Effect of early treatment with fluvoxamine on risk of hospitalization for Covid
thelancet.com
thelancet.com
That content got banned from YouTube.
Was more or less harm done by stifling this information?
In the desire to drive official therapeutics and vaccines was this potentially not surfaced as fast as it could have been?
I'm not sure. It's good food for thought though.
Prior to studies being done, how do we evaluate who is a quack and who is correct? There is a lot of harm promoting quack ideas during a pandemic. Based on reputation? Twitter followers? Their passion?
I do not believe anyone censored research and scientific literature that was mainstream nor did they say they can not try to get your theories proven, rather they were basically saying do can not claim you have the truth if there is nothing solid backing you up. Basically skipping showing your work (e.g. peer review), and just saying you have the answer.
I would argue that anyone who had a solution to Covid should rush to get it published in a reputable journal -- because that is how science works. You do not go and make YouTubes first promoting it as the cure first.
Did Steven even have a role in this paper or are these professionals operating completely independently of him? So Steven didn't even bother to make this mainstream? Too much work?
YouTube's policy specifically bans mention of Ivermectin as a possible treatment.
Combined with the safety profile and cost of Ivermectin, I'd have thought that it'd at least be worth a try in an emergency - the worst possible case being that it doesn't work (unless you have idiots taking horse-size doses).
Compared with the quality of data surrounding remdesivir, molnupiravir etc, there seems to be a significant bias towards novelty (and therefore $$$).
Similarly, it's been known for decades that vitamin D deficiency increases susceptibility to respiratory diseases, and most people in Europe/North America are deficient in winter. Why not hand it out? Worst case, it doesn't work.
No, this is false. Use of animal ivermectin for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19 in humans is dangerous [1].
[1] https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-shoul...
That said hopefully here on HN we can agree that is a dumb idea.
The situation is more akin to a few doctors deciding to prescribe azithromycin to schizophrenia patients without much evidence of efficacy, for which they'd be rightly at risk of trouble with their medical licenses.
(And it's funny, that the surgisphere study that showed that HCQ didn't work was published straight away, even though the data was fraudulent? And a similar one that showed that ACE inhibitors didn't work too? They both got published in the Lancet straight away, and noone has any questions about _why_ that was done.)
By itself? Or as part of the supposed protocol from HQC/zinc/zpak pushers?
Obviously the fda would say this is the approved, safe medicine, so this other stuff is not approved and safe. The fact is that as far as the fda knows, they don’t know anything about if it’s safe or unsafe so they call it unsafe.
> the FDA has received multiple reports of patients who have required medical attention, including hospitalization
They must have a subscription to Rolling Stone.
But they have of course carefully chosen their wording. This could mean there were two people hospitalized that took ivermectin and got symptoms the hospital thought were due to that. But it turned out to be something else.
Just like the cdc, they have received ‘increased numbers of reports of side effects’. Wow, who would have thought if a 100 times more people take a drug, that would result in increased reports of side effects. The generic side effects that are also a side effect of placebo, like headaches and nausea.
There are a number of low-quality (low numbers, methodological issue) studies with varying results. The primary "evidence" that got people excited about Ivermectin was a meta-analysis of these studies, but the meta-analysis itself pointed out that the largest amount of data and strongest evidence in their dataset came from one very large study – the study that was later withdrawn for having faked its data.
Since then, there's been no real compelling evidence at all that Ivermectin has any real impact beyond placebo.
> Compared with the quality of data surrounding remdesivir, molnupiravir etc, there seems to be a significant bias towards novelty (and therefore $$$).
There's a bias towards using treatments for which: 1) there is a reasonable expectation, based on understood science, that the treatment should impact the course of the virus
(preferably) and
2) there is some non-fraudulent, non-obscure and tiny dataset, indicating an effect.
The lack of strong data in support of Ivermectin is coupled with the fact that there's no particular reason to expect Ivermectin should have any impact on any particular virus.
> Similarly, it's been known for decades that vitamin D deficiency increases susceptibility to respiratory diseases, and most people in Europe/North America are deficient in winter. Why not hand it out? Worst case, it doesn't work.
