Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
fiercebiotech.com
fiercebiotech.com
One noteworthy feature is the newness of this drug:
> PF-07321332 was developed from scratch during the current pandemic. It’s a reversible covalent inhibitor that reacts with one of the main protease’s cysteine residues. Owen [director of medicinal chemistry at Pfizer] also discussed the chemistry involved in scaling up the compound. The first 7 mg of the compound were synthesized in late July 2020. Encouraged by the early biological data, the Pfizer team aimed to scale up the synthesis. By late October, they’d made 100 g of the compound. Just two weeks later, the chemists had scaled up the synthesis to more than 1 kg. Owen said 210 researchers had worked on the project.
https://cen.acs.org/acs-news/acs-meeting-news/Pfizer-unveils...
Less than two years from lab to clinic is highly unusual. If approved, I believe this would be the fastest lab-to-approval for a small molecule drug in the history of the FDA.
I assume like most other COVID vaccines/treatments, the timeline is shrunk by going straight to more expensive phases of the trial instead of having preliminary ones of escalating cost and confidence. Or at least prepping for them.
For instance, all the vaccines started setting up commercial production around the same time they started trials, because it's not worth the months delay of setting up a production line to determine if it worked first.
I frequently hear/read complaints of "that's outrageous [that this medicine costs $X]!"
Well, maybe it is; maybe it isn't, but if you make sure it costs $X/100, I can be pretty sure you'll get less drug R&D.
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
[2] https://oversight.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight.house....
Your second link shows that the pharma companies spend almost as much on R&D as on stock dividends and buybacks. Is there any other industry that spends as much on R&D? Apple, for instance, seems to be spending ~6x as much on stock buybacks and dividends as on R&D (approximately, based on the first Google hits).
Even your own links contradict your claim that very little goes to R&D.
How many of them are you willing to cut off?
It’s shockingly effective, look at say prescriptions for patented opioids vs the vast numbers of equally effective generics. Doctors are extremely susceptible to advertising just like most people, the difference is it’s not their money being spent.
So, it’s not a question of which is prescribed more, it’s a question of why branded opioids are ever prescribed. We aren’t talking about a ~100 Billion dollars of accidental waste, it took a lot of work to extract that from the general public.
As a part of my job I’ve talked to insurance companies and they aren’t willing to pay for branded pain relief drugs unless there is some differentiating value.
1987 “May: MS Contin, (morphine sulfate) approved; first formulation of an opioid pain medicine that allowed dosing every 12 hours instead of every 4 to 6 hours.”
1990 “August: Duragesic (fentanyl transdermal system) approved; first formulation of an opioid pain medicine in a patch (sometimes referred to as a “skin patch”) that is changed every 3 days.”
1995 “December: OxyContin (oxycodone controlled-release) approved; first formulation of oxycodone that allowed dosing every 12 hours instead of every 4 to 6 hours.”
Plus stock buybacks and dividends are being criticized? Returning money to investors is “bad”? Who do you think provides capital for drug development? The Grenadier Guards?
“Don’t tell me where your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money and I’ll tell you what they are.” – James W. Frick
If you can produce a drug for 1$ a dose and you can sell it for 100$ at most without losing customers, you do that.
If your product costs are too high, you don't advertise. You sell the drug to the government as an "orphan drug".
Suppose you can sell 1 million sandwiches at 5$ or 1/2 a million at 6$ which you price depends on your cost of production. If it’s costing you less than 4$ you pick the first option if it’s more than 4$ and less than 6$ you pick the second. Though in the real world costs aren’t independent of sales so it’s even more complicated.
It’s only when you get extreme markups from a guaranteed monopoly that you can approximate things as revenue maximization. Also, drug R&D numbers are extremely inflated as among other things it’s got tax advantages.
My whole post is the exception you mention in your third paragraph. Your first paragraph is what happens when you have generics, and they start treating the drug more like a sandwich that a treatment. (No bioequivalence tests, safety concerns, etc)
That should scare everyone and I’m not sure why it doesn’t. They wouldn’t be advertising them if it didn’t increase sales, which probably means oncologists aren’t always prescribing what’s best.
As far as other medications, most people don’t go to the doctor regularly. Even if they did, they would probably need to inquire about their condition to have the doctor think of updating anything.
I remember having to personally call a doctor and ask them to stop prescribing a drug because it was pretty much malpractice to not use the newer approved drug from another company.
That's incorrect; promotional spend on prescription drugs is the globally suboptimal result of a prisoner's dilemma where the prosecutors are going around saying "hey, that guy over there snitched, so should you". There is absolutely no guarantee that ROI is positive.
> Who do you think provides capital for drug development? The Grenadier Guards?
Most of basic drug development happens in labs e.g. at universities that are funded mainly by public sources.
Per the latest PhRMA member survey, drug companies spent about $13 billion per year on preclinical R&D, which was about 15% of their total R&D spend. Meanwhile the NIH alone provides about $40 billion per year for preclinical research. So funding for actually finding new drugs and therapies is dominated by other funding sources than drug companies.
If you look at e.g. Pfizer and J&J, more than 85% of their revenue comes from drugs that were invented elsewhere. Just to clarify, I'm not saying clinical trials isn't a necessary and expensive thing. But in large part it's not developing drugs, it's checking that there are no big side effects and that efficacy remains what you saw at small sample sizes.
For instance mRNA vaccines were invented in publically funded laboratories. Monoclonal antibodies that work against inflammation is another example. And of course CRISPR, which is very promising.
In the example you bring up. Moderna raised and spent billions over a decade since it was founded on the 'academic invention', and didn't have a product until their vaccine. The same is true for BioNTech. There was a large chance these companies could have folded, and before the pandemic, most were deeply skeptical.
It's interesting to note that the Pfizer, AstroZeneca and J&J vaccines were all invented by 3rd parties.
Even then govt funded stuff is mostly preclinical. Start ups mostly cover anything from animal studies to phase 1 / 2.
Late stage R&D, manufacturing, and marketing is extremely capital intensive and complex and is mostly done by large pharma companies, who either license the asset or enter some sort of partnership with the IP holder. And I am including regulatory approval, demonstrating value to payers, etc under marketing (e.g. it is not just advertising).
Not for generic drugs.
And let us buy our meds out of country.
(And buying out generic drug manufactures should other drug companies in order to decrease competition is not cool either.)
You'd get more R&D. There were way more new drugs released before Bayh-Dole.
Warp speed is the work of career guys. Not even Fauchi -- he was important, but these ideas are put together, presented, and executed by the unknown 9-to-5ers.
We call this the Deep State
The truth is that any government needs a ton of people to operate properly and you can't change all of them upon election.
Actually, scratch that, you can sort of do that every election/change of government.
Do you know where they do that? Failed states. Failed states change most if not all the government employees upon regime change, to put people from the new regime in their place.
It's an unmitigated disaster, because you also need people other than politicians to do the heavy lifting. And those skills can't always be built up over just 4 years, you need more than that. It's dumb to throw them away. Let alone the fact that changing them with the regime means that it's super unlikely you keep the competent people, you just get new loyal folks.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing (for the reasons you describe) but there's a fundamental deceit going on if the president can't actually control that bureaucracy (because people assume that he can).
If by “we” you mean fans of the arbitrary, irresponsible, corrupt patronage-based governance of the spoils system who use the term to denigrate the idea of a professional civil service with loyalty that extends beyond the person of the current chief executive on whom their tenure depends, then, sure, “we” do.
He made vaccinations a partisan wedge issue to such a degree that he can't afford to walk back from it if he wants to run again in 2024, similar to the Republicans' former position on Obamacare.
I think you may be getting their personal stances confused with the partisan arguments about vaccine mandates that have evolved in the year since.
I suspect the confusion between your perspective and that of the previous commenter is a result of the difficulty Trump experienced in trying to promote a vaccine for an illness he was himself at the same time claiming does not exist.
Pfizer/BioNTech weren’t part of Warp Speed. And the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines were ready and had begun trials before they were part of Warp speed.
The only vaccine it might have had an impact on was potentially Moderna. But even Moderna had the vaccine ready well before the Trump administration even believed that the virus did not only affect Chinese people.
Finally, Warp Speed was not a brilliant new idea they came up with. It was part of the pandemic response plan the Obama administration had prepared many years ago. The difference is that if they had actually followed the plan warp speed would have been activated well before.
Pretty much the only thing that the Trump administration can be uniquely credited for is picking the name. Which, as we can see from the fact that the majority of current vaccine skeptics are worried about the speed at which the vaccines were created, was a terrible choice for a name.
Here's a scholarly article on the evolution of synthesis: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8340098/
Wars and pandemics seem to be the testbeds for medicine, where people are desperate enough to try anything, and legislation is relaxed accordingly. The biotech companies know this all too well, and take advantage when the opportunity arises.
"reversible covalent"
A chemical covalent bond. Maybe it means something else in this article?
On the other side: what are you folks not curing, with your magic powers, just because you know you won't be able to make a buck from it...?
This is such a ridiculous argument, IMO. As a thought experiment consider something like cancer treatment. If some pharma company researcher found a way to 100% prevent or reverse cancer, why would the company hide that? In the best case, they could make a ton of money from it by selling it cheap to everyone. In the worse case, they could make a ton of money selling it to the ultra wealthy with an obscene price tag. If they tried to hide it, the researcher would share the information elsewhere, no?
Novel drug research is extremely expensive and time consuming, logically speaking a for-profit pharma company will assign its resources to the research which is most likely to make a profit.
As a result rare conditions will not attract the research necessary to create drugs to treat them. To give you a concrete example, AFAIK there was never a vaccine for MERS which is a coronovirus which preceded COVID-19.
And that's separate from the Office of Orphan Products Development: https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/office-clinical-policy-and-pro...
It's not a recent thing, too. Different programs have been enacted in the US going as far back as the Orphan Drug Act of 1983. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_Drug_Act_of_1983
Broader reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_drug
I'm not saying the pharma companies pursue all possible opportunities to research/create new drugs, just that it's ridiculous to think if they did find one, they would suppress that information. It seems conspiratorial.
The Orphan drug act or incubators you link don't contradict the point I'm trying to make, but maybe that's on me.
> Can you provide an example of a treatment people would like that 'big pharma' wouldn't produce because they couldn't make a profit on it?
That's very different from:
> You're saying hiding the discovery of novel, profitable, drugs because profits from the existing treatment is widespread?
?
You are the head of strategy presenting to Big Pharma CEO.
You say 'Here are 5 new drugs which have potential for great impact, each will cost a billion. 4 of them are vaccines, which will be very inexpensive, and nobody will buy and we will lose money. One of them is a fairly expensive cancer treatment. Which one do you want to focus on boss?'
Supply/Demand and just Basic Economics generally work their way into the system.
Some drugs are much more profitable than others, many of them are not going to be profitable, and there's less incentive to work on them. Vaccines in particular.
It's a big part of the equation we have to deal with.
I like to write and publish books, but only because I know that several thousand people are going to buy them (yeah, humblebrag...). I wouldn't bother with them if my audience was two orders of magnitude smaller. It is just not worth the hassle.
Similarly, most programmers here probably work on projects used by thousands at least as well. Few people will put hours and energy into something that will only be used by, say, three users.
Rare diseases suffer from the same problem. The cost of development of drugs under current regulatory regime is high and in case of rare disease, cannot be amortized later over a huge set of patients. Moreover, most promising drugs actually fail in human trials, but the costs are already incurred.
Writing a book for yourself may have some sort of forcing function to understand a topic. But mostly I wouldn’t write a whole book to do that.
1) use of Psylocibin (mushrooms) assisted Congitive Behavioural Therapy for curing PTSD, depression, anxiety, etc. we have seen extremely good results from this and pharma companies could have likely pushed it much much sooner
2) Biofeedback/Neurofeedback has been around for more than a decade and is under-researched, under-insured, and under-prescribed for treatment of a lot of mental issues from anxiety to post-concussive syndrome to ADHD.
both of these can negate the need for a years or decades long reliance on SSRIs or stimulants.
Pharma mostly avoids low-profit avenues, but at least partly because that would be a good way to go out of business. However, to suggest that they intentionally suppress researchers with the goal of reducing costs seems a bit far-fetched.
many pharma do invest some of their portfolio into things that are unlikely to have short-term or any payoff, and many of them also maintain compassionate programs to get expensive drugs to people who wouldn't be able to otherwise afford them. They do this because they are highly profitable, which unfortunately is as much explained by their marketing acumen as much as it is by solid research and development.
Mine was not a conspiracy-innuendo, but rather a simple critique of profit-driven research in health-related sciences. Humans can do wonderful things when they work together, so it's rather sad that we seem to do that only when there are riches on the line.
But as a private company they need profit to fund the science. They'd go out of business if they weren't making a profit.
It's largely the role of government to fund public goods (e.g. by providing grants to university researchers). We can't expect the scientists and engineers to work for free.
1. make drugs without a profit margin available to consumers and researchers
2. go out of business.
It seems like there's plenty of grey area in there.
Yes, as a private company. In my opinion, it's not like everything has to be a private profit-driven company, precisely because incentives are not necessarily aligned to the public good.
The problem with "Big Pharma" is generally not with the intentions or capabilities of the researchers - it's with the funding.
But most people appreciate it when as a side effect, their work save lives.
No one should work in pharma?
However on the other hand I look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Queen_Elizabeth_(R08) which cost $4 billon to build.
A billion is a lot of money but not for governments, it's kinda tragic when you look at what we spend on some things that we haven't figured out a more sensible way of allocating resources.
This is one of the most well know, tired, scammy talking point big-pharma has used for decades.
Hint: in the very document you linked, htere is a 'costing method' section, you might want to read it a bit more carefully and you will discover the big scam: opportunity cost, not cost.
Then why aren't you (or, at least, someone) out there developing new drugs on the cheap to undercut "Big Pharma"? Your opportunity awaits, dude.
You just made a straw-man argument.
I posted a 2 lines comment highlighting the fact that cost and opportunity cost are two very different things, to the point that the claim that taking a drug to market costing literally billions of dollars to poor drug companies can be taken with a grain of salt.
You main take-away was that I am "arguing that it doesn't take years of time and billions of dollars to bring a drug to market".
In your original post, you referred to the claim that it costs billions of dollars as a "scam", which is exactly the same thing as calling it false (indeed, it's not only calling it false, it's calling it intentionally and perhaps criminally false).
Now you're trying to walk back that claim by watering it down to "take it with a grain of salt" rather than calling it a "scam", but you did, in fact, deny that it costs billions.
If it doesn't, in fact, cost billions, why isn't someone undercutting them?
Yes and I still mean it, it is a scam because now people cite this study and think 'cost' where in reality they should think 'opportunity cost'.
I'm not walking back anything, this is literally a talking point coming from some lobbyists to justify the widespread practice of fake pricing of drugs in the US.
Let me just copy paste the relevant section in the document that we are referring to.
"First, we summed direct and indirect research and development spending on a therapeutic agent in each year. All sums were inflation adjusted to 2018 dollars using the US consumer price index.
