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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 […]
Who knew that Youtube was your Doctor and Guardian of Medical Truth?
Youtube banned an entire news network for one week today because they said something about one of the cheapest most commonly prescribed drugs used around the world for millions of people for long term use for the last 65 years. I don’t know what OANN said, but if someone can find that story, I’ll add a link to it, not because I agree with it (though I might) but for the sake of free speech. This move by Youtube deprives OANN of income for the next week, and heavies them to change their reporting because there is a three strikes and you’re out rule. It also deprives potentially thousands of people for hearing a different point of view. Thus Youtube is even more powerful than any appointed Minister of Health — it is deciding not only what medication you should have but even what medication you might know of and potentially ask your doctor about.
YouTube temporarily suspends, demonetizes OANN
YouTube has barred One America News Network from posting new videos for a week and stripped it of its ability to make money off existing content […]
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
Another day in the strange world of Covid
A new finding suggests Covid-19 doesn’t just bind to the ACE2 receptor, it also binds to a key pain receptor called neuropilin-1 receptor (NRP-1). This could explain why some people with a high viral load are asymptomatic and infectious but unaware they are unwell. It’s like the virus is arriving with it’s own morphine. In theory this might be a successful adaption from the virus’s point of view as it may increase the spread of the disease if infected people wander around able to shed virus for longer.
Despite being fed up with the WuFlu, the efficient perfidy is something to behold (at least to a microbiologist). It’s like a pocketknife.
On the down side, the virus may still be damaging tissues in this painless state, which might explain some of those findings of lung and heart damage even in mild or asymptomatic cases.
There is at least one potentially very nice payoff. The finding from the University of Arizona, may lead to the design of whole new painkillers based on the coronavirus spike that is “better than opioids”. The lead author says he has been contacted by people who had […]
In news just in, Donald Trump and his wife Melania have both tested positive for Covid-19. So in the last four weeks of campaigning for the US election he needs to quarantine for two weeks, will most likely survive but faces significant odds of impairment and fatigue. How convenient for Biden-Harris?
The Trumps went into quarantine and got tested today after one of the President’s closest advisers, Hope Hicks, contracted the infection.
Ms Hicks, a former White House communications director who returned to the administration as a counsellor to Mr Trump earlier this year, travelled to and from this week’s presidential debate in Cleveland, Ohio with him.
She was also aboard the President’s helicopter, Marine One, for a trip to Joint Base Andrews yesterday. And she was aboard Air Force One for Mr Trump’s visit to Minnesota, where he held a political rally.
–news.com.au
With luck, he gets the asymptomatic kind of infection, (as his wife does too). We hope his doctors are fully up with things like the Florida ICAM treatment regime.
She said ICAM works by reinforcing the immune system and protecting the lungs from inflammation.
October 2nd, 2020 | Tags: Coronavirus, Trump (Donald), US Politics | Category: Politics |  Print This Post | |
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 […]
Dr Li-Meng Yan worked in the WHO Coronavirus Reference Lab in Hong Kong. She has just published a detailed paper claiming that the SARS-2 coronavirus was artificially made in a laboratory and appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show today. She also claims it was deliberately spread (though this was slightly ambiguous– listen closely).
We already had enough evidence to know that SARS-Cov2 is a likely bioweapon. (The virus it supposedly evolved from appears to be fake.) This is largely what her paper covers.
Chinese defector virologist Dr Li-Meng Yan publishes report claiming COVID-19 was made in a lab
Phoebe Looms, News.com
Dr Yan had been working at Hong Kong University’s public health laboratory sciences division, a World Health Organisation infectious diseases research centre, when her boss was asked to investigate the outbreak in Wuhan.
Dr Yan claimed her and her team’s scientific findings were suppressed, and they were told only to report cases linked to the Huanan seafood market. After becoming fearful of her safety, she fled China on a flight bound for Los Angeles in late April.
Others in her lab said: “ Dr. Yan’s statement does not accord with the key facts […]
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 […]
Finally, some unexpectedly good news on community spread in Victoria:
Untrackable new cases in Victoria are drying up. The incidence of community spread cases with an unknown source are every epidemiologists nightmare. So their absence is a marker of how well the restrictions work– and whether the “fire” is under control. It’s cheery news.
Community spread is the number that matters most — more than daily infections. Known cases can be track-and-traced. Unknown cases mean whole clusters are spreading invisibly and restrictions need to be wider. Despite the depressing schedule planned in Victoria, if this reduction in unknown cases is sustained, then other options for pandemic management become possible. The NSW-style-management with intense tracking and tracing may suddenly become an option within weeks. (Though there may be a 50 case spike tomorrow just to prove me wrong.) Tracking and tracing works best at lower levels, and becomes overwhelming quickly as the number of clusters rise.
With strong restrictions, the exponential rise in infections can become an exponential fall. Where before each person might infect three new people, now three people staying home are only infecting one (or something like that). Two lines get extinguished instead of amplified, as the virus […]
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 […]
I didn’t think cough syrups even worked against coughs, but one new paper suggests that bromhexine in common cough syrups reduces both Covid-19 rates of ICU and of mortality.
The era of antivirals has come, not that Big Pharma want you to know that cheap out-of-patent drugs might help. But for years we were told that medical science didn’t have an answer to viruses.
