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John Clark

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Jul 29, 2020, 8:01:12 AM7/29/20
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The following is from the July 10 issue of the journal Science and shows just how far Donald Trump is willing to corrupt science just so he doesn't have to admit he was wrong: 


And meanwhile just yesterday Trump was back on national television pushing a quack cure for COVID-19 (hydroxychloroquine) on millions of Americans and using as his "very impressive evidence" testimony of a doctor who believes facemasks are unnecessary, and many illnesses are caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches, and the COVID-19 vaccines in development are made of DNA from space alien's demon sperm to make people less religious.  

The good doctor also believes the US government is not run by human beings but by creatures called "reptilians"... come to think of it ... she may not be entirely wrong on that last point.

John K Clark

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Jul 29, 2020, 4:46:15 PM7/29/20
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Lawrence Crowell

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Jul 29, 2020, 7:55:07 PM7/29/20
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On Wednesday, July 29, 2020 at 7:01:12 AM UTC-5 johnk...@gmail.com wrote:
The following is from the July 10 issue of the journal Science and shows just how far Donald Trump is willing to corrupt science just so he doesn't have to admit he was wrong: 


It is a case of how people become sycophants for t'Rump.
 

And meanwhile just yesterday Trump was back on national television pushing a quack cure for COVID-19 (hydroxychloroquine) on millions of Americans and using as his "very impressive evidence" testimony of a doctor who believes facemasks are unnecessary, and many illnesses are caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches, and the COVID-19 vaccines in development are made of DNA from space alien's demon sperm to make people less religious.  

It is my understanding that double-blind tests of hydroxycholoroqune have shown no efficacy for this and can't be judged an effective treatment of Covid-19. This is in contrast to the other links sent in this thread. Don-the-Con t'Rump bought shares of stock from a company in India back when he was met with PM Modi. Hey, wait! He violated the emoluments clause, but then again who pays attention to that old rag called the Constitution these days?

The Lizard men or Saurians from outer space! This has been around for a while. I remember running into this about 20 years ago. It is a crazy idea spun by a British media sports reporter. 


LC

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Jul 29, 2020, 8:04:07 PM7/29/20
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Lawrence Crowell

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Jul 30, 2020, 7:57:25 AM7/30/20
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I am not near enough of a bio-medical scientist to comment on these papers and what might be wrong with these. The last is just the NIH listing of papers and their abstracts or briefs. This is not an endorsement of the results. I am just aware results or claims of such results showing an efficacy for hydroxychloriquine are a minority report. The at large verdict is opposite.

LC

Telmo Menezes

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Jul 30, 2020, 11:27:02 AM7/30/20
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I disapprove of Trump and everything he stands for as much as you do. I detest him. He is an incompetent narcissist, and his election as the president of the USA was a nightmare come true.

With that out of the way: I think that the current extreme political polarization of all things is doing damage to science. A symptom of this is that the epistemological status of things such as the efficacy of hydroxychloriquine became impossible to determine for those not deeply involved in the field, even if scientifically literate and able to follow the papers.

In the beginning of June, The Lancet had to face the retraction of a paper that had previously concluded that patients taking the drug had worse outcomes than the baseline:


I have dealt with scientific journals on matters that require dataset availability (on much less serious matters), and they would not allow publication before being assured of this basic requirement. I don't know how The Lancet operates in this regard, but it is hard to avoid the suspicion that this paper was rushed to acceptance because everyone liked the conclusion. I think that the rational position for an outsider is now to doubt any results related to this topic, positive or negative. I worry that this "large veridict" may be tainted. My intuition is still that hydroxychloriquine doesn't work, and I have little doubt that Trump endorses it for all the wrong reasons, but a lot of damage was done by the above incident.

Telmo

John Clark

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Jul 30, 2020, 1:16:49 PM7/30/20
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On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 11:27 AM Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:

> I disapprove of Trump and everything he stands for as much as you do. I detest him. He is an incompetent narcissist, and his election as the president of the USA was a nightmare come true.

Truer words were never spoken! 

> I think that the current extreme political polarization of all things is doing damage to science. A symptom of this is that the epistemological status of things such as the efficacy of hydroxychloriquine became impossible to determine for those not deeply involved in the field, even if scientifically literate and able to follow the papers.

