There is a very promising treatment being used in China and beginning to be used in New York and elsewhere. And that’s high dose intravenous vitamin C. Preliminary results from one trial showed that 50 patients with moderate to severe illness none have died and the average hospital stay was 3 to 5 days shorter with no side or adverse effects.
It’s cheap, it’s safe, it’s readily available, it’s easy to administer by hospitals.
Yes but Salk published his “anecdotal” case studies in March 1953. Polio
vaccine was in use before large control study.
Similar to the way Raolt felt compelled to Publish what he is seeing right away.
& now we are seeing large studies. We will see results in next few weeks.
And no, he is not a well known fabricator. Check out his wikipedia page.
Controversial, but not fraud.
Please don’t throw around such accusations based on hearsay.
It would be nice if hydroxychloroquine works, but @chemist needs to pull the plug on his rant. There’s also an epidemic of individual anxiety that’s finding voice on the internet, masquerading as knowledgeable thinking. The Chinese study results don’t support the drug and a small Italian study that says it did fudged the numbers and actually had some inconsistent results that don’t support its conclusion. The French study didn’t have any kind of comparison, so there’s no way to know if the drugs or just time and care were decisive.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
I would ask you to review the the comments to which you are responding - the portion in bold above has nothing to do with anything that I stated - I made no references to any of those points - when you decide to throw out chastising comments - please double check who you are trying to admonish.
I don’t think it is a rant. Can we have a rational discussion without personal insult?
There is an ethical conundrum – about random trials in the middle of an epidemic.
Patients don’t want to be the control group. There are alternatives —
for instance the timeline of the virus is well established - how long it stays
in body. (thus the two week isolation)
Raolt’s study shows significant reduction in that time. It is a study
compared to a well established historical baseline.
Here is someone who presents the conundrum nicely.
yes sorry I was answering two comments at once.
This was a good podcast on the topic. Short too. From the business side but science and social stuff too.
What other people know base on response.
The Beeb says: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52012049
I am told there are several other drugs that might be more effective but they are further down the road. The evidence isn’t in on the drugs being pushed by Trump but that they might work is good enough for the hope and pray party.
The ethical conundrum is the riddle of the individual’s need versus society’s need.
Your advocacy of quinolines seems to me to blind you to what we currently know about their use in treating COVID-19, which is slightly more than nothing. We know that hydroxychloroquine is contraindicated for patients with QT abnormalities. We have a negative trial of hydroxychloroquine from China, a highly flawed study from France that uses a surrogate endpoint, and another problematic study from Italy.
Treating someone with hydroxychloroquine + azithromycin on this basis is saying, “I don’t have anything I can do, but I need to do something. That is something, so I will do that.” The interest of the individual is in receiving something that will ameliorate their condition. Note too that no drug is without its risks: exposing patients to a drug without reason to believe that it is safe and may be effective would never get past an IRB/IEB review. In other words, it’s simply unethical.
What we (society) need is evidence that this treatment works (or doesn’t). I don’t much care which way the trials come out, just so we do them. The way we handle the interest of the individual is:
Note also that treating patients with this cocktail is keeping patients out of trials for more promising treatments, like Remdesivir.
Hang in there. I am not sure why the rant against Hydroxychloroquine when there does not appear to be anything else in the wings. I suggest you read Robert Waldman on the small study saying it did not work. He is over at Angry Bear.
How long will it be before the results start coming in from the larger studies underway?
4th day on remdesvir for my friend in Boston. Off oxygen and tylenol to see how he does. Hopeful.
Look at the actual history
TIIE BIGGEST PUBLIC IIEALTH EXPERIMENT EVER:
The 1954 Field Trial of the Salk Poliomyelitis Vaccine
Paul Meier University of Chicago
Here is shows that there were two trials - one in which a “true” double
blind study was performed - and another which used older cohorts of
children who had not been vaccinated - an observational study.
Both studies resulted in equivalent results, and both used more than
a million participants.
The difference is, that in the double blind study many children contracted
paralytic or fatal polio because they were put in the control. Was it worth it,
when the other study gave the same result, and did no harm?
The double blind method is meant to remove potential bias and placebo
effect - however, when the disease has such extreme consequences,
it is my view that a placebo effect cannot account for much (ie a patient
who is on a ventilator) and the observational approach is preferred.
It remains an ethical conundrum: witholding a potential lifesaving
treatment when there are other valid approaches.
My question to everyone would be this: If you have critical coronavirus
do you want the most promising (if not perfect) treatment
or do you volunteer to be the control?
Thanks so much, @skeptical, for pointing this out.
For those who are unaware: at the 210-day mark of a vacancy without a nomination, anything done by an “acting” person is legally null and void. (See here for a nice breakdown of the Federal Vacancies Act, which governs this particular thing, courtesy of the Congressional Research Service.)
That 210-day clock can be reset by the administration bothering to nominate someone, but they haven’t. Switching to a different “acting” person does not reset the clock.
In fact, the clock ran out before Chad Wolf even got to the position — it happened while Kevin McAleenan was still acting DHS Secretary.
Just to say it again, because it is really insane: Every order signed and action taken by the DHS Secretary since November 7th, 2019, has been legally without force. Maybe this should be mentioned more often …
A valid question. If you give me a choice, I want Remdesivir. The postulated mode of action for quinolines seems iffy to me. How do I know I’m getting enough to shift my endosomal pH sufficiently?
But choosing to be on the placebo or the active drug isn’t the game and no one is ever offered that choice. What patients are offered is a chance (and we tell them what the chance is) to get the drug under controlled conditions. There is also the chance that the patient will get the placebo (also under controlled conditions). I don’t know (and you don’t know, either) whether quinolines really do work against SARS-COV-2. The only way to know is to run the trial, and that means that some people are going to get the placebo precisely because we don’t know whether that cocktail works or not.
Once something is known to be effective, it will become the new standard of care. In a sense, quinolines are getting the best shot they will ever have: they don’t have to be tested against something known to work. (Noninferiority trials are much trickier to plan, execute, and interpret.)
Our government has become a kakisto-kleptocracy.