these devices.
4. You'd have to have 1:1 RN staffing to use these machines (just like we do for continuous veno-venous hemofiltration devices for renal failure patients in the ICU).
Lots of downstream things to think about beyond just whether the concept is feasible.
Sars-Cov2 is a respiratory disease. I guess it maybe present in blood, but it doesn’t seem like removing it from blood would help with the respiratory issues it causes.
I can’t see how you would easily get UV light into the lungs. But maybe there’s a way... seems a bit far fetched.
So there would be no need to shine UV light directly into the lungs.
Medicine has often found treatments that works without any real understanding of why.
It does directly infects kidney cells, and kidney failure is one common cause of death.
Because of all the additional attention, it would be unsurprising for doctors to seemingly discover all kinds of previously unexamined phenomenon which have always been present, or to confuse increases in certain phenomenon as peculiar rather than simply reflecting the fact that you have a ton of patients with the same type of illness. For example, in one of the articles about blood clots a doctor is quoted as saying something to the effect of, "we're used to seeing these types of blood clots in the ICU, but only in 1 or 2 patients at a time, never in this number". For the sake of argument, maybe that's just because they've never had an entire ICU full of patients in viral-induced acute respiratory distress, that such blood clots happen to be more prevalent in such cases, and if you examined all such ICU patients over time (COVID, flu, w'ever), you'd see a similar pattern. (Because it's usually the elderly who die from respiratory infections, not alot of attention is paid to mechanisms of death. "Pneumonia" is something of a catch-all term, especially with an older cohort.) Maybe it's typical of anything that can incite such immune reactions--the article hinted that the mechanism may be related to how Ebola works, except with opposite outcomes (clots instead of bleeding out), which suggests the mechanism might be more a reflection of the severity of the distress than anything peculiar to the infectious agent, per se. Maybe younger cohorts are more likely to clot, but before COVID-19 they rarely died or had such severe symptoms, so nobody quantified prevalence. And if so, treating the clots might not significantly reduce fatality rates; or maybe it would, not just for COVID-19 but any similar viral ailment.
You could get UV light to the large bronchi but you couldn't get UV light into all the million little aveoli.
Biological systems are almost unimaginably complex. Unintuitive effects are not uncommon.
At least, that's how someone who researched rhinoviruses once explained it to me many years ago, but probably using more accurate terminology.
Also, AFAIU, these viruses have also evolved other exploits. It's no coincidence that cold viruses induce sneezing and other sinus irritations; the viral fragments themselves have evolved to trigger this behavior, which is why it can happen after a live infection is gone--your tissues are still shedding viral fragments.
1. Photopheresis units already exist but would require some modification for whole blood irradiation rather than wbc only.
2. There are (a limited number of) nurses
3. Catheters are routinely placed
4. Most photopheresis units don't have 1:1 staff, but for ICU patients the situation may be different
Re: catheters - agreed that they are routinely placed, but they're morbid and we don't do it unless necessary. Generally we use a different type of catheter for recirculation vs a standard central line, so this probably can't be piggy-backed on what is already going to be placed in the ICU.
So now we have to argue about whether or not a 70-year-old quack treatment from soviet Russia is effective against this current pandemic instead of building consensus on test deployment or lockdown exit protocols. It's the same thing that happened with chloroquines last month. It's tiresome, and harmful.
BRYAN: We’ll get to the right folks who could.
TRUMP: Right. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you’re going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds — it sounds interesting to me.
So we’ll see. But the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute, that’s — that’s pretty powerful."
Technically, you are correct, he didn't say the word "promising". Given that promising has latinate origins, rather than germanic, it's likely not in his vocabulary.
Still hydroxychloroquine ended up killing a bunch of vets, and at least one person credible enough to ingest it directly without medical advice or a prescription.
I applaud your goals of precision, but, stochastic terrorism is real, and the point of communication, especially in such dire circumstances, shouldd not only to be understood, but to make it impossible to be misunderstood.