This is mistaking correlation with causation. We know that many people who suffer serious respiratory illnesses, and who die from COVID-19, have low vitamin D levels. This is not believed to imply that low vitamin D levels cause death from COVID-19; rather it's simply the natural outcome of many old people having low vitamin D levels and age being a significant factor in COVID-19 deaths. People who die of old age also have low vitamin D levels; would you argue we should hand out vitamin D in an attempt to cure aging?
The idea that because these things are relatively safe we might as well just do them seems, in whole, silly. Sugar pills and crystals have a great safety profile too, but we don't expect physicians to use those on the theory of "well there's no real downside" either.
Science, not superstition, is the goal here.
Ivermectin (you spell it wrong) is a known antiviral against several viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, when studied in cell cultures. This doesn't mean that it would work as a treatment in real patients. But it gives some reason, maybe just a little, to expect that it maybe could.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivermectin#COVID-19
The trial run by Oxford University might eventually give some good quality data on this.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-06-23-ivermectin-be-investiga...
You allow the dialog to take place and make up your own mind.
>I would argue that anyone who had a solution to Covid should rush to get it published in a reputable
Any tool thats not a vaccine gets associated with Trump or the right wing and is dismissed.
Its even stifled funding for anti-virals that give a 50% reduction in hospitalizations.
The government could have spent the last 18 months encouraging people to lose weight, stop smoking, drinking, and eating fast food.
The ONLY tool silicon Valley, the msm, much of acamdeia, the DNC and their loyal sycophants care about is the vaccines and even the slightest discussion of any potential alternative gets promoted as inherently anti-vaxx even if it could be used in conjunction with vaccines
You give the average person the ability to do "research" and they are killing themselves because people fall for all kinds of bullshit. Cults exist. Scam artists are a dime a dozen.
This stuff gets associated with trump and the right because they associate themselves wth it. I don't vote Democratic, I just don't think you're being realistic about how people operate, regardless whether I beleive that "censorship" is the answer or not.
And if only "experts" are allowed speech, then how do we qualify an expert? Bc if we go by the last 2 years we're not even allowing public debate amongst medical experts, intellectuals or even the person who helped invent an mrna vaccine without gross censorship.
Experts has come to mean government appointments and government agencies,which makes them all potentially influenced by political pressures.
So the only "valid" opinions have obvious flaws and no one else, regardless of qualifications is allowed to speak up.
Bc medical experts and scientists not deemed as part of the agenda get derided as "the average person" bc they dared to have wrongthink.
Instead, the "solution" did the opposite. But worse, kids stayed inside, didn't exercise, put on (likely more) weight, didn't share illness (read: weakened immune system) and then those kids were ordered back to school in that highly vulnerable state.
The solution? The jab. With absolutely not acknowledgement or recognition they were prepped to be put in harns way.
This isn't a conspiracy theory. This is what happened and continues to happen. Unfortunately, such observations and analysis get marginalized as being a Covid denier or anti-vax. That doesn't make sense.
BTW covid is plenty dangerous to non obese as well.
The vaccine shot actually works well and is incredibly easy to use compared to a grueling year long weight loss and sustaining it for a lifetime, for most people.
“ More than 900,000 adult COVID-19 hospitalizations occurred in the United States between the beginning of the pandemic and November 18, 2020. Models estimate that 271,800 (30.2%) of these hospitalizations were attributed to obesity.6”
This is from your link - even if the government put everyone in concentration camps and forced them to lose weight, it would do nothing for the other 70%
Meanwhile vaccines are about 80-90% effective against hospitalization and death.
And falling. Remember how people were parading around 95%?
Just like ‘99% of people in hospital are unvaccinated’. While now in some areas it’s ‘70% vaccinated’.
Vaccines are not a magic bullet and delaying covid using measures that make people fat is not a smart move. Not to mention stealing 1.5% of peoples lifetime to delay a disease that less than 1% would die from.
Vaccines aren’t a magic bullet. But they’re the most cost effective item we have. You cite some irrelevant statistics but appear to agree with my statement that the vaccines remain more than 80% effective against death.