Crackpots, and in that I would include Trump supporters and thehydroxychloroquine cure COVID-19 people, don't just dispute well established theories, they dispute the raw data itself. I've had otherwise intelligent people tell me that every epidemiologist in the world is wrong, and the entire scientific community is wrong, and even insist every bit of data we have about COVID-19 is wrong. Why would they do that? Because if the data was right they would have to radically change their worldview and face the fact that Donald Trump is not doing a good job. Changing one's worldview is quite painful for some people.

Nobody can be knowledgeable about everything, so if the vast majority of expert specialists in the world on a very complicated subject like epidemiology, agrees on something, people who have spent their life studying the subject, then I think they are much more likely to be correct then you or I are after we've only been studying the matter for 20 minutes or so. That's why people read scientific journals and believe that what they say is probably true even if they haven't personally carried out the experiments described in them. People that we trust, because they have proven to be right in the past, judge new research and if they think it's not valid they don't publish it in their journals, and if they think it is valid then they do. It's a web of trust, it's what the cryptographic program PGP uses to ensure that a public key really belongs to the person that it claims to. And history has shown the system, although not perfect, works pretty well most of the time, which is a hell of a lot better than most things work.

And by the way, I don't think Trump has spent even 20 minutes studying viral epidemiology or statistical theory in his entire life. 

John K Clark

spudb...@aol.com

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Jul 30, 2020, 2:17:30 PM7/30/20
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Actually it is a summary. The conclusion is that Hydro can be efficacious is 50-70% of the cases. This is now a time AAAS Science's opinion aside (pharma funded?) when most experts regarding covid have been proven wrong, and perhaps deliberately on their part. Politicized science is not science at all. Whether it's Jewish Physics, or Lysenko's biology, or even threats of climate collapse. To quote Galileo, It Moves, Still. Its either true or not? Who is ever president notwithstanding.



Telmo Menezes

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Jul 30, 2020, 2:29:24 PM7/30/20
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I more or less agree with everything you say. That is exactly why I worry that incidents such as the Lancet retraction are damaging to the web of trust.

Telmo

spudb...@aol.com

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Jul 30, 2020, 4:02:12 PM7/30/20
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Refute this Telmo-


One viewer here indicated this was not a study-but it is a study indeed concluding the benefits of Hydro. 

Now what do I think? If it works it works, and if it doesn't it doesn't. Do the opponents of the old drug in question care if it works? Seemingly no, they are just foaming at the mouth because Orange Dude endorsed it. If it doesn't work, screw it. If it can help some people, keep it at hand. What does John Clark care about? Orange Man Bad!  This has zero to do with fighting the Wuhan flu. For the opponents of Orange Man nothing else matters. Civil (US) Conflict? Next stop! Take care.


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Lawrence Crowell

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Jul 30, 2020, 4:23:19 PM7/30/20
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I am not going to pass judgment on this. I can't really do that. I can only say that this is a minority report. The general consensus I am hearing is that a compound that changes the pH of blood in a way that slows the progress of a protistan responsible for malaria has no influence on a corona virus.

LC

Brent Meeker

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Jul 30, 2020, 4:52:09 PM7/30/20
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On 7/30/2020 1:02 PM, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote:
Refute this Telmo-


One viewer here indicated this was not a study-but it is a study indeed concluding the benefits of Hydro. 

Now what do I think? If it works it works, and if it doesn't it doesn't.

That's just false.  Some things work on some infections in some people using some protocols of care. 

Brent

PGC

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Jul 30, 2020, 4:59:54 PM7/30/20
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On Thursday, July 30, 2020 at 10:52:09 PM UTC+2 Brent wrote:


On 7/30/2020 1:02 PM, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote:
Refute this Telmo-


One viewer here indicated this was not a study-but it is a study indeed concluding the benefits of Hydro. 

Now what do I think? If it works it works, and if it doesn't it doesn't.

That's just false.  Some things work on some infections in some people using some protocols of care. 