Clarity and unambiguous language from leaders is literally essential public health.
That was, after all, exactly my point.
Because I don't think injecting hydrogen peroxide, benzalkonium chloride, or isopropyl alcohol is going to have an effect that's any better.
Quibbling over whether or not they meant bleach or some other disinfectant isn't really the point. The point is the President was lending credence to the idea that injecting disinfectant into the human bloodstream might be a good thing to do. Which is absurd, regardless of whether or not he specifically meant bleach, and bleach is a perfectly reasonable stand in.
Bleach was, in fact, the first disinfectant in his list. Then Trump stands up and says we should investigate injecting those into the body.
I really don't think this it's applying a whole lot of spin to argue that Trump was saying we should inject the stuff the guy he was referring to had listed.
FTA. He was very explicitly talking about doing it inside human bodies.
The paper is old, let's see how many news sources will magically remember about it to turn it into a PR stunt.
Why not: Remove whole blood, treat whole blood (possibly in bulk with other patients' bags of blood), replace whole blood.
It would address most of what you list, and otherwise simplify things, especially if only a small % of blood needs to be treated.
Whole blood drawn into a bag as if you were donating, then treated separately (maybe even sent to a lab), and then transfused back into the patient.
The closed loop systems are what create a lot of the complication and expense. ECMO (or similar) definitely doesn't simplify anything.
Wouldn't there be some residual blood with a virus or whatever you want to stop?
Would that actually be easier to do?
Also, "treating" the blood would also destroy red and white blood cells which we need to survive. ...not to mention the 10^6 other proteins, antibodies, and many unknown structures in the blood. ...things we'd be breaking that we don't even know what they do yet.
Which explains why the current administration sees it as a viable treatment.
https://medium.com/@ra.hobday/coronavirus-and-the-sun-a-less...
Given his mention of disinfectants at the same time, it's far more likely they just told him how they disinfect surfaces like doorknobs and countertops and he ran with it.
I imagine most of us have been in technical meetings where people who have no idea about the real problem are speaking as if they are the expert. Its incredibly unproductive, and only slows down making real progress and and getting to a real resolution.
Even if he was right, which he is not, he should let his experts speak about these matters and get out of the way.
He has also been culling any form of dissent from his government, so it’s now essentially an echo chamber.
But then he does things like this that reveal he's actually a bit on the dumb side. I don't think there's any other way to square that.
That's basically what he did during the election. He honed in on the single worst characteristic about the other candidates, "Low Energy Jeb", "Lyin' Ted", "Crooked Hillary", etc. And it worked.
The problem is that he's a salesman, he's not an intellectual. So a lot of the stuff he says is off the cuff and colloquial which is dangerous and unpresidential. He succeeded in business by bullying his opponents and using his power against them by squeezing them. But it's not something that works in politics, because his opponents are generally much smarter than he is.
> But then he does things like this that reveal he's actually a bit on the dumb side.
The second thing is part of the reason he achieved the first thing. His smarts is knowing what sells to his base, and what consolidates them.
Part of that is saying "dumb" or offensive stuff, with a lining of rhetoric that echoes with their anxieties.
Guy is a genius level troll in manipulating people and controlling the message. People didn’t get it in 2016, and they don’t get it now.
We’re in for another 4 years if people focus on whatever he twittered today and not their own message. That’s not an election strategy.
This is a horrible attribute in a president, who constantly has to deal with an array of issues that no one person could ever be expert in.
Whether it's the anti-intellectualist trend that lurks in some segments of the US population, or the way that the Republican party successfully intertwined themselves into American religious institutions several decades ago to make Republican party loyalty be perceived as an odd form of "cultural-Christian" piety by many who were swept up by the "religious Right" and "moral majority" movements, or the straight-up disinformation campaigns targeted at the most willful audiences....not one factor was tied to Trump being a good people leader or an intelligent strategist. It's more that he was the guy that happened to be there when a confluence of other efforts came to fruition, and he was crazy/manipulable/stupid enough to be useful for the role of "candidate".
