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The new super meta review of Ivermectin is out. It’s 27 pages of fine print detail and 144 references, and it’s very impressive.
Ivermectin…. by Fvasconcellos
Bryant et al soaked themselves in 24 studies involving 3,406 people and found that ivermectin use reduced deaths by a very nice 60% with “moderate certainty”. But ivermectin appears to be at its best when used to prevent infections in the first place. There was “low certainty” but with prophylactic use Covid infections were reduced by an average of 86% . But by the time patients were “in need of mechanical ventilation”, the data, while muddy, suggested ivermectin was not much help.
The bad thing about Ivermectin is that there are not many bad things. It’s too good, too cheap, too safe, and too far out of patent to be profitable.
Given the evidence of efficacy, safety, low cost, and current death rates, ivermectin is likely to have an impact on health and economic outcomes of the pandemic across many countries. Ivermectin is not a new and experimental drug with an unknown safety profile. It is a WHO “Essential Medicine” already used in several different indications, in colossal cumulative volumes.
[…]
The good news is that there is a way out of the new mutant load. The bad news is the Swamp is in the way.
India’s caseload has continued to shrink since we last looked at it. Which is great news, but instead of endorsing the approach that worked, the health ministry is now writing to doctors telling them not to use Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine.
Indeed the new recommendations even go so far as to say that zinc and multivitamins are out too. Even zinc?
Ponder that Ivermectin is so powerful it even destroys multivitamins.
Is the day coming when we see antivirals suddenly accepted like the Wuhan Lab theory was? Lives depend on it, but vast piles of money do too. The medical censorship swamp is well equipped, and I suspect, has years of experience. There are so many anti-viral medicines, they’ve been around for years and all the financial incentives not to use cheap out-of-patent drugs have always been there.
Here are the graphs of infections in some states of India:
…
So who leaned on the Indian officials? Who knows?
Ivermectin, Doxycycline Dropped From List of COVID-19 Drugs by Health Ministry
New Delhi: […]
Mutations of SARS2 are roaming. Currently there are 19 million active (known) cases of Covid. Due to copying errors, mistakes are accumulating in the genes of the virus. It’s a relentless process of trial and selection. A trillion monkeys on keyboards blindly working its way around vaccines, and immune systems. To beat this, we need to understand it.
Below is a map of known variants created from the samples which have had full sequences done. This is the remarkable “Nextstrain“ — an opensource tool. I have labelled a few clusters by their “country names”, (though we’re not supposed to do that. Let’s all say “WuFlu”.)
The family tree of SARS-Cov-2 starts at the bottom left corner with two samples from Wuhan around Christmas 2019. This is called the 19A clade, which appears to have almost died out now, though there are still remnants left of this original virus in corners like Iran and PNG. Otherwise, the Wuhan 19A virus has been superseded by its children.
The branches and time marches to the right.
Nextstrain: Latest global SARS-CoV-2 analysis
The code for one full virus is 29,000 bases long and as best as I can tell, all the dots […]
This might be one of the most incompetent studies of 2o21
Hanigan, Dear and Woodward have done a “unique”, first of, *groundbreaking study* that finally shows climate change is having a detrimental effect on our health (so they say). With great effort to ignore almost every variable that mattered, they found the seasonal ratio of deaths in Australia has changed:
”More people die in winter than summer, but climate change may see this reverse
In our study published today, we show some of the first evidence climate change has had observable impacts on Australians’ health between 1968 and 2018.
We found long-term heating is associated with changed seasonal balance of deaths in Australia, with relatively more deaths in summer months and relatively fewer deaths in winter months over recent decades.
Our findings can be explained by the gradual global warming associated with climate change. Over the 51 years of our study, annual average temperatures increased by more than 1°C in Australia. The last decade (2011 to 2020) was the hottest in the country’s recorded history.
The other interpretation is that it got warmer and deaths in winter declined more than deaths in […]
Could we halve the death rate if we just exercised 25 minutes each day?
