A Pill To Treat Covid-19? The US Is Betting on It 203
The U.S. government spent more than $18 billion last year funding drugmakers to make a Covid vaccine, an effort that led to at least five highly effective shots in record time. Now it's pouring more than $3 billion on a neglected area of research: developing pills to fight the virus early in the course of infection, potentially saving many lives in the years to come. From a report: The new program, announced on Thursday by the Department of Health and Human Services, will speed up the clinical trials of a few promising drug candidates. If all goes well, some of those first pills could be ready by the end of the year. The Antiviral Program for Pandemics will also support research on entirely new drugs -- not just for the coronavirus, but for viruses that could cause future pandemics. A number of other viruses, including influenza, H.I.V. and hepatitis C, can be treated with a simple pill. But despite more than a year of research, no such pill exists to treat someone with a coronavirus infection before it wreaks havoc. Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's program for accelerating Covid-19 research, invested far more money in the development of vaccines than of treatments, a gap that the new program will try to fill.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a key backer of the program, said he looked forward to a time when Covid-19 patients could pick up antiviral pills from a pharmacy as soon as they tested positive for the coronavirus or develop Covid-19 symptoms. "I wake up in the morning, I don't feel very well, my sense of smell and taste go away, I get a sore throat," Dr. Fauci said in an interview. "I call up my doctor and I say, 'I have Covid and I need a prescription.'" Dr. Fauci's support for research on antiviral pills stems from his own experience fighting AIDS three decades ago. In the 1990s, his institute conducted research that led to some of the first antiviral pills for H.I.V., "protease inhibitors" that block an essential virus protein and can keep the virus at bay for a lifetime.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a key backer of the program, said he looked forward to a time when Covid-19 patients could pick up antiviral pills from a pharmacy as soon as they tested positive for the coronavirus or develop Covid-19 symptoms. "I wake up in the morning, I don't feel very well, my sense of smell and taste go away, I get a sore throat," Dr. Fauci said in an interview. "I call up my doctor and I say, 'I have Covid and I need a prescription.'" Dr. Fauci's support for research on antiviral pills stems from his own experience fighting AIDS three decades ago. In the 1990s, his institute conducted research that led to some of the first antiviral pills for H.I.V., "protease inhibitors" that block an essential virus protein and can keep the virus at bay for a lifetime.
F.U.D. in the modern age. (Score:2)
Whatever form still will not stop people saying stuff like this [youtu.be].
Treatment vs prevention (Score:3, Insightful)
The holy grail for the pharmaceutical industry is to develop treatments rather than permanent cures or preventions - they would rather have a repeat customer base that has to keep buying a pill every month to keep horror disease at bay rather than wipe out the disease with a permanent cure or vaccine.
Look at the plight of AIDS sufferers - decades of research and the pharma industry has created treatments that let someone keep clinging to life as long as they keep buying the pills, but still no vaccine available which could prevent the spread of the disease in the first place, or cures which get rid of the disease permanently.
Once it becomes possible to create temporary treatments rather than permanent cures, then of course research will focus on this and not on cures, because the industry is set up for profit first, most beneficial health outcome second.
Re:Treatment vs prevention (Score:5, Insightful)
Ya, vaccine research is easy. I'll bet you could whack together an AIDS vaccine in no time.
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So EASY people can't get their facts right on YouTube or other social media.
Re:Treatment vs prevention (Score:5, Interesting)
I know a lot of money has been spent on vaccines, and it is incredibly difficult to develop them, but there seems to be a lot more effort spent on treatments.
This paper seems to sum it up well.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
Investment by manufacturers in research and development of vaccines is relatively low compared with that
of pharmaceuticals. If current evaluation technologies favour drugs over vaccines, then the vaccines market
becomes relatively less attractive to manufacturers.
It is hard to believe in the benevolence of the industry when I read stories like companies pushing up insulin prices because they can, even though it was first developed in 1920's and with tax payer funding at that.
