[HN Gopher] Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalizatio...
___________________________________________________________________
Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
Author : jeremylevy
Score : 700 points
Date : 2021-11-05 12:57 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fiercebiotech.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fiercebiotech.com)
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| Who cares about the skeptics. Give me the drug if I'm sick. End
| of story.
| throwawaymedia wrote:
| Before everyone becomes super excited, I want you all to read
| this article from Nov 2:
| https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635
|
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| _One_ of Pfizer 's trial vendors falsified information.
|
| 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.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Wait a minute. I don't see any political position in the
| comment you're replying to. I don't even see a hint of one. I
| can't even figure out what political position on what topic
| would be likely.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The author was obviously aware of the possibility that "one
| of Pfizer's vendors did a bad thing" would likely be turned
| into "Pfizer bad/scary!" (with the implication that doubt
| should be cast on the vaccines/meds) as it is here.
| salemh wrote:
| Why do you trust this company?
|
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Why do you trust this company?
|
| 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.
| djanogo wrote:
| Your take is completely wrong, OP didn't make it "political",
| he said Pfizer falsified data and your post confirms that.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > he said Pfizer falsified data
|
| 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. "
| throwawaymedia wrote:
| > Ventavia executive identified three site staff members
| with whom to "Go over e-diary issue/falsifying data,
| etc." One of them was "verbally counseled for changing
| data and not noting late entry," a note indicates.
|
| > 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Ventavia
|
| > Ventavia
|
| You're aware that Pfizer isn't spelled V-E-N-T-A-V-I-A,
| yes?
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Trial vendor.. LOL. Reminds me of a politician getting caught
| doing something. It wasn't my fault, it was the fault of the
| person I paid to do it.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| If a politician hired a hundred vendors to send direct
| mailings, and one of them used forged stamps, would it be
| fair to say the politician used forged stamps?
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| This is more like.. what if you're a food manufacturer
| and find out the food was contaminated. Do you keep
| shipping it to recoup costs and stay quiet, or do you
| come clean and risk the negative PR?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The vaccine wasn't contaminated, though.
|
| 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.
| throwawaymedia wrote:
| My assumption is that you haven't seen how big deals are
| being made in this world. VAERS has all the data as an
| outcome of these kind of deals: https://openvaers.com/covid-
| data
| ceejayoz wrote:
| If you open up the _actual_ VAERS
| (https://vaers.hhs.gov/data.html), you'll see disclaimers
| like this:
|
| > Reports may include incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental
| and unverified information.
|
| > The number of reports alone cannot be interpreted or used
| to reach conclusions about the existence, severity,
| frequency, or rates of problems associated with vaccines.
|
| The numbers are suddenly high, in part, because of this:
|
| https://vaers.hhs.gov/faq.html
|
| > Healthcare providers are required to report to VAERS the
| following adverse events after COVID-19 vaccination [under
| Emergency Use Authorization (EUA)], and other adverse
| events if later revised by CDC...
|
| There's a COVID-specific reporting _requirement_ on a
| previously _optional_ system.
| grey413 wrote:
| Agreed. The reports that VAERS provides can _hint_ at
| rare adverse outcomes for vaccines, but it simply doesn
| 't hold any significance compared to clinical trials.
| Comparing them is just outright false equivalence.
| ADSSDA wrote:
| VAERS is a great thing, but it's deeply unfortunate that
| antivax conspiracy theorists have used it to spread lies
| like yours.
|
| https://www.science.org/content/article/antivaccine-
| activist...
| throwawaymedia wrote:
| There is no conspiracy theory here. Stop using that term
| to minimize the importance of things. VAERS is a data
| point. Check out similar data points from other
| countries. Numbers DO match.
| ADSSDA wrote:
| What other data points? Can you provide peer reviewed
| high quality data to support your claims? Just because
| you _want_ a conspiracy theory to be true does not make
| it so.
| [deleted]
| grey413 wrote:
| VAERS hasn't turned up anything like you're implying about
| the Pfizer vaccine.
| mpweiher wrote:
| Please don't misrepresent VAERS.
|
| "Due to the program's open and accessible design and its
| allowance of unverified reports, incomplete VAERS data is
| often used in false claims regarding vaccine safety."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_Adverse_Event_Reporti
| n...
|
| VAERS is an unvetted database of adverse events that occur
| some _time_ after a vaccine has been given. It does not
| mean that there is a _causal_ link.
|
| "CDC cautions that it is generally not possible to find out
| from VAERS data if a vaccine caused the adverse event, or
| how common the event might be.[5]"
|
| Particularly, in the current pandemic, we vaccinated a LOT
| of sick and elderly patients, and we vaccinated them first,
| in almost unprecedented numbers. So VAERS will have a LOT
| of "adverse events", simply because the sick and elderly
| have a lot of these adverse events, vaccine or not.
| [deleted]
| JKolios wrote:
| > covers up significant adverse effects.
|
| I can't find that in the article you linked, can you cite the
| relevant parts of the text?
| IronWolve wrote:
| Related, FDA's War on Dr. Burzynski, after Burzynski won his
| court cases, the FDA gave away Burzynski patents to their FDA
| pharma buddies. The FDA stole it after they couldn't win
| lawsuits against Burzynski in multiple court cases.
|
| 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
| mataug wrote:
| I understand this concern, but what can I as an average citizen
| do about this ?
|
| - 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 ?
| warning26 wrote:
| My advice would be to avoid conspiracy theories on the
| internet and just live your life.
| throwawaymedia wrote:
| I'm skeptical and I wait. I'll be the last one in line to
| take the shot. I'm a software engineer and I know that if you
| deploy a system to production RIGHT AWAY, something is gonna
| fail.
| crottypeter wrote:
| But the virus is already in the live prod environment!
| mataug wrote:
| Wait before taking the oral vaccine ? Or wait before taking
| the existing FDA approved Pfizer vaccine ?
|
| And why not take the J&J or Moderna vaccine if Pfizer is
| the only concern here ?
| jolts wrote:
| Also called pfizermectin
| fag_tits wrote:
| Sooo...rebranded ivermectin basically?
| stevev wrote:
| I do think early treatments are important and that we have strong
| case studies to support the effectiveness of Ivermectin and high
| dosage of Vitamin D intake.
|
| https://c19early.com/
| oezi wrote:
| Why are you linking to such a page? This isn't a trustworthy
| source.
| docmars wrote:
| Oh? It only links to dozens of peer-reviewed journals and
| studies. Totally suspect.
|
| Can't win all the jab religion followers, it seems
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| oezi wrote:
| Well the authors could start by giving their names instead
| of running an anonymous page online.
|
| Then they could actually use a methodology that makes
| sense.
| docmars wrote:
| And what of the methodologies presented in the individual
| studies? Are they not sufficient?
|
| Who are you, or anyone, to assume the curator / scientist
| / reporter who put this together is acting with negative
| intent when it presents a positive outlook for the use of
| other treatments that have manifested in good outcomes
| and healing?
|
| Don't get me wrong, it's good to be skeptical, just not
| selectively.
| oezi wrote:
| Don't get me wrong Doc. Neither you nor I nor a random
| dude with a web-site has the capacity to make statements
| that might lead people to make medical decisions. Leave
| that to doctors and governments please.
|
| It is good to be skeptical, but also important to trust
| the right people.
| pjkundert wrote:
| You mean, the doctors who are making such decisions,
| getting good results, and getting their medical licenses
| revoked?
| docmars wrote:
| So much this. It's all too real, and happening at an
| alarming pace. I've stopped counting the reports and
| interviews from doctors and medical workers who have
| bravely shared their stories and fears around this.
| spurgu wrote:
| And get harrassed? One of the benefits of the internet is
| (/was) that you can share data/information anonymously.
| ufo wrote:
| There's enormous amounts of evidence that ivermectin doesn't
| work.
|
| If did work, we wouldn't have over 600,000 dead here in Brazil.
| A sizeable portion of the population, encouraged by our
| goverment, made use of ivermectin as a so-called preventive
| treatment. It didn't work, and hundreds of thousands died
| despite it.
|
| The only thing that is actually working is the advance of the
| vaccination campaign. While it started late, we thankfully are
| have a very large support for vaccination, and very few
| antivaxxers.
| ArclightMat wrote:
| Indeed, as a Brazilian, it gets to my nerves reading those
| conspiracy theories about "how the media hid ${TREATMENT}'s
| effectiveness" or "there is no interest on using ${TREATMENT}
| because no money to be made! :c".
|
| I seriously think those people are heartless. So many died
| because of those ineffective treatments and they keep
| advocating for them, with higher (and more dangerous) dosages
| while linking to random papers as if all of them are
| trustworthy (like a certain senator here). Worse, they
| consider those who use the right tool for the job (vaccines)
| the equivalent of religious nutjobs.
|
| Most of their theories don't even make sense when you
| consider the wide picture: For example, even if the "evil big
| pharma" wasn't interested on cheap treatments, governments
| would have done anything to avoid lockdowns that heavily
| damaged their economies. It is a sick joke all the way down
| and a disgrace to all who died before a proper treatment was
| available.
|
| I'm deadly sure that if they had lived through a collapse of
| public and private healthcare systems and/or had lost someone
| over it, they wouldn't be talking BS all the time.
| rpmisms wrote:
| This is good information to spread. The more we can treat
| moderate-to-severe COVID at home, the less burden on the
| hospital system.
| docmars wrote:
| It's unbelievable to me that people can't find the positivity
| in studies and results like these as long as they pose a
| threat to their beloved "miracle" vaccines that are
| objectively wrecking too many people's lives with severe
| adverse reactions and even death, over, and over, and over
| again.
|
| At some point, the horse blinders will need to be forcibly
| ripped off in order to help people see and understand the
| people right in front of them who are suffering unnecessarily
| as they, and their families now fight life-long conditions
| and grieve their losses.
|
| It feels impossible while people clutch their pearls at the
| mere mention of the possibility that something _else_ exists
| that's sufficiently and observably effective.
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| And there are a frightening number of people who will say
| there's not enough data while Pfizer launches R&D for an
| entirely new drug to get it to market.
|
| Does no one else pay mind to the fact that pharmaceutical
| companies have zero interest in potential treatment options if
| they're not under patent anymore? Why do we trust them
| implicitly but suspect Apple does shady things like employ
| slave labor and suicide nets, or that Facebook downplays
| psychological side effects of their products?
| twofornone wrote:
| The real scandal would be that ivermectin worked and
| therefore invalidated the emergency vaccine authorization,
| but I doubt that will ever see the light of day given the
| coordinated media blitz against "horse paste".
| swader999 wrote:
| All these quoted studies were under-powered or administered
| far too late and low dose and many only gave 3 does of
| ivermectin. It does work if you have a higher dose at .6
| mg/kg, take it fairly early and as recommended by the NIH.
| thehappypm wrote:
| It's crazy that money is such a huge incentive. Knowing that a
| cure for Covid is a potentially $100B market means you throw the
| kitchen sink at it. Imagine being this lab. Do you think they
| ever had trouble hiring an assistant? Buying new equipment?
| Getting bonuses? This environment must be fantastically different
| from the typical meat grinder of bio R&D.
| spamizbad wrote:
| I know people who have worked on some pretty revolutionary
| cardiac drugs that got laid off once their project was
| complete. It'll still be a meatgrinder for the talent behind
| these drugs. The spoils are further up the food chain.
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29120313.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| It's also a boom and bust business. Once COVID has gone away I
| bet funding will dry up and a lot of these people will have
| trouble finding work.
| pie42000 wrote:
| This is what being an engineer during WW2 must have been like.
| Near infinite money and resources, but very tough deadlines
| subsubzero wrote:
| agree, The manhattan project alone was 1% of the US GDP
| during its most expensive year, that would equate to $230
| Billion in today's dollars.
| tomatocracy wrote:
| There are still occasionally projects which approach this
| relative scale today. When Boeing (temporarily) shut down
| 737 MAX production in early 2020 it was reported that this
| would reduce US GDP by between 0.3% and 0.6% (depending on
| the economist doing the calculation), for example.
| xxpor wrote:
| Along these lines, for anyone who hasn't heard of it:
|
| 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.
| rangoon626 wrote:
| Still can't get over WWII, so everyone has to larp.
|
| Truly, imagine having your main frame of reference pretending
| you are in WWII, for everything else you do in life.
| FooBarWidget wrote:
| I don't think it's fair to say that it's just money. There's
| also a global crisis and a huge need for such a drug.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Well hopefully money serves as a tool for prioritizing
| resources for important problems. Seems to be working well in
| this case.
| pxc wrote:
| Money has totally failed at allocating vaccinations and
| treatments for COVID-19 to 95% of the global population.
| But it's 'succeeded' in securing boosters for people who
| are already vaccinated in the richest parts of the world
| while global supply is lacking.
| xattt wrote:
| The added incentive is survival of the species.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Lets not overdo it. Covid is not wiping out the human
| species.
| rafaelvasco wrote:
| Maybe it could if left unchecked and mutating up and down
| ?
| [deleted]
| FpUser wrote:
| >"Maybe it could if left unchecked and mutating up and
| down ?"
|
| Nope
| acdha wrote:
| No -- if it was that easy, the odds are high that
| something else would have already done so. The two things
| which tend to factor into this are that there's a lot of
| natural variation so it means that the population will
| change to favor a high percentage of people who are
| somewhat resistant to it[1] after a few generations of
| recovery.
|
| There's also an inverse relationship between deadliness
| and spread: if something kills at a high rate, the odds
| are high that it'll burn out when the outside world goes
| into quarantine as long as it doesn't spread to 100% of
| the breeding population before they start dying. Anything
| deadly enough to wipe out a species is going to have a
| LOT less resistance to lockdowns -- COVID-19 is deadly
| but far below the rates of other diseases and that puts
| it in a grey area where there are a fair number of people
| who've had it and can say "no big deal". Smallpox or
| polio were enough worse that people jumped on treatment
| campaigns because almost everyone with lived experience
| knew they didn't want it.
|
| 1. A great example appears to be Sickle Cell Anemia,
| where the gene responsible is thought to confer some
| resistance to malaria -- normally this would be a
| disadvantage but in areas where malaria is endemic the
| risk of SCA is more than balanced by the risk of malaria.
| rafaelvasco wrote:
| Makes sense to me. Thanks.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| How is species survival at risk?
| kazinator wrote:
| Big Pharma will not invest in a research program they
| know will lose money, even if that money-losing situation
| is the successful case which saves humanity from
| extinction.
|
| They will do the work, if the money comes from somewhere
| else.
| kazinator wrote:
| Pharma doesn't do charity though. Drug risky is very
| expensive and highly risky. It's risky whether you research a
| drug for some disease that ten people have in the world, or
| for a pandemic.
|
| Research related to the pandemic is de-risked by some margin
| and that alone makes it attractive.
| pp19dd wrote:
| Sadly, promise of money means "viability." Have to be realistic
| about these things.
|
| 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.
| ryanobjc wrote:
| Therefore how can you trust this drug? Follow the money! It's
| just big science trying to propagate a pandemic to make more
| money!
|
| If this sounds insane, we'll ok just reflecting the common anti
| vax sentiments I hear on this web site (ugh).
| dustintrex wrote:
| Except that this pill won't be given to people unless they're
| already sick with COVID. Not that this will stop the tinfoil
| hat brigade, but it's going to be much less controversial
| than universal vaccine mandates.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It won't happen, because the explicit arguments are just
| pretexts. After The Lancet/Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy (and
| other popular media figures), the word "vaccine" is now
| simply triggering of aggressive suspicion. That media panic
| combining with:
|
| 1) the 80s New Age/Self-Help/Healthy Living/Naturopathic
| flakes,
|
| 2) the suspicions of black people who are generally neglected
| and sometimes abused by the health care industry (over a very
| long term with sign-off from regulators),
|
| 3) and the religious fundamentalist divine punishment crowd
| (disease exists to punish weakness and evil), and
|
| 4) the factual observation that the healthcare industry in
| the US is hopelessly corrupt from top to bottom, and will not
| change no matter how strong the political will of the general
| population, or how organized it is,
|
| ...and all combinations thereof, means that this is going to
| be something that we have to deal with forever. It has
| nothing to do with whether the vaccine is new or
| experimental, it's that it's a vaccine. We still don't have
| universal vaccination for HPV, and that prevents cancer.
|
| The media blames vaccine hesitancy on Republican hucksters,
| but that's just because they're centrist neolibs and that's
| what they're paid to do. Republican grifters take advantage
| of whatever's available; this week they actually became
| animal rights activists in order to attack Fauci:)
|
| The anti-vax feeling is deeper than that; it's become
| hopelessly tangled into religion, identity, and anti-
| authoritarianism. It's not going away. Covid-19 was actually
| pretty mild when it comes down to it, when a real disease
| comes along, we're all dead.
|
| I'm actually on a personal countdown until I hear the first
| argument that this safe, effective, experimental pill is a
| reason _not_ to take the dangerous, pointless, experimental
| vaccine, and that big pharma wants you to take the vaccine
| instead of the pill because reasons.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _I 'm actually on a personal countdown until I hear the
| first argument that this safe, effective, experimental pill
| is a reason not to take the dangerous, pointless,
| experimental vaccine, and that big pharma wants you to take
| the vaccine instead of the pill because reasons._
|
| That ship sailed weeks ago on the Twittersphere, once news
| of the new drug's development came out. According to half
| of the idiots, the announcement explains why horse paste
| had to be "suppressed," given that ivermectin was
| inexpensive, already approved for human use, and
| unpatentable. The other half maintained that no, the new
| Pfizer compound was unalloyed good news, because they no
| longer needed to worry about getting the "untested,"
| "experimental" vaccine.
|
| _Covid-19 was actually pretty mild when it comes down to
| it, when a real disease comes along, we 're all dead._
|
| Exactly, SARS-CoV-2 amounts to a dress rehearsal. We know
| how the real thing is going to play out now, and oh, boy.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > the common anti vax sentiments I hear on this web site
| (ugh).
|
| Seeing this stuff so prevalent on HN really disappointed me.
| president wrote:
| Try to understand why this viewpoint exists. We are all
| logical people. The difference is in the trust of public
| media and government. Both sides of the argument are mostly
| right in what they believe given the information they are
| consuming. My suggestion - read sources from both sides
| before deciding that anyone slightly against Covid hysteria
| is misinformed and is an anti-vaxxer. Second suggestion,
| anti-vaxxer is a really misleading and extremely divisive
| term.
| mindslight wrote:
| The anti-vax movement is in the uncanny valley of media
| trust. If they had more trust, they'd follow traditional
| institutional recommendations as most had done for
| decades. If they had less trust, they'd realize that
| Faceboot et al are just more media sources hijacking
| their sense of social proof. The path to actually
| rejecting "the media" isn't to just follow substitute
| media that promotes opposite viewpoints - you have to
| reason from first principles and look to falsify every
| single thing you read.
| WillDaSilva wrote:
| > We are all logical people
|
| That's a bold claim. In my experience the vast majority
| of people hardly try to think logically or apply critical
| thinking skills in most opportunities, and no human does
| so anywhere close to all the time. Humans are deeply
| irrational creatures, and we shouldn't pretend otherwise.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > My suggestion - read sources from both sides
|
| I assure you I have; only one of those sides has any
| intellectual merit.
| trhway wrote:
| Please show intellectual merit in the government mandate
| for vaccine which:
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
|
| " A person who was fully vaccinated and then had a
| 'breakthrough' Delta infection was almost twice as likely
| to pass on the virus as someone who was infected with
| Alpha." ( and i was saying that months ago just based on
| obvious arithmetic on public data
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28081982 and was
| labeled as anti-vaxxer, i guess now it is me, the journal
| Nature and the study authors are all anti-vaxxers)
|
| "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."
|
| There is nothing wrong or unique about a vaccine being
| not effective in reducing transmission and spread. We
| have for example that with a flu vaccine each year. What
| unique and wrong is the vaccine mandate and enforcement
| of those failed Covid vaccines which plays right into the
| hands of the opposition to the vaccines in general which
| i think would result in a lot of damage down the road.
| themitigating wrote:
| Every business exists to make money, the same with most
| people.
| [deleted]
| randcraw wrote:
| So no business can exist that seeks something other than
| money? Non-profits and not-for-profits are not businesses?
| 20after4 wrote:
| Non profit organizations still need money to operate.
| They still pay their employees with money. They still
| must earn revenue somehow to cover their operations,
| unless they are entirely funded by an endowment. The only
| difference from for-profit companies is that they don't
| earn returns for investors.
| charbull wrote:
| The data sample is a bit low? 1200 people
| tpxl wrote:
| Depending on the effect severity you can get a representative
| sample from as low as 40 people (not necessarily in this case).
| nonfamous wrote:
| This is a randomized clinical trial; participants are recruited
| into the study using methods that eliminate the biases
| associated with self-selected participation, like internet or
| TV polls. You can get statistically valid results from small
| samples, that apply to very broad populations, using this
| methodology.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Gotta prove it with 1200 before you get the funding for 10,000.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| That's not low for the effect size they're observing. Note that
| this is a phase 2/3 trial. The safety trials have already
| occurred.
| roywiggins wrote:
| The effect size was very large. The calculated p-value was
| <0.0001.
|
| https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| To mention it, not necessarily directed at you. Larger test
| groups are required when trying to distinguish between less
| effective treatments.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| loceng wrote:
| Sounds like same/similar rate as Ivermectin - if proper protocol
| followed.
| distantsounds wrote:
| No, that has nowhere near the same efficacy.
| loceng wrote:
| C19ivermectin.com - which includes well done and poorly done
| studies - lists 86% reduction with prophylaxis treatment.
|
| You'll believe and weight a single study done by the company
| looking to make billions via a new patented drug over many
| third-party studies of a cheap off-patent drug though, won't
| you?
| acdha wrote:
| No, that site is anonymous for a reason: the information
| presented hasn't passed scientific review and relies on
| various methodological and analytic errors to show positive
| effects.
|
| https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/26/bmjebm-2021-11
| 1...
| loceng wrote:
| Do you think mentioning the site being anonymous gives
| any strength to your argument?
|
| Have your links been peer reviewed by competent
| individuals who aren't toeing the line?
|
| I wonder if https://mobile.twitter.com/alexandrosM has
| analyzed your links yet, I'll ask him. He's been
| debunking "long form"/poorly done "deep analysis" for
| awhile now - including people trying to show flaws in
| Ivermectin studies but where their methods are selective
| and showing bias; and then arrogant people like you jump
| in claiming they 100% know the truth.
| acdha wrote:
| Stop spreading disinformation. This has gone through studies
| showing significant positive benefits. Ivermectin has small
| studies with dubious methodology showing possible effects and
| larger studies with better methodology showing no benefit,
| along with substantial side-effects.