Agreed. Ongoing large scale international clinical trials are what they are. Nobody claims that they or the papers in their wake are perfect, but to pretend that a few tiny studies are "in need of refutation" or that the world's epidemiological community is orchestrating conspiracies without evidence like some on Twitter and on social media tend to peddle, is naive or evidence of the effectivity of disinformation, not evidence of effectivity of medication

But if Telmo and/or Mitch need, they can always get in touch with their closest epidemiologists/docs and ask for the data and emails, and inform the coordinating committee of their findings and worries, citing who they wish. While data of the majority of ongoing trials and appropriate epidemiological discourse may not be accessible on the net or published ("ongoing" being somewhat relevant...), it isn't classified or anything. PGC
 

spudb...@aol.com

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Jul 30, 2020, 6:21:06 PM7/30/20
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I would say that whomever propagates a potential fix for this problem, or any problem, we go with what we know, or what we think we know, since the experts have failed us. So, if Hydro is worse then useless-so be it. I mean, old adolf's Germany came up with methadone as a substitute for morphine, or developed rockets, so should we have ignored what the accomplished because they were mass murderers? Thus, if Orange says something that proves wrong, he is wrong, and if  correct, he is correct. If he endorsed remdesevir, and it does prove efficacious, then it works. If its ineffective, we move beyond it. 


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From: Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com>

spudb...@aol.com

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Jul 30, 2020, 6:54:58 PM7/30/20
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Yeah, the simplest approach is to determine whether Atomic Energy works of not (so to speak) even if Dur Fuhrer agrees that it does? I look forward to any treatment or vaccine that does one thing; works! By then we may have Split as a nation state, which considering the history of plagues (Justinian's Plague, the 1348 Bubonic, Smallpox, etc) shouldn't surprise anyone. Maybe well even reach the Singularity due to GPT-3 :-)


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Bruno Marchal

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Jul 31, 2020, 9:19:18 AM7/31/20
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Hmm… you might need to be more careful on this, because it is invalid to say that A is false because P asserts it using the fact that P said (many) false statements. You can certainly doubt it for that reason, but sometimes, some liars can say some truth.

About hydroxychloroquine, by taking an entire afternoon a while ago to Google on "countries, hydoxychloroquine chloroquine coronavirus covid-19", my current position is that the studies made in cannada might be right, and they corroborate most statements made by Didier Raoult in Marseilles ( guy who published 2000 papers and is well seen and listen by its peers). Hydroxychloroquine is not a panacea at all, but it eems slightly better than Remdesevir (used in the US). Also cannabis seems to be slightly better than hydroxychloroquine.
It does seem that the countries using hydroxychlroquine (in fact almost all) manage better the crisis than those who did not, but it is hard to conclude anything definite, as many others factors are in play. I have no real opinion on this, but some talk like if they knew the “obvious truth”.

About Cannabis, the work by Mechoulam (the discovers of THC and of its agonist in the brain/immune system) shows that it is an immune-stimulant, as opposed to alcohol which is known since long to be an immune-depressant, in which case it is criminal to not inform the people on this during a pandemic. It is time to switch the recreative use of alcohol and cannabis!

I certainly doubt any statements about medication made by the FDA. They lie too much since too long, and indeed, I think that they are the one responsible for the arrival of Trump and that type of bandits who don’t even tray to hide their criminal conducts.

Brno





John K Clark

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Bruno Marchal

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Jul 31, 2020, 9:30:11 AM7/31/20
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On 30 Jul 2020, at 20:17, spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Actually it is a summary. The conclusion is that Hydro can be efficacious is 50-70% of the cases. This is now a time AAAS Science's opinion aside (pharma funded?) when most experts regarding covid have been proven wrong, and perhaps deliberately on their part. Politicized science is not science at all.

Right. Like politicised religion is not religion at all. In fact those get transformed, when politicised, into tools to prevent researches in the domain, and combat any concurrent ideas.


Whether it's Jewish Physics, or Lysenko's biology,

Lyssenko’s biology was state authoritarian biology. It has led to the death of 30 millions of people in the USSR (the biggest famine due to "human error”).

I have no clue what you mean by Jewish Physics. Einstein?


Bruno


Bruno Marchal

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Jul 31, 2020, 9:37:24 AM7/31/20
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Personally, the lancet retraction augment the evidence that it is serious. They correct their mistake. The initial paper is more like what is the shame, and not all journal retracts their papers when they are disproved.

Personally, I will remain cautious about any “governmental talk on a medication” as long as prohibition exist.

Health should be separated from the state for the same reason than religion has to be separated from the state, at least in the democracies.