Other drug prescription costs have also increased hugely - at a much higher rate than inflation.
I see ads on TV telling me to "soldier on" with my cough or cold instead of staying home and avoiding infecting the rest of the office. Hardly what you would call great medical advice.
The industry spends significantly more on marketing than it does on research - and I was astonished at how much direct to public advertising there is on TV - ask you doctor about xyz for your heart condition etc. The right drug should be selected based on your doctor's advice, based on its scientific and medical merits, not based on slick advertising.
I am extremely fortunate in that I don't have any kind of condition that requires regular medication - but I dread the day that I do get told by my doctor I need to start taking statins for the rest of my life or something like that.
Better have a salad for lunch and go for another walk.
Re:Treatment vs prevention (Score:5, Interesting)
and I was astonished at how much direct to public advertising there is on TV
Not where I live. Advertising prescription medicines direct to the public is illegal.
The right drug should be selected based on your doctor's advice, based on its scientific and medical merits, not based on slick advertising.
Along with universal healthcare. You just need to move country.
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and I was astonished at how much direct to public advertising there is on TV
Not where I live. Advertising prescription medicines direct to the public is illegal.
We really screwed up when we allowed drugs and lawyers to put ads on television.
It has become a little concerning that antipsychotics have become mainstream.
But yeah, video of dancing seniors or depressed women dancing and smiling while the announcer reads off a list of sometimes fatal side effects is kinda weird. And the industry now has drugs to treat the side effects like tardive dyskinesia. Next up a drug to treat the side effects of the drug to treat whatever drug caused the tardive dyskinesia.
PRO
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One of the crazier ones I saw was an oral medication for toenail fungus (replacing a safe and effective topical treatment) that listed liver failure as a side effect. All so you can take a pill rather than put drops on your toenails.
Then you have the FDA handing out exclusivity on colchicine in exchange for some ass kissing and a worthless study. Sure enough, the cost went up 2 orders of magnitude. Note: George Washington took colchicine in herbal form, so grandfathered would be an understatement.
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One of the crazier ones I saw was an oral medication for toenail fungus (replacing a safe and effective topical treatment) that listed liver failure as a side effect. All so you can take a pill rather than put drops on your toenails.
Kind of like when an antibiotic gets prescribed for an earache. A couple drops of 3 percent Hydrogen peroxide a few times on one day, then warm Olive oil the next. Terrible thing is the antibiotic route takes several days. Peroxide sets up a ruckus in your ear, but is as close to instantaneous as you can get
Then you have the FDA handing out exclusivity on colchicine in exchange for some ass kissing and a worthless study. Sure enough, the cost went up 2 orders of magnitude. Note: George Washington took colchicine in herbal form, so grandfathered would be an understatement.
That's one I'm not familiar with. Thanks, I'll have to study up on it.
Re: Treatment vs prevention (Score:2)
https://www.contagionlive.com/... [contagionlive.com]
Re: Treatment vs prevention (Score:2)
Re: Treatment vs prevention (Score:2)
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Then that'll be the new anti-vaxxers argument. The one where no one wins because everyone's short-sighted just for different reasons.
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>"Then that'll be the new anti-vaxxers argument."
1) Some people did vaccinate and did not gain an adequate immune response.
2) Some people did vaccinate but not in time.
3) Some people had a bad reaction to the first injection and didn't follow up with the second.
4) Some people can't vaccinate because they are on other treatments for other illnesses.
5) Some people can't vaccinate because they have a weak or wiped-out immune system, or a severely over-reactive immune system.
Development of treatments is a go
Re: Treatment vs prevention (Score:2)
Re:Treatment vs prevention (Score:5, Interesting)
While I don't disagree with your assertion that big pharma has a conflict of interest when it comes to treatment vs cures, calling out AIDS is perhaps not as clear-cut as you might think.