..
A lot of people were asked how much they exercised a couple of years ago. In follow up, about 50,000 went on to catch Covid last year. They were sorted into three levels of exercisers — the 7% most active consistently got 150 mins of week of something akin to “brisk walking” or more. The slowest moving 15% qualified as true couch potatoes — doing less than 10 minutes of exercise a week.
Sadly for the least active, they were 2.3 times more likely to need to go to hospital, 1.7 times more likely to be sent to the ICU and 2.5 times more likely to end up in the morgue.
These are pretty stark figures — making sedentary behaviour more risky than obesity, smoking, diabetes and high blood pressure. Which all seems a bit surprising given how many hours of data collection and TV commentary has been spent on all the smaller risks. How did we manage to miss one of the most important variables there is?
Exercise is “one heck of an anti-viral”
If these results are correct, it suggests most […]
Maybe getting enough Vitamin B6 will reduce deaths
The main two things that kill people with Covid are blood clotting and an out-of-control inflammation known as a cytokine storm. A group of researchers noticed that both of these were things Vitamin B6 was known to reduce — blood clotting, and inflammation. In particular, there’s a molecule called Interleukin 6 which is a “masterplayer” signal in our immune system and — what do you know — B6 reduces it. Mice that weren’t fed enough B6 got mouse pneumonia more than mice who were fed enough. B6 is anti-inflammatory, anti- and reduces reactive oxygen species (ROS).
The Big Black hole in medical research?
I hoped this paper was report on experiments with Covid patients, but the paper and press release is essentially a literature review of many pre-covid studies and a plea for research into whether vitamin B6 might help stop the deadly cytokine storm.
The bigger, global question they don’t ask, is why despite the millions (billions) going into vaccine design and drug research, hardly anyone is studying the cheap unprofitable and obvious questions? Perhaps we need some government funded research that’s not driven by profits… oh. wait.? What happened to […]
The STOIC study gave an asthma drug to Covid patients, but it worked so astonishingly well, they had to stop the trial early, as it was unfair to keep giving the placebo to people who were ending up in hospital ten times as often as people who got Budesonide.
“We were hoping for 50% reduction [in severity]. We got 90%, which … is off the charts”
–h/t Eric W at WUWT
Though to keep some perspective, out of about 140 people enrolled, 70 got the drug and 70 got the placebo, with 10 of the placebo group going to hospital and only 1 in the Budesonide group.
You’ll be shocked to know that giving the drug early works better than waiting for the virus to replicate wildly. You’ll also be shocked that there were some doctors using this 7 or more months ago, and yet the media didn’t mention it Apart from Newsmax. (Eg See Dr Richard Bartlett talk about this back in July last year, who talks of using a nebulizer, not an inhaler. )
Common asthma drug slashes Covid hospitalisation by 90%, experts say
Vanessa Chambers, The Sun
A […]
How many unnecessary deaths does it take til people get angry? Angry that the Chief Medical Officers and Health Ministers didn’t ask for studies to be done. Angry that most academics sat by and said nothing. And angry that the media just parroted the institutions.
One good antiviral changes everything. If the world had a safe cheap drug, we could not only reduce deaths and disability, but also slow the rate of mutation down and probably slow the appearance of new mutations down.
…
The Chamie-Quintero study from Peru shows the West could be only weeks away from reducing the Covid death toll if we used the safe cheap sheep-dip, lice-killing Ivermectin like less wealthy countries do.
A study across the states of Peru found that after Ivermectin was introduced, deaths started to fall about 11 days later, and within a month after that, deaths were down around 75%.
Ivermectin is a drug so useful early researchers got a Nobel Prize in Medicine for work on it. It’s so well known that in the last thirty years more than 3.7 billion doses of Ivermectin have been given out. It’s so safe we can use it on cats […]
We all could use some good news, and this is quite extraordinary.
