Is anyone else "chomping at the bit" to find out if these things work? Do you feel kind-of helpless waiting, watching, wondering what is happening with all of the trials going on around the world? Are you worried that doctors are trying hydroxycloroquine as a stand-alone(like in the Chinese study) , when there are good reasons to think the addition of other nutrients could make it much more effective? If the stand alone trials fail... will a promising combination treatment be derided by mainstream media sources and not given a chance?
I am worried about that. Is there any collective action we can take to find out more details about various trials or to make sure leading health orgs, doctors, hospitals, CDC, FDA, what-not, are considering more comprehensive treatment?
Or do we just sit idly by and hope something good happens.
You really struck a chord with me, Mind. I haven't posted much in years, but the current pandemic management-by-risk-aversion is nauseating. I just couldn't stay silent any longer. There was even this former FDA guy on the news saying that it would be a mistake to try quinine derivatives on desperate COVID patients because it might result in a shortage for those suffering from arthritis.
Screw your controlled trial! People are dying at an exponentially increasing rate. We need to offer meaningful options to those who are both high risk and highly salvageable -- NOW. I think I'm going to puke if I hear one more "public health expert" opine about how we shouldn't offer options to these people because it might involve challenging side effects. As far as I'm concerned, they should all be sent to the front lines in New York. Let them lecture the emergency docs on why they shouldn't be dosing prophylactic drugs.
Thank God these people didn't manage the Saturn V project. We never would have gone to the moon!
But if you speak out, you're going to get smacked down. (OK, maybe not in Taiwan, which is the only country I'm aware of that has some rational sense of risk-vs-reward, along with full disclosure to the patient.)
The only thing I can suggest is a bunch of viral videos expounding on all of our best collective wisdom about productive approaches, with the caveat that it's fluidly evolving theory. Let YouTube take it down for violating "community guidelines" (that allow people to die on schedule). We could have redundant posters plaster it all over the place so everyone knows we're wasting money on nonsense therapies like prednisone and codeine that's better spent on aggressive therapeutics. I'm useless as a presenter; I think you and others are much better suited. But I wouldn't mind contributing to the information spray.
You want to run a 1-year trial for a disease that might kill 1% of humanity by the fall? Go ahead. Just don't stop the desperately ill among us from attempting to convert theory directly into practice because it's the only fighting chance we have.
I am thinking about doing a video about possible treatments/cures - this weekend. I am not anyone all that important, but I do have a lot of contacts. A passionate video might go viral.
If I do, it would probably be tomorrow and I would base it upon what has happened thus far in the pandemic, what treatments have shown some promise, why specific nutrients could help, and why quarantine is not a viable solution (just look at China re-locking down Wuhan again yesterday - those poor people).
A 100% cure is not needed, all we need is a protocol to manage the disease, to make it less lethal. If we can turn it into something on par with the flu, then the people who catch it can just suffer through some non lethal symptoms for a few days and then get better.
Yes, for sure! Just blunt the lethality. That's 80% of the way there. And I totally agree on quarantine. It's OK for a week or two while we get our collective heads out of the sand, but it leads to so many equally morbid complications, not to mention potential global economic collapse. (I can't shake the sense that I'm living in an implausibly bad science fiction movie, but I keep waking up inside it and it gets worse every day, and the supposed protagonists are either impractical or idiotic.)
"Extend and defend" -- Extend the time from fever onset to dyspnea as long as possible, so as to give the body time to ramp antibody production.
Wuhan just suffered a major riot because those who attempted to return to work in neighboring Jiangxi province were prohibited from doing so. It's Hubei police vs. Jiangxi police vs. the public. Imagine what we're going to see in far less repressed countries...
"A passionate video might go viral." -- Know any survivors who almost didn't make it? Or any survivors, for that matter, who were confirmed with RNA?
It would also be valuable to be crystal clear about idiotic trials involving monotherapies, so people will be made to understand the nuances of combination therapies and how they're fundamentally different and why -- as you feared -- it would be a horrible mistake to ban a low-risk drug just because it fails in monotherapy. It's also worth explaining the tradeoff between statistical confidence and body count. We want to minimize body count even if that means we're not yet able to maximize statistical confidence. Because we have to.
Edited by resveratrol_guy, 28 March 2020 - 03:51 PM.
I am thinking about doing a video about possible treatments/cures - this weekend. I am not anyone all that important, but I do have a lot of contacts. A passionate video might go viral.
