Covid: Lucky 13

[River_Ghost]

I like mine with imaginary sauce.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I like mine with imaginary sauce.

Ivermectin? The Study? Something else?

 

[Narz]

The US hardly locked down

Wut?

My daughter missed half a year of school and I'm in one of the best states, others had it much much worse.

 

[River_Ghost]

Ivermectin? The Study? Something else?

My nothing burger on an empty bun. I love the imaginary sauce. I was having a laugh.

Ivermectin works. Covid-19 was initially, deadly. In typical fashion as viruses are want to do, it evolved. The more lethal strains burned through patients quickly and the less lethal adapted to have longer, or at least equivocal incubation times, with far less severe health effects. Apparently while all this was going on, the common cold, the flu, and the crud all decided Covid is the new big dick in town, hit the road, and we haven't seen them since. Seemingly, we all memory holed the fact they even existed. We Covid now. Everything's a Covid. Get hit by a car and then eaten by a lion? It was the Covid that finished you off. Die of type 1 diabetes that's been eating you alive for years? It was the Covid. Get knifed in a parking lot because your wifes boyfriend wants her to himself? Covid. Jokes aside. I'm not saying it wasn't real. I'm saying it was more hysteria then anything else. The economic, political, and societal impacts it had are far more real and devastating then anything else. If someone is really that worried about it, look to monoclonal antibodies, vitamins, and ivermectin. If you want to go all natural, Elderberry, Echinacea, and Reishi mushroom.

Personally, I'm more concerned with the legislations they pushed through while everybody was held up in their houses wearing gas masks to watch netflix. No one worried about mutations of the influenza virus, if anything, the gas and food prices should be scaring you more then the Covid. Buy beans and rice, not face masks.

 

[Berzerker]

from your link:

There was one situation in which ivermectin might have been helpful, however. Some of the volunteers with severe COVID symptoms seemed to recover a little bit faster, but this result requires further research for confirmation because the numbers were so small. The investigators plan to increase the dose and duration of ivermectin among severely ill patients to test that hypothesis.

so in mild to moderate cases there was no 'statistical' benefit (it helps a little?) but might help people with more severe covid?

 

[Berzerker]

https://www.science.org/content/art...und-trial-saw-77-reduction-covid-19-mortality

It would be the best news by far in COVID-19 treatment: According to a preprint published on 22 June, an experimental prostate cancer drug named proxalutamide reduced deaths in hospitalized COVID-19 patients by 77% in a clinical trial in Brazil. The preprint also claims the drug, which blocks the activity of androgens—male hormones such as testosterone—cut patients' average hospital stay by 5 days, far more than any other treatment yet tested.

Another study from Brazil with the same guy who helped produce the prophylactic Ivermectin study.

Speaking of that other study, I found a rebuttal from politifact (not endorsing them, but they got input from the author):

https://www.politifact.com/factchec...brazil-ivermectin-covid-19-prevention-flawed/

The Municipal Health Department of Itajaí said in January of 2021 — a year before the study was published — that 138,216 residents took the first dose of ivermectin when it started distributing the drug as part of a citywide program. That number fell to 93,970 people taking the second and third doses, and 8,312 taking the fourth and fifth doses, the department said.

What the study’s authors say

The study’s authors acknowledged the uncertainty about the drug regimen in the "discussion" section of the publication. Dr. Flavio Cadegiani, corresponding author of the study, also addressed it in an email to PolitiFact, arguing the results would be even better in a controlled study if all users had taken the drug regularly.

I would like to know how the people who took the 4th and 5th doses did in comparison with other participants. How many took 2 and how many took 3 and 4? Lets see how they did.

The author said if more people took the doses the results would be even better, can he back that up by showing better outcomes for the people taking the 5 doses and how long did the protection last and how have they done since on avoiding re-infection or severity? I wouldn't think a few doses would have a lasting effect unless its teaching the body somehow like vaccines. If it had a lasting effect people and animals wouldn't need retreatment, but thats for parasites.

I'm surprised we still dont have a solid go to medication to treat covid. Or do we? Or did? Maybe the monoclonal antibodies were less effective against omicron and more recent variants.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I'm saying it was more hysteria then anything else.

Tell that to the families of the 1 million dead.

 

[Birdjaguar]

from your link:

There was one situation in which ivermectin might have been helpful, however. Some of the volunteers with severe COVID symptoms seemed to recover a little bit faster, but this result requires further research for confirmation because the numbers were so small. The investigators plan to increase the dose and duration of ivermectin among severely ill patients to test that hypothesis.

so in mild to moderate cases there was no 'statistical' benefit (it helps a little?) but might help people with more severe covid?