From the accessible excerpt from the book by Mary Trump (Trump’s niece), I am afraid that Trump has not spend even one minute to study anything. I think he is con artist period, escaping forward a life of lies. He has nothing to lose. November will be hot.

Bruno




Telmo


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Bruno Marchal

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Jul 31, 2020, 9:46:23 AM7/31/20
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On 30 Jul 2020, at 22:23, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

I am not going to pass judgment on this. I can't really do that. I can only say that this is a minority report. The general consensus I am hearing

… in the US. Not in Europe and Asia, who use hydroxychloroquine. It is not seen as a panacea, but as less dangerous than Remdesvir, and slightly better. But the hydoxychoroquine needs to be used with a precise protocol, before some organ are infected, or more aptly, destroyed by an immune-reaction of the patient itself. Once the lungs are destroyed, it seems that there is no more virus in the body of the patient. Most death by the covid-29 are due to “allergic” type of reaction.



is that a compound that changes the pH of blood in a way that slows the progress of a protistan responsible for malaria has no influence on a corona virus.

OK. But that is not an argument to say that it does not work (better than other medication in use).

It is a complex debate, but when I find logic error in negative argument, I decide to be very vigilant, on both sides of the issue.

Bruno



Bruno Marchal

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Jul 31, 2020, 9:58:02 AM7/31/20
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On 30 Jul 2020, at 22:59, PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:



On Thursday, July 30, 2020 at 10:52:09 PM UTC+2 Brent wrote:


On 7/30/2020 1:02 PM, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote:
Refute this Telmo-


One viewer here indicated this was not a study-but it is a study indeed concluding the benefits of Hydro. 

Now what do I think? If it works it works, and if it doesn't it doesn't.

That's just false.  Some things work on some infections in some people using some protocols of care. 

Agreed. Ongoing large scale international clinical trials are what they are. Nobody claims that they or the papers in their wake are perfect, but to pretend that a few tiny studies are "in need of refutation" or that the world's epidemiological community is orchestrating conspiracies without evidence like some on Twitter and on social media tend to peddle, is naive or evidence of the effectivity of disinformation, not evidence of effectivity of medication

OK in principle. But we can also look at the map of the evolution of the virus in country using it and not using it. My own country has used it, France has used it, then change its mind, a number of time.
We can also take into account that the US FDA has lied about “not evidence of effectivity of cannabis” since about a century. It is only very recently that it has admit its effectivity for some disease in some public way (it accepted it more discreetly for some rich patients since long though).



But if Telmo and/or Mitch need, they can always get in touch with their closest epidemiologists/docs and ask for the data and emails, and inform the coordinating committee of their findings and worries, citing who they wish. While data of the majority of ongoing trials and appropriate epidemiological discourse may not be accessible on the net or published ("ongoing" being somewhat relevant...), it isn't classified or anything. PGC


I have done that a little bit, but it is hard to interpret. A biologist friend of mine seems to believe that the Canadian studies showing that Hydroxychoroquine is better than Remdesevir is rather serious. The amount of money hidden in the pharmaceutical debate is so big that the misinformation is perpetual. But you are right: it is not classified, and even just googling on the net shows that hydroxychloroquine, when used convenably, *might* be better than some other medication, and perhaps cannabis is still better (as more and more studies seem to show).

Bruno


 

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John Clark

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Jul 31, 2020, 10:21:27 AM7/31/20
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On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 9:19 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>  it is invalid to say that A is false because P asserts it

There is more to intelligence than just deduction, there is also induction which is at least as powerful. If everything P has asserted in the past has been shown to be false and now P asserts A then you can conclude that A is probably, although not certainly, also false. That's why most intelligent people wouldn't accept medical advice from somebody who in the past has asserted that vaccines are made from space alien sperm to make people less religious, and ovarian cysts are caused by woman dreaming about having sex with deamons. But Trump is fine with taking such advice because Trump is not intelligent.

John K Clark

Lawrence Crowell

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Jul 31, 2020, 12:09:28 PM7/31/20
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There is a huge range of quackery in medicine, and the 1970s claim that apricot pits cure cancer, or there is some compound extracted from them, persists to this day. It is similar and bigger than the quasi-physics that plagues the web. I tend to consider the source for claims and whether the claim is indeed a zombie. I am not sure if hydroxychloriquine is a zombie treatment for Covid, but it appears to be heading that way. The problem with zombies, is they can be killed, but they come back. It is a bit like shooting ducks in a carnival shooting gallery; they can be shot, but they pop back up. A person who promotes zombie science, such as Fred Singer who denies CO2 warming, just cannot be taken seriously. After somebody has demonstrated a history of this sort of thing you just ignore them.