|
| https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/26/bmjebm-2021-111...
|
| https://www.cochranelibrary.com/content?templateType=full&ur...
| pjkundert wrote:
| You are misinformed:
|
| c19early.com c19ivermectin.com
|
| 128 studies, 83 peer-reviewed.
|
| The money quote, from ivmmeta.com:
|
| - There is evidence of a negative publication bias, and the
| probability that an ineffective treatment generated results
| as positive as the 65 studies is estimated to be 1 in 403
| billion.
|
| So, ... stop spreading misinformation?
| thehappypm wrote:
| Can you find a neutral source? I'm really interested in
| ivermectin but nobody posts anything from neutral web
| sites.
| pjkundert wrote:
| So, you don't want to review the 128 independent studies,
| 89 peer-reviewed -- you want me to find you _more_
| neutral sources?
|
| You're on your own, buddy! :)
| acdha wrote:
| No, I'm not. You're citing notorious disinformation sites
| whose anonymous creators are relying on you seeing big
| numbers and not noticing the problems with methodology and
| analysis. When actual experts look at those studies, the
| results have not held up.
|
| https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/26/bmjebm-2021-11
| 1...
|
| > Different websites (such as https://ivmmeta.com/,
| https://c19ivermectin.com/,
| https://tratamientotemprano.org/estudios-ivermectina/,
| among others) have conducted meta-analyses with ivermectin
| studies, showing unpublished colourful forest plots which
| rapidly gained public acknowledgement and were disseminated
| via social media, without following any methodological or
| report guidelines. These websites do not include protocol
| registration with methods, search strategies, inclusion
| criteria, quality assessment of the included studies nor
| the certainty of the evidence of the pooled estimates.
| Prospective registration of systematic reviews with or
| without meta-analysis protocols is a key feature for
| providing transparency in the review process and ensuring
| protection against reporting biases, by revealing
| differences between the methods or outcomes reported in the
| published review and those planned in the registered
| protocol. These websites show pooled estimates suggesting
| significant benefits with ivermectin, which has resulted in
| confusion for clinicians, patients and even decision-
| makers. This is usually a problem when performing meta-
| analyses which are not based in rigorous systematic
| reviews, often leading to spread spurious or fallacious
| findings.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8050401
|
| > Meta-analysis/observational studies (https://ivmmeta.com)
| are circulating in the scientific community and over the
| Internet, demonstrating the efficacy of IVM during the
| pandemic. However, most of the listed references fail to
| provide adequate methodologies, making them difficult to be
| validated. Major limitations include, small sample sizes,
| doses and frequency of IVM use, open-label studies, in
| which neither the participants nor the investigators were
| blinded to the treatments, the use of concomitant
| medications in addition to IVM, assuming that the efficacy
| resulted from IVM
| (https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/antiviral-
| the...).
| isolli wrote:
| I don't know if ivermectin is efficient, but I doubt it has
| substantial side-effects.
|
| 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.
| acdha wrote:
| The people pushing it as a COVID treatment are usually
| pushing prolonged usage at higher doses - they routinely
| dismiss studies showing no benefits as not using enough -
| and the documented side effects definitely happen at those
| levels. The lower doses used for parasite treatments also
| are balanced against high efficacy, whereas this just means
| you still have COVID along with new problems.
|
| 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.C
| D...
| isolli wrote:
| Thanks for the updated link. What I read is: "Ivermectin
| has few unwanted effects."
|
| 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.
| Izkata wrote:
| > The people pushing it as a COVID treatment are usually
| pushing prolonged usage at higher doses - they routinely
| dismiss studies showing no benefits as not using enough -
| and the documented side effects definitely happen at
| those levels.
|
| 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.
| phh wrote:
| > Pfizer used data on patients who were treated within three days
| of symptom onset as the headline finding in its press release
|
| > 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.
| loceng wrote:
| Did they also check and exclude if they had natural immunity -
| COVID recovered, having antibodies?
| prepend wrote:
| If the cost is low enough and the side effects are mild enough
| it could work. People would take it before a test is positive
| so would end up taking it when they didn't really need it.
|
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| A useful comparison. I have never taken Tamiflu because I
| know I'd need to haul my weak, shivering, flu-infected self
| through public to see a doctor to get the Rx, go to the
| pharmacy... all for the personally-uncertain benefit of
| Tamiflu.
|
| 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.
| adventured wrote:
| From the NY Times:
|
| "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....
| exogenousdata wrote:
| Yahoo news[0] and other news sources report significant
| efficacy even at the 5 day mark.
|
| "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...
| nradov wrote:
| Monoclonal antibody treatments are also commonly administered
| about 3 days after symptoms onset. They have proven to be
| somewhat effective in real life, although they still aren't
| being given to some patients who could potentially benefit.
| apendleton wrote:
| The monoclonal therapies are also administered by IV in a
| clinical setting, whereas this can be taken at home and could
| probably even be delivered. It should be even easier to make
| it within the three-day window with this treatment.
| docmars wrote:
| Man, rebranded Ivermectin is pretty great, isn't it? Go figure.
| pjkundert wrote:
| Ya, too bad there wasn't any reliable, cheap, readily available
| potent protease inhibitor available before this.
|
| Oh wait...
| moneywoes wrote:
| I'm unfamiliar
| pjkundert wrote:
| Ivermectin.
| pezzana wrote:
| > Pfizer's phase 2/3 trial randomized non-hospitalized adult
| COVID-19 patients who were at high risk of progressing to severe
| illness to receive placebo or Paxlovid, a combination of the
| protease inhibitors PF-07321332 and ritonavir. The efficacy
| analysis is based on 1,219 patients.
|
| 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.
| osrec wrote:
| It's not uncommon for human tragedies to serve as a backdrop
| for significant scientific progress.
|
| 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.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Is anyone familiar how this scaling up process works? To what
| point can it be scaled up using lab methods, and at which point
| does it make sense to start making it large-scale?
| ivoras wrote:
| There was an article specifically which explained that about
| remdesivir in really clear language but apparently it isn't
| there anymore.
|
| Here's a scholarly article on the evolution of synthesis:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8340098/
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Development tools help accelerate software development. Better
| tools help you go faster. This is happening in biotech as well
| - they're getting some very good development tools.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| >Less than two years from lab to clinic is highly unusual.
|
| 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.
| sokoloff wrote:
| This has interesting implications when we consider how much
| money drug companies "should" be paid for inventing important
| new life-saving medicines.
|
| 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.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| R&D is actually usually done outside of the major drug
| companies and is funded by the government. So I doubt it
| really will effect it. And most price hikes lately have
| been in pre-existing drugs.
|
| It's interesting to note that the Pfizer, AstroZeneca and
| J&J vaccines were all invented by 3rd parties.
| pfisherman wrote:
| Early stage R&D is the part that typically happens
| outside of big pharma, though all the big companies have
| their own proprietary early stage efforts/portfolios.
|
| 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).
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Pharma companies in the US spend about twice as much on
| advertising as they do on R&D [1]. Recent data compiled by
| the House Oversight Committee shows the biggest pharma
| companies spent $56 billion more on stock buybacks and
| dividends than they did on R&D over the past five years
| [2]. Very little of the ridiculous prices that US citizens
| pay for medicine (directly or via insurance) actually goes
| towards R&D.
|
| [1] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.13
| 71/jo...
|
| [2] https://oversight.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight.h
| ouse....
| greeneggs wrote:
| Your first link is from 2008, and analyzes data from
| 2004. I don't see how this proves anything, or even
| suggests much, about the industry today.
|
| 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.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| This is not a dick measuring contest. The comment was
| challenging the notion that pharmaceuticals companies
| spending the majority of their cash on advertising and
| stock buybacks is a desired outcome. The specific
| numbers, especially across industries, are meaningless.
| anamax wrote:
| Advertising includes drug samples given to doctors, which
| many/most of them give to patients who can't afford said
| drugs.
|
| How many of them are you willing to cut off?
| azinman2 wrote:
| And that was due to the wisdom of operation warpspeed. Trump
| is under credited for this (whether his idea or not, he could
| claim it as such). What's shocking to me is that he hasn't
| been more pro-vax given we have the vaccines we do because of
| his administration.
| Qub3d wrote:
| Operation Warp Speed is, to me, an indication of the power
| of government "intertia". Trump changed a lot of things,
| and while an uncomfortable amount of the U.S. government
| seems to run on "tradition" that isn't actually law, after
| 4 years of unchecked assault it was only at the very end
| that it really got crazy.
|
| 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.
| Redoubts wrote:
| > Operation Warp Speed is, to me, an indication of the
| power of government "intertia".
|
| We call this the Deep State
| oblio wrote:
| No need to use a conspiracy theory name for it.
|
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > We call this the Deep State
|
| 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.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I find this whole deep state thing very strange. It's
| meant to sound ominous, but really it's just a bunch of
| career diplomates that have worked over many
| administrations who are the ones that make anything that
| works, work. We should be doing our best to preserve
| their knowledge and capability.
| krapp wrote:
| >What's shocking to me is that he hasn't been more pro-vax
| given we have the vaccines we do because of his
| administration.
|
| 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.
| 0x7E3 wrote:
| That seems a bit revisionist. To my knowledge, Donald
| Trump was always a vocal supporter of the Covid vaccine.
| Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were the ones sowing doubt
| about it - right up until they won the election. Harris,
| in particular, described Trump as irresponsible for
| advocating for Project Warpspeed and suggesting that
| people should take a Covid vaccine before it had gone
| through the full approval process.
|
| I think you may be getting their personal stances
| confused with the partisan arguments about vaccine
| mandates that have evolved in the year since.
| voltaireodactyl wrote:
| Trump didn't make the vaccine a wedge issue, he made
| COVID a wedge issue by repeatedly calling it a political
| lie (which resulted in vaccines becoming a wedge issue).
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| felistoria wrote:
| I think he was recently boo'd at a rally because he told
| people to get vaccinated.
| acdha wrote:
| Also one factor slowing some studies has been the need to
| wait for test cases: you can't infect people with, say, Ebola
| so you need to wait for enough people in your study cohort to
| contract it naturally to get enough data to say whether a
| vaccine candidate is having an impact. During a pandemic,
| it's sadly easy to hit a statistically-significant number of
| infections.
| deanCommie wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It's sad that we all know people are going to use this fact to
| reject taking this medication while still chugging horse paste.
| a45a33s wrote:
| "horse paste" has been approved for human use for over 30
| years. not sure how expecting proper testing for new
| medicines became some conspiracy theory thing.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Is the similiarity of COVID-19 to other coronaviruses also a
| speed up? We are not starting from complete scratch in that
| case.
| lrem wrote:
| Aren't we? I thought that until SARS the scientific consensus
| was that coronaviruses are not interesting. And SARS died out
| too quickly to achieve much. But I might have not paid enough
| attention.
| tasogare wrote:
| Glad I waited instead of taking part in an experiment trial.
| There was an "easy" solution after all... I wonder what is the
| gotcha though, since it's a Pfizer study. Maybe something like
| selling a known molecule 10 times more expensive than before
| after rebranding it for the new usage?
| ralmeida wrote:
| Why is this drug less experimental than the vaccines?
| cies wrote:
| mRNA treatment is now also called a vaccine. That type of
| treatment has never been used on the general population until
| c19 came along and testing standards were reduced. It is a
| very interesting type of new treatment, but we lack long term
| data to say it's truly safe.
|
| Same can be said for any patented-molecule treatment. But
| that's just a new type of molecule, not a whole other type of
| treatment. Hence I'd say that molecule-drugs are less
| experimental than mRNA-vaccine jabs.
| ralmeida wrote:
| Wikipedia defines "vaccine" as _" a biological preparation
| that provides active acquired immunity to a particular
| infectious disease"_, which in my view would fit the
| Pfizer/Moderna shots. Which definition of "vaccine" do you
| subscribe to that these "treatments" don't fit into?
|
| Also, mRNA is not the only type of vaccine for COVID.
|
| Finally, two more questions: would you clarify which
| definition of "experimental" you subscribe to? And do you
| have a source for "testing standards were reduced"?
| woodruffw wrote:
| This isn't meant to be a jab or insinuation about you in
| particular, but: what about an Adenovirus vaccine? You can
| still (AFAIK) get the J&J vaccine in the US, and the AZ
| vaccine in most of the rest of the world.
|
| I'd argue that mRNA vaccine development represents the
| _most_ rigorous that the field of vaccinology has ever
| been, but those (Adenovirus) vaccines use a well tested,
| not-previously-experimental delivery technology. Do you
| have an objection to them?
| tinus_hn wrote:
| That is a valid question but another thing to note is that
| you wouldn't be giving this drug to the vast majority of
| people who do not get any symptoms from a Covid-19 infection.
| Nor would you be forcing people to take this drug.
| ralmeida wrote:
| Which is a fair viewpoint from the societal level, but not
| as much for the individual level, which was implied in the
| parent message - i.e. how can "I'll take experimental
| treatment B instead of experimental treatment A" be an
| argument for not taking experimental treatments in general?
| unanswered wrote:
| For an individual, the antiviral is better because it
| means they don't need to take the vaccine with any
| possible risks, however small, up front. Yes once an
| individual become symptomatic with covid-19, they're
| forced to be exposed to one of the risks, but at that
| point the antiviral is the only choice. In short, it
| allows an individual to delay taking the unknown risk
| until there's an actual known downside to not taking it;
| i.e. unmitigated covid symptoms. Most people will never
| be exposed to that downside anyways.
| ralmeida wrote:
| From a "reducing my risk of dying" perspective, you'd
| have to balance the risk of dying from taking the vaccine
| vs the risk of dying from COVID with zero treatments, one
| treatment, or both treatments.
|
| The numbers could lean either way and would be _very_
| sensitive to variations in the probabilities involved - I
| 'm sure it would be very hard to reach any form of
| consensus on "probability of dying from taking the
| vaccine". It's also worth addressing wasn't even making
| the point of which (so-called) experimental treatment has
| a better likely outcome but rather addressing criticism
| at (so-called) experimental treatments in general.
|
| From an "unknown risk" perspective, you'd also have to
| consider that _COVID itself_ could have yet-unknown long-
| term risks.
| unanswered wrote:
| > From an "unknown risk" perspective, you'd also have to
| consider that COVID itself could have yet-unknown long-
| term risks.
|
| That would not factor into a correct analysis: the
| unknown risks of covid are the same whether or not you
| get vaccinated (or any other treatment) because by
| definition the vaccine has not been shown to mitigate the
| unknown risks.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Imagine both the vaccine and the drug offer the same
| protection, and both come with a risk of 0.00001 that you
| will die from taking it.
|
| Considering not everyone who gets infected gets symptoms,
| would it be illogical to not take the vaccine, just in
| case you get infected and get symptoms, but to take the
| drug once you do get infected and get symptoms?
| ralmeida wrote:
| It wouldn't be necessarily illogical but would still
| qualify as "taking part in an experiment trial", as put
| by the parent post.
|
| To determine if this is a rational strategy or not, we'd
| have to get real numbers (is it really likely that 1 in
| 100k people die _from_ taking the vaccine?), and compare
| that against the reduction in probability of dying from
| COVID by even _combining both treatments_.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| It is still possible to take rational decisions in the
| face of unknowns. Just like you probably decided, in your
| opinion rationally, to take the vaccine even though there
| really isn't a whole lot of data available as they are
| pretty new.
|
| And please, I just made up these numbers to answer the
| posed question:
|
| > how can "I'll take experimental treatment B instead of
| experimental treatment A" be an argument
| roenxi wrote:
| > This is a completely novel molecule...
|
| 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.
| wbl wrote:
| This isn't a chronic exposure kind of drug where you really
| care about those things. This is a horse pill where safety is
| pretty directly measurable in a short time.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Why do I feel like this will be the new mouthpiece for
| antivaxxers?
| peakaboo wrote:
| I'm not touching any Pfizer drugs with a 10 foot pole. I guess
| I'm one of the few actually wise humans left.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Interesting. From a quick google search: Pfizer brands
| include Advil, Bextra, Celebrex, Diflucan, Lyrica, Robitussin
| and Viagra
|
| You never take an advil?
| darthvoldemort wrote:
| Pfizer also made Celebrex, the anti-inflammatory that they
| knew caused health issues but they buried them and claimed
| it was safe.
|
| We are living in an upside down world now. All of a sudden
| the drug companies are the "good" guys. Since when did the
| drug companies suddenly become the heroes?
|
| 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.
| DownGoat wrote:
| And if Pfizer fucked up the covid-19 vaccine, one of 20
| other alternatives would gladly inform the public and
| remove a competitor from the market. That's the great
| thing about having so many alternatives for the covid-19
| vaccine, all of them can gain an advantage by pointing
| out that a competitor's vaccine does not work.
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| Honestly, if you don't want to take any Pfizer drugs, nobody
| cares. More for the rest of us
| jjuel wrote:
| So if you get strep throat you are going to turn down the
| Z-pack?
| nradov wrote:
| The first line treatment for strep throat is penicillin or
| amoxicillin. Z-pack (Azithromycin) would typically only be
| used in case of a penicillin allergy, or maybe resistant
| bacteria.
|
| https://www.goodrx.com/blog/z-packs-still-good-for-
| infection...
| yosito wrote:
| There is selection pressure against your type of actually
| wise human.
| jjuel wrote:
| Pretty sure we don't understand the long term risk of getting
| COVID either right? I mean it has not even been around for 2
| years. Plus we do know it is possible only 1 infection would
| kill you.
| b0tzzzzzzman wrote:
| Or injection, bias is an odd thing.
| bordercases wrote:
| Ransoming one kind of ignorance for another, based off the
| impact one risk has over another, is Pascal's Wager, not
| knowledge.
| lettergram wrote:
| That's a straw man argument, when you take this drug you
| already have 100% covid19. Presumably that means you'll have
| that risk, plus additional unknown risk. Perhaps the drug
| works like advertised, but we've seen better and more
| successful studies for things like ivermectin and anti-body
| treatments. Which have a known risk profile.
|
| 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.
| woodruffw wrote:
| This is a strange additive error to make: proactive or
| reactive treatments for COVID-19 don't produce additive
| unknowns in the presence of a COVID-19 infection, since
| their _entire_ purpose is to improve healthcare outcomes
| (whether by reducing infection severity or incidence
| altogether).
| davidw wrote:
| > Presumably that means you'll have that risk,
|
| But greatly improves the odds of not dying, which is pretty
| important for a lot of people.
| ashleyn wrote:
| The long term risks for either is not knowable.
|
| 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.
| DownGoat wrote:
| Actually the long term risk of the covid-19 vaccines is
| well understood. You will not get a side effect from the
| vaccines in a year from now. For all of the vaccines
| created for any disease, the longest recorded period
| between taking the vaccine and side effects presenting is
| 6 weeks. 3.1 billion people are fully vaccinated for
| covid-19, many of them have been for longer than 6 weeks.
| penultimatebro wrote:
| Ha ha, funny satire.
|
| Wait, reading this again... you're serious?
|
| So do you have an actual time machine and can go to the
| future and know side effects a year from now?
|
| The long term effects are unknowable. This mRNA
| technology is brand new so please don't compare that to a
| traditional vaccine.
| kickopotomus wrote:
| The technology is not brand new. It has been used in labs
| for decades. This is just the first time it has been used
| in a drug for humans. All traces of the vaccine leave
| your body within days of receiving the shot.
| Seredo wrote:
| In Norway, some children developed narcolepsy after being
| vaccinated with Pandemrix. The average time from vaccine
| (or influensa) until developing narcolepsy was 8 months.
|
| https://www.fhi.no/nyheter/2017/pandemi/ (in norwegian)
| robocat wrote:
| > You will not get a side effect from the vaccines in a
| year from now
|
| 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.
| apineda wrote:
| I understand what well understood means but typically
| that also involves long term human clinical trials, and
| for a good reason.
| spazrunaway wrote:
| Data shows that being vaccinated divides your odds of dying
| and being hospitalized from covid by about 10. There's no
| evidence I'm aware of showing that the vaccines create
| additional risk anywhere close to outweighing that benefit.
| refurb wrote:
| Don't mistake relative risk for absolute risk. Not
| everyone who is vaccinated gets Covid, but everyone
| vaccinated is at risk of vaccine side effects.
|
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| Your numbers are way off. The CDC estimated the
| hospitalization rate in the 18-49 age group at 3%.
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-
| updates/burd...
| adamiscool8 wrote:
| Super skewed by the cohort they cobbled together. Look at
| the COVIDNet data for the decile age bands of
| hospitalization at peak waves: [0]
|
| >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.
|
| [0] https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_3.html
| spazrunaway wrote:
| You're comparing completely different statistics. The 3%
| is the infection hospitalization rate; in other words,
| the odds of being hospitalized once infected. The rates
| from your source are the total number of people per 100k
| who are hospitalized for covid in a given week; it does
| _not_ mean they only have a .05% chance of being
| hospitalized once infected, it means .05% of the entire
| age cohort are hospitalized from covid that week.
| adamiscool8 wrote:
| edit2: actually, I see the denominator there is _total
| population_ not _cases_ but I still don 't follow.
|
| 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#vir
| usTypeD...
| refurb wrote:
| Dying, not hospitalization.
| nradov wrote:
| Nope. Look at the data again. The risk of dying from an
| infection in the 18-49 age group is 0.06%. The risk of
| hospitalization from an infection in that age group is
| 3%; you claimed 0.08% which is wrong by two orders of
| magnitude.
| refurb wrote:
| Huh? 0.06% and 0.08% are 2 orders of magnitude different?
| nradov wrote:
| Are you being intentionally dense? Your original comment
| claimed a 0.08% hospitalization rate. The actual
| hospitalization rate is closer to 3%.
| trident5000 wrote:
| 18-49...could that age gap be any wider. A 20 year old is
| going to deal with Covid quite a bit differently than a
| 40 year old.
| morsch wrote:
| I think 1 in 5 is very optimistic. Unless you intend to
| remove yourself from society, you are very likely to
| catch Sars-Cov-2 in the upcoming years. Probably more
| than once. It's endemic and easily transmittable.
| allturtles wrote:
| In the long run, everyone will get Covid (though many may
| be asymptomatic). It's not going away.
| gfodor wrote:
| There is. Because kids (basically) don't die from COVID.
| The side effect risk, while small, is material in a risk
| calculation for them, since their entire risk from the
| disease is small. At a minimum, mandating it for kids (as
| is openly stated to be the plan in CA) is unethical.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Can you point me in the direction of studies comparing
| side effect risks for young children against COVID-19
| risks for children? Presumably there's such a thing that
| you're basing your opinion on. I would find that useful,
| given that I have an 8 y/o who is now vaccine-eligible
| and her mother and I are discussing.
| angelzen wrote:
| There is one in the Pfizer application for FDA
| authorization in 5-11 age group, see Table 14, page 34.
| It is not a direct study, it's an extrapolation based on
| antigen titers in a 2000 kid 2 months clinical trial, but
| it's the only one I am aware of.
|
| https://www.fda.gov/media/153447/download
| gfodor wrote:
| CDC admits that there has been severe cardiac damage to
| young people from the mRNA vaccines.
|
| 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/do
| i/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.
| jjuel wrote:
| So that link you sent says there is 12.6 instances per
| million doses. So that is 0.00126% chance of happening.
| This article from March mentions around 22 per 100,000
| chance from getting COVID. Much larger incidence rate.