The vaccine costs less than $100 and takes about an hour of time to do. There is no way to lose weight that cheaply or quickly and as a result people continue to ignore government advice and health campaigns urging them to do so.
Moreover, losing weight does not stop you from catching or spreading COVID at all, whereas the vaccines have been shown to reduce transmission.
But from the typical ‘I endured lockdown just fine’ tripe it’s clear what you think:
I have no problems with restricting others from doing things I don’t care about and I think it’s fine to force others to adopt my position. Because I think I know better than them.
And those first few months of peoples basic human rights being taken away based on ideas that clearly were never going to work? Oh, they were just a few dumb months. Pfft who cares. We’re over that now, there’s a new battle to fight. Who thinks about these measures that were going to be the end-all solution? There’s a new measure that’s going to be the end-all solution. To force on others because clearly we know what’s best for them.
That's not what the narrative says. It's earier (and popular) to say "it's a pandemic of the unvaxinated" than to tell the truth. That is, diet, lifestyle and personal health matter. They impact day to day heatlth, and they impact your ability to recover from unplanned health challenges (e.g., car accident, Covid, etc.)
The idea that there is zero connection between diet + lifestyle and health is completely unscientific. To promote / deny that during a pandemic is insane.
Hospitalization is a deceptive metric. What's more important is: long term hospitalizations, as well as higher use of treatment (e.g., ICU).
That's that data needed. This other stat - like so many Covid stats - is too high level. The Devil is in the details.
Because since not everyone can improve their immune function, nobody should, right? Messaging otherwise would be ableist or give people an idea that they could do something aside from hunkering down, and that's more important than reducing hospitalizations and saving lives...
It is the coercion / loss of livelihood and other threats, that are getting people up in arms (figuratively, and who knows, someday in real life)
Imagine if various establishments used a weight/health card where one is scored on some heuristic, and allowed access.
Just look at intellectuals like Noam Chomsky's prescriptions on how to treat the unvaccinated...
People were up in arms and fearmongering over the vaccine since 2020. This isn’t about coercion - there’s a reason the same people typically don’t get vaccinated themselves. If they believed in the effectiveness of the vaccine they’d be vaxxed themselves (like Republican Governors and Fox News tv hosts).
I personally know someone who thought the vaccine had a good chance of killing me and other acquaintances who took it, all because he read some random posts on the net.
It’s perfectly possible to be for vaccinations and against mandates.
Most people don’t fall into that category though. The “people” who are up in arms usually cite stuff like the vaccines rewriting DNA, being unsafe, untested, Nuremberg violations, “did my own research” and a hundred other reasons they found online to claim the vaccine is unsafe or ineffective.
This is the straw man
I'm not sure this applies to medicine or vaccines. I don't think any of us are in the position of "making up our own mind" about what works in medicine and what doesn't, which is why we have double-blind clinical studies. We can't even explain why/how placebo works.
I had a condition that was misdiagnosed repeatedly, including in the ER. My condition is not even "rare", just slightly uncommon, and I had a very textbook case of it.
Your doctor is not an oracle. They are a car mechanic that works on organics.
What does that mean? That there are two conflicting absolute truths?
That's the doctors that MSNBC interviews. Nothing else.
Don't get onboard - you'll lose your job. Even if you work from home.
have tons of side effects and still are up to patients as to whether or not to take them - gabapentin for neuropathic pain.
biologics for autoimmune disorders.
we don't force anti-biotics on anyone.
we don't force anxiety meds on anyone.
find me a drug that's doled out by the establishment who hasn't destroyed someone's life or even ended their live.
the same establishment that created the opiate epidemic is saying "trust us now"..
The same one that over prescribes antibiotics, especially dangerous ones like Cipro that gives people neurapthic pain for their entire lives.
