The campaign against Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine, vitamin D, zinc, etc is bizarre. I posted a video of Dr John Campbell reporting on the use of Ivermectin in India. There’s some respectable research on these things with very promising results. So why is it not being used? Why was it actually banned from use in various places? And why, for that matter, is the word ‘lockdown’ getting more airtime than, say, ‘Ivermectin’, as if the one has been shown to be more useful than the other?
I’m not suggesting, incidentally, that Ivermectin is the solution to Taiwan’s present dilemma. But Taiwanese authorities have dismissed it out-of-hand on the basis of US FDA opinion. This suggests - at best - gross incompetence.
Vietnam is saying they’ve found a new variant that’s basically a hybrid of the British and Indian variants.
To my point about unvaxxed populations being a breeding ground for mutations, Vietnam is a vaccination laggard. Well under 1% of the population has been vaxxed.
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Like Taiwan, they were lulled into complacency by their good fortune against the initial variants, a good fortune which all of the nations in the area seem to surprisingly have shared and are now losing in concert.
HCQ has failed every proper (i.e. randomised, non-biased) trial that’s been done. They’ve looked at treating severe patients, intervening with moderate patients, and even giving it to mild patients to prevent development into severe - none of them worked. The only papers showing it working are either retrospective, case reports, or heavily manipulated (like the original French studies by Raoult)
Vit D and zinc seem to be correlated. I think it’s very reasonable that if you are DEFICIENT in them, you’ll have a worse time with Covid. But again, representing them as any sort of treatment (or prevention) is totally unjustified.
That’s the thing. Scientists ARE taking it seriously. Those are two proper trials, and neither has worked. So it would be very unscientific for governments to make recommendations that people start taking them. And sadly, the ones pushing these as treatments often have stakes in selling supplements, like the Mercola types of this world.
The “desired” goal for a virus would be to replicate as much as possible. The “best” virus would be one that spreads easily but also doesn’t affect the host too much. And there are countless viruses which do exactly that.
Something like Ebola is a “poor” virus because it’s so deadly, so symptomatic, it can never cause pandemics. Most people are too sick to spread it.
Luckily for Covid, the spike protein seems to make an excellent antigen that our body recognises. It’s also essential for there virus function. So it’s quite difficult for it to evolve away from our immunity while also retaining it’s ability to enter our cells effectively.
Variants will come about more often when you have a population which is partially vaccinated. With an entirely unvaccinated population, there is no selective pressure for new variants, but you do have more virus spreading and more chance of mutations happening. But with 80% vaccinated and 20% not, that’s the worst situation. Now the virus has a huge selective pressure to try and break into the 80%.
This is exactly what a lot of people (and I mean people more qualified than I am) have been arguing for months.
The implication is that, if this worst-possible-scenario risk exists for partial vaccination, it would have been better not to vaccinate at all. Complete immunity (ie., suppression) is never going to be possible, and in the meantime, the vaccines are (possibly) driving the spread of something which would never have even come into existence if we’d left well alone and allowed our own immune systems to invent their own optimisations.
If you’re right, then what’s going to happen now is that they’re going to double down on this failed experiment, imposing more and more vaccines on more and more people in a desperate attempt to keep a lid on the thing. Suppressing COVID is going to become the sole aim of the human race.
Correct.
Low Vitamin D is a marker of early death IF you already have a chronic disease. And it naturally declines with age . AND supplementation has not shown any benefit from metastudies .
Low Vitamin D has been linked spuriously to literally every disease under the sun because it’s a very easy biomarker to do a study with. There’s tens of thousands of rubbish non repeatable studies done of vitamin D and ‘insert disease of interest here’.
Can you suggest a couple of papers that show that ivermectin doesn’t work? A brief scan of pubmed suggests some positive observations.
If you agree that deficiency is going to be a problem, then wouldn’t it make sense to ensure that people aren’t deficient? Not necessarily by means of pills.
Unless you can show some proper peer reviewed studies of why this worm killer works why should anybody bother to read this stuff ?
I may as well run down to the Chinese medicine store, choose my herb of interest and make the same claim.
Well, if you get a high enough % then you likely wipe out the virus altogether. Problem is when all the 20% unvaccinated gather together. That’s why governments are especially concerned about, for example, Indian or Pakistani communities in the midlands of the UK who are refusing vaccines. They’re all living and congregating together, which is a breeding ground for variants. If the 20% were evenly dispersed, it wouldn’t be a problem since the chains of infection would be easily broke.
Still, getting a good % of people some sort of immunity is overall beneficial. And we buy time to look at variants. I think Covid will become much like influenza, where we have yearly strains. But hopefully it will never form a pandemic again.
Problem with the natural herd immunity approach is that it kills a lot of people and collapses healthcare systems.
I really like this site for putting together clear, evidence-based discussions.
It does tell you about the positive studies, but they’re all weak evidence - chart reviews, retrospective studies etc. The worst are the in vitro (in a dish) studies using enormous doses which aren’t clinically possible.
Well again, it’s not “proven”. That was my opinion/reasonable assumption.