Prior to AIDS, we really, really didn't understand very much about the immune system. It is precisely because of the millions upon millions of dollars from the NIH budget that went into understanding a disease that attacks the immune system that we now know so much about it. The COVID vaccines were developed so quickly in part because of the vast knowledge we have gained in the last few decades thanks to AIDS research. Because of AIDS research, we have much better cancer treatments, since cancer is fundamentally a failure of the immune system to recognize an unwanted set of cells. But, perhaps not surprisingly, it turns out to be a non-trivial issue to create a vaccine that protects against attacks on the immune system itself. There have been, I believe, dozens of attempts. Some even progressed to Phase III trials, but didn't do so well. One of the really, really challenging parts of creating a vaccine is that HIV knows exactly how and where to hide to evade detection, and how to mutate to circumvent any approach we've tried so far. HIV is an insidious pathogen.
The American public, unfortunately, mistakenly thinks that we can do anything we put our minds to. And rightly so, given the evidence. The Manhattan Project. Apollo. Both huge programs that succeeded against immense odds and produced spectacular results. Now with COVD vaccines, we have had similar success. But, it turns out that overcoming HIV is more difficult because the systems involved are far more complex. As I've written before, biology isn't rocket science, it is harder.
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I’m still holding out the 100 mile per gallon carburetor. Damn you big oil!
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Re:Treatment vs prevention (Score:4, Insightful)
Look at the plight of AIDS sufferers - decades of research and the pharma industry has created treatments that let someone keep clinging to life as long as they keep buying the pills, but still no vaccine available which could prevent the spread of the disease in the first place,
Vaccines work by stimulating the immune system, basically telling it "here is a disease that you have already seen, you know what to do." It makes your body acts like you've had the disease already.
So, immunization really only should work for diseases which people can get and recover from. If the result of having had the disease is not that you recover from the disease, telling your body "you've had this before"... won't do any good.
And AIDS is a weirdly tricky one, because the attack surface is the immune system. Since the immune system is what it's attacking, stimulating the immune system (if doing to means producing more CD4 cells) makes you more vulnerable, not less.
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The holy grail for the pharmaceutical industry is to develop treatments rather than permanent cures or preventions
There actually was a relatively recent case where they did develop a cure for something that had previously been one of those chronic treat-poorly-for-life diseases. I think it was Hepatitis C, though I'm not 100% sure.
Of course they priced this cure accordingly, charging an exorbitant price so as to compensate for the lack of a lifetime prescription.
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The holy grail for the pharmaceutical industry is to develop treatments rather than permanent cures or preventions - they would rather have a repeat customer base that has to keep buying a pill every month to keep horror disease at bay rather than wipe out the disease with a permanent cure or vaccine.
Look at the plight of AIDS sufferers - decades of research and the pharma industry has created treatments that let someone keep clinging to life as long as they keep buying the pills, but still no vaccine available which could prevent the spread of the disease in the first place, or cures which get rid of the disease permanently.
Once it becomes possible to create temporary treatments rather than permanent cures, then of course research will focus on this and not on cures, because the industry is set up for profit first, most beneficial health outcome second.
Uh ... except that in this case (C19), we do have vaccines first. So ... that totally doesn't go with your narrative?
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Interestingly, in the '80s when treatments were very limited and AIDS was still considered terminal in a few years, I saw a research paper where extreme hyperthermia was being used to cure the disease. Admittedly it had a significant fatality rate, but it did seem to effect a cure and there was even evidence that the cured patients might have had some immunity.
That research was suspended.
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A cure for this illness is presently not in sight. Stabilization of the illness by maintaining or lowering viral load would enable patients to learn to live with their illness
But the main question is - (Score:3, Funny)
Will it interfere with my 5g reception?
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Will it interfere with my 5g reception?
I've found that the magnetism effects make me stick to my refrigerator. https://www.huffpost.com/entry... [huffpost.com]
Wake up America!
All you need to do is modify birth control pills (Score:2, Funny)
so they work on viruses instead of humans! Duh!