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7988375/ Now
| obviously might not be the same age ranges or such, but I
| do know last year the Big-10 almost cancelled it's
| football season due to myocarditis risk from COVID so
| clearly it has been an issue for a while. Might need to
| weigh that in the decision you make for your children.
| Too many people look for one side and use that to prove
| their point otherwise know as confirmation bias. I would
| study the incidence of both sides of this before making
| the decision. Although my children are less than 5 so
| they can't get it yet anyway.
| gfodor wrote:
| Here's the problem with those stats.
|
| 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.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| The abstract from your linked paper seems to indicate the
| risk is minimal.
|
| >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.
| Latty wrote:
| This argument makes no sense.
|
| 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.
| mattbuilds wrote:
| It's obvious to you because you are following a logical
| train of thought. These antivax people always do the same
| nonsense argument. It goes, COVID has risks and vaccines
| have risks, therefore it's impossible to know which is
| worse. It's literally the dril drunk driving tweet[1].
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/dril/status/464802196060917762?la
| ng=en
| gfodor wrote:
| I'm not anti-vax, the logical train of thought you are
| incapable of yourself is based on the very factual
| reality that COVID presents highly variable risk to
| people based on their age. This, in combination with the
| known risks of the vaccine, in combination with the
| _extremely_ early stage of wide-scale deployment of the
| vaccine in children, in combination with Hippocratic
| principles, in combination with risk-adjusted thinking,
| leads to the conclusions that no, it is not completely
| obvious if a parent should make an appointment for their
| 5 year old to get a medicine EUA authorized a week ago.
|
| 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.
| abakker wrote:
| I mostly agree with you. I think the nuance that is
| missing here is that the degree of risk is different.
|
| 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.
| gfodor wrote:
| > So, it does not follow that avoiding Covid vaccine for
| children because the immediate likelihood of death from
| acute covid is the only issue.
|
| 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.
| miles wrote:
| > Even if we completely ignore that some children do in
| fact die ... the side effect risk of the vaccine is
| obviously lower than the side effect risk of COVID
| itself.
|
| _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.
| consp wrote:
| Considering they then become the primary host and
| spreader to all others there definitely is ethics
| involved in giving it to them.
| vkou wrote:
| We have not seen better and more successful studies for
| ivermectin, we have seen a lot of studies that find it does
| next to nothing, and a few deeply fraudulent studies that
| finds that it solves world hunger.
|
| 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.
| pjkundert wrote:
| Wow. I always wonder when I hear comments this.
|
| Check out https://c19early.com (specifically,
| https://c19ivermectin.com/).
| nextaccountic wrote:
| This drug might actually save the patient from the risk of
| dying from covid. It would be the same for the vaccine: the
| vaccines reduce the risk from dying.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > Presumably that means you'll have that risk, plus
| additional unknown risk.
|
| 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.
| lettergram wrote:
| We don't actually know if it makes the long term risk
| less severe or more severe. We don't have the data.
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29119057.
| matsemann wrote:
| If the consequence of not taking it is death, I think people
| would run to the front of the queue, though.
| peakaboo wrote:
| If you watch the mass media, that's the impression they love
| to give, yup. :)
| blackbear_ wrote:
| Soo, kinda like for a vaccine?
|
| (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)
| mostertoaster wrote:
| Oh I think it will be gladly accepted by unvaccinated folk.
| The reason being is most unvaccinated people don't believe
| it isn't effective, they don't like being forced to protect
| themselves by a bunch of moral busybodies.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Nice story.
|
| Meanwhile at least 5 million are dead - 750,000 in the US
| alone.
|
| How does your story help their families?
| penultimatebro wrote:
| Important question:
|
| Did they die from COVID-19 or did they with COVID-19?
|
| Italy just revised their numbers and it's quite a
| significant difference.
| greedo wrote:
| It's better to look at excess deaths since testing is so
| haphazard in much of the world. Current estimates are
| between 10-15m excess deaths world wide.
| xkbarkar wrote:
| Excess deaths are not an anomaly to begin with. Year 2000
| saw excess deaths, so did 2014.
|
| 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.
| greedo wrote:
| Must be hard keeping your head up when you're swimming in
| such deep drama. You don't appear to understand what
| excess deaths mean; it means deaths over what previous
| trends would predict.
|
| 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.
| mostertoaster wrote:
| I don't think it helps their families. You know what does
| though, vaccines and this new anti-viral.
|
| So can I live my life and worry about own family and not
| someone's I don't know?
| imajoredinecon wrote:
| > 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.
| tdfx wrote:
| And when you give a central authority permission to
| dictate these "inconvenient measures" to the population,
| what is the recourse when those authorities act in a
| contradictory, dishonest, or incompetent manner?
| blacksqr wrote:
| In a democracy, voting.
| caeril wrote:
| Except, no.
|
| 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.
| mostertoaster wrote:
| Oh so you're the one who insists we keep taking shoes off
| at the airport, and throw our toothpaste that might be a
| bomb into the trash receptacle next to the crowd of
| people.
|
| 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.
| MisterMower wrote:
| Help me understand the limiting principle in that logic.
| What prevents particularly egregious abuses of personal
| liberty using this as a pretext?
|
| 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?
| epicide wrote:
| The lightning example isn't really analogous. Sure, one
| or two people might get struck by lightning, but they're
| not then going to continue spreading lightning strikes
| once they leave my house. Moreso, those (non-existent)
| spreadable lightning strikes aren't going to mutate to
| get worse as they propagate.
|
| 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.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| >The reason being is most unvaccinated people don't
| believe it isn't effective, they don't like being forced
| to protect themselves by a bunch of moral busybodies.
|
| 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.
| greedo wrote:
| People are stupid. As a species, we've survived despite
| this, but as Carlin used to say; ""Think of how stupid
| the average person is, and realize half of them are
| stupider than that."
|
| 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.
| angelzen wrote:
| That quote never sit well with me. How about "Think of
| how stupid the average person is, and realize there is a
| 50/50 chance _you_ are stupider than that. "
| nkingsy wrote:
| Your version is less accurate in reasonable contexts.
| People at a Carlin show or on HN are not the average
| person.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| > vaccines mean we can permanently rid ourselves of
| masks, distancing, and other authoritarian restrictions
|
| 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.
| greedo wrote:
| They didn't mean that the restrictions would go away if
| YOU personally got vaxxed, only if a respectable number
| in the US did. And that still hasn't happened because
| people are stubborn and selfish.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| No, my employer specifically stated that the vaccinated
| would not need to mask or distance at work. Then they
| walked it back.
| greedo wrote:
| The parent comment was talking about public discussion of
| how vax would allow a faster return to normal life. Your
| employer is perfectly entitled to tell you to mask or
| distance, or where a pink jumpsuit.
|
| 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.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Except they made a _big deal_ about the no mask, no
| distancing promise. It was a central theme of their "get
| the vaccine" campaign. Oh and also you won't get fired.
|
| Then they reneged.
|
| Thus, they have destroyed any credibility they may have
| had for future similar promises.
| pell wrote:
| From what I understand it's taken once an infection is
| already established. Maybe it's easier to convince the
| "skeptics" under those circumstances to take potentially
| life-saving medicine.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Sure, those same skeptics, once they're sick, happily
| line up for an hourlong infusion of experimental
| monoclonal antibodies, which have similarly unknown
| "long-term side effects" or whatever they're worried
| about.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| foolfoolz wrote:
| this drug (and all covid medicine) at this point is no
| longer about people hesitant to take the vaccine. this is
| about going back to a pre covid life. the vaccine does
| not protect you fully from covid 19. states in the u. s.
| and some eu countries have very high vaccination rates
| and still saw a wave of covid go through them, examples:
| vt, nh, de, nl. in all these places roughly 70%
| vaccination rate and many vaccinated people testing
| positive, some vaccinated dying.
|
| 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
| tomatocracy wrote:
| Away from the debate about who will or won't take the
| vaccines and why, isn't this is a huge positive for the
| small (but not tiny) number of people for whom vaccines
| don't provoke immune response (severely immunocompromised,
| etc)? That group are also more vulnerable to bad outcomes
| from Covid.
| greedo wrote:
| That's one of my hopes. I don't know if this would have
| an adverse reaction for immunocompromised patients, but
| if not that would be fantastic.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| There are a lot of hospital bed requests for the vaccine(1)
| from people who thought COVID wasn't a big deal. I'm fairly
| sure they'll take this drug once they experience the
| alternative.
|
| 1) Obviously, it's too late then. So it's only the most
| ignorant of people who changed their minds we have
| anecdotes of.
| thehappypm wrote:
| It's not really like a vaccine. A vaccine is almost more
| abstract. You're not sick, and to continue not being sick,
| take these shots.
|
| With this treatment, you ARE sick. To become well, take
| these pills.
| djrogers wrote:
| Sounds like the consequence of not taking it is a 0.5% chance
| of death, so probably not a lot of running for those who
| understand COVID death rates.
| acdha wrote:
| The study was for patients "who were at high risk of
| progressing to severe illness", where the
| hospitalization/death rate was 6.7% without it and 1% with.
| You probably wouldn't give it out to everyone but that's
| the kind of risk decision doctors make routinely.
| fspeech wrote:
| The actual death rate for the trial cohort is close to
| 2%:
|
| 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...
| HWR_14 wrote:
| If this drug is administered in the hospital, you already
| have a severe case and are far more likely to die.
| johnday wrote:
| If the drug has got this far into testing, there is no
| chance in hell that it has >0.5% chance of death (or other
| awful side-effects) on ingestion. So it's an upgrade either
| way.
| matsemann wrote:
| It seems to me that you're one of those not understanding
| COVID death rates, though.
|
| 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.
| aj7 wrote:
| A 1/200 chance of death is gigantic.
| ddingus wrote:
| Right!
|
| It floors me to see so many not internalizing what that
| means.
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| So are the people who land in that numerator - a
| correlation that's not permitted in the public discourse
| apparently.
| djrogers wrote:
| GP stated that "the consequence of not taking it is
| death", which is demonstrably false, and specifically
| what I was referring to.
|
| 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)...
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| People think 0.5% is low, but e.g. JFK airport has about
| 500 takeoffs a day, if on average every day 2 or 3 planes
| that flew out of JFK crashed, how would they feel about
| air travel?
| epicide wrote:
| I think part of the problem is people see getting covid
| as something that will only happen to them once. So it is
| easy for them to think "well, if JFK had that many
| crashes, but I only had to fly once in my life, that's
| not so bad."
|
| Realistically, re-infection is going to become more and
| more of a thing. Especially as it mutates.
| brigandish wrote:
| > A healthy young person might have a 10x reduced risk
|
| 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.
| dontcare007 wrote:
| But that's just it, there's less than a 2% chance of dying
| even if you get COVID.
| TheHypnotist wrote:
| I don't think you realize just how shitty those chances
| are.
| bena wrote:
| The same people who take their chances with COVID have
| the same energy as those who play the lottery.
| nradov wrote:
| According to the CDC, the actual infection fatality ratio
| is 0.6%. Fortunately vaccination cuts that pretty close to
| zero.
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-
| updates/burd...
| ghastmaster wrote:
| > Fortunately vaccination cuts that pretty close to zero.
|
| 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/uploa
| ds/...
| jasondigitized wrote:
| Statistically you won't die from Covid but that statistic
| may not apply to you.
| timr wrote:
| It's much higher than that for easily identifiable
| subgroups -- elderly people and obese people being trivial
| examples.
|
| 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.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Especially when we note that the clinic definition of
| obesity is much smaller than people think of, and 42% of
| Americans qualify.
| timr wrote:
| That may be true, but it _doesn 't_ automatically mean
| that 42% of Americans are high risk. This is reflected in
| the aggregate statistics. Mild obesity is probably not a
| significant risk factor, whereas severe obesity is a big
| problem.
|
| 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.)
| rndgermandude wrote:
| If you die of Covid, your loved ones will not care if the
| chance of that happening was low. You won't care either,
| you'll be dead. All it really takes is that one previously-
| undiagnosed comorbidity to put you in the front of a the
| line for a casket-fitting even if you're young(-ish).
|
| 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.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| My teenage athlete nephew mysteriously developed heart
| problems right around after he got vaccinated, and now he
| can barely walk up a flight of stairs. No one is going to
| say the vaccine caused it, but the timing seems pretty
| damning. Meanwhile, if you look at the CDC stats, the
| risk of injury from covid for his demographic is at least
| an order of magnitude lower than his risk from riding in
| a car.
|
| 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".
| ddingus wrote:
| Perhaps he got the vaccine in the bloodstream as opposed
| to muscle tissue as intended.
|
| 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.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I mean come on, if the administration of the vaccine
| caused it, the vaccine caused it. If he hadn't gotten the
| vaccine, it would not have been (as conjectured) injected
| into his bloodstream.
| ddingus wrote:
| Fact is, how it gets injected appears to have a very
| significant influence on it's impact to the patient.
|
| 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.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| That's a fair point. It seems to me like the government
| is pressuring people into taking a vaccine that isn't
| being properly administered en masse, and all the parties
| involved are both protected from liability and aren't
| being transparent about it, all to mitigate a trivial
| amount of risk.
|
| I just saw an article yesterday talking about Pfizer
| making $36 billion on vaccines this year.
| ddingus wrote:
| I see it that way too.
|
| 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.
| ddingus wrote:
| Really sorry about what happened too.
|
| Sucks :(
|
| Sure hope he improves and can get past it.
| ddingus wrote:
| Frankly, our current body politic is very seriously ill.
|
| 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.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| That's actually the theory I developed the first time
| myocarditis in skinny teenagers was reported many months
| ago. It just makes sense that spike protein mRNA is
| getting shotgunned into their heart muscle cells. So, I
| was rather disillusioned when I saw that theory finally
| pop up in the news in the last month.
|
| 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.
| ddingus wrote:
| I hear that. You are not wrong, in my view.
|
| 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.
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| There is free trial of World of Warcraft, download the game
| and make a warrior character.
|
| You start with 5% critical strike chance, see how often
| that happens.
|
| You will be seriously surprised.
| hehetrthrthrjn wrote:
| You're ok with a 1 in 50 chance of dying?
|
| 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.
| AndrewThrowaway wrote:
| That's the problem - "even if you get COVID".
|
| 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.
| thr0w72594 wrote:
| Unless you have a significant number of people working in
| your office over 70 years old, or if half of your
| colleagues are at least 60, it's more likely that nobody
| will die than 4-5.
| [deleted]
| nradov wrote:
| A death rate of 4-5 per 200 workers is highly unlikely.
| According to CDC data the infection fatality rate in a
| mostly unvaccinated population was 0.06% for the 18-49
| age group and 0.6% for the 50-64 age group. The majority
| of deaths have been among older age groups, who are
| mostly not working at companies.
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-
| updates/burd...
|
| Fortunately vaccination provides good protection against
| death.
| timr wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| seniorThrowaway wrote:
| https://archive.ph/5LWlK
| tzs wrote:
| When both the risks and vaccination rates are
| significantly different across demographic groups
| statistics for the whole population are often nearly
| useless due to Simpson's paradox.
|
| 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-...
| roywiggins wrote:
| Those statistics say nothing about the chances of going
| to hospital _if you are vaccinated_.
|
| 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...
| angelzen wrote:
| The article also shows that deaths-per-100k is highly
| dependent on age. ""Age is our top risk factor for
| vaccine breakthrough deaths," said Theresa Sokol, the
| state epidemiologist in Louisiana, one of the
| jurisdictions that contributed to the C.D.C. data.". In
| 12-17 and 18-29, deaths-per-100k are essentially 0 for
| both vaccinated and unvaccinated. This is fantastic news
| for kids of grade school age: they can live their lives
| for the next 20 years without having to worry about covid
| medical risks.
| roywiggins wrote:
| The even better news is that by the time they're older,
| they'll probably have substantial immunity to it anyway.
| timr wrote:
| This is meaningless without context. What percentage of
| the population is vaccinated? How old are the patients?
| What percentage of the hospitalized are extremely
| old/frail/comprosmised?
|
| 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-...
| AndrewThrowaway wrote:
| It could also show age of patients.
|
| 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.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Would you get on a plane if there was a 1.5% chance of it
| crashing every time?
| reddog wrote:
| 2% is pretty damn high. _Only_ 2.4% of allied troop that
| landed in France on D-Day died also.
| s_dev wrote:
| A 2% chance of death is actually very high risk for most
| people. Obviously with a name like dontcare007 I'm sure
| you've a huge appetite for risk that others don't.
| tinco wrote:
| There's a 40% chance Mr. Bond here would have died before
| his latest film "No Time To Die", if he had a 2% chance
| of death in each movie ;)
| bena wrote:
| If 2% of domestic flights in the US crashed, that would
| be about 100 plane crashes. Per day.
|
| 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.
| adrianN wrote:
| There is a much higher chance of dying when you're in the
| ICU with Covid and a doctor thinks it's appropriate to
| prescribe this new medication.
| makomk wrote:
| The trouble is that the new medications probably don't
| work by the time you're in the ICU with Covid. I'm not
| sure it was tested with this one specifically, but at
| least one of the recently-approved medications was
| previously trialled on ICU patients and showed no benefit
| - they had to do another study giving it to people who
| hadn't been hospitalized yet to get any useful reduction
| in deaths, and there's some reason to think this is an
| inherent limitation of drugs that try and reduce viral
| replication. This study only seems to cover patients who
| haven't been hospitalized at the point when they start
| the treatment.
| [deleted]
| brokensegue wrote:
| The hospitalization rate of the control was over 6 percent.
| Most people want to avoid hospitalization.
| [deleted]
| ralmeida wrote:
| > Side effects don't have to happen in the next 6 months.
|
| If you're willing to go that route, the same could be said for
| COVID itself.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| "Please don't talk about risk with so much at stake. Just push
| that code you wrote this morning to our mission-critical
| production system."
|
| "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.
| wbl wrote:
| During an incident you break glass if you have to. Because
| the risks of inaction outweigh action.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| This already went through Phase III trials. It's closer in
| analogy to having the entire QA team on standby at their
| desks to do a full test as soon as you submit a PR at 1:38am
| for a feature that has to go live ASAP.
| rangoon626 wrote:
| Lol did you not see the revelations about what was going on
| inside of Ventavia, the contractor that did the trial
| research for pfizer?
|
| They broke all sorts of protocols, covered it up, had it
| reported to the FDA, who in turn just sat on it.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| The contractor that did a small percentage of the
| research, yes. Failures and fraud occur, and thankfully
| this one was small enough that it didn't matter.
| yosito wrote:
| > Side effects don't have to happen in the next 6 months.
|
| 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.
| darthvoldemort wrote:
| Prions are "just" proteins that should get broken down by the
| body. But they don't, and they cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob in
| over 10 years after ingesting.
| cglace wrote:
| Are you suggesting that every new molecule should be
| treated as if it were a prion?
| refurb wrote:
| Again, as someone who worked with toxicology, yeah. The
| default is every new molecule might be highly toxic and
| needs to be proven otherwise.
|
| 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).
| cglace wrote:
| So over what time period do you believe we should wait to
| release a drug to the public? 10 - 25 years after
| discovery?
| refurb wrote:
| Straw man. I never said don't release the drug or delay
| it decades, I said "the risk is always there".
|
| And funny you should say 10-25 years. 10 years is pretty
| typical from initial molecule discovery to FDA approval.
| cglace wrote:
| Sorry to offend.
|
| 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.
| yosito wrote:
| I'm not an expert, but I think if a molecule is isolated,
| it is possible to determine whether or not it is a prion.
| IIRC, prions are basically misfolded protiens that cause
| other protiens to misfold, like a corrupted file that
| passes the corruption on to every copy or derived file
| until the system crashes. But you can examine them before
| systemic problems show up. And I believe a prion has to
| be a protien-like molecule. Again, not an expert.
| osobo wrote:
| Actually: Yes.
| darthvoldemort wrote:
| I'm suggesting that sometimes a very small amount of a
| substance can cause catastrophic effects a decade later.
| That's why we do testing before we release drugs.
|
| 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.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| There is nothing here that suggests that:
|
| >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.
| vidoc wrote:
| Watch out, it's becoming increasingly illegal to talk
| about Pfizer even just in a slightly negative way. Their
| covid-19 vaccine product is the gold standard of safety,
| it's spectacularly effective, and breakthrough cases are
| so extremely rare it's basically fake news to claim
| otherwise. If it's not fake news, it's perhaps just anti-
| vax, white-supremacy, or russia.
| cockzor wrote:
| Russia Russia Russia!!!
|
| Oh wait, our guy was just arrested yesterday.... :/
| cmoscoso wrote:
| it's a clown world.
| bena wrote:
| So 6 out of how many other studies and drugs they've
| released without scandal?
|
| 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.
| ionwake wrote:
| I'm perplexed why you are defending a corporation after
| such an excellent reply from the above poster ( and I've
| taken the vax).
|
| But l add the death rate according the administration is
| around 0.5% from the latest stats due to lack of testing.
| bena wrote:
| It's less defending Pfizer and questioning the poster's
| true motives.
|
| 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.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| A diversity of people will have a diversity of risk
| registers, this is actually healthy for long term
| stability because mono cultures have associated risks.
| vixen99 wrote:
| No it's about one third of drugs according to a Yale
| study and it took a median of 4.2 years after the drugs
| were approved for safety concerns to be apparent.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| 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?
| tharkun__ wrote:
| This immediately jumped to mind (Contergan):
|
| 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.
|
| So ~280 days for a pregnancy, minu 21-41 still leaves way
| more than half a year after taking the drug for when
| death occurred. And I wouldn't say the non-lethal effects
| are to be dismissed. If you ask me they're way up there
| for making sure something like that doesn't happen again.
| The system today (hopefully) is better than back then.
| And yes, personally I think it's a good thing when the
| approval process for drugs assumes that "every new
| molecule should be treated as if it were a prion".
| jdavis703 wrote:
| If I'm reading this correctly, Thalidomide caused damage
| to fetal tissue, but didn't actually kill the parent?
| This is still an awful burden for the parent, but there's
| lots of drugs that are known to cause tissue damage
| during pregnancy. I believe this is why pregnant people
| are often excluded from clinical trials.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Yes, it didn't kill the parent. You might have missed the
| part where it killed 40% of the children at or shortly
| after birth.
