Here is some fuel for your flamewar: this is the exact treatment Trump was riffing off of when the media collectively lost its mind and claimed that he told people to drink bleach.
"Some guy we hate said this might work - quick, write a thousand articles about how he's not smart for recommending it and bring on doctors who have no relevant experience/knowledge/credentials to 'prove them wrong'!"
This UV-A treatment looks very promising for people who have contracted a severe case of the virus. I do like how they're optimizing the UV light to try and find the best wavelength/frequency/etc. of light to avoid any unnecessary harm to the patient. It looks like from what I was reading that ventilators can cause harm to patients? I wasn't aware that was a thing!
I find the "horse paste" and "aquarium cleaner" memes to be very irritating though, they are FDA approved drugs. Yes, it hasn't gone through the human-medicine supply chain, but veterinary medicine needs to be just as pure as human medicine. Also, "aquarium cleaner" and other products are often sold wink-nudge with the tacit understanding that there are a lot of people who don't have health insurance (or have health insurance that's terrible) and can't get access to actual drugs and this is the only way for them to get access to life-saving medications. There are people who literally need to take "aquarium cleaner" to live, because they have lupus and that's what they can get. Same for "fish mox" which is routinely taken by people who can't afford to go to a doctor and get actual amoxicillin. In both cases, it needs to be very pure, if there were contaminants it would instantly kill exotic fish, just like veterinary medicine needs to be pure, contaminants will kill your dog or horse the same as a human.
Like it or not that's a grey-market supply chain that has existed for a while and nobody wants to actually address the problem of making sure that people have universal access to medical care (not just insurance, that's not sufficient as you can see right now). So people take aquarium cleaner to stay alive. Welcome to America.
The problem there is people self-administering huge doses that are far out of clinical standards. And that's something I'm perfectly fine mocking - if you are gonna self-prescribe for something the drug is not approved for, and you take a massive dose that makes you uncontrollably shit yourself, yeah that one's on you buddy. And that would happen even if they sourced human drugs from a pharmacy.
The problem as far as messaging is that the above stuff doesn't sink in with the general public. They won't listen to "the evidence says HCQ and ivermectin don't work", Republicans say it does, and they will trust Trump over doctors. But there's a chance they will listen if they get constantly mocked for taking horse paste. As far as messaging, it's probably the correct strategy even if we here all know it's not intellectually honest.
And yeah the FDA has gotten themselves in trouble with mixed messaging in the past, like saying the evidence showed that masks didn't work, in order to manipulate the public into not buying them to preserve the supply for health care providers (lmao at the idea of that ever working, and lmao that they thought they could pull it off without destroying their credibility). In this case mocking people for taking horse paste isn't really wrong though, it's a flat-out bad idea and if this is the approach that wakes them up, oh well.
Intellectually irritating but I get it. I'm not the target audience here.
Full quote:
"A question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposedly 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 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, right?"
"And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in 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’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but 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 pretty powerful."
It’s pretty clear he is referring to the uva as the “injected disenfectant” here.
> "COMMONLY AVAILALBLE DISINFECTANTS (Bleach & Isopropyl Alcohol) work to kill the virus"
The ridicule heaped on him was not about him mentioning things that were discussed around him. It’s that he clearly had a very weak grasp of what was being discussed and couldn’t then clearly communicate that and ended up sounding completely incompetent.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181017211703.h...
"so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of *the light*, the way *it kills it in one minute*."
I mean, the comprehension here is not that difficult.
Maybe you need to brush up on your "Queens-speak Translator".
"I'm not a republican" ... "radical liberals justifying your doublethink..."
hmmmmmm
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
yes, extremely definitely not a republican, we can definitely tell because you said so right at the start, and it's not like people would just go on the internet and pretend to be moderates, knowing that "moderation" is a trait that many people inherently assume to be credible and balanced.
if you're gonna try to pull the "well ackshually I'm a moderate" you gotta try and sell it a little better, don't immediately leap right to the fox news political slurs in literally the same sentence as you try to frame yourself as a moderate. Kinda gives away the game a bit.