“Using gene therapy, a research team has succeeded in getting mice to walk again after a complete cross-sectional injury. The nerve cells produced the curative protein themselves.”
The Town Mouse and The Country Mouse both like this news. | Illustrated by Milo Winter
Normally spinal cord damage is pretty much permanent. Even though we all still have the same genes that built the nerves in the first place, no one seemed to have the right reboot code that could switch on the correct genes in the right order to do the repair. And to give you some idea of the complexity of this, in 2018 a different team estimated that as many as 580 genes may be involved in axon regeneration.
Plenty of researchers have been tapping on the windows and doors of the Nerve Regrowth Holy Grail. This time, instead of just regenerating a nerve in a petri dish, or even even a live animal, they’ve gone a leap further. These mice could walk again.
And all it took was a single injection? “This was a great surprise to the researchers”.
The Sunlight Vitamin
UPDATED! Mea Culpa from me. The post has been corrected*. Thanks to Rob.
__________________
More junk reporting from the Australian government broadcaster the ABC which just copies the junk science press release. Is this what we pay $1b a year for?
The Journalists missed the key factor which was blood levels of participants.
The headline says Clinical trial finds vitamin D does not ward off colds and flu but all it really shows is that in a group that already have *normal, non-deficient levels* of Vitamin D, taking big doses of Vitamin D once a month won’t will raise your blood levels — but won’t make a big difference to your risk of respiratory infections. And it only applies to people aged 60 -74.
Most participants in the study had a normal but sub-optimal Vit D levels and after five years of sporadic high doses, were raised to optimal levels at the end.
After taking 60,000 IU each month, supplementers apparently went from having 77.5 nmol/L up to 114.8 nmol/L,. To put this in perspective, normal levels of Vitamin D start at “50” and above, and there are professors who point out that there are […]
Some things matter. The biggest scandal of Covid — the one worth fighting for — is that there are drugs that work, which are safe and well tested, but they suffer from the crippling problem of being too cheap for our captured public health institutions to use. Because they are old safe, mass produced and out of patent no Pharmaceutical giant will make mass profits, which dooms them to being ignored, under researched, and generally scoffed at in rude dismissive terms.
The biggest failure of our government health agencies right now is the Black Hole of Medicine — the astronomical event horizon beyond which cheap safe drugs disappear without a trace.
3,000 people are dying every day in the USA and 5,000 a day are dying in Europe, mostly from a problem which can be solved to a large extent.
Sure, the media hate HCQ because “Donald”. But it’s not just HCQ and it’s not just Trump — the media ignore all the cheap antivirals and all the rich nations have the same medical Black Hole. This is the work of the Medical Swamp, captured by Big Pharma.
The Age of Antivirals is here and hardly anyone even knows […]
Trump was right, but Biden gets the glory
Pfizer held off the discovery in what appears to be a petty political gamble
All along we were told a vaccine “by October” was unlikely and that 50-60% efficacy would be OK. On Sept 16, Trump said “a vaccine for COVID-19 could be ready in three or four weeks.” Presumably because he was expecting these results or others like them. On Sept 18th, Biden said he was irrational: ““The idea that there’s going to be a vaccine and everything’s gonna be fine tomorrow – it’s just not rational, not reasonable,” and the Medical Swamp supported Biden.
But Dr. Moncef Slaoui, the chief scientific adviser to Operation Warp Speed, said a vaccine by October was unlikely. So did Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most prominent and popular member of the White House coronavirus task force. Instead, the vaccine announcement came six days after the election as votes are still being counted in some parts of the country.
Come Nov 10, Markets rocketed with the Pfizer vaccine news.
Truth was, Pfizer was never going to announce potentially game changing vaccine news until after the election. That’s because they changed the original deadline for […]
In Europe the second wave is setting new records for daily cases but not for deaths so far (thankfully). So the big question is whether this will stay the same or follow the case tally up.