Dermalogists hand out Biologics for even mild psoriasis - which states in the literature "we do not entirely now how or why this works" (Tremfya) and "may cause cancer". (Humira)
Cardiologists will prescribe blood pressure pills without realizing someone might have kidney damage or high uric acid and then the pills end up giving them gout.
anti-anxiety meds are a "try all of them and see which one works for you!" but every single one of them has a list of side effects and can make your anxiety/depression a million times worse. getting off of them has a "discontinuation syndrome" which can fuck you up for years.
Prednisone gave my mother AVN - an autoimmune disorder that turned her joints necrotic - requiring 2 shoulder and 2 hip replacements.
"Trust us" they say - as they lie about the usefulness of masks.
Trust us they say as they lie about lab leak theories
Trust us they say as they told us that we'd need 60% of herd immunity, then changed it to 70% then to 80% and now saying we'll never reach it b/c you don't get herd immunity with a corona virus. It's just with us forever, but hey.. keep getting 3, 4 5 shots forever.
Trust us. We're the experts. The captured FDA. BigPharma and all the doctors you go to that control them
Trust us as we yank peer reviewed studies from journals b/c it conflicts with our messaging.
So yes - people are in a good god damned position to at least TRY to process it.
There's been plenty of active mainstream reporting of Merck's new COVID pill, as well as other promising treatments. What are you talking about?
Getting a COVID shot continues to be the single best public health policy, which is why people are going to continue to advocate for it. But there has been no lack of mainstream coverage of developments in both proactive and reactive treatment.
I'll preface my comment here by saying I'm very pro-vax, and after a several month wait for my own peace of mind, got fully vax'd over the summer. I have encouraged everyone I know who's on the fence to go get one. In the context of being perfectly content if they don't, since it's their body, and since I'm vax'd, I no longer really care if you are or not.
Your comment is extremely disingenuous. Yes, now, finally, two years into COVID, a non-vaccine drug is getting mostly positive active mainstream reporting. But this is after two full years of any and all discussions about anything other than the vaccine immediately being angrily met with demonizing and mockery. If you didn't tow the establishment line, you were and still are labeled an anti-vaxxer.
To the point where it seemed almost as if, pre-vax, people didn't want a solution prior to the election in case in might help a particular someone win again. And almost as if, post-vax, people didn't like the thought of an option being available for someone who didn't want the shot - almost as if the lifestyle they formed and embraced around admonishing everyone regarding the shot could fall apart just at the very idea of something else possibly working even just a bit.
Take ivermectin as an example; opinions on it aside, and I really don't have many since I'm vaccinated and it's irrelevant to me, but you can not possibly in good faith feign ignorance over the fact that this drug, on the list of the WHO's essential medicines, with over 100K active prescriptions (pre-COVID) in the US alone and millions around the world, which is essentially as "harmless" as an antibiotic, and has saved many lives and eyeballs, was deemed as nothing more than "horse paste" by the blue checkmarks on Twitter and in most media outlets, including some of our very own governmental institutions. Yes, the few people who bought and used actual animal-grade ivermectin were idiots, but perhaps this could've been avoided by not playing into their fears by attempting to silence any and all positive press about the drug, given, again, the drug's extremely minor side effect profile that's considered lower than most common antibiotics that most doctors are known to be extremely willing to prescribe without a second thought at even the slightest possibility that it might help whatever ails their patient, even if they're pretty damn sure it won't. It should be noted that this new Merck drug has the potential for more adverse effects than those antibiotics. But it's being met with more positive press, while a less harmful drug was attacked from all angles. Food for thought.
So in short, yes, this Big Pharma sponsored/discovered COVID drug developed especially for COVID has been receiving coverage - although the comment sections in articles about them are filled to the brim with people angry at its approval given that they believe it may discourage people from getting vaccinated. But almost every single other non-vaccine (most not being establishment-discovered, or being popular in conservative/independent circles, which I'm sure is the reason - as it having more attack-points vs. a drug specifically designed for COVID, which is hard to attack since you can't call it horse paste) has been met with absolute vitriol and mockery.