Second, we accounted for failed projects by dividing total research and development expenditures on a drug in a particular year by the corresponding aggregate phase-specific probability of success, similar to what was done in previous studies of costs of drug development.3-7 For example, for each drug, we divided phase 1 costs in each year by 0.138, which accounted for spending on the other 6.2 phase 1 trials that would fail, on average, for each successful development program. We used phase 1 rates to adjust preclinical expenditures, and we used the proportion of biologics license applications and new drug applications that are approved by the FDA to adjust costs once these applications were submitted to the agency for regulatory approval. Licensing fees and milestone payments, where captured, were adjusted using the success rate for the trial phase that was ongoing when the payments were made. When a phase shift took place within the financial year, we allocated the cost proportionally to the time spent in each phase. For example, if development moved from phase 1 to phase 2 on July 1 of a given year, we divided the costs equally between each phase. Similarly, in the year of approval, we multiplied the total cost by the fraction of the year elapsed by the time of approval. Hence, if a drug was approved on July 1, we only counted 50% of the costs in the year of approval since firms often incurred postapproval costs related to pharmacovigilance or testing in other indications.
Third, we applied a real cost of capital rate of 10.5% per year (ie, weighted average cost of capital in the pharmaceutical industry), as in the DiMasi et al study.4 Cost of capital is the required rate of return for an investor and encapsulates a risk-free rate (ie, opportunity cost) and premium based on the likelihood of business failure.24"
That actually does seem to be your main point.
They, together with Microsoft, tried to calculate how much money Microsoft was losing in developing countries. So they went something like: 1 billion PCs x 1 copy of Windows 98 or whatever was popular at the time x $100 per copy, so Microsoft is losing $100 billion.
They just ignored a few key facts. Such as, for example, the fact that many of those 1 billion PC users in developing countries were making $100 per year. So if someone held a gun to their head they still wouldn't have been able to pay the license cost. They would have just used something else, maybe Linux.
The cost explosion for these things are mainly the responsibility of US regulators.
According to the Pfizer press release [0] Paxlovid uses Ritonavir [1], which is a known HIV antiviral, originally patented in 1989.
At the start of the covid pandemic, chinese scientists even tried Kaletra, a generic that combines Ritonavir with another HIV antiviral, and found it to not improve outcomes [2], but this might have been due to them not giving the drug early enough in the infection, but only to hospitalized patients, while Pfizer gave it to non-hospitalized patients with a risk of later hospitalization.
[0]: https://investors.pfizer.com/investor-news/press-release-det...
Both are protease inhibitors.
> PF-07321332 is designed to block the activity of the SARS-CoV-2-3CL protease, an enzyme that the coronavirus needs to replicate. Co-administration with a low dose of ritonavir helps slow the metabolism, or breakdown, of PF-07321332 in order for it to remain active in the body for longer periods of time at higher concentrations to help combat the virus.
So the main job is done by PF-07321332 even, while ritonavir is only there to keep PF-07321332 a bit longer from being destroyed by the body.
Can someone please ELI5 what makes this unique from others?
> PF-07321332 is designed to block the activity of [a specific] enzyme that the coronavirus needs to replicate. Co-administration with a low dose of ritonavir helps slow [the breakdown] of PF-07321332 in order for it to remain active in the body for longer periods of time at higher concentrations to help combat the virus.
It's a two-part drug. PF-07321332 is the new and shiny thing that impairs a crucial enzyme for the virus, while the pre-existing drug ritonavir lets PF-07321332 last longer, making it more clinically useful.
That's my take on it.
This drug is fantastically effective at preventing hospitalisation and death, if administered within three days of symptom onset.
That gives quite a long time! But we still need to make it easy to take. Do pharmacies give it out? ER rooms? We don't want to wait until people are hospitalised; we are trying to avoid that.
So when you test positive, does the government send you out a pill with the "sorry, you have to isolate" SMS?
However, that means something like this is still very useful because of that 5–8%, especially for the elderly and the immunosuppressed, etc.
(I share your skepticism anti vaxxers would be interested in an effective treatment.)
But 99% of people don't know that water can kill you. I'm not talking about drowning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication
If the most benign substance on the surface on the planet can kill you, anything can.
So no matter what, you'll get the viral mRNA in your body. Either through infection or through the vaccine. The vaccine just contains a small fragment and it does not proliferate. Unlike the virus.
I think there's also some "it won't happen to me" mentality that quickly disappears once it does (which is far too late for a vaccine)
I'm not anti-vax, btw. I have a medical condition that requires me to receive regular vaccination against several diseases, and I'm strict about doing that on time.
I've made a calculated decision in the case of this specific vaccine based on that fact that I've now had Covid twice (first time was a bit nasty, second time was very mild) and have acquired fairly robust natural immunity.
According to almost all of the research I've read, natural immunity is at least as effective as the vaccine, which makes sense to me. Our bodies (if healthy) tend to be pretty good at this stuff.
The vaccine carries risk, all medical treatments do. When I calculate my baseline risk - very healthy, fit, no cormobidities, etc..., couple it with my acquired natural immunity, my chances of a negative outcome from Covid asymptotically approach zero. This appears to me to be less risk than the vaccine introduces.
I say all this to describe my mindset, I think a lot of people share it. Lumping everyone that choses based on a risk calculation to not receive the vaccine as "anti-vaxxer" is a common thing that people do (though I believe it is wrong).
All that being said, my primary point is that if I got Covid again, I'd absolutely be receptive to a therapeutic like this.
My decision against getting the vaccine was entirely risk based. At the point where I've contracted the illness again, however unlikely, the risk has been realized and I would 100% be receptive to taking this therapeutic if my doctor recommended it.
In my opinion, if you're nice and wear a mask in crowded conditions, don't go around hanging especially indoors in big groups, your position is kind of ok.
Though I'd still look at the numbers to check if vaccines reduce infection rates and rate of spread. Because if that's true, it might be worth getting vaccinated to protect others a bit more.
Me > Though I'd still look at the numbers to check if vaccines reduce infection rates and rate of spread.
Thankfully I said that already.
> Also vaccinated people spread delta, so everyone is getting it on some time scale.
That's not guaranteed, though. Just like not everyone on the planet will ever get all the strands of flu or cold or whatever. Through natural immunity + vaccinations at some point the disease can just die down and through a simple rotation you could avoid it (i.e. everyone else gets it at a time when you're not around so you're spared).
Plus the time scale is important. In November 2019 we didn't have any vaccines, now we have 4 that are approved on a wide scale (Pfizer, Moderna, J&J, AZ) plus a bunch of others with widespread usage but a less stellar reputation (Sputnik, the Chinese ones) plus another bunch coming soon <<and>> this very topic is about a drug for curing it. And another slightly less effective drug has also been approved recently, from Merck. That's... 24 months after the initial outbreak. Who knows what 24 more months will bring?
Vaccinated people? Much less so than the unvaccinated.
Double vaccinated people are 60-75% less likely to catch even asymptomatic COVID. If infected, they are 50% less likely to transmit it onwards to others. These are Delta figures.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-59077036
(Article contains link to the Lancet study)
From the Lancet study linked in the article:
> The SAR in household contacts exposed to the delta variant was 25% (95% CI 18–33) for fully vaccinated individuals compared with 38% (24–53) in unvaccinated individuals.
Vaccinated people will spread without even knowing, this is already the main way of spread in many areas with very high vaccination rates.
I personally didn’t mind the side effects, but mainly got it because I thought: What if I get Covid and give it to someone and something happens to them? And then I thought that it still worths the risk.
Of course no one should blame you if you want to care for yourself but I’m interested to know your feelings on this.
Your mindset should be: everyone is going to get this, probably multiple times in your life, vaccines reduce the symptoms, but not as effectively as having survived covid.
You say that, but you ended up catching COVID twice. Was the second time post the availability of vaccines?
There are some inactivated virus vaccines which would be best for people who want to avoid new vaccine types, but AFAIK they haven't even been tested in the US.
You left a lot out in regards to the mechanisms of action: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8203399/
[1] https://pubpeer.com/publications/EDF9109EE29DF2340379B562365...
Sorry you had a severe issue with your vaccine.
I had a hardened blood clot surgically removed off my scalp the other day. Was in a vein right by my temple. When the report comes back confirming I'm hoping it'll get me a proper scan.
Does that mean that there is no evidence that it doesn't work either? :)
The well run trials to this point don't show a significant difference between the groups. The ivermectin advocates say that the trials have not been run correctly for various reasons like dosage, timing, etc. More trials can be run to try to address these concerns. This can be repeated any number of times but at some point people will give up trying if no effect is found.
Or that big pharma wasn't making enough money off ivermectin, so they invented a new pseudo-drug or something.
When you believe that core institutions are worse than inept and actively work against you, you can justify anything. I'd call it a coin toss whether they're for or against.
That said, this does work better it seems if taken early, before the anti-vax sentiment may have worn off. Hard to say.
What it does signal is really the "end of the pandemic". We have both a vaccine (now approved for kids) and a cure. That sounds like it to me.
40 000 people forced to work by their employers, who then spread it to colleagues and customers, because they had a respiratory disease but ‘it isn’t COVID’.
COVID is particularly bad, but employees should also be allowed to stay home and rest, to not spread the cold and flu.
Lack of approval + length of use as medicine. There's a narrative that drug X has been used for 50 years (despite what it's used for) and therefore the pharma industry is uninterested in its success because they can't get rich off of it.
The latter is a common thread, along the lines of "what THEY don't want you to know."
So why are THEY for these but against ivermectin?
Of course the whole idea of THEY is nutty. The idea that there is this level of coordination / cooperation among pharma companies is ridiculous enough to be the punchline of a joke.
Many people sick with COVID are not getting this "standard of care" you suggest exists. Just tylenol and good luck. So those other drugs are not very far from ivermectin in terms of accessibility. All effective drugs are controlled and access is not given to the broad public, only to doctors and pharmacists, and many of these gatekeepers keep them from the sick people. You have to be lucky and have a good doctor who cares about you, not just about following what government agencies tell him to do. Then he may give both "unproblematic" stuff like heparines and also more "controversial" stuff like ivermectin.
The FDA regulates the marketing of drugs, not the practice of medicine. Physicians can prescribe whatever they want. Treatment guidelines are determined entirely by practicing physicians.
Uptodate is a good resource to check out if you want to see for yourself what clinical guidelines look like, and the type of evidence they are supported by.
https://www.uptodate.com/contents/covid-19-management-in-hos...
Anti-Vaxx people seem to absolutely love non-vax treatments.
I don't know if the rationalization is sound, but I'm not sure it's really that.
The anti-vaxx stigma pre-COVID I think has had it's toll.
The notion of 'government pushing you to take something' as well.
Whereas, 'you get sick, you take a pill' is an easy concept.
My fear is that a lot of people won't bother with a vax if they think there's a 'cure'.
So 1 * P(bad vax) vs P(getting covid) * P(bad covid case).
While most of other proposed treatments are after you already got it.
So P(bad side effects) vs 1 * P(bad covid case).
Depending on your priors and health, those balance very differently.
Also, if the new pill ends up as effective as they say it is, there is no reason to push for 100% vax uptake anymore -- it would turn covid into a slightly more dangerous cold.
Thankfully that risk is tiny.
> Also, if the new pill ends up as effective as they say it is, there is no reason to push for 100% vax uptake anymore -- it would turn covid into a slightly more dangerous cold.
No, vaccination remains far cheaper. Mass vaccination also reduces the risk of mutation, and of infection others.
If everybody gets vaccinated AND this anti viral is widely available for those infected, COVID will be well and truly deranged.
Only if the vaccine is effective enough. With these moderately effective vaccines, there is a danger that breakthrough cases will generate new variants.
Second, COVID just doesn't mutate that much considering how prevalent it is, in part due to RNA proofreading.
Moreover, no, emperical evidence shows the neutralizing antibody effect of vaccines decreases the spread of variants.
The world started vaccinating in January - 10 months ago. You won't even begin to know the true effectiveness of the vaccine and its outcomes until at least one more year goes by ey? Then you can begin to compare year over year health outcomes in highly vaccinated groups, vs unvaccinated, in the same region (same viral seasonality profile), across age groups. I can't wait to see regional all cause mortality with accurately age (and other vars) adjusted data between the vaxxed and unvaxxed.
1) There really is no such thing as 'Vaccine Risk' in the material sense, any more than we would us language such as 'Flying Risk'. Esp. in the US where thee is no AZ vaccine, the risk is negligible.
'The Vaccine Risk' in the minds of many people isn't consistent with the reality, and it's a major communications problem.
Anti-vaxxers are internalizing and propagandizing a degree of risk that just isn't real, leading to bad health outcomes.
Sure, technically, it's a risk, but so is anything else.
2) 'No push for 100% Vaccine' - maybe not for '100%' but we really need to push hard on vaccines.
COVID is not scary because it's excessively deadly. It's scary because it's excessively viral, meaning, it's a community disease, less so an individual disease.
Stopping COVID means stoping the spread, not trying to cure people when they get it.
With 95% vaccination, R0 drops below 1 and so hospitalization rates are low, we can focus on the hard cases.
With 0% vaccination and a 85% effective drug, well, 'everyone' will get COVID, and a scary number of them will die.
The 'Best Answer' by far in a world where vaccines are very safe, very cheap, and very effective - is to get 'as many as we can' vaccinated. And then use the expensive drugs on the hard cases.
As for endemic, yes, a problem, but of a different kind.
But what about 75% vaccination (lots of countries are there already or very close) and 85% effective drug? How much effort much be spent on hunting down every last antivaxxer and how many side effects of that are acceptable? (like destroying public support for vaccine mandates in general, creating nice shiny tools for the next wannabe authoritarian, etc)
If you were at risk, you can get vaccinated, why force a healthy person? (The answer is mostly for the folks who can't vaccinate, but those folks are screwed any way you look at this pandemic if we are honest).
Not to mention, everyone I know knows at least one person who had a stroke within weeks of getting one of the "vaccines", I know three. Previous to this past year I've known one person in my entire life that had a stroke, and it was my wife's uncle who was in his 90s.
Vaccine side effect tracking is done pretty thoroughly, so if what you see would be a real and generic phenomenon, it would have been noticed by now.
None of the 3 I personally know were (suppose that's just anecdotal also). The one received the second dose 3 days before a major stroke, and massive blood clots. I'm sure it was tOtAlLy UnReLaTeD.
> The official estimate by the CDC is that 1 in 40 vaccine injuries is reported.
Source?
Overwhelmingly, the numbers of people in Hospitals are unvaxxed.
In BC, the last report I saw for a region had almost 100% of people below 50 in intensive care unvaxxed, almost the same numbers for seniors.
Rates of spread are actually coming down even while business activity expands, vaccines are a potent part of this. Not perfect, but a major component.
So again: COVID is a community problem, less so an individual one. 'Stopping the Dominos' from dropping is much better than trying to lift all the dominos up after they fell with drugs.
"So taking preventative measures because it is forced down their throats seems hostile."
It's not hostile to the 80-90% of people in most advanced nations who have basic civil maturity. It's a mild distraction with obvious individual and group benefits, to the point where I have a hard time understanding lack of participation (yes, it's very easy to understand hesitancy and hostility to being required to do something, but not to the level where people actually would avoid doing something obviously beneficial).
I remember when smoking was banned indoors, I get that people were a begrudged, but I think in reality most people 'got it'.