If I do, it would probably be tomorrow and I would base it upon what has happened thus far in the pandemic, what treatments have shown some promise, why specific nutrients could help, and why quarantine is not a viable solution (just look at China re-locking down Wuhan again yesterday - those poor people).
A 100% cure is not needed, all we need is a protocol to manage the disease, to make it less lethal. If we can turn it into something on par with the flu, then the people who catch it can just suffer through some non lethal symptoms for a few days and then get better.
Maybe you can mention DRACO and the idea to get funding restarted for that?
A DRACO mention would be in my video, yes. Thanks for the reminder.
What I would really like to do is attempt to refocus humanity's attention.
National news outlets and politicians are all caught up in the calamity, watching the numbers, updating the body count, modelling the spread, etc...
More focus needs to be on REAL solutions, effective treatments, or outright cures. I am not waiting around months or years for a vaccine to be developed.
Coronavirus: Chinese Hospitals Are Saving Lives with Vitamin C Injections
Vitamin C expert, Dr. Thomas Levy, relies on a myriad of papers, his own decades of medical practice, and on that of other doctors who worked with high dose Vitamin C. He shows that there is no known virus that cannot be defeated with sufficient doses of Vitamin C taken frequently enough. Moreover, when taken orally in the form of liposomal encapsulation, the Vitamin C goes straight into body cells where it disables viruses at the cellular level at the acute stage. For serious hospitalized patients, Dr. Thomas Levy recommends both interventionist injections of Vitamin C as well as liposomal and other forms in combo.
He also points out that when Vitamin C is touted as ineffective, it is because not enough is dosed. Whereas, Vitamin C injections and liposomal C save lives that cannot be saved by low doses (just as too little antibiotic will not resolve an infection). Dietary amounts are not enough; medicinal doses are imperative.
See Dr. Thomas Levy's videos on YouTube.
Right now, our Vitamin C supplies are made in China, and this needs to be corrected.
Hospitals in China are saving lives with Vitamin C injections:
Western Media Focusses On Big Pharma’s Search for a Coronavirus Vaccine While Suppressing Coverage of High
A dramatic example of Vitamin C injections and Liposomal C rescuing an Australian man with whited out lungs who was about to be unplugged from life support and left to die:
YouTube (Dr. Fouci is not familiar with the power of high dose Vitamin C):
Dr. Fauci: You don't make the timeline, the virus does
One cannot choose experts too wisely. When it comes to Vitamin C, we must rely on the true Vitamin C experts.
Vitamin D3: Vitamin D experts point out that 5,000 to 10,000 IU of Vitamin D should be taken per day (along with Vitamin K2 to prevent calcium absorption at the wrong places in the body). But if viral symptoms appear, they say that it is better to increase the dosage to about 50,000 IU of Vitamin D3 for a few days. This keeps the immune system from overreacting to viruses. Experts say that what gets people in trouble with viruses is an overreaction by the immune system.
Zinc: Chloroquine works by getting zinc into body cells, given that zinc disables viral reproduction. Another way of getting zinc into cells is liposomal encapsulation. For example, a product called Zyta-C consists of Liposomal zinc and Liposomal Vitamin C. I do not know how much zinc is delivered with this over-the-counter health product compared to chloroquine, but liposomal zinc is a good adjunct to liposomal Vitamin C.
In his most recent video, Dr. Levy touches on coronavirus. He indicates that it typically starts in the sinuses. He recommends nebulizing Vitamin C in a cold nebulizer, but he also says that extremely weak hydrogen peroxide (3% in a water solution) can also do the trick. The key is that it must be too weak (3% or less in a water solution) to cause harm in the body. It should be at the level that the body itself makes hydrogen peroxide to destroy viruses, but directed to where the viruses starts to manifest in the body, e.g. such as the sinuses.
All in all, there are ways to deal with viruses that do not demand vaccinations that may be harmful or come with restrictions -- and that come along too late to save lives and our economy.
No reply from the White House or others in a position to appeal to them when this info was sent. Looks like they need to be bombarded with info from many.
I think that your last video was excellent. Wanting your next one to go viral might take some extra work. Most videos that I see which are liked and linked to on Social Media or via email tend to be short.
