I mean God forbid if there were a cheap cure for covid. No, can't have that.
Unfortunately, there isn't. That's why every major country in the world is looking for one.
Are you familiar with who Jair Bolsonaro is?
Well he's the 65 year old president of Brazil, a country of 210+ million people.
So when Bolsonaro contracted covid over the summer, presumably he had access to some of the best healthcare in the world.
And what did he & his team of doctors choose for his treatment? Well they chose HCQ + zinc.
And in a matter of days, Bolsonaro had beaten covid and was back on the job, better than ever.
So why do you persist in saying HCQ isn't effective?
Well I know the reason why. It's because we all have our favorite media outlets, and unless our favorite journalist blesses a given position, we reject it out of hand.
It's tribalism in action, but it's not a good look, so I would encourage anyone to rediscover the joys of thinking for yourself.
At least give it a try sometime, for you just might like it.
Effectiveness has to be studied and that will take time.
Even Vitamin D might help in some cases but everything needs to be studied.
We can't take the clinical approach used for one person and then extrapolate it to the wider population.
That doesn't work.
Clinically speaking, your medical advisor will do what he/she considers best for you given your own particular state of health.
Right now there simply isn't a cure for COVID-19 and there is still a lot to be learned.
The fact that Bolsonaro recovered doesn't mean the treatment he received can be considered a cure.
He's just another Trump sycophant. Whatever Trump does, he does.
This has nothing to do with Trump. A buddy of mine is a physician and was prescribing HCQ to his patients before Trump popularized the drug.
Just because Trump likes HCQ, doesn't mean it's not effective, as Jair Bolsonaro aptly proved to anyone paying attention.
Interestingly, my doctor (who is a head physician at his university) also endorsed the use of HCQ when I asked him in a completely non-political context.
I mean God forbid if there were a cheap cure for covid. No, can't have that.
Unfortunately, there isn't. That's why every major country in the world is looking for one.
Are you familiar with who Jair Bolsonaro is?
Well he's the 65 year old president of Brazil, a country of 210+ million people.
So when Bolsonaro contracted covid over the summer, presumably he had access to some of the best healthcare in the world.
And what did he & his team of doctors choose for his treatment? Well they chose HCQ + zinc.
And in a matter of days, Bolsonaro had beaten covid and was back on the job, better than ever.
So why do you persist in saying HCQ isn't effective?
Well I know the reason why. It's because we all have our favorite media outlets, and unless our favorite journalist blesses a given position, we reject it out of hand.
It's tribalism in action, but it's not a good look, so I would encourage anyone to rediscover the joys of thinking for yourself.
At least give it a try sometime, for you just might like it.
Why? Because what you've described is how superstition works, not science. It's well established that individual reactions to COVID-19 vary widely, from asymptomatic to death. You could just as accurately describe what Bolsonaro had for breakfast as a "cure" as you could his supposed regimen of hydroxychloroquine and zinc. Medical science uses clinical trials because it takes a lot of data to be able to filter correlation from noise, and even more data to draw conclusions about causation. Claiming that because one or even a few cherry-picked anecdotal cases look, through rose-colored glasses, like a cure, is like declaring victory in an election before all the votes are counted.
The truth is that it's people like Bolsonaro and Trump who politicized hydroxychloroquine, because they were motivated to have something on hand they could claim as a cure, even when there's little or no science to back the claim. It's also well-known that Bolsonaro is not a reliable source of truthful information about much of anything, so taking his claims about his illness and/or treatment at face value is not advisable.
Also, using science as the guide, there is a difference between noting that there isn't sufficient evidence that something is an effective therapeutic drug or "cure," and saying that it is not an effective therapeutic drug or "cure." Given that context, noting that a particular drug has been around for years does not render it "safe" for use in a novel application, especially when that novel application would likely involve vastly more people than its previously intended use. Each use of a drug must undergo a risk/benefit analysis. This drug has been used as a treatment for people who have malaria. Given the high rate of severe symptoms for malaria patients, the risk of any of the long list of side effects for HCQ are probably warranted. So even if it were shown to be effective against COVID-19, it's still a very different risk/benefit calculation, given the wide scope of symptom severity for COVID. Complicating things further, if the risk calculation limited HCQ use to only more severe cases, there would be a statistical challenge in assessing its effectiveness in that smaller number of cases.
So at this point, the science is still at best inconclusive with regards to this drug, and it is unhelpful for people to continue to promote it for political reasons as something it's not, based on anecdotal evidence like, "There's this one guy and HE took it and is fine, so let's give it to everybody!"