One thing to keep in mind is that P(getting covid) is about 1. But for sure greater than 50%, especially if people don't vaccinate in large numbers (I mean others, of course) and if we do away with masks and restrictions.
When doing this kind of comparison, vaccines are tricky, because if you vaccinate close to 100%, then you'll have very few cases, so P(getting covid) will be rather small and then it will seem that the vaccines may not be worth it. But if you don't, then it will be high and that's what you should base your decision on. BTW, this is why antivaxxery could become such a phenomenon lately (even before covid): too few children died or got paralyzed in the past quite a few decades so the usual diseases somehow started to seem not such a big deal. Because people just didn't experience the other side of the equation anymore.
Also, on a side note, I'd expect that an antiviral will have more side effects than a vaccine.
Interesting. Indeed, should people bother with a vax if there's a highly effective cure? Is it worth all the teeth-gnashing and hair pulling on the part of the medical establishment, political establishment and media about people who would rather get COVID than get the vaccine? IMO this cure (once it starts rolling out ofc) is a reason to start rolling back vaccine and mask mandates rather than impose more mandates.
[Disclaimer: Fully vaxxed, will take a booster, etc]
There is also the worry of the effects of long covid. Just yesterday I was reading a thread on here of people complaining about experiences of their loved ones with long term covid after effects not being able to find relief from doctors because, well, we still don't even know what causes it. Better to avoid an infection that let a virus ravage through your body hoping medication can reverse all the effects on the body
I agree we should get vaccinated to reduce spread but, good news, this is wrong. UK clinical guidelines[1] state the immunocompromised and the immunosuppressed should get vaccinated.
In fact, they basically recommend everybody be vaccinated. Pregnant? Yes. Mild allergies? Yes. History of anaphylaxis caused by a specific ingredient in the vaccine? Speak to a a specialist who should offer (where possible) an alternative vaccine.
Moreover we know two doses of the vaccines produce an antibody response in the immunosuppressed.
That said, three doses is a good idea[2] to boost that response to a more typical level.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-the-gree...
[2] https://twitter.com/sailorrooscout/status/138026987700974387... and preceding thread
Yes. COVID danger is it's virality, not it's lethality.
100% vaccinated population even at only 85% effectiveness means R0 is well below 1 and COVID cannot spread.
100% of COVID patients treated at 85% effectiveness of antiviral therapy means probably well over 1/2 the population still gets COVID, that's devastating.
If this were about a non-communicable disease, then probably the vaccine would be a slightly better idea, but due to virality there's no doubt vaxxes are better.
The best is to have both.
Finally, the vaxx is $20, antiviral is $700, which is material.
That said, if the 'cure' were 100% perfect, no side effects, cost $1 and could be given at any time after infection and prevents any further adverse effects, then we could probably just settle on that if we had to.
I don't suspect we're going to hear a lot about this in the press, because the 'narrative' still needs to be 'get vaccinated'. What will happen is the CFR will come down to to this and other measures behind the scenes so to speak.
Unless this thing comes down to $50 and is something any doctor can prescribe willy-nilly easy-peasy in which case I think there would be a big media campaign to 'inform us'.
Wealthy people.
If this drug is safe and can be made sufficiently cheap, it could be a great treatment for most kinds of common cold.
Why suffer for weeks with cold symptoms if you can simply spray this up your nose and feel better?
It could (potentially) be used similarly to Tamiflu.
The majority of the common cold cases is caused by rhinoviruses. But yes, like 20% (ballpark) are caused by coronaviruses.
> Similar reductions in COVID-19-related hospitalization or death were observed in patients treated within five days of symptom onset; 1.0% of patients who received PAXLOVID™ were hospitalized through Day 28 following randomization (6/607 hospitalized, with no deaths), compared to 6.7% of patients who received a placebo (41/612 hospitalized with 10 subsequent deaths), with high statistical significance (p<0.0001). In the overall study population through Day 28, no deaths were reported in patients who received PAXLOVID™ as compared to 10 (1.6%) deaths in patients who received placebo.
Those extra two days (three versus five) could make a huge difference.
This is the line I was looking for. Not that I know how protease inhibitor works, but looks more like a traditional anti-viral approach v.s. the potentially DNA altering molnupiravir.
https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/covid-19-ema-starts-rollin...
Calling out the OP for being wrong and them admitting they have no knowledge in the area is not an ad hominem attack.
The OPs theory was disproven on its merits alone.
The UK scientific advisory group SAGE published a few months ago that combination therapy might be useful to avoid 'antiviral resistant' strains of SARS cov-2 evolving. Perhaps these 3cl protease inhibitors may be used in combination.
When I first read about molnupiravir's mode of action, my gut reaction was "cancer in a pill, no thanks"
I wonder how well it will do on people who are farther along in their COVID infection?
There are a lot of people who don't get vaccinated, don't take precautions to avoid COVID, dismiss their early symptoms either because they believe COVID isn't worse than a typical cold or flu or because they think that is probably what they have, just treat it at home with vitamins and ivermectin if they do anything at all about it, and don't end up going to a doctor or hospital until they are having so much trouble breathing they have to go to the emergency room.
On top of this you refer to 'long covid' which has nothing to do with the covid virus itself. Long covid is the syndrome after a person gets over a covid infection. They're not entirely sure what causes it, but damage to internal organs and the venous system have been observed[3]. At this point there is no active viral infection in your system, inhibiting viral replication is basically irrelevant. There is absolutely zero reason, even according to the logic of ivermectin-for-covid, that ivermectin would treat that damage.
1- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC7129059/
2- http://dicyt.uto.edu.bo/observatorio/wp-content/uploads/2020...
3- https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...
(That's what the studies are for, and thus far, they've shown little sign of the effect you describe on statistically significant populations.)
None of this is scientific. What was is the safety on it so that made it low risk to try.
It really isn’t.
Neither is the placebo effect.
When can life go back to normal?
I gotta wear a mask indoors to some degree, so I guess we're at like 99% normal.
Going through extensive testing and requiring proof of vaccinations for a thing as simple as going to the zoo is also not 99% normal. I have two trips abroad planned in the next 3 months, yet chances are high that I won't go to either due to external circumstances.
People with potentially life threatening health issues such as brain tumors are seeing their treatments postponed. Excess deaths are still very high in many countries, even with high vaccination rates.
Things are 1% normal, not 99% normal.
> There were six hospitalizations and no deaths among the 607 patients who received Paxlovid within five days of symptom onset, compared to 41 hospitalizations and 10 deaths in the placebo cohort.
> Like Merck, Pfizer excluded people vaccinated against COVID-19 from its late-phase study.
No pricing information. I'm worried that "3 days after symptoms onset" is too short to be usable in real-life, but I could be wrong.
It’s similar to the antivirals for flu where you need to take it early on so it becomes habit to test early and start early.
Home labs will help with this too. Where someone could take a test, get a prescription and pickup within a few hours.
Nowadays, this should be easier with so many virtual appointment options and delivery services. It should be, but is it?
There should be an app that does all of it for you. 1. Scan your insurance card. 2. You get notified when a doctor is ready for your virtual visit. 3. If appropriate you get the Rx written. 4. That day, some delivery service will bring you the Rx. 5. Maybe a testing service stops by as well.
Insurance companies should want to participate if it decreases Flu or Covid hospitalization for a reasonable cost.
Anyone want to make this happen? My fall classes are nearly all finished.
Edit: Pharmaceutical companies may wish to partner as well. Lots of avenues for this kind of service to find revenue.
1. You're minimizing the 2 hardest parts of doing anything medical, which is the insurance billing and state licensing requirements. The state may consider you a medical services provider even if all you do is pair people with already-certified medical professionals.
2. "That day, some delivery service will bring you the Rx." This sounds illegal or heavily licensed/regulated. It's a drug addict's dream because it's so easy to maintain multiple identities. You probably get a random doctor, so the doctor won't notice it's you with a different name. And then they even send a driver to pick up the prescription, so the pharmacy won't notice that it's you with a different name.
The pharmacy would also likely need to be in on it. I.e. in Texas, pharmacies that deliver are required to include any information that would have been given orally as a written document with the prescription. If the pharmacy doesn't know it's being delivered, they won't know to include those.
If you wanted to partner with someone, it would be CVS or Walgreens, though. They already have licensed pharmacies everywhere, and handling the pharmacy requirements are going to be the hard part. I believe they also own a lot of those tiny clinic chains that are inside grocery stores, and this would give them a way to fill in any downtime in the nurses' schedules, as well as to let them soak up excess demand in one area with slack in another.
I have a lot more thoughts about this and everything you wrote that comes together compellingly as a nascent business strategy, and I’m not exactly naive in this domain. My first real software job focused on medical billing and insurance complexities in one of Epic’s two accounts receivables applications, but that’s really only the beginning of it. Happy to chat and discuss further. You can find my contact info in my profile.
:-)
Are you actually able to get tests? I've brought my kid into urgent care and they won't test for flu, so it doesn't matter that there's a drug available, because they won't test.
"The U.S. government has been in negotiations with Pfizer for enough pills for 1.7 million courses of treatment, with an additional option for 3.3 million, according to a senior administration official. That is about the same quantity that the United States has ordered from Merck. The government expects to pay about $700 per treatment course for both drugs, the official said."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/05/health/pfizer-covid-pill....
"Rates were similar for patients treated within five days of symptoms - 1% of the treatment group was hospitalized, compared with 6.7% for the placebo group, which included 10 deaths."
[0] - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pfizer-says-antiviral-pill-cu...
Medical ethics are confusing. Maybe this field needs more oversight. Especially on the corporate level.
As House put it--
>Just to shortcut this discussion.. People should not be testing drugs because they're desperate. But, people won't test drugs unless they're desperate. We need drugs to save children and puppies, ergo we need desperate people, ergo welfare kills sick children.
And pertaining to clinical trials, if I want to sign up for a clinical trial for a what might be a placebo for a great white shark bite in the midriff, that's my own choice. If I die because of this choice, that's my fault.
I wonder because almost everyone who might end up needing this isn't vaccinated (based on hospitalization rates) so I hope that at the end they also end up having some immunity to catching it again at least.
In the moment of course it is better to use than not.
Do we say that Ebola doesn't kill you directly, it's the hemorrhaging and multi-organ failure?
Of course it doesn't kill you "directly" for some sufficiently narrow definition of direct.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...
Bonus: search for OOTDTY and you'll find all sorts of unrelated items.
There goes the "company A has better names than company B" theory?
Obligatory classic: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...
There are other methods, graph substructure similarity is common. More to your actual question, it was derived from a previous attempt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lufotrelvir) which has a very similar structure, and I wasn't able to find prior information by doing a little literature searching to see if there are other similar compounds.
When I wrote my comment I knew somebody was going to come along and think I was implying CF3 was explosive.
The molecule I worked with in grad school, 5FU, contains a fluorine, it's a very effective anticancer drug which ultimately came from fluroacetyl which is highly toxic. In fact most of the molecules I worked with in grad school that had fluorine were toxic specifically because of fluorine. Not because they were unstable bonds, but because F is very effective in nucleoside analogs. So you can imagine why I am a bit wary of F and just in general don't think of F as being particularly compatible with life.
1. that compounds derive from some difficult to handle gas is only a problem for the process chemists. In this case because the TFA-based precursor is available this is not a problem. Though technically, the production of that commercially available TFA will probably have involved F2.
2. Though indeed there are quite a few toxic compounds that incorporate fluorine, such as 5-fluoro-uracil, fluoroacetate etc this is not quite a general rule, as there are also plenty of non toxic medicines and materials that incorporate fluorine. It seems decently compatible with life compared, certainly compared to some other elements or classes of compounds generally.
3. specifically concerning nucleoside/-tide/-base analogs I wouldn't quite pin their cytotoxicity on fluorine, as a class these will tend to be toxic because they are similar enough to nucleosides to get where they need to be but dissimilar enough to cause problems and make systems that deal with nucleobase derivatives malfunction. Instead of 5-fluoro you can also put 5-iodo, 5-TFM, sulfur, alkynyl, etc there and get antiviral like, cytotoxic compounds
In any case, when it comes to this specific pfizer drug, I would say the presence of some fluorines is not a production problem and certainly not a toxicity red flag. For example, Derek Lowe, whose amusing post on some of the more dangerous fluorine chemistry you cite, also has the following to say about fluorine and medicinal chemistry:
"We med-chemists just love our fluorines - as long as we don't have to use, like, fluorine itself to make them - because they armor-plate parts of our molecules against being metabolized and can change the binding profiles of the parent structures like nothing else can."[0]
[0]https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/new-ways-fluorinat...
This makes me weirdly sad. Can you imagine entering the trial for a long sought drug against a deadly disease that turn out to be working, and end up in the control group? I know that there's more to it (it's necessary, they knew, it could have not worked, plainly be nocive, etc.) but it's like being unlucky twice in a row and die out of that while having received the real thing would have saved you
It would be unethical if this placebo was given in place of a known working alternative treatment.
From what little I know of cancer treatment, that isn't how studies are generally run. When you're part of a trial, you're either given the experimental treatment, or the "standard of care", not a placebo.
So for cancer at least, you're either getting a novel treatment, or standard chemo.
It is difficult to overstate just how much thought and argument has gone into clinical trial design in the last half century. It may seem detached and unfeeling, but basically every step is carefully considered compassion, ethics, and a desire for unambiguous causal truth of drug effectiveness.
https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
Getting vaccinated looks like a better option to me. Anyone know if the Pfizer one works similarly?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2021/11/02/har...
> As a protease inhibitor, Paxlovid is free from the theoretical DNA-alteration risk tied to the mechanism of action of Merck’s molnupiravir.
https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
If rabies has a 99% death rate and you try your rabies treatment on 10 people, 9 of whom live, that's much stronger evidence than a situation where 50% of people died without treatment versus 48% with treatment (sample size 100). To be confident it's not just random chance, you'll need a really large sample size for the 2nd situation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molnupiravir#Mechanism_of_acti...
> There were six hospitalizations and no deaths among the 607 patients who received Paxlovid within five days of symptom onset, compared to 41 hospitalizations and 10 deaths in the placebo cohort.
Here's something to read on this (note the three criteria for a TL;DR): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5024796/
I am curious though: do they ever continue with the trial, with the patients on the actual drug? Might that be useful for monitoring rare-ish side effects, even if the drug is highly effective?
I can't imagine wanting to keep people in the control group when the experimental treatment is so dramatically effective.
Let’s say you have a randomized clinical trial with a control arm (placebo) and test arm (drug). If the vast majority of the test cases do significantly better (like 90% of the test cases), at some point it becomes unethical to continue. Why? Because you already have the evidence that the treatment works, so having the control arm becomes meaningless. You already know that the drug works, so there is no longer a point to collect more data AND you know that the control arm isn’t going to help half the patients. So, you stop the trial early so that you can get started with the approval process so that the drug can get to all patients faster.
I generally think of the phases like this (this is just how I think of it):
Phase 1 - is it safe? If you don’t see severe toxicity then you can go to phase 2.
Phase 2 - does it work? You look for good outcomes (cures, better survival, etc). If there is significantly better outcomes relative to placebo, then go to phase 3.