It is easy to square; it's social class. It's very important to a rather large segment of the country that it feel intellectually superior. He provokes them into talking about how superior they are, and that shores up his base.
One further dynamic.. people in the media and professional classes can be destroyed by using the wrong word or by speculating off-handedly. That is why they flip out when Trump does it. It's partially envy of his freedom.
The board is obviously talking about cleaning your living area/homes but uhhh the president thought otherwise.
Edit: Here is an article with the image: https://www.cnet.com/news/trump-suggests-injecting-disinfect...
I mean even if UBI and/or ozonetherapy don't work at all and are wildly dangerous, at least Trump knew what they were, which makes him smarter than everyone posting about how they don't even know what he's talking about.
There is zero evidence that Trump has any clue UIB exists.
The whole quote:
“ Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it. Supposing you brought the light inside of the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. And is there a way we can do something, by an injection inside or almost a cleaning? It would be interesting to check that. That you’re gonna have to use medical doctors with.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-suggests...
I can guarantee their comms department spent a long time looking at his speech and the fallout from it before deciding that they had to issue this to prevent people from dying.
https://www.rb.com/media/news/2020/april/improper-use-of-dis...
In the video linked you can see that he clearly mentioned "disinfectant" then suggested injecting it. There's no other way to spin that.
To be fair to the inarticulate speaker: evidence for the efficacy of chloroquines, sparse and vague though it may have been, was very much more convincing than this stuff. Chloroquines are existing drugs with a long history and a reasonably well understood mechanism of action.
This thing is pure experimental medicine. It wasn't practical at the time, didn't survive as a treatment, and everyone involved in the original research is retired or dead. That doesn't make it wrong, but this is a long way from being ready even for a study.
Almost as if he's using his "inside" voice on the outside - taking "thinking out loud" to a whole new level.
It's very weird for a person in his position, and I'm surprised so many support him (to the point of fanaticism) over in the US. It's like their egos are too deeply invested for them to cut their losses now. Whatever his supporters might say, the guy's a bit of a joke to us here in the UK.
Also, this fails to explain the _disinfectant_.
That didn't prevent the rabid anti-Trump media from making it a headline on every site, of course. Which then becomes:
"Trump says inject Lysol!"
Can you please point out the timestamp when Trump attempted to clarify?
The closest I found was at ~31:00, some reporter asks for confirmation that there's no scenario in which disinfectants would be injected into the body. Bryan declines to comment, Trump responds with "maybe it works, maybe it doesn't work," which doesn't really provide any clarity.
And then at ~50:00 he asks Bryan to "talk to the medical doctors" to look at applying light and heat as a cure. Then he says "maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. I'm not a doctor, but I am a person with a very good you-know-what."
Some reporter suggests that the President of the United States should not spout random stuff and say "maybe it works, maybe it doesn't", Trump responds with "I'm the president, and you're fake news."
Not only are there hundreds of doctors in the US who inject disinfectant into people to treat viruses already, there are medical textbooks about it and even an academy for certifying medical practitioners:
(Technically they advocate taking blood from people, infusing it with disinfectant, and then injecting the infused blood back into people, but close enough.)
I don't know to what extent it's safe or effective, but hundreds of thousands of people have done it without dying at this point and many of them credit it for having healed various problems, so that's something.
https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFR...
The advisors mentioned the new results that the COVID-19 virus on surfaces is neutralized by disinfectants and direct sunlight in a few minutes. He then tried to 'help' by suggesting to put light and disinfectants in the bloodstream.
In the video you can see that he already discussed with Deborah Birx about these ideas, and instead of her shooting them down, she just told him that she would consider them. During the conference he was trying to bring back that conversation, putting her on the spot.