This is Probably Why the FDA is Going After NAC (Score:3)
Been seeing things on Reddit and getting calls at work about N-Acetyl Cysteine supplements being "banned" by the FDA. The FDA *is* being shady about it too even though some companies would be exempt anyways. But NAC has shown some benefits in treating COVID-19.
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No. That was part of it. But they are going after NAC as a supplement. Several companies have discontinued theirs and Amazon has confirmed they are removing all listings of it, even if it was never advertised inappropriately.
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What is clear the FDA apparently does not know the law, know its own precedents, or keep good records when it comes to NAC.Let's take a look at that 1963 drug. The Council for Responsible Nutrition obtained the record on that drug via a Freedom of Information Act request. The date was handwritten. No one knows why is was handwritten, when it was written, or who wrote it.
Citation Needed.
Therefore its authenticity is highly suspect.
Only based on the word of CRN. You are not citing an independent authority but one who has an vested interest . Have you verified their claims?
Even more so since the FDA would raise the same concerns if a supplement company submitted such a document claiming that an ingredient was available as a dietary supplement prior to a drug.
. The FDA treats different delivery methods of the same drug as different "articles."
What kind of lunacy is this? Different delivery methods does not mean a drug is still not a drug.
The drug referred to in that 1963 document was inhaled, thus could not apply to any supplement since by legal definition supplements have to be "intended for ingestion".
What the hell are you smoking? A drug is a drug. As such approval is required to be used for any use. Using it in ANY supplement is still not authorized. That's as idioti
If so, better hurry (Score:3)
Apparently the Delta variant of covid is both more easily transmittable and causes more severe symptoms. The CDC now considers a variant of concern [cnn.com].
Those who choose not be vaccinated, or cannot be vaccinated for legitimate medical reasons, are most susceptible to this variant [bbc.co.uk]. When one considers that 99% of people now being infected and dying from covid aren't vaccinated [webmd.com], a little pill could do wonders. For those that listen to medical experts.
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When one considers that 99% of people now being infected and dying from covid aren't vaccinated
Thanks for providing that link so I could find out that you're shading things a more than a little bit. Actually. "...more than 99% of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 during the first four months of 2021 weren’t fully vaccinated." Hospitalized from January 1 through April 13. In a Cleveland Clinic hospital, not nationwide. Not "being infected now". I may not recall correctly, but I don't think that people under 65 and not on the "front line" were even eligible for vaccination in most areas for mos
There goes $3 billion (Score:2)
Free Market my ass (Score:2)
Somebody tell me why the government had to fund anything. After all the Free Market people would have you believe that they could do it all better, faster, cheaper. And all I'm hearing from them is crickets. As usual.
Re: Stop doing gain of function research (Score:2, Insightful)
This virus was not from gain of function research. The closest edge possibility was that it is a lab leak of an existing coronavirus collected from virus surveys on wildlife. The virus is very similar to existing coronaviruses. Anyway, how do you stop so called gain of function research? Can you keep tabs on what everyone is doing? Sounds like the only thing that will happen from asinine laws is that we will not have a clue how to deal with an actual engineered virus that a terrorist organization or rogue n
Re: Stop doing gain of function research (Score:3)
Would also argue regulated research is also better than banned research. The latter will still be done, but the results will unlikely be made available to the wider scientific community. This means if there is a disaster the lab in question is more likely to cover up, since âoethat research was not being doneâ.
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> Anyway, how do you stop so called gain of function research?
He didn't say "go out and stop people from doing it". He said "We should immediately stop doing" it.
So the way to stop doing it is to not pay for it any more. To just not do it. That was his suggestion.
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Nope, it probably was just that [factcheck.org]. Given the efforts to cover it up — including coercing biologists [vanityfair.com] into signing a letter denying it — it is now on the deniers prove otherwise.