Phase 3 - does it work for a large population? What is the appropriate dose? Dialing in the numbers before public release.
Phase 4 - after you’ve made the drug public, monitor the larger population for side effects or adverse events. You can’t hope to cover all patients in a phase 2/3 trial, so you keep monitoring the first waves of patients that get the drug.
Intuitively you would expect that the treatment also lowers the rate of spread.
I know it shouldn't be shocking but it just hit me that being in the control group here is very close to getting a death sentence. I couldn't find it in the article OP shared or the press release, but did the control group get any other treatment?
When trials are extremely effective, they are sometimes halted and rolled out early. That sounds like exactly what Pfizer is attempting to do here. The company thinks that they have a clear-enough signal to be worth going to the press and preparing FDA for the EUA.
Pfizer will have made an embarrassing error if the final trial-results turn out to differ with their claims, but if they don't, then Pfizer has given a several-week head start to rolling the drug out to all patients.
How does this work? You sign up for the program when you're sick and you might get meds that help you? That would really suck if a loved one was in the program and died because they happened to get the placebo.
Trials like this are performed in desperate situations, and you only ever hear about the success stories. Most such trials probably result in no measurable benefit, and run the risk of an even worse outcome than the placebo.
Real science does have a price.
I'm not following. Are you under the impression that the COVID-19 vaccine trials weren't similarly double blinded?
The rest of your post doesn't reflect any government position that I'm currently aware of. Both my local government and the CDC encouraged me to go outside, while maintaining distancing, after the initial lockdown.
I have seen plenty of scientists with all kinds of statements, the worst being ‘oh if you got infected, it’s your own fault because you clearly didn’t stay 1.5 m from other people. Because otherwise it is impossible to get infected!’
Those models were based on a very old mistake and had no basis in reality: https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...
It's a very long read, but worth it. Basically, the social distancing measures were based on two things: That the primary spread vector was "droplets", and that they fell to the ground pretty quickly (before they could spread beyond ~6 feet).
The mistake the title refers to is that the medical definition that distinguishes "droplet" vs "aerosol" isn't the same as any other context, such as when used when determining how far the particles can travel. The cutoff between "droplet" and "aerosol" in the medical context came from a Tuberculosis study about how far different particle sizes could penetrate into the lungs. Only later were those numbers mistakenly used as the cutoff for "droplets" vs "aerosols" in general, leading to a lot of confusion over 2020: SARS-CoV-2 really does spread primarily through aerosols, not droplets, as defined in any context other than that medical mistake.
From a cursory search of NEJM and PubMed, I can't find evidence that any US-approved vaccines were allowed to run unblinded trials. But I could be wrong.
Part of that price is honesty on what's truly known, indicated, suggested, hypothesized, or unknown. What is "blathering" to you is intellectual integrity to others.
If it does conclusively show effectiveness quite quickly, often they will cut the phase of the trial short and put everybody on the actual drug I think.
When to Stop a Clinical Trial Early for Benefit: Lessons Learned and Future Approaches:
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCHEARTFAILURE.111...
> In this case the alternative to the trial would be the […] option of no treatment
So the alternative is what we do now, which indeed is the ‘dangerous’ option.
But what do I know. We have survived for 2m years without this. I'm sure we can be fine without it.
I just feel people are too quick to accept a for-profit mega-corporation as the defacto source of all things covid cure.
Serious disease? - The same/similar (though studies have shown this declines within 6 months). Op is correct.
Catching/Transmission? - The current vaccines are systemic and not mucosal, so they don't stop it infecting the upper respiratory tract. - A recent study shows fully-vaccinated households can spread at similar rates to unvaccinated households [1]
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
"Vaccination reduces the risk of delta variant infection and accelerates viral clearance."
This[1] study suggests that there a brief period of significant reduction (~three months), followed by a period modest to no risk reduction, followed by a period of increased risk.
This[2] study found no correlation between vaccination rates and viral spread.
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3949410
A much larger study from the US [2] shows no measurable decline in the protection against hospitalization due to COVID over more than 5 months after vaccination.
[1] https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...
As far as hospitalizations go, I am not arguing with that, vaccines clearly reduce disease burden. The question was: Are vaccines effective at stopping spread? Many countries are experiencing record infection rates with a large majority of the population vaccinated. This suggests to me that vaccines are not effective in that regard.
Forever? No. Perfectly? No.
They do have an measurable impact on transmission, especially soon after vaccination. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
The vaccines are not 100% effective at preventing spread (nor for preventing serious illness, for that matter).
That is not even remotely the same as "not effective".
In practice, the vaccines (with the possible partial exception of the J&J single dose) provide significant reduction in both spread and serious illness.
We eliminated smallpox. Amazing! Yet, first, the smallpox vaccine wasn't perfect. It was 95% effective against infection. I would bet it's actually less than that. They probably mean symptomatic infection, because who was widely testing asymptomatic vaccinated people for smallpox? In contrast, symptomatic smallpox patients are pretty obviously and unambiguously infected with smallpox.
Second, what's particularly interesting is if you were the only smallpox-vaccinated person in a house of a couple others, the vaccine efficacy fell to about two thirds.
This isn't a world apart from the COVID vaccines. Two doses protects you 92-95% against severe disease. And two doses reduces the rate of transmission, if you end up infected, by 50% (this was 80%, pre Delta).
As I said, people act astonished the COVID vaccines aren't perfect. In reality, they're just focusing on COVID efficacy in ways they never have with other vaccines. The COVID vaccines are substantially more effective than your typical seasonal flu jag, or the BCG. COVID vaccines are not a world apart in efficacy than the Smallpox vaccine—and we beat smallpox! Smallpox elimination required universal vaccination, but we managed.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
"But growing evidence suggests that, with the Delta variant, fully vaccinated people can still transmit the virus."
And this:
"Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus."
Is also not super relevant— what most people want to know is not whether a breakthrough infection is capable of spreading it, but whether you're more likely to get a breakthrough infection. I think most vaccinated people (which is most people in rich countries now) care much more about the unvaccinated -> vaccinated transmission and the vaccinated -> vaccinated transmission than they do about vaccinated -> unvaccinated.
How much, exactly?
> Over the long run we'll all be exposed no matter what we do
Plausible, but your sources don't appear to support that, other than the claim from Mr. Pollard. Is there anything I'm missing?
Is it possible that this is not enough, and “virtually everyone will eventually be exposed”? Yes. Is it possible that COVID will become endemic and many (but not all or even most) people will be exposed? Yes. Have I seen any source that makes a strong case for this? Not yet.
Actually it does reduce transmission
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/vaccinated-people...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
That's a disingenuous statement though because vaccines also help prevent getting infected in the first place, which reduces transmission. This study seems to focus on vaccinated people who had a breakthrough infection. If you read the 'Interpretation' section:
> Vaccination reduces the risk of delta variant infection and accelerates viral clearance. Nonetheless, fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases and can efficiently transmit infection in household settings, including to fully vaccinated contacts.
The first sentence implies vaccination reduces the risk of getting infection. The second sentence is talking about vaccinated people with a breakthrough infection having similar viral load. Therefore saying "Vaccination slightly reduces the risk of transmission for individual interactions" is untrue because it ignores the infection prevention mechanism of the vaccine. It's a lot better than 'slightly'
https://theexpose.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Pierpont-Why...
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/pdfs/mm7031e2-H.pdf
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3897733
So, how could the outcome at the societal level be worse?
2021 is already "mostly normal", for me. I hope sometime in 2022 we will be back to "100% normal", but I'm not confident.
When it's absolutely unbearable for healthcare system, government also introduces soft lockdown where restaurants / cafes / public places are closed. Then everything goes back to "normal".
I really don't see how it can be 100% normal next year. At least in here.
been going to packed bars, house parties, restaurants, music festivals, concerts all with no masks
You are not forced to take any vaccine, though many (public and private) institutions will require you to do so to participate in their functions (e.g. attending public school, serving in the military, working in hospitals, etc...).
In any case, the will being applied is that of the people (indirectly) through its (mostly) elected representatives (who could abolish the public health organization any time it chose), not some nefarious government.
Can we please just stop? “Take this or lose your job and pension” is not a choice.
But in general society has rules and we must abide by them if we want to participate. For instance I'm sure most people wouldn't appreciate if I walked around naked, which does not harm anyone unlike needlessly having an increased risk of contracting and/or spreading COVID.
I hope you understand how ridiculous this is.
> All 50 states (plus the District of Columbia) mandate diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), polio, measles, rubella and chickenpox. In addition, every state except Iowa mandates immunization against mumps.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/08/states-have...
FWIW I believe Florida is in the process of relaxing mandates for some of the other required vaccinations -- certainly there is now political hay to be made from doing so because the concept has been so poisoned by the Covid vaccine mandaters.
That doesn't seem all that narrow; 90% of the population goes through the public school system. (Side note: I'm in NY, and our vaccination mandate covers private/religious schools, too.)
> well-tested and -understood vaccines
Like the COVID vaccines, sweet.
> illnesses far more threatening to them than Covid
Missed the chickenpox one, did you? Killed ~100/year before the vaccines. COVID's killed 805 children in the US so far, per https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics.
> Like the COVID vaccines, sweet
More gaslighting. The publications from the manufacturers themselves are chock full of unanswered questions and risks they say we must wait years for the answer to.
In what way are the COVID vaccines not well-tested or not well understood? I understand many laypeople want to declare an arbitrary length of time that they can pretend means a new drug is safe. But the professionals who have informed opinions on the matter are essentially in unanimous agreement that these vaccines have been proven safe.
They have tried making MRNA shots for a long time with consistently negative results. Maybe they got it right this time, but still there is reason to be skeptical, as a "lay" person you have to trust the system that this shot was produced properly, tested properly, stored properly, and administered properly. Even if on a large scale there are low risks, something can go wrong on any one of those steps.
We also have never had a shot like this brought to market in such a short period of time. There is barely a year of data in the public, and that data is heavily politicized. It's nearly impossible to ask an honest question as someone who may be worried for fear of being labeled a lunatic or a "walking bio-weapon" as someone said before in this very thread.
And then we see how much money a company like pfizer has made off of this, and their track-record in the past as well as the track record of many other pharmaceutical companies, and you have a recipe for people to be worried. Remember, public health looks at outcomes on a population level. If they push something and they think it will have a net benefit overall, they are not thinking about you and your own risk profile. You have to do that and unfortunately we're increasingly telling people that doesn't matter, that you must do what is right for the group and by-the-way, you can't possibly know what's right for you anyway.
Like most people, I have done this for dozens of drugs developed during my lifetime. Until it became politically charged I never saw much pushback. How many years had Cialis or Claritin or Wellbutrin been in use before people starting taking them without a second thought? And those drugs likely had much smaller trials.
This is a common argument, and honestly it's garbage.
Vaccines are never tested "for decades" either, because people kind of assume that it is highly unlikely that there are super-long-term side effects from small acute doses. I would tend to agree.
The argument is therefore not garbage at all.
Obviously during the first years they were in use these vaccines had not been "distributed for decades". That's the era we're in with COVID.
Next door in Kansas City Missouri I stopped at a gas station and an employee was shouting at a woman to put on a mask, then was yelling at the same woman to leave because she refused to comply. I’m glad she didn’t see me because I literally didn’t think to bring a mask with me and needed to run to the restroom.
I guess 5 miles difference magically makes COVID much more contagious.
The sky isn’t falling. Hospitals aren’t being overrun. Life is good, and I can remember the last time I worried or had anxiety about Covid.
There seems to be a group of people who still believe we can ‘beat’ Covid. That somehow we make it go away, with endless restrictions. In reality, it is here to stay, and we will have to live with it for the rest of our lives.
Doesn’t look too bad so far as the USA goes, although if legal gun owners or Mexican cartel members were out there killing 40 people a day, you’d be screaming bloody murder about it
It hasn't been doing all that great on death rates, either [2]. A bit worse than the Southern average, and quite a bit worse than the other regions of the US.
South Carolina has now reached the same death total per capita as the Northeast [3], which is quite astounding.
The Northeast got there by having a large number of people die early in the first couple of months of the pandemic as it tore through high density communities of especially vulnerable people while we were still trying to figure out basic things like how to treat it and what measures were practical and effective for limiting spread.
That should have cemented the Northeast as the US COVID death leader for the rest of the pandemic. But South Carolina in the last couple of months, despite over half the people being vaccinated, as managed to get a death rate that looks almost like an early pandemic Northeast death rate, eliminated the death gap.
[1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...
[2] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...
[3] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...
And I'm fully vaccinated. Not because I was scared of getting sick (i already contacted COVID twice before the vaccine, including the Delta variant), but because I was shamed into getting it (think about the immunocompromised!!!). And now I'm being told that vaccine doesn't prevent transmission? So now I'm being shamed into wearing a mask.
And now the govt is trying to bully the 10% teachers who are not vaccinated. They might lose their jobs if they don't get the shots. Think about the children!!! But wait a minute, the vaccines don't prevent transmission. So even if the teachers get vaccinated, how is it going to help the children?
Vaccines significantly reduce transmission, so if someone is telling you they don't, you need to re-evaluate whether you should trust that person and any information they're giving you.
(P.S. SARS-CoV-2 is a virus with airborne transmission that loves nasal passages, so it's probably pretty important that your mask cover your nose. So far, there's no evidence that the virus cares at all about how much money you have in your hand.)
None of these sources are trusted by the people who don't want the vaccine.
“Individuals who have had two vaccine doses can be just as infectious as those who have not been jabbed.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-59077036
Study: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
You're leaving out the context: they can be just as infectious once they become infected, which is significantly less likely for those who are fully vaccinated.
Vaccines significantly reduce the transmissability of the virus by making it less likely for those vaccinated to become infected, NOT by making them less infectious if they are infected.
No, 5 miles means you have a different government with a different policy response. (The difference itself doesn't justify either side.)
That's just inherent in the existence of political borders.
The parent statement was not literal, making your expansion meaningless and honestly a little stunning.
Correct. Instead it was agenda driven sarcasm, which while not forbidden on HN, adds nothing to, and always lowers the quality of discussion.
Rather than take the emotional bait and be sarcastic in return, the person who responded pointed out the misrepresentation that was behind the sarcasm, which is the most civil way to address it.
Their response was far more measured and constructive than the "take it to Reddit" response that the parent comment type usually elicits. There was absolutely nothing stunning about it - rather it was a standard civil response method in a debate whose civility has been lowered through sarcasm.
Of all the problems in your story, the employee shouting is the least 'wrong'. You've got a woman who won't wear a mask, yourself who sneaked in without a mask, and that's just in that moment of time, but somehow the employee who has to deal with that behavior all day every day is the bad person because they lost their cool.
It's one of those 'everyone sucks here' stories.
By being a vaccinated unmasked person in a crowd of non-vaccinated people, you possibly become a super spreader.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.13.21260393v...
The idea that once you are vaccinated you don't need to social distance or wear a mask is wrong and is getting people sick. In fact a vaccinated infection appears to have the same viral load as an unvaccinated. https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/covid-19/news/viral-loads-sim...
If I'm out in public, I wear socks everyday (well most), I wear a shirt, I wear pants. Its not much of a stretch to wear a mask out in public too.