|
| 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.
| wussboy wrote:
| I think the ask was actually for an approved drug, taken
| briefly, that caused a delayed death in the person who
| was taking it. If we're going to count prenatal effects,
| we can come up with thousands of examples. This is why
| pregnant women are always studied separately.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Let's take that apart: 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.
|
| Check. Contergan was approved and used in 46 countries.
| Notably in East Germany there are no known cases of this,
| because "thalidomide was rejected by the Central
| Committee of Experts for the Drug Traffic in the GDR, and
| was never approved for use." taken over
| a short-term (say less than a month)
|
| Check. As quoted before, taking Contergan past day 42
| didn't harm the fetus and deformities seem to have
| started on day 21. Less than a month.
| cause long-term death
|
| Check. Over the long term (>6 months) it caused death in
| 40% of the babies born.
|
| 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.
| wussboy wrote:
| Sure. But that's not what they meant. Can you name any
| drug that, when taken over a short course, has had long
| term detrimental effects to the person taking it?
| fastaguy88 wrote:
| It is perhaps worth mentioning that our ability to detect
| compounds that are mutagenic or teratogenic, or are
| likely to cause developmental abnormalities, has improved
| dramatically in the past 60 years, as has the stringency
| of drug testing. I'm not an expert, but I can certainly
| imagine that some of the animal testing that goes on
| today before a drug is approved is designed to identify
| problems in offspring. (The problem with thalidomide was
| not that its problems could not have been identified even
| 60 years ago; the problem was that the testing was not
| done or was suppressed.)
|
| 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.
| darthvoldemort wrote:
| The biggest problem with Thalidomide is that THALIDOMIDE
| IS PERFECTLY SAFE for the fetus! But the molecule has 2
| different shapes, one being the mirror image of the
| other. All testing was done using the correct version,
| but during the MANUFACTURING PROCESS, the mirror image
| was created, and that's what caused all the problems!
|
| There are many many ways that problems can occur. The
| fact that one configuration of a molecule is safe and
| effective and the other configuration of that same
| molecule causes disastrous effects is just another
| example of how thorough testing is necessary when drugs
| are given to millions of people. How many people either
| died or were deformed because of lack of testing?
|
| When drug companies skip the necessary testing because
| they know they can make billions upon billions, they
| aren't doing it because it keeps people safe. They love
| it because it makes things cheaper for them.
|
| I have a friend that works at Gilead and runs clinical
| trials. He is shocked at how quickly the vaccine was
| approved for EUA, because his trials take years upon
| years. I'm not saying that the vaccines aren't safe, but
| I am saying that the more drugs we let skirt through the
| full testing period, the worse it is for all of us.
|
| Look at remdesivir. It was approved from a single trial
| that showed lukewarm results and at the cost of thousands
| per dose. And now the empirical evidence is that it
| either does nothing, or might actually be harmful.
| tptacek wrote:
| This "how did the vaccines get approved so quickly" thing
| has to be one of the most asked- and- answered questions
| of the entire pandemic. The basic delivery platform for
| the vaccines had already been in human trials before the
| pandemic. We've also been doing rapid development of
| vaccines for many, many years to combat things like
| influenza. Coronaviruses had already been well studied,
| and we had dry-runs for vaccine design with SARS and
| MERS.
|
| You can just do a Google search to read about 1,000
| articles about how the vaccines got approved as quickly
| as they did. You don't need to ask your friend who works
| at Gilead. Not for nothing: their clinical trials would
| probably go a lot faster with a global pandemic lighting
| a fire under them.
|
| We've administered these vaccines to _almost four billion
| people_. "COVID vaccines are dangerous" has become an
| extraordinary claim, demanding extraordinary evidence.
| There are people who sincerely believe that aspirin is
| dangerous, and yeast, and "mycotoxins" on coffee beans,
| and on and on. We're not required to take these arguments
| seriously on faith.
| darthvoldemort wrote:
| Maybe just stick to discussions on software security
| where you actually have some credibility. Your reading
| comprehension combined with your desire for some sort of
| argument really shows your weakness outside of your field
| of expertise.
| raducu wrote:
| > Prions are "just" proteins
|
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| It's a good thing we're all here on HN to question the
| safety of novel pharmaceuticals. If we weren't, maybe
| nobody would, and we'd all just be putting prions into
| ourselves.
|
| 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.
| drewcon wrote:
| COTD
| vibrato2 wrote:
| Derek Lowe is the biggest pharma shill in media.
| yibg wrote:
| So we shouldn't introduce any new drugs unless it's been
| tested for more than 10 years? Seems like a great way to
| put a complete halt on drug development and have more
| people die / suffer from preventable diseases.
| randcraw wrote:
| And you're going to take the drug for only about 7-10 days.
| It's unlikely that such a short exposure will introduce
| lasting toxicity.
| refurb wrote:
| As someone who worked in toxicology, this is absolutely a
| false statement. This molecule is a covalent binder - it
| basically attaches itself permanently to proteins. It
| absolutely could have effects long after the free molecule is
| metabolized and excreted. The molecule is designed to be
| selective for the Covid protease but off-target effects are
| inevitable.
|
| 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.
| yosito wrote:
| > this is absolutely a false statement. This molecule is a
| covalent binder
|
| That's why I said _if_ , I know nothing about the molecule.
| donkarma wrote:
| But you're giving statements out like you know everything
| about it, and the fact you said if has no relation with
| the fact it binds to proteins
| amluto wrote:
| A recent HN posting would like to remind you that this logic
| doesn't work:
|
| 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.
| jb1991 wrote:
| Unless it were to change something in the body while it was
| still active, and those changes didn't show any signs for a
| long time.
|
| I'm just playing devil's advocate, but it doesn't seem
| impossible.
| antris wrote:
| Well, nothing's impossible really.
| mdtancsa wrote:
| I guess my question is what is probable rather than
| possible or is that a risk that's even addressable to any
| reasonable degree
| julbook wrote:
| Yes, this makes sense. Innovative, but it will alert some
| people because of this.
| thehappypm wrote:
| What's good about this pill is that it's only given to people
| who have tested positive and likely it'll only be prescribed to
| people with risk factors. In the trial, the placebo group saw a
| 7% hospitalization rate. That is very high, and many of the
| other 93% surely had a bad time as well. The risk of possible
| long-term side effects when weighed against a very real risk of
| hospitalization is an easy choice. It's different from vaccines
| in that way. Vaccines are given to healthy people, so there is
| basically zero risk tolerance.
| shusaku wrote:
| I don't think this is nearly as easy a question to answer as
| the other replies suggest. Pfizer will be required to make the
| case for safety whenever they apply for approval. It is
| premature to discuss this without reviewing the actual evidence
| they put forth.
|
| 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]
|
| [1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abb3405
| btbuildem wrote:
| So what's their play here? That those people who refused vaccines
| will want to take this pill instead?
| adlorger wrote:
| yes. many people are vaccine hesitant because they dislike or
| are afraid of shots.
|
| 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.
| oblio wrote:
| "Play"? :-) It's always the same play, they're making medicines
| to sell them.
|
| 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.
| black6 wrote:
| Three different headlines, three different efficacy percentages
| (89%, 90%, and now 85%), all of which originate from Pfizer's own
| studies. Color me dubious.
| [deleted]
| shusaku wrote:
| I also found the article a little hard to parse, but after a
| close read it seems that the 85% is the whole trial, and 89% is
| for people who got the drug within three days.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| The differences in these percentages are all trivially small
| and explained in the article. 85% is the overall view; 89% is
| on the sub population treated within 3 days of symptom onset;
| and 90% appears to be an editorialized "almost" approximation
| from news agencies.
|
| Fuck off with this fud.
| zanethomas wrote:
| aka pfizermectin
| ammonammonammon wrote:
| Seems since there are so many unapproved off-label therapeutics
| and now more and more under-patent money making ones we'll
| lighted the facist vaccine mandates.
| rblatz wrote:
| Vaccine mandates aren't new, what's new is the hyper targeting
| of propaganda meant to incite division.
| shusaku wrote:
| I think it's hard to overstate what a big deal this is for
| science. This is a completely novel molecule that appears
| effective as an antiviral. This would a huge achievement for the
| field of drug design, and will hopefully lead to all kinds of
| great medicine.
| foolinaround wrote:
| > completely novel molecule
|
| Can someone please ELI5 what makes this unique from others?
| eganist wrote:
| Reducing this quote mentioned elsewhere:
|
| > 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.
| ldehaan wrote:
| They can copyright it and make tons of money off of it is
| what it means. All of the other things that already work
| can't make them insane profits so, bought and paid for the
| news that you are fed tells you this is one of few valid ways
| to fight a virus you can dodge by staying in the sun for an
| hour each day and exercising your body.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| If unvaccinated people all died or went to the hospital it
| would be impressive, the title is misleading or lying about
| it's effectiveness. The null hypothesis would probably
| neutralize it's effectiveness. They don't use infection
| prevention which would be much higher for unvaccinated because
| in reality it's probably not very effective against COVID. The
| control we also don't know any statistics about.
| comicjk wrote:
| This is a placebo-controlled trial. The statistical
| comparison shown (85% fewer hospitalizations & deaths in the
| treatment group) already takes into account the non-
| hospitalized cases in the control group.
| est31 wrote:
| > This is a completely novel molecule that appears effective as
| an antiviral. This would a huge achievement for the field of
| drug design, and will hopefully lead to all kinds of great
| medicine.
|
| 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...
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritonavir
|
| [2]: https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2001282
| lekanwang wrote:
| Yeah, as parent mentioned in another reply below, ritonavir
| is an antiviral, but has no effect on SARS-CoV-2
| (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34048671/). Ritonavir is
| just used to inhibit CYP and therefore reducing clearance of
| the drug.
| bvm wrote:
| It's a combo regimen that includes ritonavir and PF-07321332
| which does not have a generic name yet.
|
| Both are protease inhibitors.
| est31 wrote:
| Oh thought that was some id name for ritonavir. Seems you
| are right:
|
| > 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.
| savant_penguin wrote:
| And it's here in _two_ years
| toyg wrote:
| One one side: great job, pharma industry! We're gonna live
| forever!
|
| 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...?
| thehappypm wrote:
| Diseases like COVID are probably some of the easier ones to
| cure. It's a foreign body that is tangible. We deeply
| understand how the virus replicates and how it works. We
| know which proteins and nucleosides to target. We don't
| have that luxury for diseases like cancer, autoimmune
| diseases, and the like.
| et2o wrote:
| Researchers in pharma are working extremely hard and almost
| always in good faith. I know this is probably tongue-in-
| cheek but it's not true.
| toyg wrote:
| Yeah it's not really researchers that I'm worried about,
| it's their bosses.
| bun_at_work wrote:
| 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?
|
| 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?
| raesene9 wrote:
| Whilst I don't buy the malice (big pharma deliberately
| not curing things they could) argument, there's plenty of
| things they don't do 'cause they don't think they'll make
| a profit on them.
|
| 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.
| rangoon626 wrote:
| The companies who make today's lengthy and expensive
| cancer treatments, are also making the mass-marketed
| personal care products that have carcinogens inside of
| them.
| nijave wrote:
| Antibiotics
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02884-3
| eganist wrote:
| The practice is so widespread that the FDA had to create
| an incubator/accelerator to incentivize drug-making for
| rare conditions: https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/center-
| drug-evaluation-and-res...
|
| 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
| bun_at_work wrote:
| You're saying hiding the discovery of novel, profitable,
| drugs because profits from the existing treatment is
| widespread?
|
| 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.
| eganist wrote:
| Your question:
|
| > 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?
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| New antibiotics for one -- if they make a new one that
| has no resistances in the wild yet, doctors would avoid
| prescribing it as long as possible, only after all older
| drugs are tried, so the usage would be extremely low.
| Nobody wants to sink a few billion into something like
| that.
| jollybean wrote:
| "This is such a ridiculous argument, IMO."
|
| ?
|
| 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Drugs work in economies of scale like everything else.
|
| 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.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I put a lot of time into things that are only used by one
| person: me.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| Two concrete examples of this I can think of are
|
| 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.
| dekhn wrote:
| Sandoz's original explorations into LSD were medically
| focused and it was marketed (and distributed for free in
| high purity) for psychiatric indications, but after it
| grew in popularity an illicit drug, all pharma got out of
| the business of working with highly psychoactive
| compounds for decades because of the negative press
| assocations.
| dekhn wrote:
| You ascribe far more rationality to the process of
| developing drugs than is actually applied.
|
| 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.
| ldehaan wrote:
| Found the big pharma PR guy. The people in pharma are
| 100% not in this for the right reasons. Not one. Look
| into Every Single one of these companies just a tiny bit
| and you'll see how absolutely evil they are and by
| working for them you are complicit. You don't have to
| agree with reality, but that's reality.
| chefkoch wrote:
| Huh, if all people working in pharma are complicit with
| big evil, what is your alternative?
|
| No one should work in pharma?
| GuB-42 wrote:
| People working in big pharma do it for money. But guess
| what, I work for money too, and it is the same for >99%
| of people.
|
| But most people appreciate it when as a side effect,
| their work save lives.
| dangerlibrary wrote:
| Researchers need funding.
|
| The problem with "Big Pharma" is generally not with the
| intentions or capabilities of the researchers - it's with
| the funding.
| adminscoffee wrote:
| this is where my mind was going, trying to remain positive
| and less conspiracy theory though. but it's really not
| secret that some companies (presumably pharmaceutical
| companies as well) have to stay in business and sometimes
| in order to do so, many companies build products that wear
| out, see how gillette razors came about for more insight on
| that
| chadash wrote:
| Unfortunately, it's expensive. The cost of R&D to bring a
| new drug to market is around $1 billion, and this doesn't
| include the cost of marketing (though it does include the
| cost of drugs that fail the approval process)(see
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762311).
| At these numbers, it's hard to raise the money unless you
| think the drug is gonna be profitable.
| noir_lord wrote:
| On the one hand, yep absolutely.
|
| 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.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| And we're lucky if those billion dollar military projects
| even work. More often than not you get a F-35; expensive
| and underperforming.
| DanHulton wrote:
| The problem, as it ever seems to be, is capitalism.
| todd8 wrote:
| What alternative to capitalism are you implying would be
| better? If you have a viable alternative, just do it
| yourself. (I'm not saying all by yourself, team up with
| others to make it happen.)
|
| I'm not being sarcastic, I'm genuinely interested in what
| you believe would get us from here to a Startrek-like
| economic system.
| angelzen wrote:
| Startrek is amazingly devoid of status conflicts.
| Everybody takes for granted the the BigCaptain is
| BigCaptain for life and that the SeniorOfficers are
| SeniorOfficers for life. The crew is content to work
| routine boring jobs for years on end with exceedingly
| rare promotions (where to promote to other than a new
| ship?). Even in a society of small scale material
| affluence, there are scarce coveted goods, for example,
| being the captain of a starship.
| 93po wrote:
| It would require world powers to stop squishing any
| threats to capitalism for made up reasons
| vidoc wrote:
| > The cost of R&D to bring a new drug to market is around
| $1 billion
|
| 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.
| oblio wrote:
| He he, does anyone remember the Software Publishers
| Association?
|
| 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.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Hmmm.... so you're arguing that it _doesn 't_ take years
| of time and billions of dollars to bring a drug to
| market?
|
| 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.
| vidoc wrote:
| > Hmmm.... so you're arguing that it doesn't take years
| of time and billions of dollars to bring a drug to
| market?
|
| 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".
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| No, I didn't make any kind of "straw man argument".
|
| 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?
| vidoc wrote:
| > In your original post, you referred to the claim that
| it costs billions of dollars as a "scam"
|
| 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"
| miked85 wrote:
| > _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"._
|
| That actually does seem to be your main point.
| [deleted]
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| Does this molecule inhibit replication of related coronaviruses
| or is it highly specific to SARS-CoV-2?
| ImaCake wrote:
| Wikipedia suggests they first tried it on a lethal cat
| coronavirus. And the enzyme it inhibits, 3CL, is found in all
| coronaviriae. So one suspects this works against most
| coronaviruses.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| So no we have the Pfizer vaccine (which I got) who cuts the risk
| of both catching the virus and the risk of severe complication by
| a lot (forgot the number but it's big) and in addition to that we
| now have Pfizer oral medication that can be given to positive
| cases and which reduces both hospitalization and death risk by
| 85%.
|
| When can life go back to normal?
| zapdrive wrote:
| Lol, you think life will go back to normal? That's cute. Just
| like how airport security went back to normal a few years after
| 9/11? The powers of the world are not going to let this
| pandemic go to waste. There's a lot of money to be made and a
| lot of freedoms to be trampled.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. It makes
| discussions predictable, tedious, and nasty.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Edit: you've been posting like this a lot. Can you please
| stop that? It's not what this site is for, we ban such
| accounts, and I don't want to ban you. If you'd please review
| the guidelines and fix this, we'd appreciate it.
| fredliu wrote:
| > As a protease inhibitor, Paxlovid is free from the theoretical
| DNA-alteration risk tied to the mechanism of action of Merck's
| molnupiravir.
|
| 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.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Whoa, well spotted, and good news!
|
| When I first read about molnupiravir's mode of action, my gut
| reaction was "cancer in a pill, no thanks"
| ImaCake wrote:
| In brief, coronaviruses make all their proteins as one long
| chain and then cut it up into the appropriate pieces to form
| the proteins (spike etc). 3CL protease is the cutting machine
| and Paxlovid inhibits that.
| thehappypm wrote:
| It also means it's going to be very difficult for the virus
| to be able to mutate to evade this. The protease is the
| beating heart.
| evross wrote:
| It's interesting to learn about. Other molecules are also
| found to inhibit replication of 3CL protease in SARS cov-2
| [1].
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-020-01577-x
| thehappypm wrote:
| I doubt we'll see molnupiravir getting approved in this context
| now. I think the mechanism just has too much risk.
| caleb-allen wrote:
| Are you a pharmaceutical research scientist?
| thehappypm wrote:
| Do I need to be to have an opinion?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Already approved in the UK:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/health-59163899
| thehappypm wrote:
| The UK is very different from the US. They seem hell-bent
| on approving everything. Even historically (thalidomide).
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| Unfortunately in the UK there has been political pressure
| to do absolutely anything (no matter how questionable - e.g
| challenge trials) that _isn 't_ imposing even the slightest
| restriction.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Rolling review for the EU is underway. Let's wait how it
| turns out.
|
| https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/covid-19-ema-starts-
| rollin...
| jdlyga wrote:
| This is excellent news. Vaccines and an easy to get prescription
| treatment like tamiflu are how this stops being a pandemic.
| inwardsword wrote:
| Press X to doubt.
| colordrops wrote:
| Does anyone have a sense as to when US society will completely
| eliminate COVID measures? Is it just me or is there no clear exit
| criteria anymore? This will go on forever without exit criteria.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| My guess is that the end game is when the vaccine mandate goes
| into effect in January. Most people will get vaccinated and
| those that don't wont and nothing will make them. At that point
| in time all that could be done has been done and life goes on.
| Optimally enough will be to grant some form of herd immunity or
| reducing the spread. I'll just get a booster when I can and go
| about my life. I have for all intents and purpose resumed
| normal life. I wear a mask in a grocery store most of the time
| just to give some respect to the cashiers who are wearing them
| but that's essentially it.
| bad_username wrote:
| > Most people will get vaccinated and those that don't wont
| and nothing will make them.
|
| I am almost certain they will _mandate_ the vaccination of
| children 5 and older.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I think that will be on a state by state basis as from my
| understanding the individual states set the vaccine
| requirements for schools. I guess the federal government
| could try to do something along the lines of the OSHA
| requirement but I think that would be a political misfire
| in this environment. Most of what (all) politicians do is
| to get reelected and I think mandating child Covid
| vaccination would not work in the current administrations
| favor especially considering what a good job the republican
| party has done leveraging the boogey man of critical race
| theory. So I am doubtful that they mandate vaccines for
| kids. I could be wrong though.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I don't know but I haven't had a cold or any other infection in
| 18 months so I hope that wearing masks on trains, planes and
| buses stays forever. Also, shaking hands was always barbaric
| and I don't miss that, either.
| umanwizard wrote:
| My personal opinion, which reasonable people may of course
| disagree with depending on how they weight various factors,
| is that forcing people to regularly hide their faces in
| public is too large a price to pay to avoid sometimes getting
| a cold.
| guitarbill wrote:
| Maybe not forcing, but if people did it as a curtesy to not
| get other people sick? Of course, that already happens in
| some places, and will never happen in others.
| Djrhfbfnsks wrote:
| Pre-covid Japan had the right balance IMO. It was common
| to (voluntarily) wear a mask in public when you had a
| cold (or didn't feel like putting on make-up), but no one
| was going to force you to wear one.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| People are really confusing the effects of "wearing a mask on
| the bus" with the effects of "closing offices and schools
| down."
| nradov wrote:
| What a horrible idea. I'm not willing to wear a mask just to
| avoid a cold. We cannot allow irrational germaphobes to seize
| control of our society in the name of "safety".
| jatone wrote:
| jesus people they said they hope it stays: aka socially it
| becomes normalized. No one is advocating forcing people to
| wear masks forever.
| umanwizard wrote:
| I very strongly hope that it doesn't become socially
| normalized.
| guscost wrote:
| Any society that normalizes this level of paranoid
| hypochondria will be a dead society before long.
| yibg wrote:
| Japan seems to be doing ok.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Hat, sunglasses, mask now recommended for the facial-
| recognition future.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| not exactly sure where you live but they are completely gone in
| most of the country. I live in a solidly blue New England state
| and I havent seriously thought about Covid for months.
|
| been going to packed bars, house parties, restaurants, music
| festivals, concerts all with no masks
| pwned1 wrote:
| Except now we have a federal government which thinks it knows
| best and will force medical decisions on you.
| jungturk wrote:
| Yes, the US populace has elected to fund a public health
| organization which has advised on public health measures
| since its inception (which is not recent or coincident with
| Covid-19).
|
| 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.
| skrbjc wrote:
| This is the trick. Force private companies to force you
| so that we can technically say we're not forcing you so
| you should shut-up you walking bio-weapon.
|
| I hope you understand how ridiculous this is.
| zionic wrote:
| > You are not forced to take any vaccine
|
| Can we please just stop? "Take this or lose your job and
| pension" is not a choice.
| ginja wrote:
| I mean, it is because you can look for another job or
| start your own business if that's the hill you want to
| die on.
|
| 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.
| jatone wrote:
| and forcing people to work with walking bioweapons is not
| a choice either, so I don't see your point.
|
| losing a job is not nearly as problematic as killing
| people because someone couldn't be arsed to take a couple
| jabs.
| nafix wrote:
| How disingenuous. It's been proven time and again that
| those who have been vaccinated can still catch and
| transmit Covid.
| nradov wrote:
| Please stop spreading misinformation. I encourage
| everyone eligible to get vaccinated, but by your
| definition vaccinated people are also "walking
| bioweapons". The main benefit of vaccination is in
| preventing severe symptoms, not transmission. Since the
| virus is now endemic we'll all likely get infected
| eventually regardless of vaccination rates.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-
| immu...
|
| https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS147
| 3-3...