By not funding it, which the US already did. But Dr. Fauci et al circumvented that ban — because they believed the "risk is worth it — by giving grants to a "private" charity, which would then continue to [nypost.com]
Re: Stop doing gain of function research (Score:5, Informative)
Your own reference Nature article actually debunks the article on Medium. As for the wsj Opinion piece by Steven Quay and Richard Muller which is basically echoing the same BS claim of the Medium article that too is debunked.
Do you know the difference between a journal article and fluff BS by unqualified fools? Nicholas Wade is no scientist.
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Subsequently you wrote:
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Anderson is the one arguing that we should ignore frequency information when it's inconvenient for his hypothesis, not me. His argument is that it doesn't matter how rare G or CGG are in the genome, the only thing that matters is that we know of a different FCS sequence that is more infectious than the one in SARS-CoV-2. According to him, that -- plus the fact that the S1/S2 junction is somewhat less conserved across different betacoronaviruses -- is sufficient to assume it was a natural mutation (just us
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Because most of those mutation mechanisms are not dependent upon how frequently G or CGG appear in the genome. Shocking.
So you simply stopped reading the series that he posted after that particular tweet, which conveniently discards his actual argument, including relevant information such as "The exact same (P)RRA
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You won't find Anderson saying that because it is absolutely false. Self-recombination and reassortment are based on the virus's own genome, so of course the frequency matters. Random mutation is affected because the evolutionary pressures that drive selection against G affect new mutations as much as older ones.
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And take place in mammalian host cells, and are not the sole mechanism by which the virus's genome changes. Strike one.
GC pairs are more stable than AT pairs and therefore more likely to be conserv
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I do not have any desire to debunk the ignorant babble of people who move the goalposts so blatantly and so often.
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I haven't moved them at all [nih.gov].
"In theory, it is possible that SARS-CoV-2 acquired RBD mutations (Fig. â(Fig.1a)1a) during adaptation to passage in cell culture, as has been observed in studies of SARS-CoV11. The finding of SARS-CoV-like coronaviruses from pangolins with nearly identical RBDs, however, provides a much stronger and more parsimonious explanation of how SARS-CoV-2 acquired these
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You absolutely moved the goalposts: First from "most of those mutation mechanisms" to addressing all of the mechanisms "by which the virus's genome changes". Then from your claim that I "simply stopped reading the series" of Tweets, because you failed to recognize when I addressed the specific argument/claim you quoted -- you didn't admit your error, but instead shifted the goalpost of what you expected me to answer.
Anderson absolutely did delete his Twitter account [opindia.com] after getting caught lying about it.
Agai
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Bullshit. You're the one claiming that the only source of genetic variability is the virus' own genome. I responded to that. Any movement that you perceive is a response to your new claim.
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By the way -- the next time you try to bullshit somebody based on thirty seconds of Google searches, spend the extra few minutes researching to remind yourself that (a) coronaviruses are RNA viruses rather than DNA viruses, and so they have uracil (U) rather than thymine (T), (b) your idea of how this works is wrong [wikipedia.org], (c) in fact is backwards [nature.com] to what we actually see, and (d) you are still ignorant of C and G frequen [nih.gov]
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Nice catch. Of course, GC pairs are stronger than AU pairs in RNA as well, so you haven't accomplished much now, have you?
Simply linking a non-specific Wikipedia entry does nothing to prove whate
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The only real effect of GC vs AU is thermal stability of the overall nucleic acid, it has nothing to do with how conserved the genome position is.
It is important to look at how SARS-CoV-2 mutates in mammalian hosts generally. You are implying without evidence that there is some relevant difference between how that happens in different mammals. Unless you have such evidence, it is more reasonable to believe that the selection pressures -- particularly for relative base and codon usage -- are similar.
I don'
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Go on believing that, despite it not being the only real effect.
Sure you do, now. It wasn't important to look at how coronaviruses mutate generally, and you were ok with implying without evidence that there were relevant differences between how mutation happens between alph
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You've decided upon a conclusion, and you're assembling the evidence to support it. Which is the opposite of how one conducts a valid investigation.