This is a lot of presumption. I got vaccinated as soon as I could (early spring, for my region, age, and health group), which is well after the actual R&D phase for the vaccine that I received. Every person I know got vaccinated as early as they could, in spite of reservations they had about the former president's reliability. They did that because they (and I) trust their healthcare providers to provide informed guidance more than they trust themselves, regardless of their intellectual capacity. They also did it because it's their civic duty, and also because it's the selfish thing to do.
The rest, I have nothing to say to. I haven't spent any meaningful amount of time mocking (much less thinking) about people who have taken ivermectin, so I don't feel compelled to respond on behalf of the crowd you've identified.
Medicine is perhaps the field least amenable to this.
It's so hard to figure out what drugs and therapies even work that full-time Ph.D and MD level experts in biology and medicine very often get things very wrong. Look at fat, cholesterol, sugar, and how certain foods like eggs have been classified as healthy or unhealthy multiple times. These people are not idiots nor are they all involved in some conspiracy. It's just unbelievably hard to disambiguate all the confounding factors and see actual cause and effect with a system as complex as the human body.
Even highly educated highly intelligent laypeople don't stand a chance against quacks. Anything can be made to sound plausible in medicine.
You might say "well then couldn't they be wrong about the vaccines?" The answer is that yes, they could. It's just that medical experts have maybe a 60-70% chance of getting everything wrong vs a 99.9% chance for the general public.
I have reviewed all of the available dialog, and I have concluded that not only is the coronavirus fake, the world is flat.
> You allow the dialog to take place and make up your own mind.
You want to replace a reliance on empirical evidence (science) with rhetoric debates instead? This is going backwards in terms of progress as a society. I think you do not really want to do that.
And most consumers don't even bother to do much research before selecting a car. They buy the Toyota because they had one before and liked it, or their friend who knows about cars said it's reliable.
I was given Tremfya, a biologic, for mild psoriasis. I've had a horrible reaction to it and it's exacerbated what used to be a minor autoimmune issue into something debilitating.
After autoimmune destroying my life, I was given Lexapro for anxiety which took my anxiety levels from like a 5 out of 10 to a 1000. Even after being off it for a year, I'm still really messed up and haven't gone back to pre-lexapro levels.
I was given gabapentin for neuropathic pain. It did nothing for my pain but now I have full body shivers and twitches and I have horrible withdrawal trying to get off gabapentin gradually.
Doctors push what the pharmaceutical companies tell them too.
Look into the effects of cipro and -floxin type antibiotics causing lifelong neuropathy.
My mother developed AVN from prednisone - causing her to need dual hip and dual shoulder replacements bc her reaction to the steroid caused her joints to turn necrotic.
Her lack of mobility and age has come with higher blood pressure.
Her blood pressure medication gave her gout.
"trust the experts"
Ultimately I think the expectation that platforms ought to facilitate and tolerate discussion of topics just because they are “ideas”, “suggestions”, “opinions” and not presented as fact is toxic. If you want to do actual research do it in the correct setting (not a public forum). And fortunately, that is where actual research is happening.
It is not some overarching plan by some godly G-man, you don’t see these drugs being promoted because there is ultimately no scientific proof of their effectiveness. If Moderna had the same attitude towards science and statistics as the people who are pushing “alternative” treatments, we would have had a COVID vaccine much sooner.
The number of replies to your comment against this idea is terrifying. What's even worse is the outright hostility --- it's not good enough that they trust the experts and you don't. You have to go along with it too, according to them, or they'll attack you. It's a totalitarian mindset.
It's like, do you want the friends you meet at church to be actual Christians? Well good then, stop having a damned society where atheism is so taboo that the church aisles are filled with atheists terrified of the consequences of not showing up on Sunday morning. This is still a real serious issue in the bible belt and Moslem world, etc..
https://www.justice.gov/osg/brief/thompson-v-western-states-...
I dont think the target audience for youtube videos is other researchers and doctors. Pretty sure nothing of value was lost by it not being on youtube. The only thing this would have done is rile up people.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/05/1036408/silicon-...
To be clear, the researchers kept doing research and progressing. Whether some layman could tout it, mixing their advocacy with a myriad of disproved cures (along with anti-vax disinformation), had positively zero bearing on what they were doing, and if anything is a massive distraction.