It’s probably not an accident that infections are spreading fast in mid October. Not only was it late summer in Europe, but the virus has been spreading mostly through 15 to 24 year old healthy young people and when Vitamin D levels were high. But as the Northern Hemisphere tracks away from the Sun, vitamin D levels are falling, temperatures are dropping, and the sterilizing rays of ultra violet grow weak. And, as the days grow colder people gather indoors too. Viral doses are rising.
The enduring scandal of the epidemic is that there are so many ways to treat this virus but they’re not expensive enough for the TGA to recommend them. ;- )
Lots more cases but not many deaths
Exhibit One: The United Kingdom
Some people have used this graph to claim the virus poses no threat. But it isn’t that simple.
UK New cases and Worldometer Deaths graph. (Click to enlarge)
Ten reasons death rates were lower in Europe’s […]
Normal CT Scan
We really need to know “how many”.
The NY Times tells the story of some Covid survivors who are forgetting entire holidays that were taken weeks before they got ill. They stare at photos and recall nothing… One 31 year old woman suffers from “white static” moments where she is so disoriented she washed the TV Remote, couldn’t remember who she was, or where she was.
This happens in other viral diseases too, as sufferers with chronic fatigue, ME, and ongoing inflammation will tell you. But the scale of it appears to be something unique. Months later some of these people are have given up their jobs.
‘I Feel Like I Have Dementia’: Brain Fog Plagues Covid Survivors
Pam Belluck, New York Times
After contracting the coronavirus in March, Michael Reagan lost all memory of his 12-day vacation in Paris, even though the trip was just a few weeks earlier.
Several weeks after Erica Taylor recovered from her Covid-19 symptoms of nausea and cough, she became confused and forgetful, failing to even recognize her own car, the only Toyota Prius in her apartment complex’s parking lot.
https://www.scientificanimations.com
Coronavirus is both the rock and the hard place
There are costs to stopping it, and costs to letting it go. There are businesses that won’t recover, and also people that won’t.
There is much more to pandemic decisions than just “deaths per capita”. One more aspect of the wicked dilemma are “long haulers” or the condition called “long Covid” (which is defined as being ill for 3 months or longer).
Thirty-nine UK doctors who caught Covid are still struggling 6 months later, and have written a joint letter for the British Medical Journal. These were mostly fit youngish people, and they didn’t get hospitalized. They had mild moderate cases of Covid. But many of them say that the after effects are worse than the initial infection. These include things like headaches, dizziness, the inability to walk 200 metres or more, breathlessness, strange numb patches, new allergies, difficulty regulating body temperature, ongoing diarrhea. Many are unable to work.
The cause could be nerve damage, or an autoimmune disorder (or something else entirely). If the virus triggers an immune reaction against their own cells it may be difficult to undo or “grow out of”. Some nerve damage will repair. Some won’t.
[…]
The good news: Lockdowns will end sooner than expected. Not soon enough for some desperate businesses, but sooner than Dan Andrew’s modelers thought.
As I predicted, Victoria is doing better than the models estimated. Many people focus on the “daily new cases” but the “unknown source cases” is a better, more forward looking tool.
In Newspoll today we find — also as I predicted from the outset of the pandemic — that health is priority one for most voters. It’s an awkward fact of democracy. As drastic as the restrictions are in Victoria, more than half the voters are happy to give up some freedom temporarily in order to save lives, hardship and unknown health effects, and the burden on healthworkers.
Right-leaning small business owners and entrepreneurs are often not at all happy about giving up freedom. They’re much more comfortable taking risks, but most of the population are not. It’s a personality type thing. It’s not going to change. (What’s obscene though, is that those comfortable taking risks are bearing more of the costs while public servants like Dan Andrews are getting fat pay rises. )
Despite the strict restrictions, fully 71% of Victorians view the restrictions as “about […]
Given that people with dark skin are more likely to be deficient in Vitamin D, wouldn’t studies like these be the best way to show that black lives actually matter? Would you like training in cultural sensitivity or to avoid the intensive care unit?