This is the problem with all these conspiracy theories. Because some hypothesis, H, is consistent with the known facts does not imply H is true. There can easily be other hypotheses, contradictory to H, also consistent with the known facts.
People always get this confused. Science does not prove things true, it proves thing false.
Re: Stop doing gain of function research (Score:5, Informative)
CGGCGG is not a gene it is part of a gene sequence it is just two arginines next to each other and it absolutely exists in nature. You can prove this to yourself easily. Look up the genome of literally any organism on BLAST and that sequence will be in it hundreds of times.
Reference to look up genomes: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov... [nih.gov]
A gene is a protein that is coded by a sequence of amino acids (of which there are 23). Each gene typically consists of hundreds of amino acids. Only an idiot would believe two arginines next to each other is evidence of engineering.
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There are 64 codon sequences, but only 20 amino acid bases, so most bases are represented by multiple codons. Six of them code for arginine. CGG is a common arginine codon in humans, but the least common in coronaviruses: only 5% of arginine codons in coronavirus genomes use CGG, and no one has ever seen a CGG-CGG pair in any previously sequenced coronavirus.
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only 5% of arginine codons in coronavirus genomes use CGG, and no one has ever seen a CGG-CGG pair in any previously sequenced coronavirus.
And how do YOU know that and every one else does not?
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Bullshit [forbes.com].
Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses. [sciencedirect.com] And actual immunologists specializing in genetics [googleusercontent.com] utterly disagree with you.
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You might want to read your own sources. Andersen's Twitter thread, for example, admitted that the furin cleavage site's protein base sequence is known, but implicitly also admitted that it is never known to use that RNA sequence. It argued that those codons are conserved strongly, but only by using the base rate fallacy with a virus that has error-checking and a very low mutation rate [nature.com] anyway.
He also argued that artificial insertion of a modified version of a known FCS sequence is unlikely because it is n
Re: Stop doing gain of function research (Score:5, Informative)
Outdated foffle. [theguardian.com]
"Of all the known bat coronaviruses, the most similar to Sars-CoV-2, sharing 96% of its genome, is RaTG13, a virus that researchers at the WIV were studying prior to the pandemic.
But since RaTG13 was identified, others have been isolated from bats in China and south-east Asia that are also highly similar to Sars-CoV-2. A cluster of them, from the Chinese province of Yunnan, was described last week in the journal Cell. 'The connection between RaTG13, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Sars-CoV-2 isn't required any more,' says [David] Robertson [gla.ac.uk]."
Re: Stop doing gain of function research (Score:4, Funny)
"One scientist, Linda Saif, asked via email whether it would be useful âoeto add just one or 2 statements in support of why nCOV is not a lab generatrirus and is naturally occuring? Seems critical to scientifically refute such claims!â Daszak responded, âoeI think we should probably stick to a broad statement.â
Oh no, somebody coordinated a group letter from 27 scientists (because you would never coordinate any sort of group effort) and the group letter is milder in its claim that the virus is naturally occurring than some of those scientists wanted!
Smoking gun!
Re: Stop doing gain of function research (Score:2)
You literally have zero understanding of biology. How viruses evolve. For example you seem to think the virus duplicates itself perfectly each time a copy of it is made. You have zero knowledge of statistics or evolution. You seem to think mutations do not occur in nature, and you do not understand that favorable mutations get selected in organisms. The virus is making billions of copies per hour in a given host and each copy is slightly different than each other. Does it have any feature preventing that CG
Re: Stop doing gain of function research (Score:2)
5% of something that occurs multiple times is a lot. If you randomly type out codons at a 5% probability of typing a particular codon, it should occur next to each other often especially across viruses (and it does). So itâ(TM)s not unreasonable to see two of them next to each other. It is already shown that other coronaviruses have it, I am not sure what you are saying here. You are literally pointing claiming evolution is proof of human design? There are no forbidden point mutations. The virus gained
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It's not 5% of sense codons, it's 5% of arginine codons. That's much less common. That codon only occurs 9 other places in the entire SARS-CoV-2 genome, so it is very surprising to see two of them inserted next to each other.