Talking about something by sharing a Facebook post or posting a YouTube video or even HN comment has a negligible to negative effect on actual efforts.
We as a civilization moved pretty slow on Covid.
And it seems there was no significant effect on death?
If someone knows how to read this, can you chime in?
> We found a clinically important absolute risk reduction of 5·0%, and 32% RR reduction, on the primary outcome of hospitalisation
Why is the absolute 5% and the RR 32%? What's the difference?
Also why does it say:
> There were no significant differences between fluvoxamine and placebo for viral clearance at day 7 (p=0·090) and hospitalisations due to COVID (p=0·10), all-cause hospitalisations (p=0·09), time to hospitalisation (p=0·11), number of days in hospital (p=0·06), mortality (p=0·24), time to death (p=0·49), number of days on mechanical ventilation (p=0·90), time to recovery (p=0·79) or the PROMIS Global Physical (p=0·55) or Mental Scale (p=0·32)
And they say in the Interpretation section:
> Treatment with fluvoxamine (100 mg twice daily for 10 days) among high-risk outpatients with early diagnosed COVID-19 reduced the need for hospitalisation defined as retention in a COVID-19 emergency setting or transfer to a tertiary hospital
Why wouldn't they mention anything else but the reduction in hospitalization in their Interpretation section? Is it because all the other effects were not statistically significant to count?
Example:
(20/100) 20% of patients die without treatment
(10/100) 10% of patients die with treatment
absolute = 10 percentage points difference (20->10)
relative = percent decrease. 20 -> 10 50% difference
So normally people with mean age 50 and varied medical conditions that catch Covid have 16% chance of being hospitalized (based on the study placebo group). And with fluvoxamine administered early, the same people would have 11% chance of being hospitalized.
Makes sense now.
Absolute reduction is compared to control in absolute terms (16% hospitalized in control minus 11% with treatment = 5%).
Relative risk reduction is the absolute reduction divided by hospitalizations in the control (5%/16%)
Absolute % tells you how big the effect is, relative risk tells you how big it is in comparison to the reference.
>Why wouldn't they mention anything else but the reduction in hospitalization in their Interpretation section? Is it because all the other effects were not statistically significant to count?
The P values tell you the % chance that the difference could be due to random sampling.
e.g. hospitalization for COVID P = 0·1 means that the there is an 10% chance this difference is due to random sampling. The standard for reportable finding is P < 0.05, more than 95% confidence the observation is not due to random sampling.
>Why wouldn't they mention anything else but the reduction in hospitalization in their Interpretation section? Is it because all the other effects were not statistically significant to count?
The primary test the study was designed to evaluate was:
>risk of hospitalization defined as either retention in a COVID-19 emergency setting or transfer to tertiary hospital due to COVID-19 for patients allocated fluvoxamine versus placebo
This is why most of the discussion focuses on this question. Death was also statistically significant and called out in the findings, most of the other outcomes didn't pass the 95% threshold
What about the BCI? How does the Bayesian confidence interval and the P value differ ?
E.g. you could do a study and find:
Men are taller than women on average P= 0.001 ( extremely likely) BCI = 5-10 inches taller
If you want a good read about how the **y the US healthcare system is, this is a very worthwhile read. Ironically the author is the screenwriter of “Girl, Interrupted” and the story she writes is about how her son got screwed by the US healthcare system and is titled “Boy, Interrupted”. It also shows you how desperate people get for specialized care, and will shell out unfathomable amounts of money for “treatment” at sketchy places: https://www.madinamerica.com/2021/06/boy-interrupted-a-story... K Ironically, the last straw for me, when it came to living in America was my diagnosis of akathisia (just like the linked story), which is 1000x worse than it sounds. I have severe depression and I had been taking my medications as prescribed. Because of my taking these medications, I developed severe akathisia. Literally, before all hell broke loose from the severe akathisia (of which I likely had to varying degrees for years) my highly respected neurologist in movement disorders immediately wrote a scathing report of my situation with the diagnosis. He also gave a ton of recommendations. He also wrote letters to all of my doctors. He did this all within an hour and took the situation extremely seriously.