Maybe you could outline ahead of time focused sections, and pause a little at the end of each section. Maybe with a summary. The summary frame could be captured and shared via social media where one catchy graphic is all that gets posted and then shared. There is a reason that click bait titles work. (Not that I am suggesting deception) You would still be able to record and share one continuous video, but could also cut the main video into multiple smaller videos which you also share. You might want to add notes in a description to the longer video with specific time of the recording one could forward to. If you have watched some of the Rhonda Patrick Found My Fitness videos, you might have noticed this technique. Including a section about Draco could be great, but that is not a current tool, and would be perfect for a small portion which could be cut for sharing to the initiated.
A DRACO mention would be in my video, yes. Thanks for the reminder.
What I would really like to do is attempt to refocus humanity's attention.
National news outlets and politicians are all caught up in the calamity, watching the numbers, updating the body count, modelling the spread, etc...
More focus needs to be on REAL solutions, effective treatments, or outright cures. I am not waiting around months or years for a vaccine to be developed.
There are other possible broad-spectrum antivirals besides DRACO like birinapant, MUS-Au nanoparticles, protein-based viral prophylaxis (PVP), and peptide P9. And this isn't even a comprehensive list.
Sorry, just casually getting reports from various sources. Maybe not completely locked-down, but still quarantined: https://www.youtube....h?v=y1QwUFxxSJ4
Maybe you can mention DRACO and the idea to get funding restarted for that?
DRACO may be the solution. Good luck getting Todd Rider to say anything at all. (I invite you to try. See https://riderinstitute.org .) I get the sense that he's been beaten into a corner by risk-averse health authorities, or possibly even MIT itself. What a tragically wasted opportunity in the making.
It always struck me as odd how he's been essentially silent on the matter since shortly after failing to raise $100K for rat studies a few years back.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist here, in the sense that I don't think there's a secret deep state gang trying to silence him. I suspect he's being impeded for more obvious reasons, perhaps involving ordinary and expected FDA cease-and-desist orders.
I do not think the problem is fundamentally technological. DRACO is definitely worth a mention and brief overview in the proposed video. So too is his website, so we can flood him with pleas to speak up. Rider is brilliant. I can hardly imagine that the potential use for COVID19 has failed to cross his mind.
Edited by resveratrol_guy, 29 March 2020 - 12:19 AM.
Sorry, just casually getting reports from various sources. Maybe not completely locked-down, but still quarantined: https://www.youtube....h?v=y1QwUFxxSJ4
Yeah, but that's not "re-locking down Wuhan again yesterday." The lockdown was lifted on people entering the city, and supposedly, the lockdown of people leaving the city will be lifted on the 8th of April.
The best that we can do that's not being done nearly enough is to encourage everyone to wear a mask. And perhaps looking into how to improve homemade masks would be the next best thing.
A distant second would to make your own ventilator that won't kill you faster than the virus.
Pills and potions are likely to fail. And since there's intense pressure to get rid of this coronavirus, I doubt anything that's "promising" will be overlooked for too long anyway.
The best that we can do that's not being done nearly enough is to encourage everyone to wear a mask. And perhaps looking into how to improve homemade masks would be the next best thing.
Yes! Masks are the #1 biggest bang-for-the-buck intervention. Nevermind how stupid it was not to have a national stockpile in any country including China. Moderately effective masks can be made from clean bed sheets or HEPA paper removed from unused air filters. And maybe tape on an unfolded paperclip to use for a nose clamp.
It's blindingly obvious from TV images that the countries with the slowest-growing epidemics are those in which more people are wearing masks in public.
If the outward transmission rate drops to 30% of normal by using a DIY mask, then successful reception will drop to around 9% (30% of 30%). N95 will get you closer to 8% transmission from what I've read, yielding a reception rate of under 1%. That's why, if you look at the log charts, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong are progressing at half or a quarter the speed of the US, if they're even still exponential at all.
Pills and potions are likely to fail. And since there's intense pressure to get rid of this coronavirus, I doubt anything that's "promising" will be overlooked for too long anyway.
Don't underestimate the power of socialized medicine. Good practices are ignored in favor of cost-effective symptom treatment. I'm not an optimist by nature, but I do think that "pills and potions" will eventually win the day. That's why HIV is now a basically manageable illness, when it was a death sentence 30 years ago. But it's not about belief. It's about having no other option than to try, while at the same time diverting money being spent on disinfecting asphalt roads (WTF?) to mask production.