It's not conclusive proof of human modification, but it is strongly suggestive.
Re: Stop doing gain of function research (Score:2)
If it offers an evolutionary advantage it is not unlikely. A virus replicates billions of times and each copy has a mutation. If this mutation offers some advantage, it will be preserved and replicate more. It is mathematically feasible given the number of copies being made of the virus if a large number of copies of the virus got into a host wherein the CGGCGG mutation offers an advantage it will become dominant.
Would like to know how China has expert virus designers who can figure out where to put an exac
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For someone who accuses others of not understanding statistics, that is an appalling level of "that's not how this works -- that's not how any of this works" to start a comment. Likelihood does not care a whit about evolutionary advantage.
And for someone who accuses others of not understanding viral evolution, that is an appalling level of the same. There are five RNA synonyms for CGG, every one of which gives the same amino acid base (arginine) an
Re: Stop doing gain of function research (Score:2)
The more you interact with wildlife and viral reservoirs, the higher the probability of getting one that can infect you, whether it has CGG or something else. Someone ate or (more likely) came in close contact with a bat or some other animal that was infected with a coronavirus. One of the coronavirus virus copies in that bat contained the advantageous CGG mutation and from there it was game over. If the mutation was TTG you would be asking why TTG? Remember, the virus makes 2 or 3 random changes each time
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Yes, you have finally understood why the original comment in this thread suggested that WIV should stop handling sick wildlife, shipping them back to the lab in Wuhan, handling them, and finding new and exciting ways to make their viruses more capable of infecting humans.
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No, it's different to handle them for actual research versus grabbing them like a fool or eating it raw. Also, we should find out the ways these things can be engineered. Or do you want to be helpless when someone does figure out how to engineer one better than nature? Or heck when nature evolves a more complex one.
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To me there is an obvious flaw in those whole argument that "the CGG-CGG gene in the virus .. does not occur naturally". The sentence should read "the CGG-CGG gene in the virus .. does not occur naturally ... that we know of". There are zillions of viruses that we know next to nothing about. Who knows what their sequences look like.
There is also an obvious flaw in those whole argument that "the CGG-CGG gene in the virus .. gene splice almost always used when conducting gain of function research on corona
Re: Stop doing gain of function research (Score:2)
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If you do lock up Fauci can you name a qualified replacement? And I don’t mean you googling people that disagree with Fauci.
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Ivermectin *is* promising, but it's hardly ready as a treatment for COVID. I'm no expert, but IIUC it requires toxic dose levels to be effective. And also, again IIUC, it's usually used externally, though it is effective on some things at a low enough dose to be used internally.
Therefore Ivermectin is an excellent place to start. It needs to be modified to be either less toxic or more effective against COVID at much lower doses, and those modified versions need to run through clinical trials. (If those
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Ivermectin *is* promising, but it's hardly ready as a treatment for COVID. I'm no expert, but IIUC it requires toxic dose levels to be effective. And also, again IIUC, it's usually used externally, though it is effective on some things at a low enough dose to be used internally.
What is controlling is what happens in real life not what someone is able to see or understand happening in a lab setting. There is sufficient evidence from existing RCTs to take Ivermectin seriously.
Therefore Ivermectin is an excellent place to start. It needs to be modified to be either less toxic or more effective against COVID at much lower doses, and those modified versions need to run through clinical trials. (If those considerations don't matter to you, I'm sure enough arsenic would also work against COVID.)
You might as well have said bleach is an excellent place to start. What is most needed are large scale RCTs of Ivermectin.
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Well, bleach *is* a good place to start if you don't already know lots of other things that oxidize. Ivermectin is a complex molecule with lots of places where you could tinker https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.g... [nih.gov]. And it *has* been shown to be effective, but in doses too high to tolerate.
