Who cares about the skeptics. Give me the drug if I'm sick. End of story.
Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
471–480 of 1001 posts
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
Children aren't at risk from Covid at all. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01897-w In the US, 340 children under 17 have died from Covid. Total. During the same period, 187 have died from the flu, and over 51,000 children have died from all causes: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se... They are more likely to be injured by these vaccines and neurotic parents stuffing them into mas…
Do children who get infected spread it?
They do, but not as much as adults. They have much smaller noses. Seems silly but it's physics.
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#473Does anyone have a sense as to when US society will completely eliminate COVID measures? Is it just me or is there no clear exit criteria anymore? This will go on forever without exit criteria.
It's fairly clear what the exit criteria is. Hospital capacity. When hospitals are filling up COVID measures are necessary. COVID is endemic now and will ebb and flow over the next decade. As such I would expect COVID measures to come and go based on local health department and hospital capacity needs.
> When hospitals are filling up COVID measures are necessary.
They are only "necessary" if you are optimizing the metric "make sure hospitals run smoothly" over any other concerns.
I hate this framing that Covid restrictions are ever forced on us, rather than being a policy choice with pros and cons.
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Side effects don't have to happen in the next 6 months. If this is a molecule with a short half-life that is broken down and expelled by the body, it isn't going to have random side effects that show up months in the future.
Prions are "just" proteins that should get broken down by the body. But they don't, and they cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob in over 10 years after ingesting.
> Prions are "just" proteins
According to whom? You make it sound as if at some point scientists thought that prions were "just proteins", which I'm sure is not true.
I'm not saying new medicine can't have side effects a long time after ingestion.
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
When hospitalization rates are down. In many metro areas the ICU are still full of un-vaccinated COVID patients, which means people with normal emergencies can't get a bed. Thus, COVID precautions are necessary to reduce the rate of infection to levels that do not overwhelm the healthcare system. And all those areas that have "returned to normal" are sending their COVID patients to regions that are still masking beca…
Here's "hospital stress" data for the US, showing where COVID patients are overwhelming the healthcare systems: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/09/9443799...
Would be interesting to see how that data compares with other diseases. For instance heart disease, which is largely preventable and kills more people
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s a straw man argument, when you take this drug you already have 100% covid19. Presumably that means you’ll have that risk, plus additional unknown risk. Perhaps the drug works like advertised, but we’ve seen better and more successful studies for things like ivermectin and anti-body treatments. Which have a known risk profile. It’s the same for the vaccine. You still have the risk of what ever the vaccine risk…
Data shows that being vaccinated divides your odds of dying and being hospitalized from covid by about 10. There's no evidence I'm aware of showing that the vaccines create additional risk anywhere close to outweighing that benefit.
Don’t mistake relative risk for absolute risk. Not everyone who is vaccinated gets Covid, but everyone vaccinated is at risk of vaccine side effects.
If a 30 year old has a 0.08% chance of hospitalization, the risk drops to 0.008%. But they might stand a 1 in 5 chance of getting infected so now it’s 0.016% to 0.0016%.
But if they get injected with a vaccine, the risk of a rare side effect might be 1 in 100,000 or 0.001% which is pretty similar to Covid.
It’s the same analysis the UK did that caused them to recommend against the AZ vaccine for certain age groups.
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#477Does anyone have a sense as to when US society will completely eliminate COVID measures? Is it just me or is there no clear exit criteria anymore? This will go on forever without exit criteria.
I don't know but I haven't had a cold or any other infection in 18 months so I hope that wearing masks on trains, planes and buses stays forever. Also, shaking hands was always barbaric and I don't miss that, either.
My personal opinion, which reasonable people may of course disagree with depending on how they weight various factors, is that forcing people to regularly hide their faces in public is too large a price to pay to avoid sometimes getting a cold.
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#478> This is a completely novel molecule... Then do we understand the risk profile of this thing? That sounds like the sort of innovation that people would want to be at the back of the queue for. Side effects don't have to happen in the next 6 months.
Pretty sure we don't understand the long term risk of getting COVID either right? I mean it has not even been around for 2 years. Plus we do know it is possible only 1 infection would kill you.
Ransoming one kind of ignorance for another, based off the impact one risk has over another, is Pascal's Wager, not knowledge.
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prions are "just" proteins that should get broken down by the body. But they don't, and they cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob in over 10 years after ingesting.
Are you suggesting that every new molecule should be treated as if it were a prion?
Again, as someone who worked with toxicology, yeah. The default is every new molecule might be highly toxic and needs to be proven otherwise.
It’s why we don’t look at a molecule and say “oh, that’s not a carcinogen! No need to test”. And the same reason we run hERG tests to make sure drugs don’t give you a fatal arrhythmia (a surprising number of drugs do this and some are still on the market).
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#480It’s crazy that money is such a huge incentive. Knowing that a cure for Covid is a potentially $100B market means you throw the kitchen sink at it. Imagine being this lab. Do you think they ever had trouble hiring an assistant? Buying new equipment? Getting bonuses? This environment must be fantastically different from the typical meat grinder of bio R&D.
Therefore how can you trust this drug? Follow the money! It’s just big science trying to propagate a pandemic to make more money! If this sounds insane, we’ll ok just reflecting the common anti vax sentiments I hear on this web site (ugh).
> the common anti vax sentiments I hear on this web site (ugh).
Seeing this stuff so prevalent on HN really disappointed me.