Note: I am typing this as I sit drinking my daily cup of Lysol. Invigorating and I don't have Covid-19. I have picked up an uncomfortable case of indigestion, but I'm sure it will pass.
I really doubt that.
Now you may be right that he gets his info from advisors but the quality of advice is only as good as the advisors. Considering he has removed a vast number of competent experienced people and replaced them with sycophants with no experience may reduce that quality. His daughter and son in law are special advisors.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/people/ivanka-trump/
Also I did not say he gets his info from facebook, I said he is similar to people who do.
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-jared-kushner-fa...
Trump has been shown several times however to disregard expert advice and tweet or act based on input from Fox News, so in that way, it’s not really any different.
To act like he is only ever reporting information from experts is the real pure fantasy. He’s much more likely to be citing “opinion” peddlers instead.
It's not like these people go around and make up excuses for everybody who says something silly.
I'm... At a loss what is going on.
Yet, here we are, being told that we're all morons because it's obvious that this treatment is what he was talking about. Even though he never mentioned this treatment, and there's no reason to think that he was talking about this treatment in particular.
Edit: Trump is claiming today that the question was just "sarcasm"...
Truly extraordinary times we live in.
As a global leader in health and hygiene products, we must be clear that under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route).
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/24/business/lysol-disinfectant-t...
I keep thinking of this recent Ted Chiang quote:
If your goal is to dramatize the threat posed by an unknown virus, there’s no advantage in depicting the officials responding as incompetent, because that minimizes the threat; it leads the reader to conclude that the virus wouldn’t be dangerous if competent people were on the job. A pandemic story like that would be similar to what’s known as an “idiot plot,” a plot that would be resolved very quickly if your protagonist weren’t an idiot. What we’re living through is only partly a disaster novel; it’s also—and perhaps mostly—a grotesque political satire.
https://electricliterature.com/ted-chiang-explains-the-disas...
In this case it's not typical incompetence of officials, it's an official with huge influence derived from their office endangering people by recommending injection of disinfectants into their bodies. That itself a huge threat.
"So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether its ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said, that hasn't been checked but you're gonna test it. And then I said, supposing it brought the light inside the body, which you can either do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said you're gonna test that too, sounds interesting. And I then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute, and is there a way you can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it'd be interesting to check that."
What does this mean? It certainly sounds to me like he is talking about using disinfectant to clean the virus out of the lungs.
I mean, happy for him to have those discussions with the experts (as long as it's not me sitting there), but do not do this on live TV.
I think you know this already.
Also, of course, lobotomies probably sounded crazy the first time someone suggested them. And as it turns out, they were. For everything that sounds crazy and works, there are a lot of things that sound crazy and prove to be crazy.
No, this is another example of the media taking his ramblings and trying to clean it up and make sense of it. If that had been the ONLY idea he pushed in that press briefing then I might be more willing to believe that but he followed up with injecting disinfectants so I think it's pretty clear he was just spewing a stream of consciousness.
> After he went to the mat for hydroxychloroquine, it's pretty natural for everyone to be skeptical, though.
To be fair I think the jury is still out on hydroxychloroquine. Trump pushed it because he thought it might a miracle drug that would save the economy and his reelection. That's all true but it can also be true that hydroxychloroquine can work for some people (people without heart conditions and when combined with other drugs like zinc and/or azithromycin, we need more GOOD studies: random, double-blind, high number of people, drug administered early not as "last-ditch"). I hope this whole incident is going to shine a light on a number of "academics" like the ones involved in the unforgivable VA hydroxychloroquine "study". Of course we should also blame the press for treating it as fact but I digress.
The treatment in the "good" studies that, let's be real, most people are gunning for because they go against the president's tweet, they administered the drugs to critically ill patients. The original proposed mechanism of action is solid, came from a Dutch paper in reference to SARS, and ideally the treatment is administered sometime before the patient is already dying.