Vaccinated people also have a lower rate of transmission.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... (table 5 page 19)
Your second statement is categorically false. See my comment above... you know the one you responded too. It actually links to a study showing the viral load is the same. Or here is another study: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Please stop spreading misinformation. Saying vaccinated people have a lower chance of getting covid is a true statement. However both of your statements are straight up misinformation.
Please take a look at the rest of the thread for sources that vaccinated individuals spread covid at lower rates than the unvaccinated.
Please stop spreading antivax FUD.
I wasn’t making any judgment about the woman yelling at people, I’d be mad if I was being threatened with fines by the local government for having maskless people in my establishment too.
Ha. Perhaps she was mad because she was at risk of being exposed to Covid all day long due to boneheads who were incapable of reading, or wearing a mask, and some of them turned around and gave her grief for it?
In my nearest town (in the UK) there are two supermarkets. In the budget one (Aldi) nobody wears a mask, in the upmarket one (Waitrose) everybody does.
In addition to the mask mandates, which are more bothersome than you make out (e.g. it's pretty tiring to do cardio at the gym with a mask), there are other restrictions. Parents aren't allowed on our school campus, we don't have any in-person school events, kids get tested once a week, kids have to stay at 3 feet from each other at school, no wind instrument classes.
Those restrictions are on their way out:
https://abc7news.com/amp/face-masks-mask-mandates-bay-area-i...
> Parents aren't allowed on our school campus, we don't have any in-person school events, kids get tested once a week, kids have to stay at 3 feet from each other at school, no wood wind instrument classes.
Not sure where you are but in my very urban CA city, except for testing which is a very good thing IMO, none of these rules are in place.
This morning, the parent community met for donuts at the elementary school campus, where kids were playing close-contact basketball. The local middle school jazz band - with plenty of wind instruments - played recently at the local street fair as a fundraiser, and it's clear they had been practicing.
Then again, around here vaccine and mask wearing rates are extremely high, so we basically had very little in the way of outbreaks and community transmission. It seems like when a critical majority of people are civically considerate and voluntarily mask and vaccinate, life can go on pretty close to normal.
I'm in the East Bay, and most of what you have described - people at the park wearing masks, riding bikes or skateboards with masks, nannies wearing masks - are voluntary behaviors not mandated by any authority.
Why does it matter to you what measures others take to protect themselves from the virus voluntarily, and which is totally within their personal liberty to do? Does it offend your sensibilities somehow? Should they not be wearing masks to make you feel like things are "normal" per your definition?
The other cases you raise -retail, restaurant, and daycare - all have very specific risks either due to density or because unvaccinated children are present.
It is "normal" now because I can go shopping or to a restaurant, have a drink at my neighborhood bar, take my kids to school, fly somewhere on vacation, have a gathering in my house, attend public events (Halloween was huge in my neighborhood) - everything I did before the pandemic - with the tiny inconvenience of getting vaccinated and wearing a mask when indoors in public.
Well, based on case and death counts between the two states, this is true. Kansas has significantly higher case and death rates than Missouri.
Now we're JUST starting to talk about relaxing again. If this is any barometer, not to mention the rate of which we are seeing pills/vaccines/what have you, I imagine 2022. Outside of work, things are largely "normal".
For what it's worth - I live in a dense Northern state not seeing a surge of cases.
The local pharmacies that administer the vaccines are not validating your eligibility. Those I know who are interested in the 3rd round, and beyond 6 months from their 2nd, have received it.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...
They are more likely to be injured by these vaccines and neurotic parents stuffing them into masks for hours at a time.
Sweden halts Moderna: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-moderna-sweden-ha...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-08/iceland-j...
117 children murdered for profit. https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/we-will-kill-117-kids-to-...
fixed that for you
The guy above literally said "Children aren't at risk from Covid AT ALL".
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/05/1036408/silicon-...
Thus, COVID precautions are necessary to reduce the rate of infection to levels that do not overwhelm the healthcare system.
And all those areas that have "returned to normal" are sending their COVID patients to regions that are still masking because they've exhausted their local ICU capacity.
This has been my experience as well. My state is pretty strict overall, but my area of my state is not.
Our hospital has been operating at capacity for 6 months or so, but nobody is talking about it. Because we can just ship to where they have stricter COVID control measures.
We're causing problems for other people because we can't be bothered to be part of society.
It's a joke all around. The entire world. Nihilism is almost impossible to escape right now.
I used to think that one of the worst things in the USA was that 100 people per day die in preventable car accidents, but now we’re getting 10x that from a virus and people pretend that it isn’t happening
I told my wife I used to think we'd be one of the first to die in the Zombie Apocalypse because her and my kids are all high-anxiety people that typically crumble with too much psychological pressure. Yet covid has shown me we'd actually be one of the longest survivors given our resilience so far and how we haven't caved into the pressures of society itching to get back to normal. My dad - a self-proclaimed "survivalist" and doomsday prepper didn't make it even two months before he gave up on quarantining. He said the psychological stress was too much, he couldn't handle it lol
It couldn't mass produce fighter pilots, though.
I live in South Carolina & their Department of health website has great data. As of today, there are currently 551 Covid patients hospitalized statewide. 1280 ICU beds are occupied for a 76% utilization rate. Of those beds, 150 are Covid patients. That means 88% of folks in ICU are non-covid related.
https://scdhec.gov/covid19/covid-19-data/acute-hospital-bed-...
This data doesn’t exactly corroborate what your saying. The way you tell it, the ICUs are still overflowing with Covid, and they just aren’t. Not in SC at least. And we’re not exactly known for our stringent Covid restrictions.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/09/9443799...
Also, there's been a couple of big hoaxes that have circulated like the one about how ERs were full of Ivermectin ODs and they were turning away car accident victims.
Here's the actual real-time-ish data of ICUs for the country:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-hospitals-...
Right now the national average for ICUs is 68% occupancy. Also from that article:
>The national average I.C.U. occupancy in 2010 was 67 percent, according to the Society of Critical Care Medicine, though the occupancy baseline changes depending on the place, time of year and size of hospital.
>I'm sure it's true that there's places in the country where ICUs are full up with pandemic patients.
If you are operating at your normal capacity factor but have reason to predict that you are on a trajectory to be completely overwhelmed along with every hospital within reasonable driving distance, it's different than if you are operating at your normal capacity factor and have to send a patient or two to the nearest hospital with more spare capacity.
Covid is still very real. And there are still very real risks. But this fear of overrun ICUs is irrational nonsense. We are back to pre-pandemic ICU utilization. And we have been since before the Delta variant hit.
But maybe the media called every hospital in the state to find her or something.
We are scraping by with the measures we do have in place, we can't use the fact that we are successfully scraping by as evidence that we have too many measures in place.
I don't understand why you extrapolated that data to suggest something about how many measures we have in place. Is your position that we should lie to the public so they will do what you want?
I frankly don’t mind that. It’s only for a limited time (while you feel ill, or suspect you are coming down with something), it’s very cheap and only mildly annoying. There is the side benefit that it makes you think twice before you go out if you think you might be infectious (is this trip really necessary?).
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/11/what-amer...
- Vaccinate everyone who can be vaccinated, at gunpoint.
- Allow everyone who is vulnerable to die, at which point the death rates will drop.
Choose. Which one do you want?
In the US, this is a very bad idea, indeed.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01897-w In the US, 340 children under 17 have died from Covid. Total. During the same period, 187 have died from the flu, and over 51,000 children have died from all causes:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...
Sweden halts Moderna: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-moderna-sweden-ha... The reason the vaccines aren't being approved for children is that there is compelling evidence that children are at greater risk from the vaccines than the virus. This is why (for example) approval for vaccination of children and teenagers is split across Europe, and the UK has restricted access to only children with known vulnerabilities:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-19/u-k-to-gi...
A high population of vaccinated is mathematically more likely to produce more virulent strains with a non sterile vaccine in a fast mutating virus.
Not so. Lots of cases produce worse variants, not vaccines.
https://theconversation.com/massive-numbers-of-new-covid-19-...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-variants-ma...
We're talking about covid vaccines here.
Somewhat less likely; on average if you're vaccinated you won't be infectious for as long a time if you do get it.
“The low rate of severe acute disease is important news, but this does not have to mean that COVID does not matter to children,” says paediatrician Danilo Buonsenso at the Gemelli University Hospital in Rome. “Please, let’s keep attention — as much as is feasible — on immunization.”
> "according to data reviewed by the CDC's advisory panel on vaccines, as of Oct. 10, almost 2 million 5- to 11-year-olds have gotten ill from COVID-19, and 94 have died."
That's a laughably low death rate. Driving your child to school is more dangerous for them than Covid.
>In Pfizer's clinical trial for 5- to 11-year-olds, there were no cases of myocarditis, although the company acknowledged that the trials were not big enough to pick up such rare events.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/11/03/1051299...
(Time to check my pfizer stock...)
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
- What would the properties of vaccines need to be (efficacy, etc.), for experts to deem the vax mandates not reasonable?
- Same about face masks. How low the estimated efficiency must be for mandates to not be acceptable?
- Bonus point: how more soul-crushing the curfews and other movement limits need to be for them to remain in the realm of personal choice?
In other words, I would like to gauge how "falsifiable" is the "scientifically-informed" reasoning behind covid-enthusiasts' defense doctrine.
This tracks with Dr. Vanden Bossche's assessment [2] from March of this year that mass vaccination with prophylactic vaccines will actually prolong and worsen the pandemic due to shedding of infectious variants.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/ [2] https://www.geertvandenbossche.org/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/t...
They are only "necessary" if you are optimizing the metric "make sure hospitals run smoothly" over any other concerns.
I hate this framing that Covid restrictions are ever forced on us, rather than being a policy choice with pros and cons.
That also doesn't account for the damage people contracting the virus accumulate that doesn't register on that metric.
Some businesses require their employees to all be vaccinated. Governor appears to be fighting against that, would not be surprised if those same businesses just don't hire unvaccinated people going forward and the situation is resolved via attrition.
> This will go on forever without exit criteria.
It will go on without an exit decision, but the exit criteria that have been issued have frequently been adjusted anyway, because understanding of how current metrics project the future have evolved. Which is probably why their are fewer announced criteria and more reliance on periodic, holistic review.
Children are now eligible for a vaccine. It'll take a few weeks for this to trickle through the population, but we're pretty close to the point where everyone who wants a vaccination will have one.
At that point, I expect restrictions to swiftly ease up. In Massachusetts, things are already mostly back to normal. With children protected, there's definitely a light at the end of the tunnel.
Some places will do that earlier than others, and quite a few practically already have.
I am almost certain they will mandate the vaccination of children 5 and older.
When hospitalization and community transmission is "low" based on the CDC definition of low, and when 80% of the total population is vaccinated or eight weeks from yesterday, whichever comes first. They also publish a dashboard with the information so anyone can see how we are progressing: https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboards
We were at almost 80% vax rate for 12+ already and hospitalizations are currently low and have been for a while, however community transmission remains high.
So at least in our county they have specific standards as to when the restrictions leave. Other than a mask mandate, there are no other restrictions anymore, except for school kids.
Research related to the pandemic is de-risked by some margin and that alone makes it attractive.
At the Trinity test, there was a containment unit called Jumbo:
https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/jumbo
Basically, if Trinity fizzled, they wanted to be able to recover the billion dollar plutonium core.
It didn't actually end up being used, and so it was ordered destroyed. But the thing was so tough that they essentially couldn't blow it up. Normal bombs just weren't powerful enough. So now it's just sitting there at the site.
You wouldn't believe it, but no one wanted to make a good hip broach to fix grandma. It took athlete injury repair R&D money to make that happen.
Then do we understand the risk profile of this thing? That sounds like the sort of innovation that people would want to be at the back of the queue for.
Side effects don't have to happen in the next 6 months.
(And to clarify what I am saying, even though the vaccine does prevent death, there is still considerable push back. Not sure why it will be different for this drug)
It turns out that long-term side effects (which are a possibility with every livesaving medical intervention- what are the long-term side effects of CPR?) are a lot less scary compared to short-term death.
when this happens governments get scared. they start doing mask and vaccine mandates. things shut down. what if you could still have these waves but nearly eliminate the chance of anyone dying? then we could start treating this like an endemic cold or flu. i think these waves in high vaccine areas show convincing “vaccine skeptics” is not the gate to get there. we could be 100% vaccinated in areas and still see covid waves. the question is can we make it less risky to the point where we can go back to where we were
I just accepted as soon as we saw that covid was spreading so quickly, welp I’m gonna get that. I figured I wouldn’t be that affected by it and wasn’t.
Our parents said, well if I get it I get it, and if I die, I die, now let me see my grandkids. When the vaccine came out they were like sweet I’ll get it, can we stop these stupid mask wearing and social distancing crap. No, we can’t. So now us younger folk who aren’t afraid of covid aren’t getting vaccinated because we’re being forced to, and they’re going to keep up all the stupid rules like wearing masks everywhere anyways.
An anti viral drug that is this effective gives even less reason to have any mandates around vaccines, so unvaccinated people will cheer this.
Meanwhile at least 5 million are dead - 750,000 in the US alone.
How does your story help their families?
So can I live my life and worry about own family and not someone’s I don’t know?
Unfortunately, no. We live in a society where sometimes we have to take collective action to prevent collective harm. Taking personally inconvenient measures to help fight an epidemic is a prime example.
Yes there are collective actions we take, and the first two weeks of covid response might’ve been justified. But nothing since then. Maybe having to get tested to get on a plane.
Natural immunity does lower your chances, but you’re saying nope for the collective good (the good you’ve decided on) you must do xyz.
Bull crap. The emperor has no clothes.
For example, people might get struck by lightning walking by your house, so we must force you to install a lightening rod on your house to protect the collective.
Where does it stop, and how do you make that determination?
There isn't an easy or obvious answer to where it stops and how to determine that, but that goes both ways. We can't just have zero laws for fear that the laws might overextend themselves.
Unfortunately, we have to deal with nuance either way.
Two important considerations:
1. The vaccine is extraordinarily effective at mitigating risk of hospitalization and death.
2. No current COVID vaccines are sterilizing. Vaccination confers only marginal reduction in ability to carry and transmit the virus (and even this, mainly due to duration, not due to viral load).
Taken together, the "get vaccinated to protect me" canard is insane. I don't care if other people are vaccinated or not, because I am. Any other position is political, not scientific.
There is a minor argument to be had over the (tiny) immunocompromised population, but it's important to bear in mind that this population already does conduct their lives with isolation, antiviral, antibacterial, and other safety protocols regardless of COVID. They did it before the pandemic, and they will after. Nothing changes for them regardless of vaccine uptake rates.
Did they die from COVID-19 or did they with COVID-19?
Italy just revised their numbers and it’s quite a significant difference.
Also, when you have deliberatly forced an additional 150 million people into extreme poverty to keep them healthy ( as it were ), you are bound to see a spike in deaths.
Frankly I am surprised the death toll of the brutal restrictions toward marginalized populations is not higher.
I suspect we will soon reap the dubious benefits of undoing 35 years of 3rd world progress in 22 months.
6 months ago I still cared. Now I am just numb.
Reduced from human being with rights, to a piece of diseased flesh that must be muffled, silenced, tested, regularily injected with one experimental drug after the other and preferably locked up for eternity.