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
| Izkata wrote:
| > but by your definition vaccinated people are also
| "walking bioweapons".
|
| Worse than unvaccinated really, since they're less likely
| to get sick they won't know they're infected and that
| they should try to stay home.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| We've done that for decades in this country.
|
| > 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...
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| The comparison to mandates for children to receive well-
| tested and -understood vaccines, against illnesses far
| more threatening to them than Covid, for the narrow
| purpose of attending public school, is so dishonest as to
| be a form of gaslighting.
|
| 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.
| standardUser wrote:
| "well-tested and -understood vaccines"
|
| 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.
| skrbjc wrote:
| The point is that if you aren't in agreement, then you
| can't be part of the group of people that say they are
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > for the narrow purpose of attending public school
|
| 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.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| > > _well-tested and -understood vaccines
|
| > 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.
| Gwarzo wrote:
| This would be acceptable to me if the vaccinations were
| in any way comparable. The diseases you speak of have
| been known for centuries (I am comfortable being wrong on
| that) and the vaccines have been tested and are
| understood as part of being distributed for decades.
|
| This is a common argument, and honestly it's garbage.
| standardUser wrote:
| "the vaccines have been tested and are understood as part
| of being distributed for decades."
|
| 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.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Actually, the vaccines they used decades ago are
| definitely not the same ones they use today. For
| starters, vaccines from centuries ago tended to have
| actual non-zero mortality rates.
|
| 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.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| The difference is that kids still get to go to school if
| the parents refuse these vaccines. It has never been
| publicized, but it's always ultimately been up to the
| parents.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Not here in NY, it's not.
| colordrops wrote:
| LA. School activities and procedures, which are a big part of
| life for families with kids, are still heavily restricted.
| pwned1 wrote:
| Depends where you are. In many places life is back to normal
| and we're free human beings again.
| wincy wrote:
| I live in Kansas and have basically forgotten COVID is a thing.
| The people who wanted to get vaccinated like me have and those
| who haven't, haven't. Nobody asks about it and no businesses
| have any sort of mask requirements. Half of the people at the
| grocery store wear masks and the other half don't. Everyone
| seems to be getting along.
|
| 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Odd that you have forgotten it since Kansas, if it were it's
| own country, would have been a top-5 world hotspot for COVID
| deaths only 6 weeks ago. Is your memory really that short?
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >I guess 5 miles difference magically makes COVID much more
| contagious.
|
| 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.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| I've noticed that, Waitroses and doctor's surgeries seem to
| be the last bastion of English mask-wearing. I wonder what
| the correlation actually is fundamentally? Waitrose's
| clientele are wealthier and therefore older and more
| concious of COVID?
| skrbjc wrote:
| It's virtue signaling
| bshoemaker wrote:
| Lol it's nice that you can just send all the covid patients
| to the city to get treated and you guys can pretend covid
| doesn't exist
| swader999 wrote:
| It may be a forgotten thing but the new federal mandates are
| coming that to work you must be vaccinated.
| peeters wrote:
| > I guess 5 miles difference magically makes COVID much more
| contagious.
|
| Well, based on case and death counts between the two states,
| this is true. Kansas has significantly higher case and death
| rates than Missouri.
| 10x-dev wrote:
| I've always found it strange that some Americans focus on
| politeness above all.
|
| 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.
| wincy wrote:
| I mean, I saw the "masks required in this county" sign, but
| I really needed to pee. I knew I was going to be driving
| through that county for about 20 more minutes, so I checked
| my car for a mask. I couldn't find one as there's no mask
| mandate in my area so I've stopped carrying a mask around.
| I then held my shirt up as best I could as a "mask" and
| made a bee line for the bathroom. If they'd had masks at
| the door I'd have been perfectly fine with putting one on.
|
| 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.
| teachrdan wrote:
| > 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?
| renlo wrote:
| Sounds like she should be vaccinated
| splistud wrote:
| That could be it. But there's of course no way to know
| what the source of her neurosis is with no further
| information.
| dtech wrote:
| I didn't read the comment as putting the employee in a bad
| light.
| dymk wrote:
| He's vaccinated, so it seems a little dramatic to be
| calling OP a bad person and that they suck.
| striking wrote:
| A more charitable reading is that the people involved in
| OP's story suck.
| dymk wrote:
| That's a misreading, because GP explicitly calls out OPs
| behavior as bad.
| keneda7 wrote:
| Vaccinated people still spread the covid and vaccinated
| people still get covid. Most of my friend group was
| infected when two vaccinated friends came up to visit.
| They said they were feeling sick but because they were
| vaccinated it was fine. I think everyone in the group but
| 1 person was vaccinated.
|
| 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.
| dymk wrote:
| Vaccinated people don't take up hospital beds. That's the
| resource that's constrained.
|
| Vaccinated people also have a lower rate of transmission.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| The vaccine protects you but still allows you to carry
| and spread a viral load. The mask protects people around
| you but not yourself but limiting the viral load that you
| can spread.
|
| By being a vaccinated unmasked person in a crowd of non-
| vaccinated people, you possibly become a super spreader.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| The vaccine drastically reduces your chance to spread the
| virus.
|
| https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.13.212603
| 93v...
| covfa3hah wrote:
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
| danielvf wrote:
| Pretty much the same story in South Carolina. Outside retail
| workers, mask usage in my hyper local area is about 2%. Life
| has been basically completely normal since June 2020.
| 40four wrote:
| I live in South Carolina as well, and I can confirm (I
| think you meant 2021 not 2020?). Most people in my city
| have been going about life as usual since ~ May if this
| year. Almost nobody wears masks. Everything is open. And
| guess what? We're all good!
|
| 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.
| VRay wrote:
| https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-
| america/sout...
|
| 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
| NullPrefix wrote:
| How many people are dying because of obesity? There's an
| epidemic going on and I hear no bloody murder screams
| near any McDonald's
| robflynn wrote:
| Let me know when a fat person walking into a room makes
| other people fat.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| He carries donuts. Frosted with layers or sugar.
| tzs wrote:
| South Carolina has had a pretty high number of cases
| since mid year [1]. Higher than the late 2020/early 2021
| surge which was before vaccination.
|
| 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-...
| zapdrive wrote:
| Being in BC, Canada sucks. I went in to an Apple store to
| buy the fully loaded MacBook M1 max, with 6000 dollars in
| my hand (literally). And was told to leave the store
| because my mask didn't cover my nose. I'm buying a Razer 15
| now.
|
| 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?
| jjwiseman wrote:
| If you don't understand by now that vaccines
| significantly reduce transmission, you just need to
| google "do covid vaccines reduce transmission". The top
| results are links to the CDC, Nature, New Scientist, the
| New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and more,
| all saying that vaccines significantly reduce
| transmission.
|
| 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.)
| throwawayboise wrote:
| > CDC, Nature, New Scientist, the New England Journal of
| Medicine, The Lancet
|
| None of these sources are trusted by the people who don't
| want the vaccine.
| ldehaan wrote:
| You must be young.
| frealy wrote:
| Here in San Francisco, a.k.a. East Germany the Stasi are
| _very_ strong.
|
| Even 5 year olds now have to show proof of vaccine _and_
| wear a mask to enter most private companies.
|
| Either masks work or they don't. Either vaccines work or
| they don't. Pick one asssholes.
|
| The mayor herself won't follow her very own draconian covid
| orders.
|
| The governor of California won't follow his very own
| draconian covid orders. He also won't vaccinate his own
| daughter.
|
| FUCK EVERY PIECE OF LOW-LIFE DEMOCRAT LIBERAL FUCKING PIECE
| OF SHIT IN SAN FRANCISCO.
|
| I know you all are reading this so please go jump off the
| big beautiful bridge of ours or jump in front of Cal-Train.
| You people are FUCKING LOSERS.
|
| I hope you all get FUCKED! If you somehow survive the next
| year just wait cause the right wing death squads are coming
| for you.
|
| We will throw you out of planes at 30,000 feet over the
| fucking ocean.
|
| LIBERALS: You ARE FUCKED!
| Panther34543 wrote:
| Where in South Carolina are you?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I guess 5 miles difference magically makes COVID much more
| contagious.
|
| 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.
| dymk wrote:
| Yeah, that's the joke
| bena wrote:
| It's a bad one. Because it only works if the numbers are
| the same across both states.
|
| But Missouri is doing better than Kansas.
|
| So unless the virus is somehow less contagious in
| Missouri, it seems like Kansas is just being an idiot in
| this case.
| anonfornoreason wrote:
| Depends on your metric. It's perfectly reasonable to
| think that Kansas is doing better than Missouri because
| more people are able to lead the life they want.
|
| There are other metrics beside "least fatalities" to
| factor.
| captainredbeard wrote:
| The death rate difference could be due to something as
| simple as a higher percentage of seniors in the state,
| for instance, or differing population densities. Hacker
| News is full of sophists.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't sneer, including at the rest of the
| community._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Your comment would be just fine without that swipe.
| kickopotomus wrote:
| Median age in Kansas is 36.7. Median age in Missouri is
| 38.6. Kansas has 4 towns with population densities
| >4000/sq mile. Missouri has 38 towns with population
| densities >4000/sq mile.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Looks like anxiety is better in Kansas, though...
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads further into regional
| flamewar, or any flamewar. It's not what this site is
| for.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| I was curious, and it looks like the metrics for Kansas
| and Missouri for infections, mask use,
| hospitalizations/deaths, and social distancing are all
| pretty similar: https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-
| states-of-america/kans...
| [deleted]
| Gwarzo wrote:
| I appreciate you explaining that.. allow me to explain
| something to you.
|
| The parent statement was not literal, making your expansion
| meaningless and honestly a little stunning.
| danans wrote:
| > The parent statement was not literal
|
| 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.
| Vrondi wrote:
| I'm in a very educated university town, and very few people
| wear masks here any longer in public.
| danans wrote:
| In California, except for wearing masks in retail
| establishments, everything has been back to normal for
| months. School has been full time in person, and traffic
| sucks once again.
| colordrops wrote:
| I wouldn't call it "back to normal".
|
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| That's on your school/county. None of those are mandated
| by the state.
| greedo wrote:
| Isn't the point of doing cardio work to be tired? To
| stress your lungs and heart? That's why extreme athletes
| wear masks while doing cardio... I'm sure a little
| surgical mask isn't as difficult as this:
|
| https://www.trainingmask.com
| danans wrote:
| > e.g. it's pretty tiring to do cardio at the gym with a
| mask
|
| 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.
| skrbjc wrote:
| Where are you in CA? Here in the Bay Area, at least East
| Bay, you have to wear a mask to go shopping. >90% of people
| at the parks are wearing masks, we can't go into the
| daycare to pick up our son and the nanny wears a mask all
| day, you can't sit in a restaurant unless you show your id
| and paperwork proving you have a vaccine. Heck, I see kids
| and adults riding their bikes or skateboarding without a
| helmet or any protection but they have their mask on! Not
| sure what "normal" meant to you before, but it's definitely
| not any definition of normal to me, unless you take it that
| we are going to be living with all of this forever.
| oblio wrote:
| Well, apparently Kansas is passing the buck to other places:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=29119688&goto=item%3Fi.
| ..
| TheHypnotist wrote:
| My company is fairly standard with the state we are in. They
| are extremely cautious, put emphasis on safety, but did get to
| a point where if you are vaccinated, you can go maskless...
| right up until the delta variant surge started infecting and
| killing people at an alarming rate.
|
| 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.
| jartelt wrote:
| I could see things starting to really ease up once all children
| have had a chance to be vaccinated and everyone else has had a
| chance to get their 6 month booster shot.
| salemh wrote:
| Children aren't at risk from Covid at all.
| 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.
| ..
|
| 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-...
| kevin_b_er wrote:
| Last link is from a propaganda peddler and should be
| treated with extreme caution.
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/05/1036408/silicon
| -...
| jartelt wrote:
| A portion of parents are very worried about Covid in their
| children. These parents have sway with school
| administrators and local governments. All I am saying is
| that I doubt we get total easing of Covid restrictions
| until these kids have had ample chance to be vaccinated.
| I'm not making any arguments or claims about what you are
| taking about.
| thedorkknight wrote:
| "at all"? What? Tons of children end up with post-acute
| sequelae. Where are people getting this notion that the
| only possible negative outcome of viral or bacterial
| infections is death and that that's the only stat we should
| look at?
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7927578/
| skrbjc wrote:
| Where are people getting this notion that the only
| possible negative outcome of unnecessary vaccination is
| death and that that's the only stat we should look at?
|
| fixed that for you
| thedorkknight wrote:
| Didn't mention anything about vaccinations. Don't be
| disingenuous.
|
| The guy above literally said "Children aren't at risk
| from Covid AT ALL".
| ssully wrote:
| Do children who get infected spread it?
| swader999 wrote:
| They do, but not as much as adults. They have much
| smaller noses. Seems silly but it's physics.
| Steltek wrote:
| Not everyone is eligible for a booster shot.
| jartelt wrote:
| Yes - which why I doubt we will see full "reopening"
| everywhere until they open up boosters to everyone and
| provide time for people who want them to get them.
| jungturk wrote:
| This is true, but moot in my area.
|
| 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.
| Steltek wrote:
| People making up their own rules is the defining problem
| of the pandemic.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Sure, but I don't think people getting a booster that may
| not be qualified are going to prolong the pandemic, quite
| the opposite. There is more than enough supply.
| foogazi wrote:
| Right now - sure, same case with the covid vaccine in the
| first few months it was available
| willcipriano wrote:
| After the midterms is my guess.
| jedberg wrote:
| Santa Clara County (aka Silicon Valley) has put out hard limits
| as to when the mask mandates will leave:
|
| 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.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Florida is essentially back to normal. Cashiers in most of the
| large grocery chains and ~50% of restaurant workers still wear
| masks, hit and miss in most other stores. Most people who come
| to the house don't wear them, for example, have had a
| contractor, electrician and cleaning crew at the house in the
| last week. Electrician wore a mask, no one else did. People are
| vaccinated who wanted it (I am), and optimally a booster will
| be freely available soon. Schools ended the mask requirement at
| least in my county a couple weeks ago.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Most COVID measures are not at the US federal level. Some
| mandated measures have exit criteria, at the level of
| government issuing them.
|
| > 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.
| jayknight wrote:
| This is a good article. I'm firmly on team do-what-it-takes-to-
| stop-the-spread, but no one has an exit strategy. I got a
| booster and we have appointments for two of our three kids to
| get there first shot. By mid-December I'm hoping to not have to
| think much about it anymore.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/11/what-amer...
| salemh wrote:
| Your children do not need it - perhaps you should evaluate
| whether they are in an 'at risk' category like the Nordics
|
| 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...
| simoneau wrote:
| I though most of the point of vaxing children and other
| low-risk groups is to stop the spread, not for their own
| individual safety. Reducing the chance they'll infect
| grandma. And reducing the circulating pool of infections to
| prevent more virulent strains from developing. Have I got
| this wrong?
| csee wrote:
| Yes you have it wrong. That goes against medical ethics.
| You can't give someone a treatment that is net
| detrimental to them in order to benefit others.
| jayknight wrote:
| >net detrimental
|
| We're talking about covid vaccines here.
| colordrops wrote:
| I thought the vaccines don't stop or even really slow
| spread that much, especially with Delta variants. At
| least that's what authorities are saying. My
| understanding is that the point of vaccines as now
| explained is to prevent hospitalizations.
| jayknight wrote:
| They do. If you have a "breakthrough infection", you are
| just as likely to spread it to someone else as someone
| who is infected without the vaccine. But you're much less
| likely to get infected in the first place if you've had
| the vaccine, so overall much less likely to pass it to
| others. So the more people who get vaccinated, the slower
| the spread.
|
| See https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/
| rsynnott wrote:
| > If you have a "breakthrough infection", you are just as
| likely to spread it to someone else as someone who is
| infected without the vaccine
|
| Somewhat less likely; on average if you're vaccinated you
| won't be infectious for as long a time if you do get it.
| swader999 wrote:
| I think Delta is still above r0 1 in vaccinated. Delta
| plus is worse. So there will be spread amongst
| vaccinated. Not as much as unvaccinated but with
| vaccinated conditioned to think they are safe I don't see
| it solving much in the medium to longer term.
|
| A high population of vaccinated is mathematically more
| likely to produce more virulent strains with a non
| sterile vaccine in a fast mutating virus.
| jayknight wrote:
| > 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-...
| nradov wrote:
| That's possible but unproven. The current thinking is
| that new variants are mostly likely to evolve in
| immunocompromised patients who experience persistent
| infections. Vaccines are less effective in such patients
| because the immune system doesn't respond as it should.
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-
| variants-ma...
| MisterMower wrote:
| But if vaccines permit asymptomatic spread, meaning the
| virus enters a host and begins replicating, without the
| host showing symptoms, by definition you're increasing
| the number of opportunities for new mutations to occur.
| I'm not sure how that article refutes the grandparent
| comment's point.
| jayknight wrote:
| Asymptomatic spread is possible with or without the
| vaccine, but significantly less with it.
| swader999 wrote:
| Its much more possible with a vaccine that reduces the
| severity of the disease and permits people to still be
| out and about, perhaps even unaware they might be
| infectious. If it puts you on your ass or worse, you
| aren't out spreading it.
| jlongr wrote:
| From the nature.com link that you posted:
|
| "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."
| skrbjc wrote:
| LOL let's not look at the data that says children are
| very low risk, it's important to blindly give them the
| shots.
|
| (Time to check my pfizer stock...)
| rpmisms wrote:
| How about 1 out of 52 children in the 5-11 test group
| experiencing heart inflammation as a result of the
| vaccine? That sounds a hell of a lot more dangerous than
| covid for kids.
|
| > "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.
| jayknight wrote:
| Can you provide a citation for that "1 out of 52"
| statistic? I'm seeing
|
| >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...
| nradov wrote:
| I encourage everyone eligible to get vaccinated, but at this
| point there is zero possibility to stop the spread. Your
| "team" never had a chance. We can all expect to get infected
| eventually.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-
| immu...
| jayknight wrote:
| By "stop", I guess I really mean slow/reduce/flatten-the-
| curve, etc. It's all a game of probabilities, and I guess
| I'm on team lets-work-together-as-a-society-to-reduce-the-
| chances-of-getting-and-spreading-sars-cov2. But that's
| slightly less catchy.
| angelzen wrote:
| Are there any other considerents in life, or reduce-the-
| chances-of-getting-and-spreading-sars-cov2 is the only
| metric of relevance? Can you conceptualize any possible
| anti-covid measure that has too little of a benefit for
| too high of a cost, such that we should not deploy (or
| mandate!) it?
| Filligree wrote:
| There are two possible exit strategies.
|
| - 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?
| [deleted]
| swader999 wrote:
| You can't produce, distribute and vaccinate everyone at gun
| point fast enough before it mutates away from what your vax
| targeted. And this strategy ignores animal reservoirs where
| the virus can reside and come back.
| rpmisms wrote:
| > You can't produce, distribute and vaccinate everyone at
| gun point
|
| In the US, this is a very bad idea, indeed.
| Filligree wrote:
| So the second one, then?
| Vrondi wrote:
| You mean you're going to skip the rest of the boosters
| they'll want you to get each quarter forever?
| jayknight wrote:
| Not what I said. I, and my whole family, get flu shots
| every year. I wouldn't mind also getting one for covid if
| it is determined to help me and my community.
| thomascgalvin wrote:
| > Does anyone have a sense as to when US society will
| completely eliminate COVID measures?
|
| 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.
| thr0w72594 wrote:
| Subramanian Kumar 2021 [1] found that there is no correlation
| between vaccination rates and new case rates on a country-wide
| level, or a county-wide level in the United States.
|
| 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/
| rileyphone wrote:
| several comments on the quality of its science here - https:/
| /pubpeer.com/publications/693A0D3B374ACED0103ADDEA0D9...
| decebalus1 wrote:
| Stop spreading misinformation. The 'study' is in itself a
| case study about shitty studies. Also check who Akhil Kumar
| is and what are his credentials.
| frealy wrote:
| You are just racist. Shut the fuck up libtard.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Imagine having this data and concluding there is no
| relationship between vaccination and new case rate.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/t.
| ..
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Vanden Bossche seems alone in this regard? Surely NPIs would
| ameliorate that?
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| Aside from islands closing their borders and implementing
| extremely strict testing and quarantine regimes (and even
| these don't hold up forever), the evidence for the
| effectiveness of NPIs is a lot thinner than you might
| intuitively expect.
| umanwizard wrote:
| It seems like we are experiencing a very slow and gradual
| offramp from the restrictions, rather than something that will
| have a clearly defined endpoint.
|
| 2021 is already "mostly normal", for me. I hope sometime in
| 2022 we will be back to "100% normal", but I'm not confident.
| avaika wrote:
| It really really depends on where you are. E.g. in my country
| it's almost like "normal". But that's not what you think.
| People just don't follow restrictions, people don't wear
| masks, abuse vaccination (simply skip or even buy fake
| vaccination certificate to fulfill government / employer
| requirements). The only difference from "normal" is increased
| workload on hospitals and daily news "over thousand people
| died today from covid-19".
|
| 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.
| kgin wrote:
| Masks became a regular fixture in Asia after original SARS.
| Not by regulation, but they just became an ordinary item used
| by people to avoid getting sick or avoid getting others sick.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Having been to many parts of Asia before Covid hit, masks
| were indeed not unusual, but were never worn by _everyone_
| or even the majority of people, even in crowded places like
| subways.
| kgin wrote:
| Ah, yes that's more what I meant to say. We'll get to a
| place where masks aren't required anywhere, but we may
| never return to a world where masks are a weird or
| unusual sight.
| pie42000 wrote:
| In SF the only Covid measures are vaccination checks, and
| wearing masks indoors. 99% back to normal.