I sure wouldn't claim that it's the only or best place to start. I don't have the expertise to have an opinion about that. But it's a reasonable place to start. (OK, excellent was too strong an adjective.)
Re:Redundant Crony enrichment. (Score:4, Informative)
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There are lots of studies (including RCTs) showing Ivermectin effectiveness. The paper you linked (Garegnani et al) hypothesizes that there were many more Ivermectin studies which were not registered, came back negative and were not published. And maybe that happened.
Garegnani also point out the safe dosage of Ivermectin insufficient to reach the in vitro effectiveness concentration. So the obvious mechanism is not in play. That's definitely a strike against Ivermectin.
Still, what about all tho
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That opinion article you linked to doesn't say Ivermectin doesn't work, it just says not enough research has been done. This latest $3B round of corporate welfare won't be spent on doing gold-standard studies with drugs that are no longer patent-protected, drugs that are already developed that have a long safety record, this is just more public funding and private profit.
Re: Redundant Crony enrichment. (Score:2)
Right, so you we should believe BS because likable person A says it? Ivermectin does not work. It is well debunked.
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Those are expensive, and Ivermectin is no longer patent-protected.
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Ivermectin is no longer patent-protected.
Even when things are not patent-protected you still have to do clinical studies to determine if they are effective or not and do not do harm. Otherwise you don't know what treatments are effective and which ones to give, or if the treatment actually makes things worse. Patent-protection is a red herring here.
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Re: SIze matters (Score:3)
What a gull-a-bull
What a nin-cow-poop
What an ultra-maroon
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Thank god they threw that moron in jail for a few years.
Re: Thank you President Trump (Score:4, Insightful)
How do you deal with irrational individuals? Here is a picture of Georgia rep Clyde Davis on January 6th. https://i.redd.it/7fe7x3u8lv57... [i.redd.it]
Notice his terrified expression as he barricades a door. He now claims those individuals who made him shit his pants in fear were “tourists”. We are supposed to take this man seriously?
Re: Thank you President Trump (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you deal with irrational individuals? Here is a picture of Georgia rep Clyde Davis on January 6th. https://i.redd.it/7fe7x3u8lv57... [i.redd.it]
Notice his terrified expression as he barricades a door. He now claims those individuals who made him shit his pants in fear were “tourists”. We are supposed to take this man seriously?
How does one deal with people who have made it their goal to oppose everything you try to do? How do you deal with people who support an end to democracy? How do you deal with people who believe that vaccinations are a 21st century holocaust.
The modern Republican party has no intention of any sort of compromise. They are the political version of a disease.
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The Democratic Party's idea of compromise is accepting the Democrat Party's commands.
Give me the citations. Apparently, Mitche McConnel is a Democrat he is on record as saying:
“One hundred percent of my focus is standing up to this administration,” the Kentucky Republican said at a press conference in his state in response to questions about fighting among House Republicans. “What we have in the United States Senate is total unity from Susan Collins to Ted Cruz in opposition to what the new Biden administration is trying to do to this country,” he said, referring
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the Dems should be trying to build bridges to repair the ideological chasm that has developed between 2 halves of the US.
Somehow it always seems to fall to the dems. If they're in power, they're the incumbents so they should. If they're out then they're "out of touch" and need to build bridges. So one ever says the Republicans ought to, maybe because the thought of them trying anything that reasonable is so laughably absurd.
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That's seniority for you. He's been director over at NIAID for 37 years. If he stays there another year he'll have been director for longer than most Americans have been alive.
Also after fifty years of a pretty impressive annual publishing output he's the eighteenth most cited scientist of all time. At 80 years old he's past his research prime, but he's still putting out textbook chapters and clinical guidelines and the like. Still, that's pretty good; 79 is the average age for someone to enter a nursing
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Come, come, there are web-sites with much dumber audiences. Which makes things even scarier, actually...