To add to it, I must feel a sende of pride in partaking in this. Because it is the holy science.
My very existence is inconvenient to the experts.
Here are some links to challenge your statements:
https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj-2021-066768
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
I would post more, but I'm sure that you're capable of using Google.
150m pushed into extreme poverty? If you mean the US, your facts are wrong. And then you pivot to the "death toll of brutal restrictions"? What is this nonsense?
You've been muffled - Oh wow, wearing a mask is just torture.
You've been silenced - Hmm, not sure what this nonsense is about.
Tested - Yup. As part of an ongoing pandemic, yup. If you can't live in civil society and agree to give up some small freedoms, buy land in Alaska and live in a cabin.
"regularily injected" - A) the drug wasn't experimental, and B) it was primarily two doses. That's not regularly...
"preferably locked up for eternity" - wow, that's exactly what my daughter said when I grounded her last week.
Do you realize how ridiculous this sounds to people? How absolutely childish and selfish? This is why a huge portion of the US is just fed up with anti-vaxxers.
I think this is something that's very understated in public discussion around COVID-19, I got vaccinated because I weighed up the odds and thought it made sense from both a social and a personal cost/benefit perspective. I didn't get vaccinated because I was gaslit into it by the government's "nudges", nor did I get it because I was nagged or shamed into it by those who can't keep their noses out of other people's business. There's few things I dislike more in a person than a Puritan wagging finger, yet all the messaging around the pandemic was nothing but wagging fingers.
People don't like being manipulated, even if it's "for their own good" or even "for the greater good". People aren't stupid either, they know when authority figures aren't being entirely upfront with them. As well-intentioned as the measures were, the institutions who imposed them have burned up a lot of public trust in the process with the use of fear and coercion as a tool to manage the pandemic as well as being a bit economical with the truth instead of just saying "we don't know" where appropriate. I think the unfortunate persistence of the anti-vax movement is partially down to this instinct for authoritarianism and shaming people rather than extending an olive branch.
I do wonder if "vaccines mean we can permanently rid ourselves of masks, distancing, and other authoritarian restrictions" would have been more effective as a campaign than "get the vaccine or you're a horrible selfish piece of crap who probably wants to bump off grandma for her inheritence". Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference, but I think it would.
They said that, and it turned out to also be a lie. I got the vaccine because I was threatened with loss of employment if I didn't, and enticed by a promise that frequent testing, social distancing, and mask-wearing would not be required for the vaccinated. They pretty quickly reneged on that. To say that I am infuriated is putting it mildly. I obviously cannot undo the vaccine that I didn't want and was forced/coerced into taking.
They have destroyed any faith I had in their promises. I will most certainly now refuse any further demands along these lines, whether for flu shots, boosters, or whatever. Fool me once, shame on you.
With people getting fake vax cards, etc, I can see some employers deciding to err on the side of caution. Especially since some workers can't get vaxxed at all due to medical conditions.
Then they reneged.
Thus, they have destroyed any credibility they may have had for future similar promises.
People hold irrational beliefs (JFK Jr. is still alive), the earth is flat, on and on.
And America in many respects can be incredibly anti-intellectual. Being smart is often a negative in a lot of environments.
With this treatment, you ARE sick. To become well, take these pills.
1) Obviously, it's too late then. So it's only the most ignorant of people who changed their minds we have anecdotes of.
Firstly, even though I doubt your number a bit, even a 1/200 chance of death is mighty high enough for most people to seek treatment for something.
Secondly, if you're already infected, the pill is probably less risky than those 1/200.
Thirdly, the chance of death isn't equal for everyone. A healthy young person might have a 10x reduced risk, while an older person with an existing condition a 10x increased risk. So at least for one of them the new medicine is clearly worth trying.
It floors me to see so many not internalizing what that means.
Realistically, re-infection is going to become more and more of a thing. Especially as it mutates.
The risk doubles every 7 years so it's going to be ~18x between generations, and much greater beyond that. Those who are old and have existing co-morbidities are really pushing the difference as severity of disease is strongly correlated with number and severity of co-morbidities.
Edit: ~18x, not ~30x. It's late here, I can't calculate 2 to the power of 4 without a calculator until I sleep, wake up, and have a strong coffee.
Also, the current mortality rate overall in the USA for Covid is less than 0.1% - in fact it's less than 0.02%. 46M confirmed cases, and 751k deaths (not all confirmed to be caused by COVID)...
Pfizer said 0.8 percent of patients who got the drug combination within three days were hospitalized within four weeks — three out of 389 patients — compared to 7 percent of patients who got placebos, or 27 out of 385. And seven of those who got placebos died, Pfizer said. No one who got the treatment died within a month.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/11/pfizers-new-covid-pi...
An accident rate of less than 1% grounded the Boeing 737 MAX. In a study of the aircraft, the FAA estimated there would have been 15 crashes over 30 years. This was seen as unacceptable.
The control arm of this study had a rate of "hospitalization or death" of 7% because they selected for subgroups at high risk.
It's fine to acknowledge that aggregate risk of Covid is low (and indeed, more people should acknowledge that fact), but we must also acknowledge that it is a serious risk for a large group of people.
The BMI-based definition of "obesity" is a crude qualifier, and the vast majority of the affected will be in the smaller group that is both elderly and obese (esp. considering that age is, by far, the more important factor for serious outcomes.)
At the start of pandemic we could have hoped that it will pass in half a year, in a year or so. Now we know that it is probably here to stay.
So eventually you will get COVID.
Depending on how long has passed after your vaccine, what variation of virus you will get, how old you are and etc will depend if it is more like 5% or 1% or so.
In my office I have 200 or so colleagues. Imagine having 4-5 funerals at the company because of this illness.
This is fear-mongering. There is no example of a risk of death post-vaccination that gets this high. The few studies that document a decline in efficacy show a modest decline, against symptomatic illness. The vaccines remain highly effective against severe disease and death.
Currently, the deaths-per-100k of the unvaccinated vs vaccinated population is twelve times higher.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/10/28/us/covid-brea...
There is no doubt about vaccine efficacy. However it all depends. On your age, on your illnesses, on strains of virus. Who knows what you will get in 2 years.
So people who say that "pfft it is only 2% chance and only if you get" are just denying it.
You will get COVID. Hopefully you get it after a few years when there are not only vaccines but drugs widely available.
Remember: if 100% of your population is vaccinated, then 100% of your hospitalizations and deaths will be in vaccinated people.
https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...
Depending on how we define severe COVID you link is showing between 36% and 44% of the severe COVID patients at the hospital are vaccinated.
That's similar to what they have seen in Israel. As of about a month ago they were seeing about 60% of their severe cases were in vaccinated people.
Sounds pretty bad for vaccines, right? It does until you remember Simpson's paradox and take a finer look at the data [1]. It turns out that the Israel data showed in each age group efficacy against severe COVID ranging from 81.1% to 100%, with above 92% in all the 10 year age groups under 60 and still above 88% is the 10 years groups through 80.
It is very likely a similar thing is going on at the hospital whose data you linked to. That's been the case for every place I've come across in the US that published breakdowns of the stats by age group.
[1] https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
Fortunately vaccination provides good protection against death.
If you survive but get permanent damage e.g. due to the blood clots that a lot of COVID patients develop, or due to the side effects of medications and treatment e.g. (partial) blindness from high-dose steroids or reduced mobility up to no use in your limbs especially your legs due to ECMO, then I am pretty sure you won't be running around (in the latter example because you physically cannot anymore) telling people how COVID only kills so-and-so tiny percent of the population.
Even if you escape realtively unscathed, spending a month or two in the hospital followed by some weeks of recovery or in a rehab facility (e.g. to learn how to walk again after a few weeks of coma and maybe some ECMO hoses in your legs), then that probably still would be an experience you'd like to avoid.
And that isn't even yet considering what effects you may experience in the future, "long covid" and all that.
Personally I don't believe that we are living in a rational society right now. For the fun of it, maybe I'll figure out one of those browser plugins to replace the word "science" with "propaganda".
There are reports now of injections done without pulling back to see whether the injection site is a blood vessel. How the drug performs is seriously different in blood stream vs muscle tissue.
The primary impact of blood stream doses appears to be heart related problems.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34406358/
TL;DR: The vaccine probably did not cause it. How it was administered could be the cause.
There is a clear distinction here; namely, whether the vaccine was improperly used.
Taking too much Tylonol can cause liver failure. Too much Ibuprofen can cause renal failure...
In those cases, the drug was improperly used, but the cause analysis centers on improper use, because doing that multiplies the risk and symptom severity.
See how that all works?
Saying the "vaccine caused it" simply is not enough information, which is why I linked what I did.
It is important that we get these discussions right.
Edit:
In the interest of accuracy, note I did not say the vaccine did not cause the trouble. I said it probably did not cause it, and I said improper injection probably did.
Neither is an absolute. I did not intend, nor mean to imply otherwise. What I did intend was to improve on the clarity, scope and accuracy of the discussion.
Why bother?
Better discussion means more informed people taking fewer risks and or making more good choices, all of which will improve law, costs, outcomes.
Getting back to the matter at hand, when we factor the elements down, we see one thing we can do right away, and that is we make damn sure we are administering vaccines properly.
There are risks with the vaccine. They are small by percentage, but they are there. No argument from me.
Those risks go up dramatically with improper injection; namely, it being delivered directly to the blood stream, which is entirely avoidable.
I just saw an article yesterday talking about Pfizer making $36 billion on vaccines this year.
We do not have absolutes to work with here.
The damn Covid is novel, meaning we get our education together, the hard way and that sucks.
And that means being smart about probabilities and potential cost and risk outcomes matters a lot! Doing that is harder than necessary too.
A small investment in proper injection can seriously reduce vaccine risks, for example. That is real news as far as I am concerned and that should be acted on STAT. And you just gotta know the optics on all that complicate and likely bias action away from optimal too.
My own first injection was not done properly. (By that I mean the person doing it did not do a blood vessel check.)
I made sure the second one was done properly.
I very seriously oppose the blanket immunity myself for similar reasons.
The profit drive on this is pretty ugly too, and it is a complicated discussion. Very generally, I must say the problem is global and allowing profit to drive policy is not doing humanity any favors.
There is a whole lot to be said... but, maybe another day.
Sucks :(
Sure hope he improves and can get past it.
Trust is low.
Because of all that, I personally am paying close attention to how I handle my part in it and am reluctant to judge anyone else.
I am usually reluctant anyway, because what I feel should be obvious reasons! But yeah, extra care is indicated right now.
Best move, in my view as a normie out there wanting to be a good human, is to try and understand one another better, avoid judgement and the usual fear, blame and shame, talk more and hopefully more of us make smarter choices and see lower risks and better outcomes more of the time as this all plays out.
Pretty sure that is as good as it all gets right now.
Saying the vaccine didn't cause the myocarditis because it was "injected wrong" isn't a compelling argument to me, or likely to anyone that's thinking rationally.
The discussion is complex and difficult enough as it is.
People struggling with it should be expected and handled with tact and candor far more than it is right now.
You have to look at the CDC stats and the vehicle fatalities to make this claim. "Risk from riding in a car" is extremely low. 0.008% of teens die annually (2400 out of 30 million, age 13-19) in car accidents.
Case fatality rates from COVID are an order of magnitude higher for that age group -- 0.04-0.06%, depending on your source -- so you'd have to believe case underreporting by 100x (impossible, since cases are > 1% of population everywhere) in order for risk from "riding in a car" to be "at least an order of magnitude" higher.
Since you gave a statistic for car accidents, I'll do the same for the covid side: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
Since the start of 2020, there have been 576 "All Deaths involving COVID-19" among people under 18 in the US. Compared to 60,811 deaths from all causes, that's slightly less than 1% of all child deaths.
The 576 covers almost two years, so let's call it 300 deaths/year. Not accounting for the slight difference in age ranges, that's 1/8 your number of 2400 deaths/year from car accidents. I'd call that roughly one order of magnitude lower. If you clump in children under 13 in your car accident statistic, I suspect it would fall below 1/10.
Is my math wrong or is your math wrong? If my math is wrong I would love to understand why.
The truth is we don't know how many kids in the US have had COVID, but I'm pretty sure it's not 100% of them -- which is why the number I cite is the estimated case fatality rate and not just the total number of cases.
I understand where the 0.05% case rate number comes from (reported deaths divided by reported cases). I do personally think the reported deaths number is probably slightly over-reported and the reported cases is significantly underreported.
Even if the case fatality rate is accurate, I just don't think it's useful when assessing personal risk unless you routinely go out of your way to catch covid. If you start getting into that level of detail, you at least need to correct for comorbidities as well.
Specifically, when I say that it's an order of magnitude less likely for a teenager to die from covid than a car accident, I don't mean a teenager that caught covid or a teenager that was in a car accident. I mean a randomly sampled teenager out of the 60 million or so in the US.
I know that people can have difficulty interpreting probabilities, but given the outcome, you don't think those are really terrible odds? Of course the medicine also has a risk profile but it's clearly much, much lower.
Also it should noted that even when covid doesn't kill you it can have debilitating effects that linger or are permanent.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
Unfortunately as can be seen in table 5 from the link below, vaccination does not bring the fatality rate close to zero. It brings it closer to zero depending on your age. Bearing in mind this applies to hospitalized patients only(therefore not exactly IFR), the rate of death was reduced by vaccination in people over the age of 50, but not in people under the age of 50. Vaccination helps in certain cohorts.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
You start with 5% critical strike chance, see how often that happens.
You will be seriously surprised.
It’s the same for the vaccine. You still have the risk of what ever the vaccine risk is, PLUS covid19. Supposedly it reduces the covid19 symptoms, but doesn’t reduce risk of infection (or at least unclear), it just improves the immune response.
But greatly improves the odds of not dying, which is pretty important for a lot of people.
Hospitalisation is an acute scenario that can lead to death, negating any concerns about the long-term in the first place. The short term risk of hospitalisation in the unvaccinated versus the vaccinated is well-known. Given what we know, it still makes sense to get vaccinated, and it may make sense for those at risk of hospitalisation (vaccinated or otherwise) to take an antiviral proven to cut the risk of hospitalisation.
https://www.fhi.no/nyheter/2017/pandemi/ (in norwegian)
There are possible severe negative effects due to vaccination, even if there are zero medical side effects. Herd vulnerability could cause widespread harm - there is a monoculture of immune responses and monocultures have vulnerabilities. I agree it's unlikely to have severe long term downsides, and the short-term gains are very significant. Note that I'm mostly pro vaccination.
This leads to an obvious series of questions: just how dangerous is COVID for children? What mechanism is causing this heart damage? Could heart damage be happening without diagnosis, and manifest later? In a year, will we be able to fix this problem with the vaccines, or have protocols to prevent it? Are the vaccines more likely to cause permanent damage in children, than COVID, as opposed to temporary health problems? Are the non-mRNA vaccines completely de-risked from the proposition from causing permanent harm to children? Will CDC guidance in a year guide parents away from mRNA vaccines and towards different ones? Is there a correlating variable we will discover so we know which specific population of children would get heart damage from this? Etc.
https://twitter.com/cdcgov/status/1306689138612203520
More recent paper I found: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.121.0...