Link quotes:

“There was no significant benefit in our primary endpoint of resolution of symptoms in mild-to-moderate COVID-19 illness. Overall, most people improved their symptoms whether they took ivermectin or not. Given these results, there does not appear to be a role for ivermectin outside of a clinical trial setting, especially considering other available options with proven reduction in hospitalizations and death.”

Drilling Down on the Data:
If ivermectin were the cure for COVID, we should have seen very clear evidence that patients got better way faster than people on placebo. That did not happen. People taking the sugar pills got better in about 11.5 days. Those on ivermectin recovered in about 11 days. What was the difference between placebo and ivermectin? About half a day (12 hours). Not a dramatic “cure.” For the metrics that really mattered, hospitalization or death, there was no statistically significant difference between the patients on placebo and those who got ivermectin. There was just one death during the clinical trial, and it happened to a patient on ivermectin.

Was There a Glimmer of Good News for Ivermectin?
There was one situation in which ivermectin might have been helpful, however. Some of the volunteers with severe COVID symptoms seemed to recover a little bit faster, but this result requires further research for confirmation because the numbers were so small. The investigators plan to increase the dose and duration of ivermectin among severely ill patients to test that hypothesis.

Link to the actual study: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.06.10.22276252v1

 

[River_Ghost]

Tell that to the families of the 1 million dead.

The last I heard, it was 8 million. So. I guess we'll never really know how many actually died because none of the information about it can be trusted, because it comes from untrustworthy sources who literally had monetary interests in promoting it and lying to us all about it. As I said, it was more hysteria then anything. And I doubt we will hear any truth about it in the future, what would the truth about Covid even look like? If it looks like the information we get now, I'll go ahead and make up my own mind about it.

 

[Samson]

The last I heard, it was 8 million. So. I guess we'll never really know how many actually died because none of the information about it can be trusted, because it comes from untrustworthy sources who literally had monetary interests in promoting it and lying to us all about it. As I said, it was more hysteria then anything. And I doubt we will hear any truth about it in the future, what would the truth about Covid even look like? If it looks like the information we get now, I'll go ahead and make up my own mind about it.

I agree we will never know, but there are lots of people looking and using proper scientific methods. It does not look principaly motivation driven to me.

 

[MrCynical]

The author said if more people took the doses the results would be even better, can he back that up by showing better outcomes for the people taking the 5 doses and how long did the protection last and how have they done since on avoiding re-infection or severity? I wouldn't think a few doses would have a lasting effect unless its teaching the body somehow like vaccines. If it had a lasting effect people and animals wouldn't need retreatment, but thats for parasites.

Answering these or any other questions around the Itajai study is more or less impossible due to its messy, uncontrolled nature. There's also the problem that for much of the data we have only the authors' word that it is accurate. And we have very good reason to doubt their honesty. They failed to disclose numerous conflicts of interest when required to, resulting in the journal having to publish the linked warning. Of the 9 authors, 3 are heavily involved with the pseudoscientific FLCCC group, which expressly advocates for Ivermectin in the absence of evidence. Even worse is Hibberd, who's the founder of two separate anti-vaxxer groups. No one with a shred of scientific integrity would have anything to do with her. The two who are merely paid consultants for Ivermectin manufacturers seem an almost trivial issue by comparison.

The new proxalutamide study I can only see one common author - Cadegiani, one of the FLCCC lot, but it's enough for me to cast a particularly skeptical eye on it, given he's the lead. The preprint paper claims a 77% reduction in mortality, but the underlying numbers make little sense. They report around 11% mortality rate for those taking proxalutamide, and 49% for placebo. But the thing is, we typically see a mortality rate of 10% or less for hospitalised Covid patients. It's not that the numbers for proxalutamide are particularly good - they're about what you'd expect for placebo. It's that their placebo group stats are unbelievably awful! If that information is accurate, the question we need to be asking isn't whether proxalutamide works - it's what on earth was going on during that trial that killed so many of the placebo group patients.

I'm surprised we still dont have a solid go to medication to treat covid. Or do we? Or did? Maybe the monoclonal antibodies were less effective against omicron and more recent variants.

Well, antivirals have never been easy, but we do have some new drugs which have modest effects - the mabs are probably the best as yet. Compare to flu - even after decades of work we're still looking at stuff like Tamiflu, which shaves a matter of hours off the symptoms at best.

