261–270 of 379 posts
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"But I think people should — if it were me — in fact, I might do it anyway. I may take it. Okay? I may take it."
Biden "may work, then again, [...] may not work." - Is that an endorsement?
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Even a small volume of an effective treatment could still be helpful. Usage could be restricted just to patients with cases serious enough to otherwise require ventilators, for instance, which would both ease the strain on limited ICU resources and save lots of people who would otherwise die (since only around 10-30% of ventilated patients survive even with that treatment).
But antivirals tend to need to be given early to have a good effect. How will be know who is going to be severe?
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Because it's become an arbitrary political football to separate "left" vs "right"
As insane as that is. And how funny is it (at least to me) that this is only because Trump came down on one side initially. If he had come out saying exactly the opposite, that HCQ was bad and we should be skeptical, everyone hoping it doesn’t work now would be looking for the 10 person studies saying it totally works and defending its use. It’s almost beyond reason how hyper partisan this specific issue is.
For some issues there's plenty of partisan hackery to go around, but in this instance there is clearly one person to blame for turning this into a partisan issue. Politicians should not be offering their opinions on drug efficacy, full stop.
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Face masks have been shown to be effective at controlling pandemics, and apparently no one (in many western countries) thought to stockpile those.
> Face masks have been shown to be effective at controlling pandemics, and apparently no one (in many western countries) thought to stockpile those. You're dropping the context of the hard decisions nations and governments actually deal in day to day, year to year when it comes to budgets. That's why not a single country had a proper stockpile of N95 masks for a pandemic like this. That isn't an exaggeration: literal…
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> between 7% and 28% of hospitalized have acute myocardial injury So, for a younger (< 60) otherwise healthy person whose chance of death with covid is less than 1%, it would seem ill advised to take this medication at the onset of symptoms, unless the the disease itself causes similar or higher rates of heart damage.
Taking random drugs that you read about on the internet, rather than under medical advice, is almost always a bad idea.
Correct, which is why I used the expression "ill advised". The advice in this case being that of a doctor.
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Face masks have been shown to be effective at controlling pandemics, and apparently no one (in many western countries) thought to stockpile those.
> Face masks have been shown to be effective at controlling pandemics, and apparently no one (in many western countries) thought to stockpile those. You're dropping the context of the hard decisions nations and governments actually deal in day to day, year to year when it comes to budgets. That's why not a single country had a proper stockpile of N95 masks for a pandemic like this. That isn't an exaggeration: literal…
I think there is an alternative solution, though: Rather than maintaining a gigantic stockpile large enough to last a multi-year pandemic, it might be more efficient to maintain a modest stockpile sufficient for the breakout phase along with ready-to-deploy crash production capacity. This might be significantly cheaper.
This means that we need to ensure that we have the capacity to 100x, 1000x, 10,000x production--whatever is modeled to be enough to meet ongoing demand during a pandemic--within the time bought by drawing down the strategic reserve.
We don't need to maintain and refresh a complete stockpile of finished goods, or even a complete stockpile of production capacity (suitable factory floor space, meltblown nonwoven fabric equipment, etc.). We just need to know where such things exist that can be quickly directed to the desired use either with cooperation from the owner or with the DPA, how much exists naturally, and only if there is a deficit, to maintain a stockpile sufficient in combination with those identified supplies: Government-owned sterile factory floor space, for example, or spare production lines for meltblown nonwoven fabric.
We can even enlist private companies to maintain the stockpile for us. It makes way more sense to just subsidize e.g. 3M to have lots of extra meltblown nonwoven fabric production capacity. They are in the business, they maintain and operate the machinery and have the know-how and commercial connections to produce and distribute the material. They will have the capability to quickly respond to demand spikes if the capital requirements for increased production capacity already exist thanks to Uncle Sam's foresight.
Finally, what is maybe even more important than stockpiles or production capacity subsidies is the organization this exercise entails (knowing who makes what critical parts in the supply chain, where they are, what their production capacity is and how quickly it can grow, etc.), which gives an ability to rapidly marshal resources and eliminate inefficiencies to surge production as quickly as possible.
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Trump pushed it as a miracle cure, at least at one point, and he evokes bitter opposition in many. (I think this is quite irrational, but that's your answer.)
People are in opposition to the president promoting drugs with unproven effectiveness as a miracle cure for an ongoing pandemic. I didn't think testing drugs before giving them to people was considered "irrational" as you state, but I guess that is where we are now.
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Face masks have been shown to be effective at controlling pandemics, and apparently no one (in many western countries) thought to stockpile those.
Facemasks are only produced in a handful of countries. In fact we basically don’t even have the skill set or machinery here to convert factories to producing facemask even if we wanted to. Garment work was moved offshore decades ago. Unlike off-patent prescription drugs.
"Covid-19 Could Bring Generic Drug Manufacturing Back to the U.S., Analyst Writes"
https://www.barrons.com/articles/covid-19-could-bring-generi...
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From what I understand, in the late stages of the disease, it's not necessarily the virus that's killing the patient. Often, the virus has been cleared and it's the patient's own immune response that's doing the damage.
This matches what I've read, too. It's less about the virus during the later stages and more about the infected person's immune system. If they've entered a state of amplified immune response, colloquially called a "cytokine storm," organs are damaged when their cells are mistakenly attacked. If you can moderate the immune system's reaction you can prevent significant damage. HCQ is useful for this type of immuno-sup…