More questions: given this known to manifest in younger people, could it imply that age is inversely correlated with frequency? Will young children be less likely to report or articulate symptoms, even if they have increased risk? Given it seems sex coupled, is there an underlying variable correlated with sex that is a root cause we will soon understand, resulting in a vast risk reduction for parents who will be able to know if their children apply?
People claiming you can know if vaccination is a good idea or not for your kids have primitive mental models: the choice isn't to vaccinate or not vaccinate, but vaccinate now or (maybe) vaccinate later. When something is risk laden on both sides and is a dynamic system, the smart choice may be to wait if the marginal de-risking per unit time is high.
My personal view is that wrt children taking mRNA vaccines, there's basically close to free "money on the table" - wait a few months. If you've avoided COVID until now, its pretty unlikely your kids will catch it, nevermind be unlucky enough to get a severe case, which is extremely unlikely. On the other hand, it could turn out in a few months we identify the root cause of the heart issues of the vaccines, or alternative vaccines become available that de-risk it entirely. In any case, personal views aside, it's incredibly immoral to mandate this for schools, and it wouldn't surprise me if CA does this before we fully understand what is going on.
>According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, myocarditis/pericarditis rates are ≈12.6 cases per million doses of second-dose mRNA vaccine among individuals 12 to 39 years of age
That's a 0.0013% chance of getting something that "almost all" patients had resolution of with or without treatment:
>Almost all patients had resolution of symptoms and signs and improvement in diagnostic markers and imaging with or without treatment. Despite rare cases of myocarditis, the benefit-risk assessment for COVID-19 vaccination shows a favorable balance for all age and sex groups; therefore, COVID-19 vaccination is recommended for everyone ≥12 years of age.
First, if this has a mechanism which is damaging heart tissue, the diagnosed cases may just be the ones which are manifesting severely enough to the point of getting to through the entire funnel of a diagnosis. The actual blast radius may be much larger, and only result in problems later in life. Especially for children whose hearts are developing, it is extremely risky to administer a drug which we know has the capacity to damage heart muscle and we do not yet understand why and have a handle on the expected distribution of that damage across the whole population.
Second, the stat you mention on COVID is misleading, because a) it is a broad age group, my concern is primarily in the very young, many of whom are now being vaccinated in the US, and b) it is conditional on a positive COVID test. Many, many young children are contracting COVID and not developing symptoms or are not getting severe enough infections to get through the funnel of being determined to be a positive case. So the incidence rate you mention is effectively a meaningless number if you account for these two elements.
Based on our current understanding, it could very well turn out that the data we have now is consistent with a situation where eg, the vaccine administered to 5-6 year olds is in fact damaging their hearts with a sizable % liklihood, and their risk of having such kinds of permanent damage to their bodies from COVID (across the entire funnel, beginning at a non-infection) is much lower. I'm not sure of the liklihood of this reality, but it's not zero. We just don't know yet.
Even if we completely ignore that some children do in fact die (being rare doesn't stop it being terrible when it happens and worth avoiding), and that even if they don't, suffering while ill is bad: when we are talking about risks of completely unknown side effects, the side effect risk of the vaccine is obviously lower than the side effect risk of COVID itself.
The vaccine is relatively simple thing specifically designed to do one task. While there is always a chance there is something we didn't understand or see coming, the chance of a virus, a hugely complex and mutating thing with broad and varied effects, having some long-term side-effect is far, far higher.
[1] https://twitter.com/dril/status/464802196060917762?lang=en
Besides, if you're so smart, and it's so obvious, why do you think you're smart enough to state that Sweden, a modern country, is objectively wrong for banning mRNA vaccines for children?
In any case, my primary point was that it should be up to parents if they give their kids this vaccine, and when. Not the government mandating it.
We know the degree of risk from vaccines is low, both in the short and long term. The side effects harm few people, and are not catastrophic.
With viruses, we know that side effects in the long term are real, and can be catastrophic. It is the reason that girl are vaccinated against HPV - HPV is the leading cause of cervical cancer. This is a very big problem down the line, even though HPV itself is mostly asymptomatic.
So, it does not follow that avoiding Covid vaccine for children because the immediate likelihood of death from acute covid is the only issue. We are aware that the long term risk of viral infection can be very great with viruses. Avoiding infection is much better if the alternative is the possibility of cancer.
I never said it was the only issue. But neither is the only choice to give your kids the current approved vaccines ASAP or never give the vaccine to them ever.
Avoiding infection is much better if the alternative is the possibility of cancer. But of course, we don't know or plausibly think something like cancer is a long term risk of a COVID infection in children. Maybe one day we will realize such outcomes happen and then it would become much more sane to rush your kids to get the vaccine that day.
I think it's important to stick to what we know, about this virus, and these vaccines: we know that it is extremely rare for children to be hospitalized from COVID, and we know that it is extremely rare for diagnosed myocarditis. But what we also know is that as time goes on, we learn more. And especially for things where are very new, like using these vaccines have on children, we stand to learn a lot, quickly. So I think it's a bad frame to presume parents are pro- or anti- vax. Hesitancy is sane on this specific issue, and that's not to mean that other positions are insane, but what is insane is to impose this on parents who are hesitant at this present time, until we understand what, exactly, is going on with heart tissue.
Why COVID-19 Vaccines Should Not Be Required for All Americans https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/why-covid-19-vacci...
> Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and editor in chief of MedPage Today, argues that mandating vaccines for "every living, walking American" is, as of now, not well-supported by science. ... The risk of hospitalization from COVID-19 in kids ages 5 to 17 is 0.3 per million for the week ending July 24, 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We also know that the risk of hospitalization after the second vaccine dose due to myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, is about 50 per million in that same age group.
As to vaccinating children more generally and assessing known risks, there is no simple answer. What are the risk levels for different age groups? What is the damage to kids if they pass COVID onto their parents or grandparents and they die? I'm not saying that we should just blanket give it to everyone, but I don't think that one stat is enough to say don't give it to any child, or that no mandate could be justified.
If a 30 year old has a 0.08% chance of hospitalization, the risk drops to 0.008%. But they might stand a 1 in 5 chance of getting infected so now it’s 0.016% to 0.0016%.
But if they get injected with a vaccine, the risk of a rare side effect might be 1 in 100,000 or 0.001% which is pretty similar to Covid.
It’s the same analysis the UK did that caused them to recommend against the AZ vaccine for certain age groups.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
>18-29: 5/100000 = 0.05%
>30-39: 10/100000 = 0.1%
>40-49: 14/100000 = 0.14%
I would ask why our agencies keep doing things like this and burning trust, but it's rhetorical.
There have been 19,850,744 cases in 18-49 year olds [0] and 63,207 hospitalizations [1] which suggests at 0.3% infection hospitalization rate..
[0] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics
[1] https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_5.html#virusTypeD...
That's a bad argument. This makes COVID less severe, which in turn makes the long-term affects less severe. Things in medicine are rarely binary.
It's a strange day when people argue against evaluating a new medicine, in favour of snake oil that doesn't work.
Given that you think that it's unclear that vaccines reduce the rate and seriousness of COVID, I am not sure that your have a good enough understanding of the ground facts to have an informed opinion on this subject.
Check out https://c19early.com (specifically, https://c19ivermectin.com/).
If this is a molecule with a short half-life that is broken down and expelled by the body, it isn't going to have random side effects that show up months in the future.
I'm just playing devil's advocate, but it doesn't seem impossible.
And Pfizer isn't the hero here, they never have been.
https://corporatewatch.org/pfizer-six-scandals-to-remember/
This list doesn't even include Celebrex.
1986: Pfizer had to withdraw an artificial heart valve from the market after defects led to it being implicated in over 300 deaths. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) withdrew its approval for the product in 1986 and Pfizer agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation after multiple lawsuits were brought against it.
2003: Pfizer has long been condemned for profiteering from AIDS drugs. In 2003 for example, it walked away from a licencing deal for its Rescriptor drug that would have made it cheaper for poorer countries.
2011: Pfizer was forced to pay compensation to families of children killed in the controversial Trovan drug trial. During the worst meningitis epidemic seen in Africa, in 1996, Pfizer ran a trial in Nigeria their new drug Trovan. Five of the 100 children who took Trovan died and it caused liver damage, while it caused lifelong disabilities in those who survived. But another group of 100 children were given the conventional “gold standard” meningitis antibiotic as a “control” group for comparison. Six of them also tragically died because, the families said, Pfizer had given them less than the recommended level of the conventional antibiotic in order to make Trovan look more effective.
2012: Pfizer had to pay around $1billion to settle lawsuits claiming its Prempro drug caused breast cancer. Prempro was used in hormone replacement therapy, usually for women going through the menopause. The settlements came after six years of trials and hardship for the women affected.
2013: Pfizer paid out $273 million to settle over 2,000 cases in the US that accused its smoking treatment drug Chantix of provoking suicidal and homicidal thoughts, self harm and severe psychological disorders. Pfizer was also accused of improperly excluding patients with a history of depression or other mental disturbances from trials for the drug. Later, in 2017, a coroner in Australia ruled that the drug had contributed to a man’s suicide. The man’s mother campaigned to change the label on the drug.
2020: Pfizer reached an agreement with thousands of customers of its depo-testosterone drug in 2018 after they sued it for increasing the likelihood of numerous issues, including heart attacks.
If we're applying the COVID standard to Pfizer, would their failure rate be greater than or less than COVID's death rate?
If we use the 2% number I've seen around here for COVID's death rate, that means if Pfizer has over 300 drugs, these six scandals are a non-issue because they happen so rarely.
But l add the death rate according the administration is around 0.5% from the latest stats due to lack of testing.
Some people seem determined to do anything except take precautions laid out by infectious disease experts and take medicine specifically for this virus. And they're looking for any excuse to do so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide_scandal
The total number of people affected by the use of thalidomide during the mother's pregnancy is estimated at more than 10,000, of whom approximately 40 percent died at or shortly after the time of birth. Those who survived had limb, eye, urinary tract, and heart defects [...] The severity and location of the deformities depended on how many days into the pregnancy the mother was before beginning treatment; thalidomide taken on the 20th day of pregnancy caused central brain damage, day 21 would damage the eyes, day 22 the ears and face, day 24 the arms, and leg damage would occur if taken up to day 28. Thalidomide did not damage the fetus if taken after 42 days' gestation.
And yes, that's (one reason) why the recommendations for the Covid vaccine were not given for pregnant women at first.
The point wasn't that there are drugs known to be dangerous to pregnant women (mainly the unborn child). The ask was for an approved drug that caused delayed death.
There were definitely so many things going wrong w/ that specific drug but it serves as a really good example for why all these precautions are taken and should be taken and any new drug should not be presumed safe but presumed dangerous and proven to not be harmful. The specific time frames and measures can of course be debated to find a good spot on the spectrum and an active pandemic can influence the choices. The discussion was going in the direction of some posters saying we should assume safe first and the Contergan case very clearly shows why assuming safety is the wrong choice.
Are there any authorized or approved drugs that are taken over a short-term (say less than a month) that have been shown to cause long-term death?
authorized or approved.
taken over a short-term (say less than a month)
cause long-term death
Nowhere in there does it say to exclude any drugs than only cause direct death to the taker. Nor do I think should that matter. I do agree that pregnant women are studied separately precisely because the risks there are higher. To quote from the wikipedia article again:
The Society of Toxicology of Canada was formed after the effects of thalidomide were made public, focusing on toxicology as a discipline separate from pharmacology. The need for the testing and approval of the toxins in certain pharmaceutical drugs became more important after the disaster.Now you asked a new question. Fair enough. Unlike the previous question, where Contergan immediately jumped to my mind, for your question nothing jumps to mind. But google helped. I think you wanted to ask a different question, more like what I originally answered to, e.g.:
Can you name any approved drug that, that when taken over a short course, can over the long term cause the death of the person taking it?
Can you name any drug that, when taken over a short course, has had long term detrimental effects to the person taking it?
Let's take that apart:
name any drug
The UK Department of Health's Rolleston Committee Report in 1926 established the British approach to diamorphine prescription to users, which was maintained for the next 40 years: dealers were prosecuted, but doctors could prescribe diamorphine to users when withdrawing. In 1964, the Brain Committee recommended that only selected approved doctors working at approved specialized centres be allowed to prescribe diamorphine and cocaine to users. The law was made more restrictive in 1968. Beginning in the 1970s, the emphasis shifted to abstinence and the use of methadone; currently, only a small number of users in the UK are prescribed diamorphine.
taken over a short term
However, contrary to Bayer's advertising as a "non-addictive morphine substitute," heroin would soon have one of the highest rates of addiction among its users.
long term detrimental effects to the person taking it
Common side effects include respiratory depression (decreased breathing), dry mouth, drowsiness, impaired mental function, constipation, and addiction.[12] Side effects of use by injection can include abscesses, infected heart valves, blood-borne infections, and pneumonia.[12] After a history of long-term use, opioid withdrawal symptoms can begin within hours of the last use.
So I’ll ask a third time, hoping that perhaps finally I can get you to the original asker’s intention:
Can you name any drug that when taken for only a short period of time, like this Covid drug surely would be, and is non addictive like this Covid drug surely is not, is harmful in the long term to the person who took it (assuming they are not pregnant as all of the people who would be allowed to take it would not be)?
Remember all those war movies? I remember watching Vietnam war movies as a kid and one of the things I remember best is the use of morphine as _the_ field medicine.
Now we can argue that, especially in those times, it might be better to give a soldier that just lost a limb in the battlefield morphine than not to. It doesn't change the fact that
https://www.onceasoldier.org/veteran-ptsd-and-opioid-addicti...
The VA and other reports acknowledge that physicians need better training to manage opioid treatment for veterans. Between 2001 and 2009, for example, the percentage of veterans receiving pain management with prescription narcotics increased from 17 percent to 24 percent. The number of opioid prescriptions written by military physicians more than quadrupled during that time.So the previous poster's question about drugs given for a short time causing long delayed effects and approved in the last 20 years stands. If a drug is not a mutagen, it is harder to imagine how it could have a long-term effect.
I absolutely agree that they could have tested for certain things but didn't. It's a product of its time in that sense:
One reason for the initially unobserved side effects of the drug and the subsequent approval in West Germany was that at that time drugs did not have to be tested for teratogenic effects. They were tested on rodents only, as was usual at the time
While initially considered safe, the drug was responsible for teratogenic deformities in children born after their mothers used it during pregnancies, prior to the third trimester. In November 1961, thalidomide was taken off the market due to massive pressure from the press and public
I doubly apply to medications that can potentially eff your one body/mind you have up for good what I practice in software development and try to teach my teams: assumptions make an ass out of you and me.
If a drug is not a mutagen, it is harder to imagine how it could have a long-term effect.
>very small amount of a substance can cause catastrophic effects a decade later.
Medication failure modes are either short-term acute and found in test quickly, like Trovan example; or where long-term ingestion causes problems.
All of your examples are one of those two.
It’s why we don’t look at a molecule and say “oh, that’s not a carcinogen! No need to test”. And the same reason we run hERG tests to make sure drugs don’t give you a fatal arrhythmia (a surprising number of drugs do this and some are still on the market).