LC

spudb...@aol.com

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Jul 31, 2020, 4:06:45 PM7/31/20
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You really must read up on your history more Bruno, That term comes from the nazis and not I. Here is a 2015 Scientific American article reviewing a book by Philip Ball,  The Struggle for the Soul of Physics. 

I am accusing the politicization of medical science and the observations of physicians who have claimed that hydro can be helpful. I  have no opposition to anything that can help, whether Donald Trump likes it or not? The opposition here is more concerned with defeating the president in the election, blaming him for democrat arson and looting, so as to secure the election for their leaders, Kamala Harris, the real presidential candidate, and Joe Biden, their figurehead. Thus, if orange dude recommended aspirin as a blood thinner for suspected heart attacks, those here, would oppose it vehemently.


spudb...@aol.com

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Jul 31, 2020, 6:08:27 PM7/31/20
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THC, like alcohol is a powerful agent, and does have some medicinal effects as noted. There are medical reasons pro and con to apply or avoid any drug. I am more impressed by the 50 thousand physicians around the globe who take it as a preventative, or at treatment for patients. If we lose sight over what may be effective, over ideological loyalty, then all we do is say, My religion won't allow it because Orange man Bad! If it doesn't work, then the hell with it, onward to better treatments and vaccines. 

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PGC

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Jul 31, 2020, 6:52:34 PM7/31/20
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On Friday, July 31, 2020 at 3:58:02 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 30 Jul 2020, at 22:59, PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:



On Thursday, July 30, 2020 at 10:52:09 PM UTC+2 Brent wrote:


On 7/30/2020 1:02 PM, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote:
Refute this Telmo-


One viewer here indicated this was not a study-but it is a study indeed concluding the benefits of Hydro. 

Now what do I think? If it works it works, and if it doesn't it doesn't.

That's just false.  Some things work on some infections in some people using some protocols of care. 

Agreed. Ongoing large scale international clinical trials are what they are. Nobody claims that they or the papers in their wake are perfect, but to pretend that a few tiny studies are "in need of refutation" or that the world's epidemiological community is orchestrating conspiracies without evidence like some on Twitter and on social media tend to peddle, is naive or evidence of the effectivity of disinformation, not evidence of effectivity of medication

OK in principle. But we can also look at the map of the evolution of the virus in country using it and not using it. My own country has used it, France has used it, then change its mind, a number of time.
We can also take into account that the US FDA has lied about “not evidence of effectivity of cannabis” since about a century. It is only very recently that it has admit its effectivity for some disease in some public way (it accepted it more discreetly for some rich patients since long though).



But if Telmo and/or Mitch need, they can always get in touch with their closest epidemiologists/docs and ask for the data and emails, and inform the coordinating committee of their findings and worries, citing who they wish. While data of the majority of ongoing trials and appropriate epidemiological discourse may not be accessible on the net or published ("ongoing" being somewhat relevant...), it isn't classified or anything. PGC


I have done that a little bit, but it is hard to interpret. A biologist friend of mine seems to believe that the Canadian studies showing that Hydroxychoroquine is better than Remdesevir is rather serious. The amount of money hidden in the pharmaceutical debate is so big that the misinformation is perpetual. But you are right: it is not classified, and even just googling on the net shows that hydroxychloroquine, when used convenably, *might* be better than some other medication, and perhaps cannabis is still better (as more and more studies seem to show).

If you, Mitch, Telmo, your biologist friend, or Trump have data concerning effectiveness of HCQ with significant sample sizes in randomized placebo-controlled trials, and can demonstrate that said trials are free of epidemiologists' long lists of possible issues/bias, then the only thing stopping you guys from stepping forward and making world history as non-professionals is your own minds. PGC



  

Jason Resch

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Jul 31, 2020, 7:12:49 PM7/31/20
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There have been 65 studies on HCQ. Of all the tests that looked at giving it early in the disease, or prophylactically, they showed HCQ was beneficial. This site summarizes them all: https://c19study.com/

The only studies that have shown HCQ to be ineffective are those where it is given late in the disease progression (when the disease shifts from the viral replication phase to an immune system dysregulation phase (see page 2)). Even then, 61% of studies have shown some effectiveness even when it is given late.