I do supplement D and check my blood levels, and I encourage others to do the same. And I don’t think any government is telling you NOT to try and be healthy, to not be obese, to not exercise etc. If you are likely to be deficient, a doctor will gladly order you a blood test and prescribe vitamin D for you.
But putting it out there that Vit D is some sort of preventative measure or treatment is simply not backed by evidence yet. Also, Vit D has been associated/correlated with a TON of health outcomes, and supplementing it has never really been shown to move the needle unless you were clinically deficient. And that’s usually the case with anything. If you’re deficient, and particular pathways in the body literally can not function without it, then correcting the deficiency is beneficial. But once you exceed that, there’s no benefit to just throwing more of it in there.
Another problem, as seen in Brazil, is that even when a community has presumably been widely infected by earlier forms of COVID, they can still be whacked—and hospitalized en masse—when new variants arrive.
I’ve seen those three studies mentioned on pubmed.
Here’s the sort of thing I was referring to, though:
Now you might argue that the study is flawed. You might raise an eyebrow and say, yeah, it’s a preprint. I admit I haven’t gone through this one in detail. But they’re reporting a significant risk reduction that’s worth investigating. Whether it has something to do with antiretroviral activity is irrelevant - a lot of drugs work by unknown or unexpected mechanisms. The only important question is “does it work?”, and even if only a small proportion of subjects derive benefits, that still means you might save a lot of lives in the context of a pandemic.
If it doesn’t work, then what we need here is robust disproof: an RCT with lots of people in it showing no difference between ivermectin and placebo. Given the number of potential subjects, I find it absolutely astounding that no such thing has been done. Or if it has, it’s not been published. Or if it has been published, nobody knows about it. Possibly it hasn’t been done because doctors have been told that they must not, under any circumstances, prescribe ivermectin? Wouldn’t it be prudent to let doctors try it, and record the outcomes?
I’m aware of that, but the logical path from that observation is to find out why so many people are vit.D deficient (and there are a lot of them) and then find out what can be done about it.
I’ll also add that telling people to eat unhealthy food and do no exercise is precisely what governments are telling people to do right now. Standard dietary guidelines still tell people to eat mountains of shit that will make them fat and diabetic, and in my area at least, the gyms are closed and the exercise areas are taped off.
This gets repeated a lot, but it is quite obviously not true, even given the limited number of territories where dramatic “hygiene theater” was not practiced. There is not one single country that has lost more than a fraction of a percent of it’s entire population to COVID; even countries like Brazil (held up as the poster child of COVID failure) have recorded only 2 deaths per thousand over the entire period of the pandemic. Bearing in mind that 90% of deaths are in the older cohort, that translates to about 0.5-1% of the very old, and a tiny number of the young. It’s not great, of course, but that’s a pretty pathetic kill rate compared to the various worldwide plagues of the 20th century.
Even if we accept the proposition that pursuing ‘herd immunity’ is suboptimal, the question arises: so what do we do instead? Because the things that were done last year didn’t help. Hungary had some pretty severe lockdowns but nevertheless made it to the top of the charts (with a whopping 3 per thousand death rate).
I’m guessing you’ll suggest that we have to vaccinate, vaccinate, and vaccinate again. But isn’t that effectively the same thing as herd immunity?
I strongly disagree. I actually used to have this viewpoint, but around last September I changed my mind.
There are deaths, yes. But there are also many consequences resulting from letting the pandemic rage. It’s now becoming clearer than ever that there are long-term consequences from Covid infection. People who were previously young and healthy are suffering a huge variety of physical and mental traumas.
This study (Functional decline in hospitalized patients with COVID-19 in the early months of the pandemic - PubMed) looks at people who got Covid in March to April 2020. Now, over a year later, there are a sizeable proportion who needed physical therapy, who still suffer deficits in physical performance. That means not just consequences for them, but also their families, their employers, and the economy for the long-term.
Plus, many of the deaths are decidedly NOT old people at the end of their life. It’s true that Covid does an excellent job of culling the nursing home people and that demographic, but there are plenty of 60-75 year olds who would have lived another 10-15 years if not for Covid. I knew two of them personally. One was a 68 year old who was totally healthy, still working every day. Got Covid, pneumonia, blood clot, dead. He should have lived another 15 years and been able to see his grandkids graduate and get their first jobs.
And maybe it’s “only” 2 deaths per 1,000. But look at India. Do you want hospitals being crushed, people refused ambulances, paying for oxygen cylinders on the black market, or just dying in traffic jams leading to hospital?
The way out is to do these restrictions to buy time, like Taiwan is doing. And yes, vaccinate as many people as possible, beginning with those most at risk. If we’re lucky, we can more or less eradicate Covid by breaking chains of transmission. In reality, it will become like flu where it always exists, periodically coming back.
There are some countries which seem to have been lucky. We definitely don’t understand everything about this virus, and it’s weird how some countries have been relatively unaffected. The African continent, for example, is largely unaffected. However, their testing is non-existent to unreliable, their reporting is non-existent, and their population median age is really young. But the average population of some wealthy country with an ageing population is going to have a really, really bad time.