It's revealing to look at what might be called the "exit survival ratio" (ESR) in various countries, which I would define as
recoveries / (recoveries + deaths)
According to the Johns Hopkins data for countries with thousands of cases, the lowest ESR belongs to the Netherlands, but with only 6 survivors, it seems like there's honestly something wrong with how they're tracking patients. So the gold medal goes to the UK and its NHS death optimization machine, at an appalling 13%. The silver goes to the US, as a testament to its brilliant public health policies; it currently stands at just 34%. Italy and Spain aren't far behind.
You must, of course, take this with a grain of salt, because it's possible that people die faster than recover, so the final rankings won't be known until well past the peak. Meanwhile, the cases keep filling up the hospitals. The actual survival ratios are surely much higher, as most people never present themselves to the medical system, opting to tough it out at home. (That would seem to be wise, as an overburdened hospital system serves as little more than an infection distribution center.)
I'm not an optimist by nature, but I do think that "pills and potions" will eventually win the day. That's why HIV is now a basically manageable illness, when it was a death sentence 30 years ago. But it's not about belief. It's about having no other option than to try, while at the same time diverting money being spent on disinfecting asphalt roads (WTF?) to mask production.
But we have weeks to months, not years. And except for novel (not repurposed) HIV drugs and so-so flu vaccines for the elderly, there aren't any good magic bullets for similar infectious diseases despite decades of research.
We can dispute it all day, and yes the history of antivirals is generally unimpressive, but we need to try.
Here's a new deep dive into COVID19 vs. azithromycin, HCQ, rapalogs, and cellular senescence. The biggest surprise to me was that, because it downregulates protein synthesis, rapamycin might, at some optimal dose, inhibit viral reproduction despite suppressing the immune system.
We need to offer meaningful options to those who are both high risk and highly salvageable -- NOW. I think I'm going to puke if I hear one more "public health expert" opine about how we shouldn't offer options to these people because it might involve challenging side effects.
Potentially, these experimental drug treatments might make the infection worse.
Several drugs were trialed during the SARS outbreak of 2003, and in one study I looked at, the authors said that some of them may have actually worsened SARS. They could not say for sure, because the number of subjects was too small to reach statistical significance. But they did suggest that some drugs may have done more harm than good.
At the moment, there are at least 45 compounds that are thought may have some useful effects against COVID-19. These are listed here. But without knowing which (if any) work, and without knowing if there are downsides, you don't know which ones to give.
Just FYI, I did produce a video today, but it was too long and rambling. I will have to chop things up and take one subject at a time. Make each video more concise. Thanks for all the ideas so far.
I was concerned to see that most healthcare workers (HCWs) and patients are still roaming the hospital floors and the emergency department without wearing masks. Hospitals are citing guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) restricting mask use mostly to close encounters with symptomatic individuals or confirmed cases with COVID-19.
I decided to research the evidence and justification behind official prevention guidelines. My findings were rather striking.
'Stealth Transmission' of COVID-19 Demands Widespread Mask Usage
And soon it's gonna be time for torches and pitchforks (just read to comments) for the idiot savants at the CDC and WHO. Well, probably not; those geniuses might even get promoted.
More evidence that HCQ plus azithromycin works, this time from a prominent French expert on infectious disease, backed up by local COVID patient data, including a control group. Spoiler: results were quite positive, but not at the level of success or statistical depth as Dr. Zelenko's claims. At least it's consistent with zinc being the third leg of the therapeutic foundation.
At the moment, there are at least 45 compounds that are thought may have some useful effects against COVID-19. These are listed here. But without knowing which (if any) work, and without knowing if there are downsides, you don't know which ones to give.
We don't "know" anything in medical science because the test space is too large. We have to deal with insufficient information, to varying extents, at all times. But insufficient information is not equivalent to no information. Case in point: AI is very good at accurately reconstructing faces from tens of pixels, whereas human need thousands. Which is to say that just because it can be very difficult to piece together a strong case from lots of noisy data, does not mean that it's impossible to do so or hopeless to try. Just the same, those who want more certainty are welcome to join the control groups.
Two thumbs up! Don't have a mask? Make one. YouTube videos abound.
Sadly, it might actually be harder for medical professionals to procure them than the rest of us, due to the byzantine regulatory requirements for design and manufacture. The insane quest for perfection, in these circumstances, is doing far more harm than good.