Given the well-established safety record of HCQ, this is the dilemma we face:

HCQ worksHCQ doesn't work
HCQ widely dispensed10,000s of thousands of lives saved$20 wasted per patient
HCQ use restricted10,000s of thousands of needless deaths$0 wasted per patient

Even in the face of impartial information on its effectiveness, the decision is clear.

Jason


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PGC

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Jul 31, 2020, 8:20:35 PM7/31/20
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On Saturday, August 1, 2020 at 1:12:49 AM UTC+2, Jason wrote:
There have been 65 studies on HCQ. Of all the tests that looked at giving it early in the disease, or prophylactically, they showed HCQ was beneficial. This site summarizes them all: https://c19study.com/

The only studies that have shown HCQ to be ineffective are those where it is given late in the disease progression (when the disease shifts from the viral replication phase to an immune system dysregulation phase (see page 2)). Even then, 61% of studies have shown some effectiveness even when it is given late.

Given the well-established safety record of HCQ, this is the dilemma we face:

HCQ worksHCQ doesn't work
HCQ widely dispensed10,000s of thousands of lives saved$20 wasted per patient
HCQ use restricted10,000s of thousands of needless deaths$0 wasted per patient

Even in the face of impartial information on its effectiveness, the decision is clear.


Why not find out from the WHO or the steering committee itself? Just be prepared to wait as I believe they are somewhat busy.

But contact them if you feel the need. PGC
 

Jason Resch

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Jul 31, 2020, 8:26:40 PM7/31/20
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Find out what from the WHO? 

Jason

PGC

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Jul 31, 2020, 8:37:32 PM7/31/20
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Why they discontinued the treatment arm and why you think they should re-establish it (again btw) to save thousands of lives, with your table and the website. PGC

Jason Resch

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Jul 31, 2020, 8:49:51 PM7/31/20
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It's purely a decision theory problem. They WHO is not infallible (and have demonstrated that recently), the science on HCQs effectiveness is mixed, the science on its safety is clear.

Given that there is a clearly optimal decision with a higher expected value.

The very link you provided says they only cancelled only the late stage testing. They are continuing early and prophylactic use tests.

"This decision applies only to the conduct of the Solidarity trial in hospitalized patients and does not affect the possible evaluation in other studies of hydroxychloroquine or lopinavir/ritonavir in non-hospitalized patients or as pre- or post-exposure prophylaxis for COVID-19."

Jason

Bruce Kellett

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Jul 31, 2020, 9:13:04 PM7/31/20
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On Sat, Aug 1, 2020 at 10:49 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 7:37 PM PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Saturday, August 1, 2020 at 2:26:40 AM UTC+2, Jason wrote:
On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 7:20 PM PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Saturday, August 1, 2020 at 1:12:49 AM UTC+2, Jason wrote:
There have been 65 studies on HCQ. Of all the tests that looked at giving it early in the disease, or prophylactically, they showed HCQ was beneficial. This site summarizes them all: https://c19study.com/

The only studies that have shown HCQ to be ineffective are those where it is given late in the disease progression (when the disease shifts from the viral replication phase to an immune system dysregulation phase (see page 2)). Even then, 61% of studies have shown some effectiveness even when it is given late.

Given the well-established safety record of HCQ, this is the dilemma we face:

HCQ worksHCQ doesn't work
HCQ widely dispensed10,000s of thousands of lives saved$20 wasted per patient
HCQ use restricted10,000s of thousands of needless deaths$0 wasted per patient

Even in the face of impartial information on its effectiveness, the decision is clear.


Why not find out from the WHO or the steering committee itself? Just be prepared to wait as I believe they are somewhat busy.

But contact them

Find out what from the WHO? 

Why they discontinued the treatment arm and why you think they should re-establish it (again btw) to save thousands of lives, with your table and the website. PGC



It's purely a decision theory problem. They WHO is not infallible (and have demonstrated that recently), the science on HCQs effectiveness is mixed, the science on its safety is clear.

Given that there is a clearly optimal decision with a higher expected value.