 

[innonimatu]

What was the common term used for negative immune imprinting by previous variants? Oh yest, original antigenic sin.

What else can cause such negative imprinting? Anything that exposes the different variety of antigen to the immune system.
My country has the most vaccinated population in the world. It also has the most covid cases recorded per capita. And the online state database for all-cause mortality shows the highest numbers for April and May since records there begin in 1980.

Make of this what you will. I know what other questions I would like to ask in the discussion of that paper, if I were an author. I also know I wouldn't actually ask it because it would be heresy and cause the paper to stick in a limbo.

 

[Kyriakos]

I agree we will never know, but there are lots of people looking and using proper scientific methods. It does not look principaly motivation driven to me.

Wouldn't excess deaths, when not verified (or even reported, in this graphic) by covid, be more likely due to lack of resources to treat serious illnesses due to congestion from appropriation of a large percentage of the hospital rooms to treat covid?
For cases that reach the hospital, eventually (including surgeries) this is easier to account for (cancelled/postponed surgeries with critical result), but not so much for loss of access to primary health examination/lack of diagnosis.

Ultimately, far more people died prematurely/before they would, despite not having/not being reported with covid. A question would be if more such died than all those who died due to covid.

 

[Samson]

Wouldn't excess deaths, when not verified (or even reported, in this graphic) by covid, be more likely due to lack of resources to treat serious illnesses due to congestion from appropriation of a large percentage of the hospital rooms to treat covid?
For cases that reach the hospital, eventually (including surgeries) this is easier to account for (cancelled/postponed surgeries with critical result), but not so much for loss of access to primary health examination/lack of diagnosis.

Ultimately, far more people died prematurely/before they would, despite not having/not being reported with covid. A question would be if more such died than all those who died due to covid.

It is true that excess deaths is very complex, from the link:

Excess deaths are a good indicator of COVID-19 deaths, Wang says, citing studies from Sweden and the Netherlands suggesting that COVID-19 was the direct cause of most excess deaths during the pandemic. But he stresses that such estimates also include deaths from other causes. More research is needed, he says, to separate deaths caused directly by COVID-19 from those that are the indirect results of the pandemic, such as those of people who did not have COVID-19 and died because of inadequate medical care in overwhelmed hospitals.​

There is some direct measures of underestimated covid mortality, for example this paper showing that in one hospital in Zambia ∼90% of all deaths were COVID-19 positive, and only ∼10% of COVID-19+ deaths were identified in life. There is a big margin for error in these estimates, but I have no doubt that the true number is much higher than the recorded death toll.

 

[The_J]

What was the common term used for negative immune imprinting by previous variants? Oh yest, original antigenic sin.

What else can cause such negative imprinting? Anything that exposes the different variety of antigen to the immune system.
My country has the most vaccinated population in the world. It also has the most covid cases recorded per capita. And the online state database for all-cause mortality shows the highest numbers for April and May since records there begin in 1980.

Make of this what you will. I know what other questions I would like to ask in the discussion of that paper, if I were an author. I also know I wouldn't actually ask it because it would be heresy and cause the paper to stick in a limbo.

Not to challenge your little conspiracy theory, but the UAE actually have a higher rate of vaccinations, and Portugal is closely followed by Cuba, Chile and Singapore, who all don't come close to Portugal in the number of current infections. And while I wouldn't necessarily believe the numbers from Cuba, at least Chile I would consider reliable.
So... maybe reality is more complicated as you imagine.

Numbers from
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases

 

[innonimatu]

I do believe Cuba's numbers. They have no reason to hide reality. Cuba and Chile have used different vaccines. Focusing only on the spike, precisely the portion that should have been avoided, was a defect of the ones deployed here. The portion that has mutated the most, the portion that is inherently toxic anyway... someday the error will be admitted, hut it just can't be admitted now. Too many people are fully invested in the "miracle". I don't mean financially, I mean emotionally and reputationally.

These vaccines were huge failures but all those who promoted them, and all those who still want to believe they enable them to "live with the virus", cannot just face failure. They failed at stopping the pandemic, the goalposts of the early propaganda were shifted to "protection against "disease". They failed at keeping symptoms away, the goalposts were again shifted to "reducing mortality". Now all-cause mortality is at record highs. I can state that as a fact both here for my country and for the USA, I have checked the numbers. You might want to do the same for France or Germany, I guess you will also find unexplained rises for the month of May compared to previous years. Possibly even previous years of the pandemic, not just the pre-pandemic era.
Here our "health authorities" claim that only about half the excess deaths are attributable to covid. The other half is oh-so-satisfying other causes. Which must not have anything to do with delayed damage done by covid, oh no sir.