A free antiviral shining down on you?
In the Castillo study in Spain, 76 patients were randomly assorted into Calciferol treatment ( 0.532 mg Vitamin D ). Of the 26 who didn’t get it, 13 were admitted to the ICU. Of the 50 who got Vitamin D doses on days 1, 3, and 7 — only one ended up in the ICU. It’s worth noting that all patients got HCQ as well, and azithromycin too.
A second study tested 500 people to find out if they were deficient and followed them to see if they caught Covid.
Why has it taken 6 months of pandemic to do these small studies?
Before the pandemic came there was already ample evidence suggesting that it mattered. Vitamin D influences over 200 genes. Its levels also correlate with lower rates of cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma, heart disease, dental caries, preeclampsia, autoimmune disease, depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders. […]
It appears people who wear masks are much less likely to get severe infections
This will make some heads spin.
Child Wearing a a Mask. Author vperemen.com
Not only do masks reduce the odds of getting infected, but if people do get infected while wearing a mask — the severity of Covid is so much milder. With masks on, the odds of getting an asymptomatic infection improve. Masks don’t stop all viral particles but they stop the large droplet clusters, and thus reduce the viral load. If asymptomatic people get some protection (and we still don’t know for sure) it could solve so much.
Consider the two cruise ships where the asymptomatic rate varied from 18 to 81%:
One used masks and one didn’t:
In February, one of the first outbreaks of COVID-19 outside of China occurred on the Diamond Princess cruise ship docked in Yokohama, Japan. Of the 634 people on board who tested positive, about 18 percent of infections were asymptomatic. In March, an Argentinian cruise ship found itself in a similar predicament, but of the 128 people on board who eventually tested positive, 81 percent were asymptomatic— Ghandi et al.
Nations that use […]
Be wary of junk data and junk conclusions
Death data has become a political tool (stretched both up and down by vested interests). We’ve all heard of the motorcyclist who crashed into the Covid tally, and the payments for US docs. We know there’s junk data out there, but the suggestion we only count deaths “from” Covid, and not the deaths “with” Covid is unscientific in the extreme.
Stick with me. We all want WuFlu to be nothing, but scientists and skeptics need to pick their targets carefully. Don’t lose sight of the real scandal and the real solutions. It’s a travesty that people are dying while cheap vitamins and antivirals are being ignored. Let’s fight for Vitamin D, HCQ, Ivermectin, and all the other potentials like Interferon, Bromhexine, Melatonin, steroids, asthma drugs etc etc. But let’s not get distracted by a hopeful fantasy that the true US “death tally” is only 6% of Covid deaths in the US.
There’s an idea out there that only 9,680 people have died of Covid in the US, not 161,392 people. It’s because of this CDC quote:
“For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned. For deaths with […]
It’s really quite a scandal.
Missing out on the Sunshine Vitamin?
Historians will marvel that societies that were advanced enough to stream reality-tv-shows at 100 million bits per second, were also so backwards that half the population was deficient in Vitamin D — something that costs 6 cents a dose or comes free from the sun. Nearly 60% of older Germans were deficient, and the ESTHER study puts a fine point on how much that matters. Almost 10,000 people were followed for 15 years in Germany, and during that time about half the people who died of respiratory illnesses might not have died if they had enough Vitamin D.
In this German study 44% did not have adequate Vitamin D and about 1 in 6 people have levels so low they are clinically deficient.
Imagine if someone found a drug that stopped nearly half of all influenza deaths?
Right now, the Northern Hemisphere has higher levels of Vitamin D than most months which is quite likely reducing the death rates. The message needs to get out about Vitamin D before the next Northern Winter.
Morethan half the population is deficient.
In terms of respiratory diseases, those whose […]
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