Just look at what's going on on this website! Anything remotely supportive of Trump is automatically voted down. This is a board of learned professionals who have clout and their lack of objectivity is representative of academia and industry at large right now. Let's not pretend you could openly support Trump at almost any major institution right now.
And this isn't about Trump. This is about getting over petty rage and not leaving treatments on the table to stick it to the man.
The well conducted studies that show chloroquine as having an affect on novel coronavirus have all be in vitro. The in vivo studies that have been done that showed anecdotal evidence of effect were poorly conducted, including doing things such as excluding people from the results that died from cv19 while taking chloroquine.
Better in vivo studies have showed that hydroxychloroquine on it's own had no impact on whether or not someone needed to go on a ventilator, and resulted in a nearly 3x increase in all cause mortality. Hydroxychloroquine + azithromycin did not show a significant increase in all cause mortality, but also had no statistically significant impact on whether or not the patient would need to go on a ventilator, and overall mortality was similar to the control group.
Other studies have had to halt due to the number of patients dying due to cardiac issues.
If anything, all large studies with proper controls are showing that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are ineffective at treating cv19 at best, and deadly in their own right at worst.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/sunlight-destroys-coronavirus-ver...
https://www.scmp.com/video/china/3075171/shanghai-introduces...
Occam's Razor: He's just a senile old coot full of quack theories about everything. There's tons of people like him, you don't have to waste your time on them.
Most of the damage is caused by the upvotes and replies, but that's what happens when you post something trollish to an inflammatory topic.
Edit: on closer inspection, 22968349 is not so great either because if there's anything interesting to discuss about blood irradiation, it's probably not related to Covid-19.
To be honest, baiting people into discussing this quackery is the actual troll here and I'm genuinely interest why people take the bait. When the media does this, the simple explanation is that they're optimizing for ads. Great, that makes sense, but what's happening here? It's not like this is an astro-turf either, the discussion looks back-and-forth. Is asking people for introspection trolling?
When you call me a troll, you're not calling me a troll in the classical sense of someone posting crap to get a rise out of people. What you're trying to get at is something more subtle - the way a person has an allergy, this particular community has outsized reactions from otherwise very benign opinions, and that I should be aware of these allergies and know not to post them here. But these are not obvious allergies at all and very much at odds with a place that considers itself a place to satiate your intellectual curiosity.
* An ignorant authoritarian with an obvious agenda sets the discussion topic
* We discuss said topic without mentioning his ignorance, authoritarianism, or agenda
The topic effectively becomes "laundered"? Much like OP, I've seen this over and over again. Trump (or similar) says something batshit insane, a "well, maybe..." topic gets bumped to the front page, political discussion gets culled from the thread, topic gets somewhat normalized. And so the koo-koo express keeps chugging towards the cliff.
> There's tons of people like him, you don't have to waste your time on them.
Unfortunately, the broader 'you' (society) _kind of does_; I know this is nonsense, but lots of people don't, and when he's promoting dangerous behavior that's a problem (see chloroquine).
Your periodic reminder that the US is not in fact a dictatorship, and that random ex-cathedra rambling by Trump does not have the force of law.
Is that the US or Russia?
(Light hearted comment for a non serious thread!)
He also won, with fewer votes than his competition, while only half of eligible voters cast ballots.
You're allowed to view this person as illegitimate. Sometimes the situation necessitates that we do that.
no need for conspiracy theory that a cabal of trump supporters are jumping on to find a theory backing his absurd clamis.
You mean Donald Trump or Michael R. Hamblin? Because if it's the first (as a comment downthread implies) then I must've missed a big story, and if the second, then I personally haven't heard this name before.
I'm guessing most HNers are like me: drawn to interesting ideas that seem to make sense on the surface. Here, UV light is a known and powerful disinfectant (and seemingly very much underused in this pandemic), ionizing radiation is commonly used in medicine, and applying it as a blood filter sounds like a plausible idea - so overall, sounds like a compelling reason to check out the article and the comment section.
