Comment by Zolde | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zolde | Hacker News Reader

It feels like a little too late. Science has to wait on controls, and that is difficult to do with a new disease.

Civilian science/shitposters were promoting tea and catechins since early 2020, but such information was classified as dangerous misinformation by the authorities fighting an "infodemic".

https://justpaste.it/8bq9r

> If smelling not good is a bit of a problem, then raw apples, lemons, spinach, lettuce, green tea and chew gum would help a bit

> Significant inactivation of SARS-CoV-2 by a green tea catechin, a catechin-derivative and galloylated theaflavins in vitro

> Preferably only tea and not tea extract pills, as the latter have a chance to cause liver injury

> results strongly suggest that EGCG, and more remarkably TSA and galloylated theaflavins, inactivate the novel coronavirus

> Teas contain Epigallocatechin-gallate (EGCG) which is a zinc ionophore that helps your cells to absorb zinc that halts viral replication in your cells.

> Antiviral activity of [green tea] and plant juices ([black chokeberry (Aronia melanocarpa) juice], [pomegranate (Punica granatum) juice]) against SARS-CoV-2 and influenza virus in vitro

> Green tea, muscadine grapes, cacao powder, and dark chocolate - able to bind to a particular enzyme, or protease, in the virus and stop it reproducing

> To further substantiate the inhibitory activities, extracts prepared from [green tea (GT), two muscadine grapes (MG), cacao, and dark chocolate (DC)], which are rich in CAG, ECG, GAG, EGCG, or/and PB2, were used for inhibitory assay.

It’s not too little too late. It’s just too little.

The paper is showing about a 100x reduction in infectivity from exposure to saliva collected “0 minutes” after drinking tea. That’s a very small effect. Compare to, say, penicillin, which will kill viruses in the levels present in your blood and tissue hours after taking a small pill.

Or, for a different comparison, I don’t know of anyone testing a handgun against COVID (sorry, xkcd), but pool water and presumably chlorinated tap water reduces infectivity by at least 1000x in 30 seconds:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8480993/

Maybe one could use these compounds in tea as a basis to try to develop a useful antiviral drug. But numbers like this don’t make it look like the pandemic could have been averted by telling everyone to drink four cups of tea a day or to continuously gargle chlorinated tap water.

(Seriously, I doubt there were evil authorities out there trying to get people not to drink lots of tea so they could drum or support for mask mandates or quantitative easing or whatever other measures seem horrible. This whole concept seems utterly absurd. And at least opening a window or using a MERV 13 or N95 or better seem like more justifiable public health measures than distributing free bottles of iced tea!)

Not necessarily evil, but elitist.

Authorities were writing that even multivitimins could be dangerous and had no scientific proof against Covid. Mentions of turmeric got your Youtube video delisted. It is crazy that the information gathered above has to reside on a paste site, when 25 years ago anyone would have found it on BBS or mailing list. Western medicine is needlessly dismissive of natural medicine. They censored wisdom of the crowds.

First masks were made taboo, as they did not work for civilians (but in reality they had not enough in stock to service health care workers). The flip flop on masks only came later. In February it was known that chloroquine, which helped for SARS-1, was also likely effective for SARS-2. Interesting to see the hitjob on that. Ivermectine in vitro studies were only censored, because these were discussed on "far-right" sites, not because it did not work (because it turned out to help in vivo, but doctors lost license for prescribing it anyway).

Let the people, especially black skinned people, take vitamin D next time there is a viral pandemic. No need for public health info-management. It did more damage than good.

Penicillin never kills viruses; only bacteria. This is true of all antibiotics. Antivirals are a separate category (and don't tend to work as well AFAIK).

Bah, typo.

The point stands: useful pathogen-killing much more effective than tea appears to be in the paper.

You never had a point.

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