Edited by resveratrol_guy, 30 March 2020 - 12:00 AM.
Just FYI, I did produce a video today, but it was too long and rambling. I will have to chop things up and take one subject at a time. Make each video more concise. Thanks for all the ideas so far.
Please post a link to your channel here in the thread, to make it dead easy for everyone here to like and subscribe.
We don't "know" anything in medical science because the test space is too large. We have to deal with insufficient information, to varying extents, at all times. But insufficient information is not equivalent to no information. Case in point: AI is very good at accurately reconstructing faces from tens of pixels, whereas human need thousands. Which is to say that just because it can be very difficult to piece together a strong case from lots of noisy data, does not mean that it's impossible to do so or hopeless to try. Just the same, those who want more certainty are welcome to join the control groups.
Yeah, but what are the odds? 1 in 2 or 1 in 1 trillion? Supposedly, even in the best of times, most medical research is junk anyway. And no one has the luxury of time anymore.
Yeah, but what are the odds? 1 in 2 or 1 in 1 trillion? Supposedly, even in the best of times, most medical research is junk anyway. And no one has the luxury of time anymore.
Yes, indeed, it's all about the odds. I'll answer with an example relevant here.
As I pointed out above, French infectious disease expert Didier Raoult recently produced a paper in which he claims that 65 of 80 patients (81%) recovered and exited hospital within 5 days, given a therapy involving HCQ and sometimes azithromycin. So, predictably, he got attacked by one of his peers, who quite correctly observed that "The majority of patients recover form #COVID19 infection, with or without #Hchloroquine and #Azithromycin treatment." It seems that this is in fact the case for 80% patients. Therefore HCQ plus azithromycin offers no benefit. (His extra 1% is deep in the noise.)
But the reasoning is flawed because Raoult's patients had been admitted to hospital, whereas the aforementioned 80% are members of the general public, almost none of whom end up there. At most, they might visit their doctor and get sent back home with instructions to rest and drink fluids, without ever ending up as an official case.
So what about those who do, in fact, get hospitalized in France? Well, as of last count (per Johns Hopkins), they have an exit survival rate of only 73%. This is worse than Raoult's 81%, even assuming that his pending 15 patients all die! (One has died already, and one remains in ICU.)
It's tough to do an exact comparison because that 73% may rise (if recoveries tend to take longer than deaths) or even fall further (due to an overburdened healthcare system). But dealing with the data we have, as-is, it's possible to compute the odds of a "73% heads" coin coming up heads at least 65 times out of 80. (The calculation involves Bernoulli distributions, and unfortunately WolframAlpha seems to be down at the moment.) What's clear is that the mode (peak) of the distribution is at just 59 survivors exiting hospital (73% of 80).
It's also important to realize that multiple weak studies can be aggregated to equate to one strong study. It's not straightforward to do this, but AI has made it plain that such feats are possible in theory. Combined with Zelenko's 699 patients, only 4 of which hospitalized, a compelling picture emerges. Of course, you can't just combine the numbers outright because he also used zinc, but nevertheless the information is partially additive and not merely redundant. Yes, both teams could be lying, and we need to allow for some probabilistic accounting for that. All in all, it's not a trivial task to come up with a hard p value at this stage, but I know where I would be placing my bets.
One more monumentally important lesson from AI is that the best performing systems are those which act continuously on dynamically updated information about the world -- not those which do nothing until a crystal clear picture of the world fully emerges from the noise. We need to take a hint and optimize for minimum deaths, not maximum precision.
DRACO may be the solution. Good luck getting Todd Rider to say anything at all. (I invite you to try. See https://riderinstitute.org .) I get the sense that he's been beaten into a corner by risk-averse health authorities, or possibly even MIT itself. What a tragically wasted opportunity in the making.
It always struck me as odd how he's been essentially silent on the matter since shortly after failing to raise $100K for rat studies a few years back.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist here, in the sense that I don't think there's a secret deep state gang trying to silence him. I suspect he's being impeded for more obvious reasons, perhaps involving ordinary and expected FDA cease-and-desist orders.
I do not think the problem is fundamentally technological. DRACO is definitely worth a mention and brief overview in the proposed video. So too is his website, so we can flood him with pleas to speak up. Rider is brilliant. I can hardly imagine that the potential use for COVID19 has failed to cross his mind.
I have sent him many emails via many different ways, I received ZERO reply from him.
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