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Comment by systematical | Hacker News Reader

Dude said don't wear masks when it was known the virus was airborne. Joke.

Until they understood that it could be spread by asymptomatic carriers -- at which point (In mid March), they fully recommended them. There are far bigger 'jokes' who are still denying mask wearing and other interventions are saving lives.

I think it’s fairly well established by now that at least part of the initial advice against wearing masks was because the federal government bungled the stockpile and wanted to prevent a run on remaining retail inventory. Which is a shame because it seriously undermined their credibility and lent much fuel to conspiracy theorists.

(I have a workshop long stocked with both disposable surgical and N95 masks and reusable P100 masks/cartridges, so I have no skin in the game.)

Right - they thought that it was only spread by symptomatic carriers so they advised people that were buying up the limited mask stockpiles to not buy them. It turned out that they were wrong, and that asymptomatic spread was already happening so they revised their advice and by early April were encouraging people to use homemade masks (to preserve hospital supplies of surgery masks and N95s).

I don't think their credibility should be negatively impacted for updating their advice with the latest science. It's a shame people are reading it in the most negative light possible.

That’s painting it in the most charitable light. For the first months of the pandemic, they specifically said “don’t wear a mask because current evidence is that it does not spread airborne and most likely infection vector is contact with a contaminated surface, don’t bother with masks but wash hands and scrub surfaces.” It wasn’t about asymptomatic cases not being transmitted in the air but in general about the coronavirus not being “primarily” transmitted via the air, which would have been patently false even at the time, except for the “primarily” weasel word. (You can look at the archive.org snapshots for the CDC website.)

As a scientist, my answer to “should we wear masks?” wouldn’t have been to deflect to contaminated surfaces - even setting aside that subsequent research showed that to be largely a non-issue.

They said a mask won't prevent you from getting it or prevent spread. Just wash your hands. It didn't make much sense to me that respiratory virus wasn't transmissible through the air, but I washed my hands like they said. The Trump tapes prove they knew about its air spread as late as early February. Who knows how many lives this cost? You could argue it may have saved some as well. You can't argue we weren't lied to.

Those same guidelines were echoed by the CDC because of the PPE shortages caused by people mass buying masks and such. So they understandably designed those past guidelines to prioritize health workers who had a higher viral load than probably any of us experience from day to day activities, mask or not.

But now that masks are common place, the guidelines were evolved to reflect the new reality.

They said masks weren't effective but changed their tune after the PPE shortages were ameliorated. Predictably many people only accepted their first answer or worse, lost trust in their recommendations. They're thinking, "what are they lying about now?" This was a big public health blunder and only fanned the flames of the bizarre politicization of masks. They should have been upfront with the public and encouraged mask wearing from the beginning.

Because there was a critical shortage of masks in hospitals treating COVID and people were hoarding them, and it was unclear at the time that asymptomatic carriers could be contagious. Once there was no longer a critical shortage in hospitals and it became clear that the asymptomatic could very much spread it, he quickly switched his position. It was an entirely sensible position.

It is ironic that vitamins are okay to recommend. But when practicing physicians got together to recommend HCQ, that advice was labeled as misinformation and promptly removed from everywhere.

Clearly vitamins are better than a drug that has been in use for decades with a proven safety record AND while being recommended by physicians bound to the hippocratic oath.

Why can't there be validity to both vitamins and certain existing drugs? (AND vs OR)

It as though we actively do not want to admit that we may already have something out there that can help us.

PS: Vitamins is a friendly name for often synthetic or derived compounds, not necessarily in the exact same chemical structure as found naturally in organic matter. Not to mention there are also various chemistries that affect absorption etc.

HCQ is a prescription medication with side effects. There was some concern that HCQ’s known heart-related side effects might interact poorly with COVID-19’s known heart-related side effects, although other than the retracted study based on Surgisphere data it seems like that has proved unfounded.

Vitamin C and D are over the counter, or easily obtained from diet (citrus fruits and milk).

Moreover, HCQ was promoted by political entities as “100% effective” for COVID-19 (viral Charlie Kirk tweet, quoted by Rudy Giuliani, deleted by twitter). There was no clear scientific evidence of this and it was studied extensively and the best scientific trials (RCTs) of HCQ have shown no effect on the disease progression.

A big part of the concern with HCQ is that it was promoted as a cure alongside the claim that all other efforts to fight the virus could be discontinued, since HCQ would cure the disease.

Vitamins are something already required by the body, and with these two taking slightly too much rarely causes an problems.

HCQ is a drug that most people will never consume, can have adverse effects and cause allergic reactions, and was often recommended at doses more likely to cause side effects. Taking it is better than having malaria, but taking it without a proven benefit is a dangerous choice.

The problem with HCQ is:

* it still has had no good RCTs backing it up

* it has significant negative side effects

But I have been eating zinc and quercetin rich foods, like spinach and kale (respectively). Quercetin is a zinc ionophore like HCQ but without the side effects.

I don't understand what your problem with vitamin C and D supplements is. People have taken supplements for a long time, and those vitamins have been a part of the human diet for much longer than HCQ has existed.

A mask has far more effectiveness than vitamins and has none of the side effects associated with anti-malarial drugs

It's a bit off topic, but the seeming "conspiracy" to suppress HCQ has been an eye opener for me. I think the press wants so badly for Trump to be wrong about that, that they're independently all refraining from publishing anything to the contrary. But we heard all about the very flawed or in one case outright fraudulent studies that showed it in a negative light. Meanwhile YouTube has censored videos from doctors talking about the subject. So blatantly partisan and it is costing lives.

I also find it amusing that I get down voted on HN whenever I bring it up. Sheep.

If you ignore the press and go to the science, you'll see that the RCTs done in other countries failed to show any effect.

Plus, your theory doesn't have any legs because it makes no sense for other countries to ruin their economies and lockdown themselves just to make Trump look bad. If it was a magic cure then countries like India wouldn't give a flying fuck about Trump or whatever your pet theory is.

It's not a magic cure and had nothing to do with lockdown. There are 53 studies that show positive results of HCQ in covid19 infections. 14 studies with neutral and negative results, but of those 10 were in late stage patients where it doesn't seem to be beneficial, and two were the flawed Brazil paper and the fraudulent Lancet paper which was retracted. You seem to think the science shows the opposite, perhaps your view was informed by the media on this topic.

It does seem to be a valid treatment option and most countries that temporarily stopped using it soon reinstated it as their mortality rates spiked.

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