Lives are indeed at stake, and politicizing this drug just to claim to have a "cure" is indeed disgusting and reprehensible.
Interestingly, my doctor (who is a head physician at his university) also endorsed the use of HCQ when I asked him in a completely non-political context.
Yeah, one of the more asinine aspects of 2020 is why in the world a 60 year old malaria drug should suddenly become so hotly politicized. Lives are potentially at risk, and people want to play politics? Kinda disgusting.
"At the end of the study, 6.3 percent of those who took the hydroxychloroquine had tested positive for COVID-19 while 6.6 percent of those who took the placebos were positive. None required hospitalization. Additionally, there was no difference detected in the heart rhythms between those in either arm of the study, which showed that while the drug had no preventive effect, it was also not detrimental, outside of some temporary side effects like diarrhea for some.
“The differences we saw were negligible,” Amaravadi said. “And those who did get the virus, whether they were taking hydroxychloroquine or not, were all asymptomatic or had very mild forms of COVID-19.”
While the study was originally slated to recruit 200 health care workers, an analysis along the way showed that a continuation of enrollment would not yield different results. An independent data safety and monitoring board reviewed the findings and concurred".
Please put all efforts into simple, preventive universal 1.5m detection. Use BT, UW, LiDAR, NFC, TOF, AirDrop proximity detection and all other high-profile technologies to their extreme. How hard can it be now that the Covid API already uses a form of proximity-detection and the Measurement app has sub-millimeter precision ?
I just had a vision of your idea come to fruition. If anyone comes within 1.5m, Siri loudly exclaims "GTFOutta my face!" And on public transport there'll be hundreds of phones all barking the same thing. O brave new world, that has such things in it!
Comments
Even Vitamin D might help in some cases but everything needs to be studied.
We can't take the clinical approach used for one person and then extrapolate it to the wider population.
That doesn't work.
Clinically speaking, your medical advisor will do what he/she considers best for you given your own particular state of health.
Right now there simply isn't a cure for COVID-19 and there is still a lot to be learned.
The fact that Bolsonaro recovered doesn't mean the treatment he received can be considered a cure.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7341710/
The truth is that it's people like Bolsonaro and Trump who politicized hydroxychloroquine, because they were motivated to have something on hand they could claim as a cure, even when there's little or no science to back the claim. It's also well-known that Bolsonaro is not a reliable source of truthful information about much of anything, so taking his claims about his illness and/or treatment at face value is not advisable.
Also, using science as the guide, there is a difference between noting that there isn't sufficient evidence that something is an effective therapeutic drug or "cure," and saying that it is not an effective therapeutic drug or "cure." Given that context, noting that a particular drug has been around for years does not render it "safe" for use in a novel application, especially when that novel application would likely involve vastly more people than its previously intended use. Each use of a drug must undergo a risk/benefit analysis. This drug has been used as a treatment for people who have malaria. Given the high rate of severe symptoms for malaria patients, the risk of any of the long list of side effects for HCQ are probably warranted. So even if it were shown to be effective against COVID-19, it's still a very different risk/benefit calculation, given the wide scope of symptom severity for COVID. Complicating things further, if the risk calculation limited HCQ use to only more severe cases, there would be a statistical challenge in assessing its effectiveness in that smaller number of cases.
So at this point, the science is still at best inconclusive with regards to this drug, and it is unhelpful for people to continue to promote it for political reasons as something it's not, based on anecdotal evidence like, "There's this one guy and HE took it and is fine, so let's give it to everybody!"
Lives are indeed at stake, and politicizing this drug just to claim to have a "cure" is indeed disgusting and reprehensible.
https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/news-releases/2020/september/hydroxychloroquine-no-more-effective-than-placebo-in-preventing-covid19
"At the end of the study, 6.3 percent of those who took the hydroxychloroquine had tested positive for COVID-19 while 6.6 percent of those who took the placebos were positive. None required hospitalization. Additionally, there was no difference detected in the heart rhythms between those in either arm of the study, which showed that while the drug had no preventive effect, it was also not detrimental, outside of some temporary side effects like diarrhea for some.
“The differences we saw were negligible,” Amaravadi said. “And those who did get the virus, whether they were taking hydroxychloroquine or not, were all asymptomatic or had very mild forms of COVID-19.”
While the study was originally slated to recruit 200 health care workers, an analysis along the way showed that a continuation of enrollment would not yield different results. An independent data safety and monitoring board reviewed the findings and concurred".