Unfortunately, even though he is technically a high powered doctor, the US healthcare system has taken a tremendous amount of power away from doctors in general. So a scathing write up in my medical record plus letters to all of my doctors (with recommendations) was all he could really do for me. I literally ended up in the ER 6 times in a week, with improper help. I kept on being discharged over and over again without any further help and even got in to trouble with the law multiple times. One time, after being drugged with Ativan (a benzodiazepine) and Ketamine (a general anesthetic) in the ER, from which I had been discharged. I had called my mother and she was going to pick me up from the hospital. She was well on her way for picking me up. Honestly, I thought I was just waiting outside on the sidewalk right next to the ER, for my mother, but something very wrong had happened. All of the sudden I see a cop car pull up about 30-40 feet away from me and they were headed my way to talk to me. Obviously the number one rule is to never talk to the police under any conditions. Traffic stops are a good time to practice Mm that, by the way. The best thing you can do is say “no comment, I need to talk to my lawyer first.” Anyways I was drugged up to the extreme so it was not like I was not talking and running my mouth to both of the cops observing the situation. Obviously I had caused some sort of public disturbance and somebody had called the cops on me and clearly I should have never been discharged from the hospital. Honestly, I have no idea how, when, or even where the public disturbance occurred (obviously this is public record but it is not healthy for me to investigate the situation further). Anyways, after the cops talked to me, they said that an “emergency detention order” was being issued and that I was going to be forced to get treatment at the **hole hospital which had improperly discharged me after being hella ativaned and ketamined up. Long story short, I had 3 interactions with the cops in 1 week. Prior to that I had only had 2 interactions with the police in my adult life (+14 years). Both were traffic stops, but neither were for moving traffic violations (burnt out headlight and expired registration during COVID-19). I was tremendously lucky that I was never charged with anything over that week from hell, and the cops managed to see that something was “off”. Anyways, like in the above link (excellent storytelling by the way so it is a worthwhile read), there are common denominators that I share with the writer’s son. I am a dual US|European Union (Croatian) citizen and I fled the US after the final hospital trip (from hell actually...it was the worst hospital trip of all time and I am hardcore chronically ill just in general) for Croatia exactly 21 days later (I had to obtain legal documents). Because of my training in electrical engineering, which I am profoundly fortunate to have, I do LORETA (technically sLORETA) neurofeedback training completely on my own to help heal my brain, just like the person in that story. Anyways, there is much more to the story that is better not put in writing. Just know that there is nothing that will bring me back to the USA.
There are plenty of people taking fluvoxamine already, which acts as a natural experiment. After a few thousand hospitalizations, this effect size would have been obvious (ie. March 2020). At that point, a double-blind study could have been run, which (if done in a city with many infections) could have given results within weeks.
What bit of health research dropped the ball on this?
The influence of anti-histamine drugs was relatively quickly discovered because everybody expected asthma patients would get worse and the opposite was happening, so this was an obvious thing to examine. But many more drugs may play a role and these are hiding in plain sight - I hope researchers try to organize around it and make more meaningful discoveries.
On the other hand, we are probably most interested in patients who got infected but did not end up in a hospital. Were they taking any meds routinely? I don't think it's easy to gather this kind of data unless people share them voluntarily with an organization they trust.
If states like California can hire 20,000 contact tracers, it seems plausible to hire 20,000 people to transcribe medical records into a database for analysis and remove personal identification.
https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/math-plus...
(The criticism of the protocols is warranted however, and is partly a separate matter.)
If scientists actually could mine everyone’s data easily it would be a lot easier to do stuff like this. Privacy laws and the fact that so much of the medical system is disconnected from itself get in the way - it’s normal for every new doctor to ask the same questions again because there’s no reliable way to share information.
There was also indeed a French observational study that showed that people on SSRIs did notably better among those hospitalized for COVID. And a few other smaller studies.
I’d suggest looking towards Dr. Angela Reiersen and Dr. Farid Jalali and see if their words haven’t been making consistent sense for a while now.