Yeah but it was more like a slow news day than a big story. Yesterday President Trump said this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHkzqejFKbM
And the media reacted as expected.
If this technology were effective, we would already be using it. This isn't some secret cure that we forgot about - it's an ineffective treatment that we did away with.
Focusing on this topic isn't for the benefit of COVID-19 patients during this crisis - it's for the benefit of Donald Trump's reelection as he gambles on snake oil cures for this virus.
So maybe ask yourself what you care about more: Human life, or politics?
Edit: Apparently he was being "sarcastic". Unbelievable. https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1253736546534141963
"So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that hasn't been checked but you're going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside of the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting."
There was more about possibly injecting disinfectants but you get the drift. As of a few minutes ago he's saying that he 'asking a question sarcastically to see what would happen.' https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/494519-trump-say...
I'm reminded of this cartoon: https://www.lovethispic.com/uploaded_images/29513-What-Troll...
Even if he was "normal" politician, we shouldn't be listening to politicians about medical advice, and they shouldn't be pushing pseudoscience contrary to what medical professionals and virologists are saying.
Asking loaded questions about pseudoscience, that implies that there is some sort of promise in it, absolutely counts as peddling it.
The fact that he went off script and talked about things that aren’t confirmed and are speculation is not good, but he did say it was speculation.
Yes he should be more responsible in his comms as president, but your attitude of automatic dismissal and thinking he’s an idiot is exactly why he managed to get elected under the radar.
Science and researchers don't "forget" things.
Things that aren't effective or practical are retired.
This is just someone trying to make the president seem less stupid but of course there is no way he's ever read anything about blood radiation and all the failed experiments over the years.
In the COVID-19 case the major problem is the bacterial sepsis caused by the infection.
My hunch is that he heard about this as a potential treatment from some doctor/advisor and then put his usual spin on it. This could work, it could be great, it's very promising, why don't we try it?
Like, confusion over this is not uncommon; elderly people trying to ingest disinfectants, say, is A Thing, and weird health claims for UV/sunbed aren’t new. It’s just that most senile people don’t really have the platform to promote it.
Cynical response to Trump: He only half listens to the people around him, and genuinely believes he knows better than everyone in the world.
Not sure which of those it actually is, but I'm sure it's one of the two.
Oh wait, you mean because he kinda-sorta had a similar suggestion to this absurd medical practice? No. His goal is to stay in power.
He never said anything about mainlining bleach though.
Discussing potential treatments with, as he said, "medical personnel", is nowhere near advising people to drink bleach.
The fact that a person would ingest a known and clearly dangerous chemical simply because Trump said the word disinfectant is a reflection on the individual, not a valid reason to censor the president. If people are ignorant enough to go from "president mentions potential treatment" to "I must inject myself with bleach" then, frankly, the heard needs to be culled. Arguably the way we've coddled such people for decades is part of the reason we're in this sorry state, but that's another discussion. In any case the number of people who actually go on to do such a thing will be negligible if not zero. This is pure sensationalism.
You speak of misinformation but you are consuming the very same, only oblivious to it because of your bias. How often do people actually look at the primary source, i.e. the interview? Because by the time anything is filtered through the media it is nearly always exaggerated and misreported. Even this example - the guy is rambling like an obvious idiot, that's clear and more than enough to report on. But then we go and have the media holding him liable for the poor choices of others, for discussing a potentially medical treatment? This happens literally every time he talks.
We're way past the point of justifying faith in any of our popular media.
Can you find where in this clip he says to inject Lysol or sells snake oil? https://youtube.com/watch?v=zu60uj0_-Nw&feature=emb_title&ti...
Because I saw him ask questions to his medical professional and make very general statements that are objectively true but at worst impractical or irrelevant.
Can anyone time stamp the snake oil for me?
he is clearly talking about injecting disinfectants
I see him ask his medical professional to confirm they are indeed looking into various options. Are you perhaps looking intentionally for the worst possible take and using that in place of an objective fact?