Bromhexine was patented in 1961 and is commonly found in OTC pharmacy cough syrups with names like Bisolvon, Robitussin, and Duro-Tuss (Wiki has a long list).
Theoretically Bromhexine sabotages one of our molecules — with the snappy name of TMPRSS2 (which is shorter than saying Transmembrane protease S2). A protease is a fancy pair of molecular scissors, it chops or tweaks the viral spike and if that doesn’t happen, the virus can’t get into the cell (at least not through its favourite path).
The nice thing about an antiviral acting against our molecules, rather than against the virus itself, is that it’s harder for the virus to mutate to get around it. That means it’s less likely the virus can develop resistance. The downside of targeting our own molecules is that it might fritz things up. […]
The first case of a definitive reinfection was reported today
Before we look at whether a cold gives us protection let’s point out we don’t know how well a SARS 2 infection gives us protection.
A 33 year old man in Hong Kong was tested positive nearly five months after his first infection, and with a slightly different variant of the virus, so it’s very likely this was a second infection rather than a resurgence of the first. It hints that Covid may be a bit like the common cold, and our immunity may be partial and temporary which is not good news for the herd immunity idea and the vaccine plan, but it’s only one case. On the plus side, he had a three day fever, cough and sickness in March, but is asymptomatic this time, suggesting that maybe there is enough residual immunity to help him beat the second infection.
There have been other reports of people getting reinfected but none of the previous cases had genetic testing of both infections to show they were different. But 13% of 4,000 doctors who were surveyed in May (even at that early stage) believed that at least one of their […]
The “Aeronabs” are on the way?
Right now there are more biomedical research teams focused on one problem than at any point in history, and they are armed. This is Biotech’s Big Moment, and here’s just another potential game changer. The time line here is short, and the ability to scale it is large. The seige of 2020 will end one way or another, and we will gain a whole set of tools to use on other viruses too.
If the virus has a key to get into our cells, this is like making millions of decoy locks that stick to the keys and thus disable them.
What if we could coat our lungs with tiny particles that work like PPE against coronavirus? The aim here is that one nasal spray a day might stop the virus getting entry into our cells. At the moment, one team have this working in the lab already. They’ve created a kind of cut down mini antibody, and at this stage it sticks like glue to the viral spikes. It still needs to be tested in humans, and might yet fall in a hole. But it’s another example of the potential contained […]
Three important findings from three different studies:
1. That people who survive Covid have more antibodies against Covid virus spikes than the nucleocapsid shell.
2. Monoclonal antibodies against the spike are already being developed and are progressing apace.
3. But many antibody tests are looking for the wrong antibodies.
A new study found a different pattern of antibody responses in people who recovered from Covid compared to those who died. Survivors had a antibodies predominantly against the viral spike (S), whereas early in the infection those who would not recover had more antibodies against the outer shell, known as the nucleocapsid (N). This has implications — in vaccines, testing, treatment and possibly figuring out why some people don’t even get sick at all.
Atyeo et al is a small study. But one tantalizing line suggests the pattern of antibody responses was even better at predicting who would die than the age of the patient, which was until now the best clue we had. It appears that some patients had a strong immune response but they were making more of the wrong kind of antibodies, and perhaps these would not able to neutralize, or stop […]
Lessons from Coronavirus
Lockdowns and border closures mean many diseases have been prevented
It’s peak season for flu here in Australia and there’s almost no sign of it. As Chris Gillham wrote here back in May, we know lockdowns stop viruses, because flu cases are 85% down. Now he shows that this extends to other diseases too, and Chris has used data from the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System to calculate that just shy of 200,000 fewer Australians contracted any of the notifiable diseases in the first seven months of 2020 compared to the first seven months of 2019.
Is some of that disease burden just the price of holiday-makers bringing back diseases from overseas each year?
No one wants to stop the planes returning to the skies, but it begs the question — do we have to accept the onslaught of winter germs every year?
The answer may lie with other things we’ve discovered in the Covid pandemic too — that sick people should stay home from work and school, and that we have a lot of anti-viral tools we can use. Perhaps it’s time that travellers considered taking preemptive anti-virals, which might improve their holidays and also reduce […]
Something that marks how strange times are, was that in March and April, a group of seismologists found seismic activity fell by 50% at 185 stations around the world (at least in certain high frequency bands from 4 – 14 Hz). For example the three graphs below show seismic activity in Brussels, Barbados and New Zealand. A slight downturn happens at Christmas but the lockdown period fell far below that.
For the first time seismologists could identify small quake signals they had missed before.
Co-author Dr Stephen Hicks, from Imperial’s Department of Earth Science and Engineering, said: “This quiet period is likely the longest and largest dampening of human-caused seismic noise since we started monitoring the Earth in detail using vast monitoring networks of seismometers.
Who knows what they might figure out now they have a handle on human background “noise”.
(B) Lockdown effects in hiFSAN compared with audible environmental noise and independent mobility data in Brussels, Belgium. (C) Lockdown effect in Barbados compared to noise levels in the last decade (in gray) and correlation with local flight data at the Grantley Adams International Airport (TBPB) (24). (D) Lockdown noise reduction recorded on borehole seismometers in […]
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