And funny you should say 10-25 years. 10 years is pretty typical from initial molecule discovery to FDA approval.
I was referencing your assertion that all molecules are prions until proven otherwise.
Also, I asked two questions. Next time try answering them before jumping to being an ass.
And please show us the words where where the poster claimed that “all molecules are prions”…as you claimed. I can point to your exact words here…look forward to you doing the same.
If you have something specific about this particular molecule to talk about vis a vis safety, that's an interesting comment to make. But "aspirin is a molecule but so is Mad Cow Disease so we had better be careful about new drugs" is just about the most boring, banal comment you can make. Drugs: can they be unsafe??? We'll have more at 11!
We need more Derek Lowe-type drug safety discussion here, and a lot less of whatever this is.
According to whom? You make it sound as if at some point scientists thought that prions were "just proteins", which I'm sure is not true.
I'm not saying new medicine can't have side effects a long time after ingestion.
Do I think that is likely? No, because the FDA isn’t stupid and screens for obvious toxicity in cell cultures and lab animals and only then is testing humans allowed. Then those are screened before approval.
Of course the risk isn’t 0%, but it’s pretty low and if you’re at chance of dying or Covid it’s a pretty small risk relatively speaking.
That's why I said if, I know nothing about the molecule.
https://rxisk.org/post-ssri-sexual-dysfunction-pssd/
There are plenty of drugs with long term effects despite not remaining in the body. Every addictive substance comes to mind, but so do chemotherapies and many other things.
"We can do proper code review, unit testing, integration testing and full test cycle later on, when the pressure fades away."
We engineers all understand the risk of pushing untested code to production, but when it comes to medicine and other fields, we forget everything and rush it out. We basically act based on fear and hope.
They broke all sorts of protocols, covered it up, had it reported to the FDA, who in turn just sat on it.
If you're willing to go that route, the same could be said for COVID itself.
That being said, one of the reasons that protease inhibitors are considered the way to go is that “no human proteases with a similar cleavage specificity are known, such inhibitors are unlikely to be toxic.” [1]
“The only way they are alike is that they are both pills,” Petri said.
Dr. Kevin J. Downes, assistant professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania, agreed, “They are dramatically different molecules. The drugs are different in their structure and their molecular size.”
[...]
Ivermectin binds to glutamate-gated chloride channels and is used to treat parasite infections, said Joseph Glajch, a consultant in pharmaceutical and analytical chemistry.
“These two are so far apart,” he said. “If you look at how they interact with the body..., they don’t even go to the same pathways or receptors.”'
In related news, Merck's molnupiravir has been approved in the UK as well.
also if this can help impact the rate of hospitalization and death among unvaccinated than it also alleviates the need for actual vaccinations to do the lift of ending the overall pandemic.
And vaccinated people can get infected and suffer from serious symptoms. If the entire world were vaccinated and 0.1% of people would have serious symptoms, that would still be more than 8 million people looking for a cure.
If it's expensive - we'll have government printing more money to afford the pill, like they've been doing for the vaccine, and the general populace for the past 2 years.
But the vaccine is free! Yep... sure.
They needed to inject liquidity into the economy and justified it with COVID.
And Monoclonal antibodies are not widely rolled out. This is not relevant.
Edited. https://wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/health-news-florida/2021-09-23...
> In August, DeSantis began opening the first of 21 rapid-response sites to administer Regeneron treatments, and more than 90,000 doses have been given.
>monoclonal antibodies [cost] over $2,000.
It’s about $180,000,000 just for Florida and that doesn’t include administration.
My back of the envelope math suggests less than a billion. Peanuts compared to the recovery bills
COVID Vaccines: "7.19 Billion Shots Given (Globally), and in the U.S. 425 million doses have been given"
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo...
This is trivial to google.
Like I said, Monoclonal antibodies are not widely rolled out. Don't extrapolate from Florida.
Expensive drugs will enjoy trials designed and sponsored by their manufacturers.
Why just assume this and post it as if your opinion on what it COULD be without even reading a little bit about it has any value?
Read it carefully. Pfizer falsifies clinical data and covers up significant adverse effects. FDA knows about all of that and covers their asses. Whatever comes from Pfizer will be authorized without any questions being asked. It's not even a legislation, but a straight up internal arrangements between FDA and Pfizer executives.
Whatever you see in media about Pfizer is a complete crap.
I also want to remind you that Pfizer is responsible for the largest health care fraud in history. They had to pay $2.3B fine in 2009.
https://www.cbs17.com/news/north-carolina-news/fact-check-re...
> The Pfizer Phase III trial involved 44,000 people and 153 locations. From August 2020 through Sept. 17, 2020 — when she was fired — Jackson told CBS 17 that Ventavia accounted for at least 1,200 of those people and accounted for three sites.
The author of the BMJ piece is quoted as saying “people are going to use this to push a political position because that’s what they’re interested in”, so congrats on demonstrating that.
https://corporatewatch.org/pfizer-six-scandals-to-remember/
1986: Pfizer had to withdraw an artificial heart valve from the market after defects led to it being implicated in over 300 deaths. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) withdrew its approval for the product in 1986 and Pfizer agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation after multiple lawsuits were brought against it.
2003: Pfizer has long been condemned for profiteering from AIDS drugs. In 2003 for example, it walked away from a licencing deal for its Rescriptor drug that would have made it cheaper for poorer countries.
2011: Pfizer was forced to pay compensation to families of children killed in the controversial Trovan drug trial. During the worst meningitis epidemic seen in Africa, in 1996, Pfizer ran a trial in Nigeria their new drug Trovan. Five of the 100 children who took Trovan died and it caused liver damage, while it caused lifelong disabilities in those who survived. But another group of 100 children were given the conventional “gold standard” meningitis antibiotic as a “control” group for comparison. Six of them also tragically died because, the families said, Pfizer had given them less than the recommended level of the conventional antibiotic in order to make Trovan look more effective.
2012: Pfizer had to pay around $1billion to settle lawsuits claiming its Prempro drug caused breast cancer. Prempro was used in hormone replacement therapy, usually for women going through the menopause. The settlements came after six years of trials and hardship for the women affected.
2013: Pfizer paid out $273 million to settle over 2,000 cases in the US that accused its smoking treatment drug Chantix of provoking suicidal and homicidal thoughts, self harm and severe psychological disorders. Pfizer was also accused of improperly excluding patients with a history of depression or other mental disturbances from trials for the drug. Later, in 2017, a coroner in Australia ruled that the drug had contributed to a man’s suicide. The man’s mother campaigned to change the label on the drug.
2020: Pfizer reached an agreement with thousands of customers of its depo-testosterone drug in 2018 after they sued it for increasing the likelihood of numerous issues, including heart attacks.
The great news is that I don't have to.
The vaccines are being widely administered by dozens of countries, each with their own regulatory authorities, and the whole process is generating enormous amounts of data, including ones outside Pfizer's control/influence.
Which is an assertion the BMJ article doesn't support.
"Revelations of poor practices at a contract research company helping to carry out Pfizer’s pivotal covid-19 vaccine trial raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight. Paul D Thacker reports"
"A regional director who was employed at the research organisation Ventavia Research Group has told The BMJ that the company falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial."
> At several points during the late September meeting Jackson and the Ventavia executives discussed the possibility of the FDA showing up for an inspection (box 1). “We’re going to get some kind of letter of information at least, when the FDA gets here... know it,” an executive stated.
> Ventavia
You're aware that Pfizer isn't spelled V-E-N-T-A-V-I-A, yes?
The worst case scenario here is ~1,200 out of 44,000 trial participants in three out of 153 trial sites may have had bad data. I would hope that Pfizer and the FDA are double-checking the data from that vendor (and I strongly suspect that one vendor with aberrant data versus the rest of them is already something they keep an eye out for).
We've subsequently given (and monitored for the same sort of issues we look for in these trials) hundreds of millions of doses of the vaccine successfully.
Found a recap via google @ https://www.jpands.org/hacienda/blevins1.html
Burzynski: Cancer Is Serious Business @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_7LZ8GLerI
- Should we choose the moderna vaccine instead ?
- Should we avoid the oral vaccine, and opt for the injection instead ?
- Should we merely be skeptical and wait ?
And why not take the J&J or Moderna vaccine if Pfizer is the only concern here ?
I can't find that in the article you linked, can you cite the relevant parts of the text?
https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/26/bmjebm-2021-111...
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/content?templateType=full&ur...
Your first link states that ivermectin is "proved to be safe at the conventional dose, although severe adverse effects have occasionally been reported". Occasional is not "substantial". Your second link does not work for me.
Sorry about the link - it worked earlier when I tested it. You can try this one:
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
I don't think (and you also seem to imply) that any of the studies conducted for Covid were using much higher doses than the standard. On the contrary, this was precisely the point of clinical studies: to determine whether a standard dose of ivermectin (with known and limited side effects) would provide benefits, even though it is lower than the dose at which ivermectin was initially shown to have antiviral properties in vitro.
Uh, I have never seen that from them. All of them say the bad studies are the ones using too high a dosage, and the side effects from that dosage are why those studies have bad results.
Fuck off with this fud.
> The rates of hospitalization or death in the Paxlovid and control arms were 1% and 6.7%, respectively, resulting in a risk reduction of 85%. Most people that get COVID don’t go to the hospital nor do they die. How much is from a null hypothesis; people who wouldn’t have complications anyway? It’s barely significant if you use 5% as the minimum, and it can still be noise. Vaccinated people are not going to have complications like this anyway. People care about not getting infected, this treatment is inferior to monoclonal antibodies and not barely significantly different from control.
> The rates of hospitalization or death in the Paxlovid and control arms were 1% and 6.7%, respectively, resulting in a risk reduction of 85%.
> Pfizer used data on patients who were treated within three days of symptom onset as the headline finding in its press release. In that subpopulation, the rates of hospitalization or death in the Paxlovid and control groups were 0.8% and 7%, respectively, resulting in a risk reduction of 89%. Merck’s 50% reduction was seen in patients who were randomized within five days of symptom onset.
The effectiveness is very low.
This information will absolutely be part of the FDA's EUA process, and as such, it's a silly idea that Pfizer would've set up a study that doesn't account for these.
> The effectiveness is very low.
Bullshit.
https://corporatewatch.org/pfizer-six-scandals-to-remember/
1986: Pfizer had to withdraw an artificial heart valve from the market after defects led to it being implicated in over 300 deaths. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) withdrew its approval for the product in 1986 and Pfizer agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation after multiple lawsuits were brought against it.
2003: Pfizer has long been condemned for profiteering from AIDS drugs. In 2003 for example, it walked away from a licencing deal for its Rescriptor drug that would have made it cheaper for poorer countries.
2011: Pfizer was forced to pay compensation to families of children killed in the controversial Trovan drug trial. During the worst meningitis epidemic seen in Africa, in 1996, Pfizer ran a trial in Nigeria their new drug Trovan. Five of the 100 children who took Trovan died and it caused liver damage, while it caused lifelong disabilities in those who survived. But another group of 100 children were given the conventional “gold standard” meningitis antibiotic as a “control” group for comparison. Six of them also tragically died because, the families said, Pfizer had given them less than the recommended level of the conventional antibiotic in order to make Trovan look more effective.
2012: Pfizer had to pay around $1billion to settle lawsuits claiming its Prempro drug caused breast cancer. Prempro was used in hormone replacement therapy, usually for women going through the menopause. The settlements came after six years of trials and hardship for the women affected.
2013: Pfizer paid out $273 million to settle over 2,000 cases in the US that accused its smoking treatment drug Chantix of provoking suicidal and homicidal thoughts, self harm and severe psychological disorders. Pfizer was also accused of improperly excluding patients with a history of depression or other mental disturbances from trials for the drug. Later, in 2017, a coroner in Australia ruled that the drug had contributed to a man’s suicide. The man’s mother campaigned to change the label on the drug.
2020: Pfizer reached an agreement with thousands of customers of its depo-testosterone drug in 2018 after they sued it for increasing the likelihood of numerous issues, including heart attacks.
Oh, a protease inhibitor you say? I was told those were horse dewormers by the media.
This whole thing is bullshit. With this much money at stake we were never going to learn the truth.
As have people who didn't get any treatment.
That's why we rely on data from more than one case, to figure out relative effectiveness of different treatment methods.
Regardless of the answer, I'm not interested in debating the wisdom of taking dog medicine in unstudied doses for an unstudied treatment with unstudied effectiveness that has a clearly documented ability to strip the lining of your intestines. You want be a trailblazer with every Facebook remedy? Be my guest.
The cultivated animosity towards it is more of a result of propaganda. With this much money at stake, it’s easy to see who might actually be pushing that propaganda.
I'm not anti-Ivermectin anymore than I'm anti-any prescribed drug. I give it to my dog. My dad has used it, under the guidance of a doctor.
It causes kidney failure. Just the thing for treating someone whose lungs are filling with fluid from viral pneumonia.
I really wish at the time they went in the hospital (in December) that I had known the WHO had withdrawn it from their recommended treatment list the month before, in November 2020. BUT that particular piece of news was not important to the people who run the big propaganda campaign against Ivermectin.
Is this a defense of Ivermectin somehow?
> I really wish at the time... that I had known the WHO had withdrawn it from their recommended treatment list the month before
Sounds like the people who don't endorse Ivermectin did in fact say the right thing. "The people who told you" I am referring to are doctors and health professionals, not Internet mobs.
So, you would have to guzzle 20 times the recommended dosage of a foul-tasting elixir to get near a lethal dose. It sticks around in your system for ~4days, so there could be a cumulative effect if you guzzle enough over a few day period.
But still, much less dangerous as Tylenol (toxic at 10g dose; typical therapeutic dose on the order of 1g):
Paracetamol poisoning was first described in the 1960s.[6] Rates of poisoning vary significantly between regions of the world.[8] In the United States more than 100,000 cases occur a year.[1] In the United Kingdom it is the medication responsible for the greatest number of overdoses.[7] Young children are most commonly affected.[1] In the United States and the United Kingdom, paracetamol is the most common cause of acute liver failure.[9][1]
And furthermore, since Ivermectin is a potent antiparasitic, many people are likely to experience Jarisch–Herxheimer reaction to the death of intestinal parasites, which indicates its working, not dangerous. So, take is slow if you also have parasites.
But, by all means, carry on believing what you're told to! ;)
This is a straw man. Lethality isn't the only negative consequence. You don't have to die to hurt yourself for no reason.
> But still, much less dangerous as Tylenol
Another drug I'd rarely if ever recommend taking. Could have saved you the lecture.
>... many people are likely to experience Jarisch–Herxheimer reaction to the death of intestinal parasites
I'm sure some are. My money is on shitting intestine lining being more likely, but whatever.
“The only way they are alike is that they are both pills,” Petri said.
Dr. Kevin J. Downes, assistant professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania, agreed, “They are dramatically different molecules. The drugs are different in their structure and their molecular size.”
[...]
Ivermectin binds to glutamate-gated chloride channels and is used to treat parasite infections, said Joseph Glajch, a consultant in pharmaceutical and analytical chemistry.
“These two are so far apart,” he said. “If you look at how they interact with the body..., they don’t even go to the same pathways or receptors.”'