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| When hospitalization rates are down. In many metro areas the
| ICU are still full of un-vaccinated COVID patients, which means
| people with normal emergencies can't get a bed.
|
| 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.
| horns4lyfe wrote:
| Can you point me to a mandate anywhere with some kind of
| hospitalization rate cutoff? Because everywhere where there
| are still mask mandates, they seem to be nebulous things that
| will just last until it's no longer politically popular.
| Oregon for example set an arbitrary date, which of course
| makes no sense.
| striking wrote:
| Bay area (note that there are additional criteria):
| https://www.sfgate.com/coronavirus/article/Bay-Area-mask-
| man...
| colordrops wrote:
| Does LA County have anything like this? I haven't been
| able to find it.
| striking wrote:
| Just eight Bay area counties ("San Francisco, Alameda,
| Santa Clara, San Mateo, Contra Costa, Marin, Sonoma and
| Napa" from https://www.sfgate.com/bay-area-
| politics/article/Bay-Area-ma... Solano is not included as
| they have chosen not to reinstate a mask mandate)
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| In the US the nation-wide ICU vacancy is down to pre-pandemic
| levels. There may be anecdotes of individual hospitals that
| have a lot of COVID patients in ICU, but it's simply not true
| that this is a wide spread problem.
| skrbjc wrote:
| It's funny that people read the same data with such
| different interpretations. This is why I feel like the
| insistence of "just look at the data" rarely leads to a
| clear decision, and anyone working at a company that has
| dealt with giving data to people to make decisions will
| know this intimately. People use data to make their point,
| and if the data doesn't agree, then they slice it or adjust
| it or reason their way out of using it, so they can make
| the decision they want. I think Scott Adams calls it
| "watching the same screen, but seeing two different movies"
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| There are several problems, but a big one is just the way
| the news works. ICUs are designed to run at near capacity
| and are overwhelmed all the time if, for example, there's
| a big car accident. Right now, all eyes are on the
| pandemic and I'm sure it's true that there's places in
| the country where ICUs are full up with pandemic
| patients. But the way the news cycle works, "ICUs at
| capacity with COVID patients" gets a lot more clicks than
| "ICUs in this hospital are always at capacity, but now
| they are at capacity with COVID."
|
| 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.
| maxerickson wrote:
| I mean, big car accidents don't happen across multiple
| states at the same time, it isn't that surprising that
| the response to something happening super-regionally is
| different than the response to something happening
| locally.
| Loughla wrote:
| >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.
| VRay wrote:
| It's pretty amazing how stupid and shortsighted people are.
| We're so good at overlooking the horrible situation we're
| in and focusing on other things that are completely
| irrelevant
|
| 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
| ryandrake wrote:
| The last two years have convinced me: When the Zombie
| Apocalypse comes, zombies are biting and killing people
| in the streets, and neighborhoods are burning down, 50%
| of the country (world?) will whistle and just continue to
| go about their day, shopping, going out to eat, sending
| their kids to school, and looking down at all those
| hysterical alarmists bunkering up trying to defend
| themselves from the hoard. "Government, don't force me to
| change my life! I have the freedom to pretend everything
| is normal!"
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| Haha I've had this conversation with my wife as well.
| We've basically been under house arrest since early
| February 2020 (yes we quarantined even before there was a
| quarantine) and taking very conservative measures since,
| always 1 step ahead of the CDC the whole time with double
| masking and still masking when mandates were lifted here
| in Oregon because we knew there would be an immediate re-
| surge.
|
| 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
| Vecr wrote:
| At least buy BSL-3 suits (PAPR/P100 helmets, gloves,
| splash resistant suits) and get on with your life, I
| assume you can afford it.
| oblio wrote:
| Based on the photos I can find of BSL-3 suits, I highly
| doubt that others on the street or in stores would let
| them "get on with their lives" :-))
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Unless you have significant risk factors, this is
| unnecessary. Most people don't and/or took care of
| business.
| unabirra wrote:
| You survived because... most people (>99% of infected
| individuals) survive Covid? lol. If this was your end of
| the world scenario (people dining everywhere because you
| know... if you sit the virus goes past you) then you are
| up for a rude awakening if a real crisis ever arises
| (which I hope it doesn't)
| skrbjc wrote:
| That's the beautiful part of humans, though, we push
| through and live our lives no matter what. If everyone
| panicked every time there was something that seemed
| apocalypse, then we probably wouldn't be where we are
| today. Maybe it's just the resilient ones that survive
| and keep reproducing.
| zionic wrote:
| The medical cartel has had 2 years to adapt at this point.
| How have they failed to scale capacity despite charging
| record prices?
| colordrops wrote:
| If they scale then the politicians won't have an excuse to
| maintain their mandates. They were able to get navy ships
| with hundreds of beds scaled up in weeks at the start of
| the pandemic. The cost to society of the mandates is
| certainly more that it would cost to scale ICUs.
| oblio wrote:
| During WW2 the US managed to mass produce about as much
| fighter planes as it needed.
|
| It couldn't mass produce fighter pilots, though.
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| Here's "hospital stress" data for the US, showing where COVID
| patients are overwhelming the healthcare systems:
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
| shots/2020/12/09/9443799...
| motherzucker wrote:
| Would be interesting to see how that data compares with
| other diseases. For instance heart disease, which is
| largely preventable and kills more people
| greedo wrote:
| I think altering your diet and lifestyle to prevent heart
| disease (assuming it's non-heritable) is harder than
| getting two shots to prevent COVID.
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| 3 shots now, Israel is preparing for 4th...
| skrbjc wrote:
| That website is very much designed to be scary. They say
| that hospital admins think 30% and above of Covid patients
| mean "extreme", but they use 20% and above for the
| "extreme" red. Then below that they use % "extreme", but
| without close reading, you think they are talking about
| hospital capacity. Over the whole map it's hard to find any
| county with over 20% of their beds being Covid patients.
| The big thing is what did all of this look like before
| Covid? Most of the problems with capacity are due to
| staffing, which seems to be the real bottle-neck here.
| 40four wrote:
| I am wary of stories like this. What you're saying is
| probably true true in specific cases in the most populous
| cities in the country, but I don't think it's a general
| policy that makes sense across the board.
|
| 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.
| kec wrote:
| Maybe not today, but the peak of the most recent wave in
| South Carolina was in September and saw about 2500 people
| hospitalized statewide.
| thehappypm wrote:
| ICU capacity is not that interesting to me anymore. Most
| hospitals don't have row after row after row of empty ICU
| beds most of the time. They actually want their ICU to have
| just the right number of beds. 70% capacity sounds full, but
| it means 30% of the beds are empty. Would it ever make sense
| for a hospital to have 99% capacity free? Just have 99 beds
| empty for 1 patient? I think it's a scare number.
| colordrops wrote:
| Aren't the unvaccinated people in ICUs already not following
| COVID mandates? In areas of Southern California (e.g.
| Temecula) with low vaccination rates, there are virtually no
| restrictions. Why restrict a compliant populace that is
| already mostly vaccinated?
| jsight wrote:
| There won't be defined exit criteria. Each state will exit when
| its people decide the exiting is worth the risk.
|
| Some places will do that earlier than others, and quite a few
| practically already have.
| Server6 wrote:
| It's fairly clear what the exit criteria is. Hospital capacity.
| When hospitals are filling up COVID measures are necessary.
| COVID is endemic now and will ebb and flow over the next
| decade. As such I would expect COVID measures to come and go
| based on local health department and hospital capacity needs.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > When hospitals are filling up COVID measures are necessary.
|
| 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.
| colordrops wrote:
| I'd imagine that scaling up ICU capacity has to be more
| efficient than constantly enacting mandates on the entire
| population for a decade.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Pandemics are an exponential process, so scaling capacity
| linearly buys you only a few days or weeks of time unless
| the exponential is controlled. It's not useless, but it's
| also decidedly not a lone solution.
|
| That also doesn't account for the damage people
| contracting the virus accumulate that doesn't register on
| that metric.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| It was a stroke of genius for the powers that be to convince
| people that they have a personal responsibility to
| restore/protect a health infrastructure that has been looted
| out, and structured if not designed to act in a predatory
| manner. They created new emergency powers and a new _moral
| imperative to avoid contagious respiratory disease_ out of
| whole cloth. "Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires!"
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Only you can prevent the dismantling of the health
| infrastructure!
| [deleted]
| mostertoaster wrote:
| Probably about as long as they will make us take our shoes off
| at the airport.
| woodruffw wrote:
| NYC's vaccination rate is trending towards 75%, and life is
| essentially back to normal with the addition of vaccine
| requirements for indoor dining and events (which strikes me as
| perfectly reasonable, given that we have a large tourism
| industry).
| rackjack wrote:
| For me, it's when the kids get vaccinated.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| So, is this expensive and patented and does it have limited
| availability?
| tamaharbor wrote:
| Invermectin Plus
| n8cpdx wrote:
| Does it matter? Vaccine flows like water these days, and at
| least in the rich world, nearly everyone who needs this chose
| to be in that position. Making that choice should be incredibly
| costly.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Oh it matters. A drug that is not expensive, patented or is
| readily available surely will either never really be tried or
| will be tried in such a way it'll never succeed.
|
| Expensive drugs will enjoy trials designed and sponsored by
| their manufacturers.
| scohesc wrote:
| I think it does matter.
|
| 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.
| brokensegue wrote:
| Do you think there's a significant increase in government
| spending for paying for these pills? It's trivial compared
| to things like enhanced welfare benefits or military
| spending
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| Yes, by sheer volume. It's not trivial. Monoclonal
| antibodies are thousands of dollars per treatment for
| instance and the idea of business loans or small business
| aid is that it's going to investment. Of course none of
| this matters in 2019 a repo crisis was triggered: https:/
| /www.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_2019_events_in_the_...
|
| They needed to inject liquidity into the economy and
| justified it with COVID.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > Monoclonal antibodies are thousands of dollars per
| treatment for instance
|
| And Monoclonal antibodies are not widely rolled out. This
| is not relevant.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| According to whom? It's everywhere around me and you if
| you live in the US. https://protect-
| public.hhs.gov/pages/therapeutics-distributi...
|
| 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.
| brokensegue wrote:
| I'm getting a 404. Can you estimate total spending on
| monoclonal antibodies?
|
| My back of the envelope math suggests less than a
| billion. Peanuts compared to the recovery bills
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > more than 90,000 doses (of monoclonal antibodies) have
| been given.
|
| 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.
| kvakerok wrote:
| they're basically suing the original company who developed
| monoclonal therapy for COVID and are trying to copy it. This is
| the first copy.
| covfa3hah wrote:
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
|
| COVID NEWS IS FAGGOT NEWS
| freddealmeida wrote:
| I don't trust Pfizer in any case. But interesting at least. I
| think it needs far more study before this is simply introduced
| into the wild.
|
| But what do I know. We have survived for 2m years without this.
| I'm sure we can be fine without it.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Sure, we survived as a species, but certainly not as
| individuals. We see plenty of evidence of genetic bottlenecks
| where the human population was reduced to small numbers, quite
| possibly due to disease. Just within the historical period,
| there are legions of plagues with extremely high mortality
| rates, including nearly the entire native population of North
| America after contact with Europeans. And let's not forget
| antibiotics and near every lifesaving piece of medical
| knowledge we have developed over the last few thousand years.
| It's your choice to refuse medical care, but don't assume the
| rest of us want to go back to the caves and the hunt. Rapid
| drug discovery is an extremely powerful medical technology and
| I 100% welcome it for this disease and all futures ones.
| proc0 wrote:
| But don't you think it's even a little suspicious other
| countries have been administering another infamous antiviral
| that happens to be a generic drug? I mean it's at least a
| coincidence that pfizer is somehow the one doing all the
| heavy lifting here... are they that good of a drug company?
| Aren't there other doctors, virologists, etc out there?
|
| I just feel people are too quick to accept a for-profit mega-
| corporation as the defacto source of all things covid cure.
| ImaCake wrote:
| The press release is much more reader friendly than this re-
| report of it.
|
| https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
| cockzor wrote:
| AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
|
| PANDEMIC!!!!! AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!
|
| We're all going to DIE!!!!! AAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!
|
| MASsk Up! V4xccC1nATE!!! CLOSE ALLL THE BUSINESSES!!!
|
| REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE@@!!!!!
| covfa3hah wrote:
| COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
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|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
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|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
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|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
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|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
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|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
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|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
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|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
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|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
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|
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|
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|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
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|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
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|
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|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
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|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
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|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
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|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
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|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
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|
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|
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|
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|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
| COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
|
| YOU ALL ARE COCKSUCKING FAGGOTS!
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| > _Pfizer's phase 2 /3 trial randomized non-hospitalized adult
| COVID-19 patients who were at high risk of progressing to severe
| illness to receive placebo or Paxlovid, a combination of the
| protease inhibitors_
|
| 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.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| Except this is studied and dosed appropriately vs. tacking a
| bunch of Ivermectin and shitting your intestines out based on a
| half-truth you read about from Facebook.
| dontcare007 wrote:
| Like what happened with Joe Rogan, oh wait, he recovered.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| As have people who _didn 't_ get ivermectin.
|
| 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.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| Do you believe that to be some sort of counter-argument or
| opposing view for anything I said?
|
| 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.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| You know IVM has been around since the 70s? People take
| it all of the time. It's a very studied drug, on the list
| of WHO's 100 most essential medicines. The inventor won
| the noble prize for it.
|
| 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.
| cheaprentalyeti wrote:
| I lost a family member to one of those "supposedly treats
| Covid" drugs. It was called Remdesivir, and it had the full
| blessing of the people who told you Ivermectin causes you to
| shit your intestines out.
|
| 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.
| pjkundert wrote:
| The LD50 for Ivermectin is 10mg/kg. The standard dosage range
| is .1-.5mg/kg. (from memory... YMMV)
|
| 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! ;)
| kibwen wrote:
| _' There is no relationship at all between the two drugs, said
| Dr. William A Petri, professor of infectious diseases at the
| University of Virginia.
|
| "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."'_
|
| https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-067310377629
| colordrops wrote:
| Dr. Kevin J. Downes receives money from Pfizer:
|
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/art.41772
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| Do you have an explanation for how he's wrong?
| colordrops wrote:
| Did I say he's wrong? I'm simply pointing out a conflict
| of interest, which is a legitimate fact to bring to
| light.
| [deleted]
| sharklazer wrote:
| You forgot the best part. They get to patent it and charge
| 10000 times more.
| roywiggins wrote:
| The difference is that this one has a double-blind study
| showing high effectiveness. There's no reason to think every
| protease inhibitor is as good as the next, drugs are weird and
| unpredictable, and you can only know if they work with a good
| study.
| tacobelllover99 wrote:
| You mean ivermectin with a new name?
|
| Got it.
|
| Sad world we are living in right now.
| neltnerb wrote:
| If you take an antiviral like this, do you still develop a good
| immune response to reinfection?
|
| 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.
| grey413 wrote:
| Anyone taking this should still develop an immune memory to
| covid. As I recall, even people who took monoclonal antibodies
| (that is to say, an antiviral where they literally inject
| functional anti-covid antibodies into your veins) developed
| some degree of natural immunity.
| lekanwang wrote:
| You should -- protease inhibitors inhibit replication, but
| existing viruses should be more than enough to generate a
| durable response in most individuals.
| prox wrote:
| If I remember correctly, it's not Covid that kills you
| directly , but a runaway immune response. What was the
| name... Cytokine storm?
| pezzana wrote:
| No. There's a big difference between drugs and vaccines. The
| drug doesn't generally illicit an immune response, but the
| vaccine is designed to do exactly that.
| jaywalk wrote:
| But by definition, anyone taking this drug is already
| infected. So their immune system has already been exposed to
| the virus.
| standardUser wrote:
| With antibiotics, it is possible to kill an infection
| without developing a full immune response, leaving the
| person susceptible to reinfection. Even if that infection
| is symptomatic and has been going on for days, the immune
| response still may not be robust enough before the
| antibiotics kill off the infection. Not sure if that also
| occurs with anti-virals.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| I thought the Mechanism of action section for this drug on
| Wikipedia was quite interesting:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molnupiravir#Mechanism_of_acti...
| cblconfederate wrote:
| This is not molnupiravir. That one is mutagenic, (which makes a
| lot of people skeptical about its use).
| covfa3hah wrote:
| Has it ever occurred to you that you are a cock-sucking FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
|
| COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
| fullstackchris wrote:
| Did anyone hear NPR's reporting on this? They said the early
| study was originally halted BECAUSE of it's positive effects at
| preventing hospitalization and death... very weird, I hope it is
| a typo or I'm understanding it wrong...
| TOMDM wrote:
| It's a semi common issue for highly effective novel treatments.
| In order to continue the study you need to keep some portion as
| a control group.
|
| I can't imagine wanting to keep people in the control group
| when the experimental treatment is so dramatically effective.
| pkulak wrote:
| If something proves to be too effective, too early in a trail,
| it's no longer ethical to give placebos to the control group.
| mbreese wrote:
| I haven't read anything about this study, but this is common
| for highly effective treatments.
|
| 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.
| tmoravec wrote:
| Pardon my naive question, but aren't there more objectives
| for the clinical trial? Particularly testing for negative
| side effects? How are those judged if the trial is
| discontinued?
| akiselev wrote:
| Data on the most obvious side effects are collected in the
| first phase which is a very small group of healthy patients
| who take the drug under medical supervision in increasing
| doses until the side effects are so bad they can't keep
| going. They use this data to establish safety limits for
| the rest of the clinical trial and continue monitoring the
| situation until well after the drug is approved.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| You don't need people to actually have covid to find side
| effects. So you don't need sick people in your control arm.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| To be cleared though, both arms or the trial are people
| who have COVID. The control arm is not getting the drug.
| If there are side effects that occur in some combination
| with having COVID, they will find those.
| mbreese wrote:
| This was a phase 2/3 trial. So there was some side effect
| data collected, but enough people went through the trial to
| see any large/common side effects.
|
| 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.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Safety continues to be evaluated during Phase 3 (and after
| approval), but trials don't proceed to Phase 3 without
| establishing some reasonable baseline for safety in the
| earlier phases.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| guerrilla wrote:
| Maybe they meant that further study at that level was not
| necessary and they were moving on to later stage trials? In
| order to speed up the release I mean.
| newsbinator wrote:
| When something obviously works, it's standard practice to halt
| the study and seek out emergency use authorization.
|
| > 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.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Maybe to reduce risk to the control group?
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| I didn't hear the NPR story, but studies can be halted when
| it's shown that the treatment is so clearly effective that it
| becomes unethical to continue administering non-treatments/weak
| treatments to your comparison groups. This usually indicates
| that research can and should advance to the next stage
| immediately.
|
| Here's something to read on this (note the three criteria for a
| TL;DR): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5024796/
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| I guess halted because meaning they are confident enough to go
| to phase 3 with larger amount of trial participants?
| peapod91 wrote:
| That's correct. If a positive effect in the treatment arm of
| the study is found to be strong enough, it is deemed unethical
| to continue giving patients the placebo as control. Hence, they
| terminate the study and proceed to the next phase of approval
| orra wrote:
| That it's unethical to continue giving half the participants
| a placebo makes sense.
|
| 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?
| zerkten wrote:
| They almost always do this as an approval requirement.
| orra wrote:
| Gotcha, thanks.
| dbbk wrote:
| I believe they've only halted recruiting for the trial, not
| the trial itself. The Pfizer CEO this morning also said
| they're continuing with plans for two other trials starting
| soon, which is in people with non-co-morbidities, and to
| household contacts of confirmed cases.
| orra wrote:
| Presumably they're kicking the placebo participants out?
| As others say, it is not ethical to give them ineffective
| treatment (placebo), given the effectiveness of the drug
| has been clearly demonstrated.
| dekhn wrote:
| Damn, the structure has 3 fluorines. This particular structure is
| stable, but in general, fluorine chemistry is tricky.
|
| Obligatory classic: https://www.science.org/content/blog-
| post/things-i-won-t-wor...
| whymauri wrote:
| Exactly what I was thinking, especially for an entirely novel
| molecule. I wonder how novel the scaffold is. Whichever med
| chemist led this initiative is an artist -- amazing job.
| comicjk wrote:
| C-F bonds are very stable, not like O-F bonds. They're found in
| common drugs like Prozac, and common materials like Teflon.
| dekhn wrote:
| It's stable, but the chemistry to get there isn't trivial.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organofluorine_chemistry (my
| Organic Chemistry class was more than 25 years ago, but I did
| research on drugs containing fluorine in grad school; we had
| to parameterize the force field specially, the bond has a ton
| of energy in it,
|
| When I wrote my comment I knew somebody was going to come
| along and think I was implying CF3 was explosive.
| frealy wrote:
| Friendly reminder Fauci authorized "research" where they
| physically ripped out puppies vocal chords so they wouldn't have
| to listen to them cry while they fed their faces to insects and
| slowly were murdered over the course of 2 weeks:
|
| https://www.skynews.com.au/opinion/outsiders/utterly-disgust...
|
| Of course, that isn't even the most grotesque that piece of shit
| did. They also threw acid on monkey brains to induce terror.
|
| Seriously, if you support Fauci - at all - I hope you get shot in
| the fucking head.
| covfa3hah wrote:
| There's that fag talk.
| vibrato2 wrote:
| Kinda like ivermectin with the same mechanism
| kibwen wrote:
| _' There is no relationship at all between the two drugs, said
| Dr. William A Petri, professor of infectious diseases at the
| University of Virginia.
|
| "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."'_
|
| https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-067310377629
| thedorkknight wrote:
| To the user who keeps getting comments deleted for bringing
| up this guy's funding: please look up "ad hominem fallacy".
| Attacking someone making a statement says nothing about the
| truth of their statement
| vibrato2 wrote:
| What attack? He stated a fact about this mans funding
| relationship to Pfizer. He didn't say anything about his
| trustworthiness, you assumed such.
|
| It's not an ad hominem if it's something the reader
| assumes. It is a relevant detail to consider whether to
| trust the person's statement. He didn't say the guy was a
| shill or to never trust a funded scientist.
| colordrops wrote:
| Dr. Kevin J. Downes receives money from Pfizer:
|
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/art.41772
| xioren00 wrote:
| Correct, they both work as protease inhibitors.
| an9n wrote:
| What a money spinner eh? Coronavirus really is the gift that
| keeps on giving...
| zapdrive wrote:
| Exactly. Everybody is trying to milk it.
| rsynnott wrote:
| While this looks like potentially great news, Pfizer really needs
| a new Head of Making Up Drug Names. Paxlovid! Between this and
| 'Comirnaty' (the vaccine) it is clearly not their strong point.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Are all the other names taken ? "Viagra" was a nice choice tho
| dopa42365 wrote:
| Basically all pharmaceutical names are created by the same
| branding company. https://www.brandinstitute.com/
|
| There goes the "company A has better names than company B"
| theory?