Singapore does not have a completely incompetent government actively promoting spread of the virus by reopening everything for the sake of tourism. We get to import and spread the newest variants here, yay for us and for all those vacationers huh?

@Kyriakos excess deaths are hitting also younger demographics which that should not be suffering from lack of medical care a couple of years ago. Hospital chaos here was brief, and delays only affected elective procedures after the first and second waves. In fact covid worked as a "culling of the elderly and frail" which should have meant unusually low death rates now, if the damaging phase of the pandemic had ended. The fact that we are observing unusually high death rates now means that the health damage from the pandemic is not controlled, it is ongoing.
The people who warned that this virus damages the immune system, can easily damage a number of organs at each encounter with it, are very likely correct. But as bearers of bad news they keep being shunned.

How happy would you be with the idea of living with a virus capable of "scrambling the nucleus" of your neurons?

Early in the pandemic, a study showed that the virus attacks cells in the nose, called sustentacular cells, that provide nutrients and support to odour-sensing neurons.
Since then, clues have emerged about what happens to the olfactory neurons after infection. Researchers including biochemist Stavros Lomvardas at Columbia University in New York City examined people who had died from COVID-19 and found that, although their neurons were intact, they had fewer membrane-embedded receptors for detecting odour molecules than usual.

This was because the neurons’ nuclei had been scrambled. Normally, the chromosomes in these nuclei are organized into two compartments — a structure that enables the neurons to express specific odour receptors at high levels. But when the team looked at the autopsied neurons, “the nuclear architecture was unrecognizable,” Lomvardas says.

Covid does that. You better hope that it can't cross the blood-brain barrier. Oh bit the spike protein has been shown in other studies to enable that crossing. Apparently there's iteration with mechanisms that may enable it for the immune system under particular circumstances. R really bad news about covid have a way of not showing up on people's radars.
But this virus is bad, really bad, in non-immediately obvious ways.

 

[The_J]

Focusing only on the spike, precisely the portion that should have been avoided, was a defect of the ones deployed here. The portion that has mutated the most, the portion that is inherently toxic anyway.

Not to forget that it's the most obviously exposed and therefore the obvious target .
And then obviously under selection pressure, that is no surprise to anyone.

Now all-cause mortality is at record highs. I can state that as a fact both here for my country and for the USA, I have checked the numbers. You might want to do the same for France or Germany, I guess you will also find unexplained rises for the month of May compared to previous years. Possibly even previous years of the pandemic, not just the pre-pandemic era.
Here our "health authorities" claim that only about half the excess deaths are attributable to covid. The other half is oh-so-satisfying other causes. Which must not have anything to do with delayed damage done by covid, oh no sir.

Well, at least you're not talking covid deaths, since that is simply an effect of the overall spread, and is therefore higher in Portugal.

The mortality in Germany is slightly above average, which is due to shifted effects of the year before, see https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/S...ulation/Deaths-Life-Expectancy/mortality.html . But keep on the paranoia .

 

[innonimatu]

Paranoia you say? You should be aware that we've been playing a role of canary in terms of new variant spread. Those tourists will return home.

Thanks for the german data link. I see they set on blaming the flu for having higher death rates this year than the average or the previous one also. I take it that March-May 2021 despite covid's supposed to not have had any unusually high death rate? Strange that, don't you think?

I suggest you take a look at the June data when it becomes available. I wonder which excuse will be used.

 

[MrCynical]

Focusing only on the spike, precisely the portion that should have been avoided, was a defect of the ones deployed here. The portion that has mutated the most, the portion that is inherently toxic anyway... someday the error will be admitted, hut it just can't be admitted now. Too many people are fully invested in the "miracle". I don't mean financially, I mean emotionally and reputationally.

It's not really that vaccine development focused only on the spike protein, it's that the spike was the most successful target (to no one's surprise given the structure of the virus), and so is the one that has progressed to a working vaccine. There's been research ongoing looking at targeting the other protein components, in particular the nucleocapsid, such as in these:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(21)00358-X/fulltext
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/pdf/S2211-1247(21)01108-6.pdf

Results have been rather mixed - hence the tendency of looking at nucleocapsid targeting as an addition to the existing spike proteins rather than a substitute. Low immunogenicity has tended to be the issue targeting other proteins, but research is still in progress.