Your table above presents a false dichotomy. There is no evidence that use of HCQ is effective as a cure for COVID-19. It was only ever suggested that it might act prophylactically, or in relief of some early stage symptoms. Decision theory is only useful if you don't misrepresent the facts....

Bruce

Jason Resch

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Jul 31, 2020, 9:25:01 PM7/31/20
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It either works or doesn't. That's two options. Unless you can point out a third one that I missed.
 
There is no evidence that use of HCQ is effective as a cure for COVID-19.

"No evidence" is a rather poor way to describe "100% of scientific studies that have investigated it's early administration" (see: https://c19study.com/ )
 
It was only ever suggested that it might act prophylactically, or in relief of some early stage symptoms. Decision theory is only useful if you don't misrepresent the facts....

What is misrepresented by the table? Either it works or it doesn't.

Jason
 

Bruce

The very link you provided says they only cancelled only the late stage testing. They are continuing early and prophylactic use tests.

"This decision applies only to the conduct of the Solidarity trial in hospitalized patients and does not affect the possible evaluation in other studies of hydroxychloroquine or lopinavir/ritonavir in non-hospitalized patients or as pre- or post-exposure prophylaxis for COVID-19."

Jason

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Bruce Kellett

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Jul 31, 2020, 9:43:38 PM7/31/20
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It is a false dichotomy, because it misses the nuance that it might be useful with early administration, but is not a cure, and does not save lives.
 
There is no evidence that use of HCQ is effective as a cure for COVID-19.

"No evidence" is a rather poor way to describe "100% of scientific studies that have investigated it's early administration" (see: https://c19study.com/ )

Having lots of studies does not prove that something works. They may not present any evidence at all for efficacy as a cure.

It was only ever suggested that it might act prophylactically, or in relief of some early stage symptoms. Decision theory is only useful if you don't misrepresent the facts....

What is misrepresented by the table? Either it works or it doesn't.

False dichotomy, as explained.

Bruce

Jason Resch

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Jul 31, 2020, 9:48:37 PM7/31/20
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I see. I would count that as "Doesn't work" for the purposes of the table.
 
 
There is no evidence that use of HCQ is effective as a cure for COVID-19.

"No evidence" is a rather poor way to describe "100% of scientific studies that have investigated it's early administration" (see: https://c19study.com/ )

Having lots of studies does not prove that something works. They may not present any evidence at all for efficacy as a cure.

True, but not a single study is on the side that it doesn't work when given early. So then what should the scientific consensus be? I only say that it remains uncertain.
 

It was only ever suggested that it might act prophylactically, or in relief of some early stage symptoms. Decision theory is only useful if you don't misrepresent the facts....

What is misrepresented by the table? Either it works or it doesn't.

False dichotomy, as explained.

Take "works" in my table to mean "saves lives".   Or if you want to redefine works as minimizing symptoms, then you can make another table that shows tens of thousands of people who would experience reduced symptoms. The conclusion is the same.

Jason
 

Bruce

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Brent Meeker

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On 7/31/2020 5:49 PM, Jason Resch wrote:


On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 7:37 PM PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:


On Saturday, August 1, 2020 at 2:26:40 AM UTC+2, Jason wrote:


On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 7:20 PM PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:


On Saturday, August 1, 2020 at 1:12:49 AM UTC+2, Jason wrote:
There have been 65 studies on HCQ. Of all the tests that looked at giving it early in the disease, or prophylactically, they showed HCQ was beneficial. This site summarizes them all: https://c19study.com/

The only studies that have shown HCQ to be ineffective are those where it is given late in the disease progression (when the disease shifts from the viral replication phase to an immune system dysregulation phase (see page 2)). Even then, 61% of studies have shown some effectiveness even when it is given late.

Given the well-established safety record of HCQ, this is the dilemma we face:


HCQ works HCQ doesn't work
HCQ widely dispensed 10,000s of thousands of lives saved $20 wasted per patient
HCQ use restricted 10,000s of thousands of needless deaths $0 wasted per patient

Even in the face of impartial information on its effectiveness, the decision is clear.


Why not find out from the WHO or the steering committee itself? Just be prepared to wait as I believe they are somewhat busy.

But contact them

Find out what from the WHO? 

Why they discontinued the treatment arm and why you think they should re-establish it (again btw) to save thousands of lives, with your table and the website. PGC


It's purely a decision theory problem. They WHO is not infallible (and have demonstrated that recently), the science on HCQs effectiveness is mixed, the science on its safety is clear.

