Christy. Blessings and Happy Easter. Ok it is regrettable that since Dr. Trump for political reasons was promoting Chloroquine (Cq)that some are discounting the drug for the same reasons. It seems to me that some people really don’t want a treatment for cv 19? Waiting for a vaccine is not a good idea for the same reservations that many have for drugs. We should note that Dr. Fauci was a leader in the treatment of HIV and we still don’t have a vaccine for HIV. Instead we have a drug cocktail that took many years to develop.
Our medical doctors are really smart and have experience with their drugs indications and contraindications. They know that they need a drug to treat early and prevent onset severity. I know for a fact that they are using many drugs off label to try to treat cv19 based on the patient particular conditions. A battle is not fought well from headquarters and must be fought by the doctors in the field. I have seen respiratory doctors totally perplexed by the sudden onset of severe symptoms essentially helpless to prevent that. In my other posts I have mentioned that this virus works via a specific RAS pathway and in certain patients due to comorbidity or genetics are more susceptible to severity. I can’t stress enough that risk factors require early intervention in those patients rather than waiting for a patient to go south.
We don’t know if the drug (Cq)by itself or in combination with other drugs is effective in prophylaxis or preventing the severity of CV19. We understand the drug well enough in its use with arthritis and lupus as an effective immune suppressant that it may have benefit in reducing the expression of severe symptoms. Especially with positive reports coming from France, China and South Korea. The drug has very well known short term and long term contraindications. doctors know these risks well as the drug has been used effectively for years in arthritis and lupus patients. I doubt that the drug by itself has prophylactic antiviral effects but perhaps in combination with an antiviral agent may be beneficial for infected patients.
Due to the poor outcomes with the standard of care there is great benefit to evaluate drugs efficacy to prevent onset of severe symptoms. there are many other drugs in evaluation such as a number of Arthritis drugs, anti virals, Ace inhibitors, ARBs, anti parasite drugs, convalescent plasma and immunoglobulin. Each of these treatments using FDA approved drugs have well know contraindications. Any of these drugs may be found effective alone or in combination in certain instances. A clinical trial requires testing of drugs with unknown outcomes but we have the benefit knowing the side effects of established drugs and that to not treat the outcome is likely poor and the medical system will be overwhelmed.
Thank you for this reference. I know for myself and hope for all our members to never get their scientific or medical information from politicians or the news media. I don’t put my faith in them. There is a lot of very active medical and scientific research coming out in real time from around the world. It is incredibly active and developing science. Necessity is the mother of all innovation. We really don’t need a magic bullet for this we just need a shotgun approach at this stage to control this virus.
Thank you Randy. It is incredible seeing all the information coming out about cv 19 research. It is actually gratifying to see the world of scientist coming together. I am seeing very good research coming out of China and even Iran. Maybe we as a people can learn something from this. Blessings and Happy Easter.
Iran has a good education system. It is no surprise that they can produce people of the caliber of Field prize winner Maryam Mirzakhani who went to Sharif Institute of Technology before doing her PhD at Harvard or have people doing high level research (though they have the problem of government officials not necessarily listening to scientific advice).
Yes, I have been following a case study by Dr Reza Nejat of a Covid patient with ARDS that responded in a dose response to the arb inhibitor Losartan. It’s interesting because other studies are showing these as risk factors early in the disease but maybe is beneficial to treat ARDS.
This disease is very tricky. Pathology reports out of China show blood clots in organs and dvt forming. This explains the organ failure seen. The question is why this is happening. It seems to be like an autoimmune response. This virus is playing games with the immune system. Happy Easter and Grace.
Cost should not be a factor in reaching a cure/anti-viral for this. Governments around the world were short-sighted just a few years ago when SARS appeared. The research got to the penultimate stage, but the final stage was left to private pharmaceutical companies to complete and it never was. Why? Because those private companies decided they would just lose money if they invested £billions only to have to stockpile the vaccine. An absolute disgrace. One wonders how far we would now be into finding a vaccine for Covid-19 if the SARS trials had been done properly. It was a coronavirus too.
“If we don’t know the risk-benefit ratio for a medicine then it would be improper to push it.” Agreed, I guess, if I understand what you mean by “push it.”
But we should evaluate and use cautiously those drugs that show promise. Evaluate the risk/reward. Save more lives than we lose, rather than opting for none lost through treatment while losing more through non-treatment.
Some people like to analogize the pandemic response as a war. It’s not a war, but to the extent the analogy works, realize that winning the war requires taking casualties.
"It seems to me that the people who are saying, “Some older and/or already unhealthy people need to be sacrificed for the good of the economy, that’s an acceptable cost” are the same people saying, “Some people who have severe side effects to an untested drug regimen need to be sacrificed, just in case it helps some people, that’s an acceptable cost.” "
Do you have a source for this correlation? What poll determined this correlation? Or did you just make it up to fit your prejudice?
Nice pivot on the automobiles! Once you realized you’d overlooked that they were once virtual tanks, you deflected by getting into safety features mandated mostly unrelated to sturdiness.
Interesting rhetorical strategy – stray further and further from the topic, wait for the other party to realize it’s a discussion going no where, and then you claim victory. Signing off here!
Cost must always be a factor in saving lives. It is in many aspects of life.
For example, we could save lives by reducing the highway speed limit to 45 mph. Why don’t we? There are costs to doing so.
Highways are designed to balance the cost of construction with the cost of lost lives. We could make curves banked more safely and designed with milder curves; that would cost more and save lives.
We could require more airbags in every vehicle, increasing costs and saving lives.
In many places in the US, we don’t even require seat belts in school busses!
This shelter-in-place shutdown has cost trillions of dollars.
In past work, I did analysis of the cost of electrical system reliability and balanced the cost of blackouts against the cost on keeping all the lights on. This is what planners do, trying to optimize for the overall benefit.
It is easy to say “if we just save one life, it is worthwhile,” but that is overly simplistic.