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Second that, they sound like these made-up AliExpress/Amazon
| brands.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...
|
| Bonus: search for OOTDTY and you'll find all sorts of unrelated
| items.
| oblio wrote:
| Comirnaty sounds like Comintern
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_International) to me
| :-D
| jolts wrote:
| Lets ignore the fact that its basically ivermectin with more side
| effects. Except ivermectin is 30 cent per dose and not under
| patent..
| twofornone wrote:
| Well, they are both protease inhibitors. It is quite plausible
| that if this drug works that ivermectin also does indeed work.
| But this isn't new information and every time I post it I get
| downvoted for spreading "misinformation".
|
| But big pharma would _never_ skip an existing, cheap, off
| patent treatment in lieu of guaranteed multi-billion dollar,
| liability free vaccine contracts, right? We can _totally_ trust
| these guys, it 's a pandemic after all, how low would you need
| to stoop to use that as an excuse to make _billions_ of risk
| free dollars? It 's completely implausible that for example,
| the former FDA commissioner, who now sits on Pfizer's board of
| directors along with the CEO of Reuters, would pressure the FDA
| to ignore an existing, safe, cheap medication to instead pursue
| vaccines based on a novel, widely applicable tech ology and
| new, expensive, patentable medication. We're only talking tens
| of billions of guaranteed, risk free dollars here,
| contractually free of any liability.
|
| Nope, no need to worry about regulatory capture, about self
| serving past mistakes that harmed hundreds of thousands of
| people in the past on behalf of characters like Fauci (see his
| AIDS debacle), no, its totally impossible, this is a _global
| pandemic_ after all and industrial executives are known to be
| shining beacons of honesty.
| reureu wrote:
| Ivermectin isn't a protease inhibitor though?
| twofornone wrote:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7996102/
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7996102/
|
| Almost as if after clinical evidence (sure, arguably week)
| and a promising mechanism of action (yeah, in silico) a
| widespread, double blind RCT should have been conducted a
| year ago...
| lightavalanche wrote:
| Another link:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-020-01577-x
|
| Paxlovid and Ivermectin are both 3CLPro protease
| inhibitors.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| Yeah the big pharma were so moral they allowed any other
| company to copy their complex vaccines that needs special
| cold storage with significant investment they got free from
| the government also for specialized manufacturing, all this
| is offered patent free out of the goodness of their hearts! I
| wonder why smaller companies didn't take them up on their
| generous offer?
| jolts wrote:
| Yeah because a vaccine against the beta/wuhan variant which
| haven't even been updated for the delta variant is great.
|
| 99.97% of people will develop antibodies naturally.
|
| And there is early treatment like ivermectin,
| hydrochloroquine, monoclonal antibodies.
| [deleted]
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That's a big nope.
|
| https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-067310377629
|
| > 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."
| [deleted]
| orra wrote:
| I am thinking: if and when this is approved, we have to think
| about distribution.
|
| 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?
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| Who is the market for this? The assumption is that you give it
| ASAP and people want to take it. If people aren't interested in
| vaccinations they may not want it either, and the vaccines are
| already very effective at preventing these issues.
| tempoponet wrote:
| And unfortunately the window for this closes before a skeptic
| will get desperate. Once people go on a vent they appear to
| become open minded to other treatment options.
| jollybean wrote:
| Unfortunately, it's the opposite.
|
| 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'.
| rajup wrote:
| > My fear is that a lot of people won't bother with a vax
| if they think there's a 'cure'.
|
| 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]
| tsol wrote:
| Then you have the issue of people continuing to spread it
| to those who can't take a vaccine, including the
| immunocompromised.
|
| 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
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| I think the main difference is one has to necessarily take
| on vaccine risk without catching covid, so you balance
| chance of vax complications vs chance of getting covid
| multiplied by chance of getting bad case of covid.
|
| 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.
| jollybean wrote:
| Well, kind of.
|
| 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.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| For endemic viruses that also spread through domestic
| pets 95% becomes unobtainable unless we start going after
| the 100,000,000 domestic pets in the US alone.
| orra wrote:
| > one has to necessarily take on vaccine risk without
| catching covid
|
| 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.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| This is also the same line of thinking that pushes for more
| knee replacements than dietician and gym trainer
| appointments. For some reason preventative thinking is
| alien.
| jdhn wrote:
| I'd say that this will appeal to people who are covid vaccine
| skeptical. If you're skeptical of the mRNA vaccines, you'd
| probably be in favor of this treatment than the vaccines.
| dboreham wrote:
| Because _absolutely_ _anything_ is less dangerous than
| mRNA.
| epakai wrote:
| mRNA has _potential_ to be dangerous. There is nothing
| inherently dangerous in what our bodies already use as
| building instructions, nor is there evidence to suggest
| current mRNA vaccines cause any of these theoretical
| issues.
| oblio wrote:
| Yeah, plus on top of that, anything has the potential to
| be dangerous. Take, for example, water. Everybody knows
| about its positive sides, and about most of the negative
| ones.
|
| 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.
| orra wrote:
| I'm not so certain. People who for whatever irrational
| reason don't want an mRNA vaccine can take a viral vector
| vaccine. Yet they don't.
| toast0 wrote:
| Maybe if they're hesitant for irrational reasons. But if
| they're hesitant for rational reasons, mRNA vaccines and
| modified adenovirus vaccines are both new for mass use.
|
| 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.
| nijave wrote:
| Monoclonal antibodies get less pushback
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/health/covid-antibody-
| reg...
|
| 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)
| claytongulick wrote:
| I suppose some people would lump me in with "anti-vaxxer"
| because I don't want to get the Covid 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.
| geraneum wrote:
| I hear you and your argument sounds rational. I wonder
| what do you think about receiving it for the sake of
| potentially vulnerable people around you. Just to reduce
| the likelihood of spreading it to someone who, unlike
| you, might be in real danger.
|
| 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.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It's rational argument especially now that we know
| vaccinated people spread this endemic virus.
|
| 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.
| oblio wrote:
| The thing is, you're not representative of unvaccinated
| folks. You're an extreme outlier. Most of them haven't
| done this research.
|
| 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.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Your priors probably need updating as natural immunity as
| the OP describes appears to be much more robust, esp
| compared to the J&J after a year. Also vaccinated people
| spread delta, so everyone is getting it on some time
| scale.
| oblio wrote:
| You > Your priors probably need updating as natural
| immunity as the OP describes appears to be much more
| robust, esp compared to the J&J after a year.
|
| 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?
| swader999 wrote:
| I had one vaccine dose with severe issues. So maybe I'm
| skeptical, I won't get a second or third dose. Most people
| in this camp will just use ivermectin. Including myself, it
| works and is safe.
| tsol wrote:
| The antiviral mechanism of Ivermectin involves the
| inhibition of nuclear transport by importin a/b1 in the
| host. It can and has lead to death when improperly dosed.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > Who is the market for this?
|
| Wealthy people.
| orra wrote:
| The vaccines are 92-95% effective at preventing
| hospitalisation and death. (They also reduce spread
| significantly.) That's great.
|
| 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.)
| penultimatebro wrote:
| The mRNA vaccines do not, and never have, reduce the spread
| of the virus from one infected person to someone else.
|
| The only thing they do is reduce symptoms. That has been
| known from clinical trials.
|
| Everything else is a talking point not based on a peer
| reviewed scientific study. Or if you think you have a study
| that refutes this, please post.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > The mRNA vaccines do not, and never have, reduce the
| spread of the virus from one infected person to someone
| else
|
| That's simply not correct.
| [deleted]
| miked85 wrote:
| Do you have a source for that?
|
| "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." [1]
|
| [1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PII
| S1473-3...
| tylerhou wrote:
| This study is for household transmission in an extended
| setting. That's not the same as transmission e.g. in an
| outdoor environment or for short, casual contact.
|
| Vaccinated people are less likely to be infected, hence
| "breakthrough case." Your quote is like saying that
| "people thrown out of windows in car crashes have the
| same rate of injury, despite whether the person was
| wearing a seatbelt or not." That may be true, but wearing
| a seatbelt definitely reduces the chance of getting
| thrown out of a window.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| I too can google: https://www.businessinsider.com/covid-
| vaccine-effectiveness-...
| miked85 wrote:
| So I guess we can just choose which study to believe.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Rules of thumb:
|
| a) choose the later study
|
| b) look at what happens in the real world (e.g.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29124652 )
|
| And, If there is uncertainty (and there always is some
| small amount of it) then this does not support the parent
| commenter's strong and confident assertion that "do not,
| and never have" ... produced an effect.
| penultimatebro wrote:
| Well I'm convinced. Case closed, you win.
| pkaye wrote:
| California shows that unvaccinated people were 6.8 times
| more likely to get COVID-19 than fully vaccinated people.
|
| https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Yes, This trend is true anywhere in the world that has
| mass vaccination, e.g. UK:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hc7A1bVuSJU&t=56s
|
| IDK why anyone would deny this observable reality.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| I can see your comment history, and you made the same
| false statement 3 days prior to this one. You were given
| long responses with links then. ( e.g.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29078217 )
|
| The same thing 5 days ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29058624 you were
| given a response that you ignored.
|
| Those didn't make any impression on you; you carried on
| saying the same false thing. So there was no point in
| trying to convince you this time, it's clear that would
| be simply a waste of my time to try to change your mind
| again. You aren't here for that.
|
| I'm merely marking your misinformation for the benefit of
| others.
| delecti wrote:
| I think skepticism of vaccines largely doesn't transfer to
| the broader medical field. The ineffective fad treatments
| (ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine) are still medicine, but
| are still "popular" with vaccine skeptics. It's not rational,
| but I think vaccine skepticism is largely not rational to
| begin with.
| mchusma wrote:
| Anecdotally, hearing from doctors working in COVID wards,
| they consist almost entirely of anti-vaxxers who are now
| seeking (and receiving) treatments only recently approved.
| So while not everyone will take this, I think probably many
| would once they have symptoms.
|
| 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.
| laurent92 wrote:
| This. Being antivax when one has 93% if not facing the
| virus [?] refusing drugs when infected. At that point,
| it's worth doing everything because the risk is realized.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| The first three days of symptoms for an anti-vaxxer are
| obviously just a flu, because covid is fake. It's not
| covid until they're hooked up to a machine...
| tshaddox wrote:
| The fad treatments are "still medicine," but crucially are
| not generally approved of by the "mainstream medical
| establishment." This lack of approval is the key feature of
| these treatments.
| nkozyra wrote:
| > This lack of approval is the key feature of these
| treatments.
|
| 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."
| pfisherman wrote:
| But this makes absolutely no sense. Plenty of previously
| approved drugs, such as anticoagulants and dexamethasone,
| are part of the current standard of care; and their
| effectiveness has unambiguously been borne out by the
| data with multiple independent studies / analyses that
| all agree.
|
| 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.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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?
| ISL wrote:
| Sometimes the experimental drug has unexpected side-effects or
| is _less_ effective than the placebo. Both sides of the trial
| are a gamble. It is a trial because literally nobody knows for
| sure what the outcome will be -- only an informed guess that
| the new treatment is a good idea.
|
| 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.
| uranium wrote:
| While I haven't read this particular study, the standard way to
| do a trial like this is to compare against the current standard
| of care, not no treatment.
| jedberg wrote:
| Usually with these kinds of experiments, you would get all the
| other normal treatments, because it would be unethical
| otherwise.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| 10 deaths in 600 is not quite a death sentence, in my opinion.
| And yes, placebo group always gets current standard treatment,
| it would be rather wrong to do otherwise.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Not a chance I'd like to take
| joenot443 wrote:
| For sure, but in this case, not taking the chance
| guarantees you the "placebo", or standard care, meaning
| you'd be in the same boat as if you'd entered the study and
| received the placebo dose.
| rafale wrote:
| So as good as a vaccine basically?
| grey413 wrote:
| They're apples and oranges, really. The best course of action
| to get a vaccine for the preventative effects and an antiviral
| if one has a breakthrough infection.
| spazrunaway wrote:
| I'm excited to hear the results of the pill among the
| vaccinated. Cutting the risk of severe symptoms among high-risk
| vaccinated people, and the risk of long covid for everyone is
| very important. The vaccines are great, but not silver bullets
| themselves.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| "Long covid" is an urban legend.
| helge9210 wrote:
| It does exist. Probably has the same symptoms as any other
| virus pneumonia.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Long-everything exists, we just don't talk about it. I've
| had multiple colds that lasted 2-3 months, and one that
| didn't completely resolve for almost 6 months.
| spazrunaway wrote:
| I'm guessing they didn't damage your organs, though.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| How could I know? My lungs aren't so great, so maybe they
| did.
|
| Also, the WHO definition of "Long COVID" is
|
| "Post-COVID-19 condition occurs in individuals with a
| history of probable or confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection,
| usually 3 months from the onset of COVID-19 with symptoms
| that last for at least 2 months and cannot be explained
| by an alternative diagnosis."
|
| That's any symptoms, not necessarily organ damage.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Really? I don't think so:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_COVID#Further_reading
| widjit wrote:
| as someone who definitely had and suffered through long
| COVID, I would like to know what you think you are
| accomplishing by making false claims like this.
|
| do you think you're being edgy? what possible work is your
| ignorant comment doing?
| adventured wrote:
| It took me about six months to recover from Covid post
| infection. I got it in the early weeks of the pandemic;
| it took from around mid April to October of 2020 to get
| back to normal. I've felt fine since. I don't know what
| exactly they're calling long Covid these days, but the
| parent comment is pretty obviously ignorant.
| cbtacy wrote:
| As long as your definition of "good" doesn't include public
| health and you know "not killing other people", sure... it's as
| "good".
| merpnderp wrote:
| People should get vaccinated. But at this point making claims
| that the vaccinated don't spread covid is not supported by
| the science.
| grey413 wrote:
| On the other hand, claiming that the vaccinated spread the
| disease 63% less even in close household situations _is_
| supported by the science.
|
| https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.14.21264959
| v...
| merpnderp wrote:
| If we made policy decisions based on a single paper, we'd
| all be taking HCQ and Ivermectin. And that study's
| confidence intervals are large. The upper bound looks
| like it could be in the same range for unvaccinated
| people.
| [deleted]
| gameswithgo wrote:
| For protecting yourself, probably, for protecting others and
| helping prevent the virus from spreading and mutating, no.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Didn't we establish last week the vaccine is not effective at
| stopping the spread of the virus?
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| More or less yes. The initial narrative of the jab as
| panacea has since evolved. The talking point now focuses on
| reducing hospitalization and death. The bit about the jab
| stopping transmission has been dropped as the number of so
| called breakthrough cases increases. Press Secretary Jen
| Psaki comes to mind.
| kps wrote:
| Stopping entirely, no. Reducing, yes.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Depends on how you define effective.
|
| 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
| Sindisil wrote:
| No.
|
| 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.
| isolli wrote:
| That vaccines reduce spread significantly is possible,
| and we can hope that they do, but it is not proven yet.
| sjg007 wrote:
| If everyone was vaccinated it would make a big difference.
| orra wrote:
| People act astonished the COVID vaccines aren't perfect.
| You mentioning universal vaccination is such a key point.
| Let's look at smallpox.
|
| 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.
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| No: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/vaccinated-
| people...
| finolex1 wrote:
| It's not a binary yes-no question. It is still effective at
| stopping the spread of the virus, though not perfect.
| incrudible wrote:
| What exactly you would consider "effective"?
|
| 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=3
| 949410
|
| [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/
| fsh wrote:
| The first study is clearly underpowered to say anything
| about the risk after more than around 150 days. This can
| be seen in figures 2 and S1, where the confidence
| intervals get larger than the effect size at around this
| point. Combining multiple age groups together also leads
| to a large risk of getting incorrect results due to
| Simpson's paradox [1]. But with so little data, the
| authors probably couldn't stratify for age groups without
| the confidence intervals exploding.
|
| 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-...
|
| [2] https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)02183-8
| makomk wrote:
| It's not quite a binary yes-no question, but the vaccines
| not being effective enough for it to be possible to
| achieve herd immunity through vaccination alone makes a
| huge difference in how widely the virus ends up
| spreading.
| ralmeida wrote:
| Comparable individual outcome, worse societal outcome - you
| still spread it, so no reduction in overall cases, unlike a
| vaccine.
| FjolsvithAase wrote:
| Yet, with the COVID vaccine, you still spread it, too:
|
| 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?
| ralmeida wrote:
| Do you have a source for R0 being _absolutely equal_ in
| vaccinated vs unvaccinated?
| chki wrote:
| While a vaccine is not 100% effective in preventing the
| spread of new cases it is at least somewhat effective.
| helge9210 wrote:
| Vaccine doesn't prevent spreading.
| ralmeida wrote:
| Citation needed - and note I didn't say it prevents "100%
| of spreading"
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| No: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/vaccinated-
| people...
| gadders wrote:
| I thought the latest research was that the vaccinated can
| still spread COVID?
| ralmeida wrote:
| Some might, but not all, which is still a reduction
| nradov wrote:
| I encourage everyone eligible to get vaccinated if they can,
| but it does little to prevent spread. Over the long run we'll
| all be exposed no matter what we do. The real benefit of
| vaccines is in reducing the risk of severe symptoms.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-
| immu...
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| > ...but it does little to prevent spread.
|
| Actually it does reduce transmission
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/vaccinated-
| people...
| nradov wrote:
| Vaccination slightly reduces the risk of transmission for
| individual interactions (at least for a while) but that
| just stretches the curve out a little. Since SARS-CoV-2
| is now endemic throughout the worldwide human population
| (plus several other mammal species) we can all expect to
| be exposed multiple times throughout our lives no matter
| what we do. Fortunately the vaccines are very effective
| at preventing deaths.
|
| https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS147
| 3-3...
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I don't think either of those sources justifies "does
| little to prevent spread." The language used in them is
| considerably more hedged, eg:
|
| "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.
| ralmeida wrote:
| > it does little to prevent spread
|
| 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?
| nradov wrote:
| "The most statistically significant data point is that
| vaccinated people certainly have a faster rate of viral
| decline," said Ferguson, "so they may potentially be
| infectious for less time, but they don't necessarily have
| any reduced peak of viral load. Most transmission
| probably happens around that peak of viral load, which is
| why we think we're still seeing substantial transmission
| rates from vaccinated people, both to unvaccinated people
| and to other vaccinated people."
|
| https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2638
| jensensbutton wrote:
| Minus the preventative part.
| rbut wrote:
| Preventative of what?
|
| 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/PIIS147
| 3-3...
| spankalee wrote:
| From your own link:
|
| "Vaccination reduces the risk of delta variant infection
| and accelerates viral clearance."
| dmingod666 wrote:
| vaccines do not work if administered after infection -- this is
| after infection and symptoms.
| G79 wrote:
| as "good" as...as in...its effectiveness % reduces in line with
| the increase in profits?
| dTP90pN wrote:
| Minus the high safety profile current vaccines exhibit.
| rob_c wrote:
| why does this site make it so difficult to escape back in history
| again? someone please shoot that designer.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| We had reports of people who wanted to take weird-ass drugs-of-
| the-day just to refuse getting vaccinated. And screaming
| "conspiracy" when their efficacy was not confirmed to be as high
| as they expected.
|
| Good that we have something that actually works, bad that some
| assholes will use it as an excuse not to get vaxxed, completely
| missing the point (among others, trying to prevent something
| worse than Delta).
| foolinaround wrote:
| > weird-ass drugs-of-the-day
|
| which ones are you talking about?
| _Microft wrote:
| On top of that, they will most likely discredit the new drug,
| claim that it was only developed because there is no money in
| old drugs,... blablablah.
| civilized wrote:
| I think that crowd will hate on this new drug. It's from Big
| Pharma, very expensive, it's probably full of GMOs and brain-
| controlling chips from Bill Gates. They'll stick with their
| cheap, generic ivermectin.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| In Poland the "wonder drug" was amantadine and the "martyr"
| was dr Bodnar.
| tclancy wrote:
| And LUCIFERASE!
| adrianN wrote:
| That's the enzyme you take when you have trouble digesting
| Satan?
| tsywke44 wrote:
| No they won't. conspiracy theories are based on instincts and
| emotions not any science or rationality.
|
| pills are basically just food(=good) to the subconscious
| lizard brain, zero negative connotations from evolution, zero
| conspiracy theories
| civilized wrote:
| But if that were an iron truth, wouldn't people be
| comfortable with GMOs?
| tsywke44 wrote:
| GMO's is emotional, largely based on the public image
| around the word "mutant" meaning a hulk like green person
| that was irradiated by a James Bond villain etc
| base698 wrote:
| Or maybe spraying roundup on everything and suing small
| family farms for not using your GMO seed makes them the
| James Bond villain.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsa
| nto...
| kibwen wrote:
| And to be clear, this drug is not related to ivermectin:
| https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-067310377629
| pjkundert wrote:
| Except that they are both potent protease inhibitors.
|
| Other than that, you mean?
| thehappypm wrote:
| Why would a parasite drug have protease inhibition
| properties? Parasites don't have protease enzymes
| Fellshard wrote:
| Genuine question: is it necessary to get vaxxed if - all else
| held the same - the cost is not significantly higher for the
| antiviral? Wouldn't that cut the risk down so significantly
| that we can safely say, "Vaccinate if you're at-risk for your
| own protection, and have negligible risk otherwise"? This
| changes the entire risk calculation.
| cossatot wrote:
| Vaccination is in large part about beating the _epidemic_ ,
| i.e. the population-scale prevalence of the pathogen, by
| preventing most of the infections and therefore disease
| transmission. This pill is about treating disease symptoms,
| but while doing nothing to limit disease spread.
|
| So while on a personal level, there may not be dramatic
| differences in death rates etc., on a population level the
| differences are huge.
| orangepurple wrote:
| Incorrect, mRNA COVID vaccination is about reducing
| symptoms in infected patients. It does absolutely nothing
| to slow down or stop the spread of COVID.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| This is one of the most persistent pieces of
| misinformation I've seen, especially in the face of clear
| data.
|
| The reduction in transmission rate for the vaccinated is
| 89%. Even for someone with a breakthrough infection of
| the more contagious Delta variant being vaccinated means
| a 63% reduction.
|
| https://www.newscientist.com/article/2294250-how-much-
| less-l...
| Izkata wrote:
| It's become reflexive whenever people claim it stops
| transmission because all evidence for it is very _very_
| recent, while the claim of stopping transmission started
| to be used with authority as early as Feb 2021 with
| absolutely no evidence. Not even Pfizer 's press release
| in 2020 tried to claim they even researched it, let alone
| had a conclusion, despite people nowadays claiming
| otherwise.
| [deleted]
| orangepurple wrote:
| You are correct, it seems, if this trial is done
| correctly. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.1
| 0.14.21264959v...
| Nextgrid wrote:
| If your reason to not get the vaccine is to avoid yet-to-be-
| discovered side effects, wouldn't that apply to this drug as
| well though? Not to mention that the vaccines now have a
| year-long track record of safety despite widespread adoption,
| where as this one has yet to be deployed on such a large
| scale.