The objection that the spike is the portion that has mutated the most is mixing up cause and effect. It's under the most selection pressure, in part, although not solely, due to vaccines, hence has a large number of mutations. It's dubious if it's the most susceptible Covid protein to mutation in a more general sense. The E protein, given its poor conservation among related virus, would probably be the best contender for that spot. Highly conserved protein sections are problematic choices of target for a vaccine. That the virus has been able to get away with keeping those sections unchanged, over a long period by the standards of viral evolution, is usually a giveaway that they are inaccessible or otherwise difficult for antibodies to bind to. Hence poor or no immunogenicity on vaccines that target them. The very nature of evolution means that the bits the immune system can get at will inevitably undergo substantial mutation.

 

[innonimatu]

It is not a matter of mixing up cause and effect. It's a matter of vaccines being the wrong strategy for handling this pandemic.

It is a matter of rank incompetence of the people who decided that vaccines were the way out of the pandemic. That very same people, those who decided and those who, in positions of influence, backed the decisions produced an apparent "unanimity of experts" (which never actually existed, but was sufficient to shut down dissenters from the media), these people are now slowly - and far too late - turning around the narrative they themselves created and blaming it on "omicron". Buy hey at least Topol translated imprinting as the dreaded "antigenic sin", and noted the paper I mentioned here also. He's still married to the vaccines miracle though, supported it too much to change now.

The truth is that the vaccination strategy didn't fail due to the new variants as if that was a surprise. It failed because they discounted the known fact that coronaviruses mutate fast. That was incompetence #1: a vaccine was not a way out of this pandemic, could not be.

Incompetence #2 was the kind of vaccine supported and peddled, with no others being subsidized or even so much as tolerated (approved for use). Can you explain why western countries only ever approved 3 vaccines? Do you have any scientific explanation to justify "vaccine nationalism"? This is kind of besides the point because real useful vaccine to end this pandemic should have produced reasonably high immunity against caching the infection. And none of the many used across the world did. But it also shows imo evidence of state regulators carrying water for their favorite corporations - delivering captive markets. And if they are willing to junk science for that, won't they just science for approving an ineffective product?
A vaccine is not a way out, but a vaccine that did produce partial immunity could be part of a way out. These presently in sue are not even fit for that.

Incompetence #3 was the sloppy way in which the vaccination campaign was decided on and implemented, based on just a few corporate-run tests, and this rests on the politicians and the bureaucrats. They chose the "experts" to promote and platform, and to shut down the others. Wanted an easy way out and that was to be vaccines, originally on the promise of ending the pandemic ("you can throw away masks"), known even at the time to be false - "virtuous lies", that tenebrous guy name Fauci called it. Then continued based on "controlling" it - the boosters. In both cases I have said, and it remains blindingly obvious to me: vaccination is being used as an excuse to have people acquiesce with "living (dying) with the virus", avoiding ever having to make an effort to eliminate it. Or dropping such efforts, as it happened in Australia, NZ and more recently Taiwan.

In the meanwhile other "miracle cures", this time new medications, also have a dismal track record. First it was remdesivir, resulting in failure and possibly more harm than good for takers. Paxlovid more recently keeps failing in new trials, how is it supposed to act, again? If it did act as an antiviral, if Pfizer's claims were correct, how come it shows no efficacy in these trials? Increasingly it seems it only "worked" on the Pfizer-run trial! How many RCT apart from the Pfizer-ordered one, back Paxlovid as an effective treatment? And whatever happened to molnupiravir? Thankfully that aid to covid mutation seems to have been quietly discarded, but that at one point was peddled by authorities just shows how this whole process has been based on arbitrary decisions taken according to pharma industry lobbying efforts. A testing system where tests are paid for and effectively under the control of the party most interested in declaring it a"success", is broken. And people who attempt to publish how broken it is are blacklisted, cannot get media time. That is incompetence #4 , more properly called corruption, and also applies to the approval of these vaccines.

So, what is the way out from the pandemic? Waiting for worse variants is not a way out. Recognizing the failure of vaccines, and the fact that one cannot boost a way out of a virus that both evolves and disorients the immune system, may be a path in the right direction but it stills provides no way out - unless the way out for these "experts" is to say: "sorry we screwed you all. Good luck with surviving now".

I will remind, there is one known and proven technically sound way out. It always lacked but the political will to implement it.