|
| Also, the vaccines work on a principle that's somewhat well
| understood, accepted and deemed safe: training the immune
| system by giving it something that looks like the virus so it
| can learn. The only novel part is how this "something that
| looks like the virus" is created (mRNA as opposed to weakened
| but real virus). On the other hand this new molecule has a
| totally different mechanism of action and the potential for
| side effects may be higher.
| sabujp wrote:
| yes vaccination 300% (i.e. single, second, and third booster
| dose when ready!) Drugs that have anti-biologic properties
| are never good for your body, neither is allowing symptoms to
| fully manifest before taking drugs. People should still get
| the vaccines. The drugs are a backup in case the virus still
| overwhelms your immune system or causes it to overreact.
| aneutron wrote:
| In my untrained eyes (from an edipemological point of view),
| it depends on many things. It's a slippery slope anyway ...
| But I sort of view it from a "practical ethics" point of view
| if you will ....
|
| First thing I noticed is these result actually select people
| who had the antiviral administered to them within 3 days of
| the symptoms appearing. I have personally known people who
| unfortunately died in a week tops after contracting the virus
| (they had pre-existing conditions, namely hypertension and
| diabetes).
|
| Which brings me to my next point: Suppose the antiviral
| exists and is viable to even beyond 85%. How much will it
| cost ? I'm not a US citizen, but I'm thinking insurances will
| rush to trying not to cover anyone who's not vaccinated or
| some shady shit because they always do. And how about 3rd
| world countries like the one I come from. We can't even get
| RNA vaccines, let alone an experimental drug like this.
|
| And now my final and target point: Suppose you don't want to
| get the vaccine and you can afford the drug. We do have proof
| that even if the vaccine doesn't protect you from the virus
| completely, even in the unfortunate case where you do
| contract it, you'll end up infecting less people. Now if you
| choose to not get vaccinated, then you really do risk
| potentially contaminating more people that will either have
| no access to the antiviral within a reasonable effective
| timeframe(and that maybe not vaccinated either) or just plain
| infecting more people overall.
|
| Not the cleanest reasoning, and not a mathematical proof by
| any means, but I believe it's one of those "mathematical"
| problems where the proof is finding an edge case (sorry
| studied in french, really don't know how they say it in
| english).
| Jarmsy wrote:
| I guess even _if_ that were the case, there 'd still be the
| increased risk of catching and passing it to vulnerable
| people with reduced immunity.
| Steltek wrote:
| I'm guessing you only get this pill if you're hospitalized
| with severe symptoms. In which case, you're still occupying
| hospital beds/resources, which is the main remaining threat
| to rational society.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| It was to prevent hospitalization.
| mherdeg wrote:
| > which is the main remaining threat to rational society
|
| What is a "rational society" and what threatens it?
|
| My default view is Rawlsian: I'd like to live in a society
| which maximizes the well-being of the least well-off
| people, even if that's not currently me. In that framework
| one threat from a pandemic is that some at-risk people
| might die (people with some health conditions will die when
| infected and may not respond well to vaccination); that
| threat can be mitigated if people develop treatments, apply
| nonpharmaceutical interventions like indoor masking, and
| participate in community inoculation.
|
| There are other very different notions of a "rational
| society". In some, the premature death of people who are
| elderly, medically at-risk, or choose to avoid vaccination
| might be preferred outcomes. Hmmm.
| tsywke44 wrote:
| The same antivaxxers who "refuse to take experiemental drugs
| from big pharma Pfizer" will gobble this pill down no questions
| asked.
|
| Which just proves, the anti-vaxxer moment is based on the
| primitive instinct of "pain and needles=bad"
|
| Being scared of vaccines should be considered the same thing as
| having a fear of dentists. Or pets hating going to the vet.
| politician wrote:
| Do open random executables that you get in your email? If
| not, why not?
| tsywke44 wrote:
| No, I don't.
|
| But just like I can trust the things I buy from the grocery
| stone to not poison me or to have stones embedded inside, I
| trust medical products taken by millions or even billions
| of people
| politician wrote:
| People in urban areas like yourself only get food from
| the grocery store, so they naturally treat everything
| behind that as a black box. You have a learned belief in
| the "API of the City", and that's OK. The API tells you
| to inject yourself with random concoction that you can't
| independently verify and so you do it.
|
| People in rural areas see how food grows directly-- from
| the ground or from livestock. They can get food from the
| grocery or from their backyard: sometimes the backyard
| food is fresher and better. These folks don't trust the
| "API of the City" to provide for them. That's OK too. The
| API tells them to inject themselves with a random
| concoction that they can't independently verify and so
| they refuse.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I don't get injections or pills from random people stopping
| by my house.
| politician wrote:
| You trust the manufacturer and their supply chain on the
| value of their marketing efforts. That's OK.
| kibwen wrote:
| Do you apply random security patches signed by your distro
| maintainers?
| politician wrote:
| No, I have the type of job where reading the changeset is
| important. For this reason, I prefer to run NixOS.
| overboard2 wrote:
| I doubt it.
|
| Source: https://babylonbee.com/news/pfizer-releases-popular-
| new-drug...
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I'm not sure that's how it works. There's a calculus to this
| I don't quite understand.
|
| The group blesses and curses treatments based on
| contradictory criteria.
|
| Ivermectin is blessed, supposedly because it is cheap.
| Molnupiravir is cursed, because it is a new drug Big Pharma
| wants you to pay more for. The vaccines are cursed, even
| though they're cheap. Monoclonal antibodies are blessed, even
| though they are very expensive, and are effectively just the
| products of vaccination.
|
| I think it's more likely people are just doing what they are
| told by whoever influences them the most. None of it has to
| be consistent or make any kind of sense.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I'm being downvoted but in March, conservatives were
| screaming about how unfair it was that prisoners were
| getting their shots first. Things aren't always what they
| seem.
| base698 wrote:
| It's related to the Lindy effect.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
| rory wrote:
| > _some assholes will use it as an excuse not to get vaxxed,
| completely missing the point (among others, trying to prevent
| something worse than Delta)._
|
| It's still quite unclear whether vaccinated or unvaccinated
| people pose a greater risk via viral evolution (especially
| w/r/t risk to people that are already vaccinated). Basically
| comes down to a comparison of a higher level of spread with
| "normal" genetic drift vs. a somewhat lower (but still fairly
| high) level of spread with selection for immune escape of the
| current vaccine versions.
|
| It's still a good idea to get vaccinated to help your own
| reaction to the virus, and to keep hospitals at sustainable
| capacity, but the "UNVACCINATED ARE MAKING THE VIRUS MORE EVIL"
| claim is, at this point, more propaganda than fact.
|
| Here's some discussion:
| https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
| sabujp wrote:
| There's no bad propaganda when it comes to persuading people
| to get vaccinated. The alternative is the mess we're in now
| because people hesitate to get vaccinated. This study uses
| HIV to model sars mutation. HIV is highly mutagenic :
| https://www.google.com/search?q=hiv+mutation+rate&oq=hiv+muta
| tion+rate&aqs=chrome.0.0i512l6j0i22i30l4.1834j0j7&sourceid=ch
| rome&ie=UTF-8
|
| sar-cov2 is less mutagenic than the flu and far less than
| HIV:
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7539923/
|
| i.e. based on the PLOS study and the one above:
| 1. PLOS study constantly uses the word "risk" and "may", i.e.
| the authors don't know the actual probabilities of escape and
| use a mathematical model based on a far more mutagenic virus,
| HIV. 2. even if there's a low threshold for the virus
| to mutate, most of the mutations are not viable 3. so
| far we've seen only 4 dominant strains, the rest are being
| outcompeted : https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+domina
| nt+mutations+of+covid+are+there 4. It makes more
| logical sense to me that if your unvaccinated body takes 10
| days to mount a peak immune response (as mentioned in the
| PLOS study), that still gives the virus more time to mutate
| even if there are no pressures to mutate. There's lots of
| missing data in your study, particularly what exactly is the
| mutation rate for sars-cov-2 in vaccinated vs unvaccinated
| populations? But if we simply look at where the dominant
| mutations have come from so far, it's not from countries with
| high vaccination rates like Israel, New Zealand, or from
| asian countries that take serious measures at curbing the
| spread of the virus, singapore, japan, korea, china.
| rory wrote:
| > _There 's no bad propaganda when it comes to persuading
| people to get vaccinated_
|
| This is a very dangerous road to go down. I strongly
| disagree that the government and media should have license
| to lie to people if it's a useful lie in the moment. All
| that does is erode trust in those institutions, the longer
| term results of which are the root cause of most of the
| anti-vaccine sentiment today.
|
| > _PLOS study constantly uses the word "risk" and "may",
| i.e. the authors don't know the actual probabilities of
| escape and use a mathematical model based on a far more
| mutagenic virus, HIV._
|
| You're absolutely right. The experts are just guessing the
| odds of this stuff, and you and I are really only able to
| do the same, with even less certainty.
|
| > _It makes more logical sense to me that if your
| unvaccinated body takes 10 days to mount a peak immune
| response (as mentioned in the PLOS study), that still gives
| the virus more time to mutate even if there are no
| pressures to mutate_
|
| With all due respect, when dealing with probabilities like
| this, non-experts estimating what makes "logical sense" is
| completely useless.
|
| > _if we simply look at where the dominant mutations have
| come from so far, it 's not from countries with high
| vaccination rates like Israel, New Zealand, or from asian
| countries that take serious measures at curbing the spread
| of the virus, singapore, japan, korea, china._
|
| Israel and New Zealand have negligible populations on a
| world scale. The efficacy of social distancing in the east
| Asian countries you mentioned is clear, but completely
| unrelated to the question at hand. The delta variant came
| from India, a country of 1.4B people, before any of them
| had access to the vaccines. That tells us nothing about
| whether the vaccines net encourage or net discourage
| harmful virus evolution.
|
| It's okay to say we don't know, and in fact far better to
| do so than to make up a politically convenient answer.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| All those countries are small aside from China whose
| vaccine is not very effective and people with high East
| Asian ancestry have natural mutations against COVID.
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2818-3
|
| You say vaccination or serious measure, which is the truth?
| Could a mutation not occur elsewhere and infect a densely
| populated area? There isn't evidence that the places most
| affected were the origins of the virus mutations.
| splatcollision wrote:
| Easy - just brand it "ivermectan" and sit back and relax
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| It would be somewhat ironic if antivaxxers latch onto this
| drug, because it actually has a possibility of turning out to
| have bad side effects that will only show up much later
| (increased rates of cancer), which is a major reason that is
| given for people not wanting to get vaccinated.
|
| Edit: Actually I was confusing this with molnupiravir; this
| drug is presumably perfectly safe.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Why is the probability of late-appearing side effects higher
| for this than for the vaccine?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Because of its mechanism of action, which is to induce
| massive and deadly mutation and reproductive issues on the
| virus. Normally this should not have an effect on our
| bodies, but it's not impossible that it does lead to higher
| cancer rates.
| datameta wrote:
| > but it's not impossible that it does lead to higher
| cancer rates.
|
| That is almost a non-statement that _could_ be seemingly
| applied to anything with some pharmacological effect. I
| think you and I and every other layman are talking out of
| their ass when we make some kind of determination as to
| any side effects Paxlovid might have.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| It's not a non-statement, such effects are a serious
| concern for nucleoside analogs. But I can't say it's an
| actual issue or that it's definitely not because we just
| don't have sufficient data.
|
| You're correct that almost anything with a
| pharmacological effect has such concerns, which diminish
| with time. That's why prevention is superior to
| treatment.
|
| Also I wasn't talking about Paxlovid, but molnupiravir,
| which you'd also be taking.
| datameta wrote:
| I don't know enough about the difference between how
| viral RNA polymerase and human RNA polymerase function,
| but my hunch is the nucleotide substitution might not
| apply to us. This could be wrong.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| That's the hunch these drugs are based upon. But things
| in biochemistry are rarely black and white. There are
| people with serious experience in the field saying that
| there is a risk.
|
| Certainly the risk is lower than untreated covid, but
| it's just that if you can avoid the risk then all the
| better.
| [deleted]
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| Sorry I was confusing it with Merck's molnupiravir which
| could potentially cause genetic errors in humans. The drug
| this article is about is unlikely to have side effects that
| appear later.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > some assholes will use it as an excuse not to get vaxxed
|
| Well, they've succeeded in holding out long enough, now that
| there's no longer a good reason to get vaxxed. Because, as most
| people are starting to realize, the pandemic is over (at least
| in the US).
| kibwen wrote:
| _> the pandemic is over (at least in the US)_
|
| That remains to be seen. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New
| Years will be the test of this hypothesis.
| switchbak wrote:
| 1500 deaths a day, how is the pandemic over?
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Whether it's gun violence, suicides, drug overdoses, car
| accidents, or now Covid -- the US has an _insane_ threshold
| for what counts as an acceptable death rate.
| datameta wrote:
| It's potentially almost over thanks in large part to all the
| people who made the sensible society benefiting decision of
| taking the vaccine and/wearing a mask when in a non-dining
| public indoor space.
| cossatot wrote:
| A simple look at the time series shows that this is not the
| case in many places (e.g., Oregon, where I live):
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/oregon-covid-
| cas...
| cockzor wrote:
| It isn't the case!??
|
| Holy shit! There's a pandemic!
|
| Get the kids and run and hide!
|
| Holy fucking shit!!!
|
| PANDEEEEMMMIIICCC!!!! It's coming right for us!!!
| djrogers wrote:
| > completely missing the point (among others, trying to prevent
| something worse than Delta)
|
| Given that there isn't a ton of data showing that vaccination
| actually reduces infection or transmission, and all of the
| clinical studies before approval were based on hospitals death,
| I don't think you can claim that's 'the point'.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| The title is all marketing. What's the 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%. 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| If you read past said title, the article literally includes
| details on the control group.
|
| > 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.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| My point was that we don't know anything about the control.
| Age, BMI, health, vaccination status, sex.
|
| The effectiveness is very low.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > My point was that we don't know anything about the
| control. Age, BMI, health, vaccination status, sex.
|
| 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.
| salemh wrote:
| Is regulatory capture not a thing anymore? Why do you
| trust this company?
|
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| You've already copypasta'ed me this elsewhere.
| blackbear_ wrote:
| Note that to make the overall risk of adverse effects from
| covid19 lower, any treatment that is taken _after_ the onset of
| symptoms must be much more effective at preventing adverse
| effects _in symptomatic patients_ compared to a vaccine. This is
| because the vaccine greatly reduces the probabilty of symptomatic
| infections, while the other treatments do not.
| rob_c wrote:
| Grand. Anything which stops the idiots stopping us from getting
| back on with our lives is good. Not for me thanks, but it gives
| people options to make decisions for themselves.
| deworms wrote:
| By now you should have noticed that you're not "getting back on
| with your lives" no matter how good a boy you are and how many
| freedoms you give up. You should have resisted this from the
| start, this is your choice.
| rob_c wrote:
| Frankly given the work I've done demonstrating the anti
| science direction policy has taken and the work I've done to
| call out the bad "science" since the start you should be
| thankful for the work I've done.
|
| As for further "resistance" as soon as the 5G anti-vax
| nutters started i started looking out for me by putting money
| in the bank. My response from idiots insulting me over the
| last 2 years is too stop carrying about _your_ freedoms being
| taken. I'm looking out for me and I've had it with people
| pretending to understand topics without at least reading and
| properly understanding article summaries...
| busymom0 wrote:
| >5G anti-vax nutters
|
| I have yet to meet anyone who's unvaxxed because they think
| of some 5g conspiracy. I smell corporate media type elitism
| in your comment.
| dang wrote:
| You've been using HN primarily for political and
| ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that,
| regardless of what they're battling for or against,
| because it's destructive of everything this site is
| supposed to be for. Surely you know that?
|
| I'm not going to ban you right now, but please review the
| site guidelines and stop breaking them.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| deworms wrote:
| Hey, we're all in it together. I'm not the one "staying at
| home" or wearing masks though, so ironically this affects
| me less than it does you. We don't have any vaccine-related
| restrictions where I live either.
| dang wrote:
| Would you please stop posting flamewar comments and using
| HN for ideological battle? You've been doing it a lot and
| we ban that sort of account. It's not what this site is
| for, and it destroys what it is for.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. It makes
| discussions predictable, tedious, and nasty.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| brink wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| brianmcc wrote:
| It's unusual but not unheard of for trials to be stopped ahead
| of schedule because of this - the treatment is so clearly and
| substantially beneficial it's considered unethical to continue
| depriving the control group of the treatment.
|
| When to Stop a Clinical Trial Early for Benefit: Lessons
| Learned and Future Approaches:
|
| https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCHEARTFAILURE.111...
| tinus_hn wrote:
| In this case the alternative to the trial would be the
| 'dangerous' option of no treatment. So that doesn't really
| apply here.
| putnambr wrote:
| How does it not apply here? Are you saying that no
| treatment (right now there are no standards of care for
| COVID-19) is not dangerous? If I recall correctly, that
| option is leading to people dying.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Read again.
|
| > 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.
| imeron wrote:
| Standard double blind trial protocol: you sign up for the
| trial. You might get the actual drug or you might get placebo.
| It's double blind because not even the doctor knows who gets
| what.
| jeffbee wrote:
| They randomly assign people to the control or treatment cohort.
| Don't forget there's also the chance that the treatment gives
| patients liver cancer or some other yet-unknown adverse
| outcomes.
| [deleted]
| kenjackson wrote:
| It's a trial. That's not how they distribute it outside of a
| trial.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> 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.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| The alternative is what we have right now, 'scientists'
| blathering about their assumptions with the constant disclaimer
| that nobody really knows for real.
|
| Real science does have a price.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| > Real science does have a price.
|
| 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.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > 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?
| tinus_hn wrote:
| No, I am talking about 'scientists' telling others that
| Covid-19 is magically limited to a 1.5m or 6 feet circle
| (depending in which country you live). Or that they have to
| be really careful outside, and that it's more safe to not
| go for a walk and fatten up in front of the TV. Or that
| 'covid 0' is a valid policy and that if it doesn't work it
| is the fault of this week's scapegoat. And then censoring
| anyone who would dare to point out the lack of logic.
| [deleted]
| woodruffw wrote:
| Nobody, and I mean _nobody_ , genuinely believes that
| COVID-19 can't be spread when social distancing measures
| are perfectly observed. The 1.5m/6ft distance was chosen
| based on both epidemiological models that show
| statistical decreases in contagion _and_ the political
| reality that people (understandably) get very upset the
| more you ask them to stay away from other people.
|
| 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.
| Izkata wrote:
| > The 1.5m/6ft distance was chosen based on both
| epidemiological models that show statistical decreases in
| contagion
|
| 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.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| The US is not the world and really, a lot of people have
| made a lot of truly strange statements.
|
| 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!'
| adolph wrote:
| Seems like some of the emergency nature of C19 development
| is altering previous ethical guidelines.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01299-5
| woodruffw wrote:
| This is a correspondence piece, offering the _opinion_ of
| a WHO working group. The opinion is also not the one you
| might assume: it proposes unblinding _some subjects_ ,
| not _researchers_ , based on COVID-19 morbidity risk.
|
| 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.
| stephen_g wrote:
| Well, the other possibility is the drug could turn out to have
| severe side effects including death, so either way you take a
| risk.
|
| 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.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Keep in mind, it can go the other way as well. That the drug
| leads to worse outcomes than a placebo. This is why there are
| trials. This is why they are voluntary.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| That's great news! But remember that lowering the death rate has
| a linear effect, while the R0 has an exponential one.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| I hope this proves to be real going forward. The vaccination
| route seems to be hitting a deadend as a way to end the pandemic.
| The pill will have to be cheap and available over the counter, it
| makes no sense not to subsidize this.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| They didn't mention side effects at all.
| JanSt wrote:
| I think less than in the placebo group, so none really
| cblconfederate wrote:
| True, OTOH unless the side effects are worse than covid, this
| is absolutely game changing
| Ginden wrote:
| There is catch for antiviral drugs - like antibacterial drugs,
| they can lead to selection of resistant strains. Therefore, we
| can't just give it away to everyone without any control.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| we re already doing that with vaccines which are given to
| more people. Besides this does not stop the virus from
| transmitting, but it mitigates its harmful effect
| jolts wrote:
| Amazing how many cucks on HN are afraid of a virus with 99.97%
| recovery rate. Natural immunity > vaccines
| dang wrote:
| We've banned this account for posting unsubstantive comments /
| flamebait.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| shoto_io wrote:
| This is Pfizer's antiviral drug. Merck's drug might be effective
| as well, but if seems like to be also a drug with many side
| affects interfering with your genome.
|
| 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...
| apendleton wrote:
| Per the article:
|
| > As a protease inhibitor, Paxlovid is free from the
| theoretical DNA-alteration risk tied to the mechanism of action
| of Merck's molnupiravir.
| charles_f wrote:
| > compared to 41 hospitalizations and 10 deaths in the placebo
| cohort
|
| 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
| ImaCake wrote:
| It is sad and unfortunately needed. You will note they stopped
| this study at the first "interim analysis". One of the really
| important reasons such interim analyses are done is precisely
| to stop a trial when it so obviously works. They then switch
| anyone in the placebo group to the real drug.
|
| 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.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Yeah, I would consider that 10 people likely did not die
| because they enrolled and got lucky.
| jpambrun wrote:
| Some patient next to them are not even offered to be part of
| this draw, and winning this draw (i.e. getting the real
| medicine) may lead to severe adverse effects.
|
| It would be unethical if this placebo was given in place of a
| known working alternative treatment.
| thomascgalvin wrote:
| > 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.
| epylar wrote:
| in this case there was no standard of care
| jbrnh wrote:
| This is why the trial was stopped due to efficacy.
| destitude wrote:
| Is probably just a large dose of vitamin D with other inert
| ingredients making it patentable. Vitamin D has already had
| research showing same results but you can't patent Vitamin D
| alone.
| stnmtn wrote:
| Why would you say this without doing any research or looking
| into this at all?
|
| 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?
| m0zg wrote:
| Rejoice, for pfizermectin is now upon us. Did they at least test
| the study participants for natural immunity ahead of time?
|
| In related news, Merck's molnupiravir has been approved in the UK
| as well.
| tzs wrote:
| > [...] patients who received Paxlovid within five days of
| symptom onset [...]
|
| 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.
| jaywalk wrote:
| I wonder if having an effective oral antiviral readily
| available will result in someone who would have acted in the
| manner you suggest seeking this treatment instead.
| grey413 wrote:
| My understanding is that other antivirals are much less
| effective after the first week or so of infection.
| swader999 wrote:
| Why not just treat it at home with ivermectin if it works? It
| did for me for long covid.
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