Given that there is a clearly optimal decision with a higher expected value.

No, there is not.  The trials show some improvement for ill persons.  It doesn't show there would be no harm in using it as a preventative in well persons.

Brent


The very link you provided says they only cancelled only the late stage testing. They are continuing early and prophylactic use tests.

"This decision applies only to the conduct of the Solidarity trial in hospitalized patients and does not affect the possible evaluation in other studies of hydroxychloroquine or lopinavir/ritonavir in non-hospitalized patients or as pre- or post-exposure prophylaxis for COVID-19."

Jason
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Jason Resch

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Jul 31, 2020, 10:45:15 PM7/31/20
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One study found early use reduced hospitalizations by 84% deaths by 80%. That's hardly insignificant.

What's the downside risk, as you perceive it?
 
It doesn't show there would be no harm in using it as a preventative in well persons.

That has been established by the 60 year history of use by tens of millions of people. See the CDC link I gave, it's safe even for pregnant and nursing mothers.

Jason
 

Brent


The very link you provided says they only cancelled only the late stage testing. They are continuing early and prophylactic use tests.

"This decision applies only to the conduct of the Solidarity trial in hospitalized patients and does not affect the possible evaluation in other studies of hydroxychloroquine or lopinavir/ritonavir in non-hospitalized patients or as pre- or post-exposure prophylaxis for COVID-19."

Jason
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Bruce Kellett

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Jul 31, 2020, 11:04:50 PM7/31/20
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That is the problem with your table -- works can mean a multitude of things besides "saves lives". There is, of course, another problem that you have not taken into account. This is that if there is a widespread belief that HCQ cures COVID-19, then many people might take it in this mistaken belief, and consequently fail to take reasonable precautions against infection. This could easily lead to a greatly increased death toll -- many more people get infected than would otherwise be the case, and for none of these does HCQ cure their disease. So there will still be the same proportion of deaths but a greatly increased absolute number. You have no provision in your table for the possibility that mistaken beliefs might actually cost lives.

Bruce

Jason Resch

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Jul 31, 2020, 11:38:03 PM7/31/20
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You can make that argument against any potentially viable treatment. But I don't think it invalidates the decision on a personal/individual risk management basis.

Someone who thinks they got exposed to the virus or has early symptoms, if given the option to take or not take HCQ, is better off taking it given: A) The medication is extremely safe and has a proven safety track record, and B) Every scientific study so far of early use has found it to be beneficial, and C) It is extremely cheap, so the personal cost of being wrong is low.

You have a point from a social-engineering perspective, that making people believe there is a cure could result in increased risk-taking behaviors, and this isn't taken into account by the table. But I find it alarming that government bodies, such as Ohio's pharmacy board, are banning pharmacists from honoring doctor's prescriptions for this medication. It should be the doctor and patient, who make the risk-management decision of whether to use a certain medication or treatment or not, based on the specific circumstances of the individual, not a blanket edict made and enforced by unelected government officials.

Jason

Lawrence Crowell

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Aug 1, 2020, 5:51:51 AM8/1/20
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On Friday, July 31, 2020 at 6:12:49 PM UTC-5 Jason wrote:
There have been 65 studies on HCQ. Of all the tests that looked at giving it early in the disease, or prophylactically, they showed HCQ was beneficial. This site summarizes them all: https://c19study.com/

The only studies that have shown HCQ to be ineffective are those where it is given late in the disease progression (when the disease shifts from the viral replication phase to an immune system dysregulation phase (see page 2)). Even then, 61% of studies have shown some effectiveness even when it is given late.

Given the well-established safety record of HCQ, this is the dilemma we face:

HCQ worksHCQ doesn't work
HCQ widely dispensed10,000s of thousands of lives saved$20 wasted per patient
HCQ use restricted10,000s of thousands of needless deaths$0 wasted per patient

Even in the face of impartial information on its effectiveness, the decision is clear.

Jason

Most drug trials and studies of this sort do not assert a counterfactual claim of this sort. 

LC

spudb...@aol.com

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Aug 1, 2020, 4:27:29 PM8/1/20
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Your people didn't try it with zinc (long time respiratory treatment) which was the Zelenko method. I don't care about whether the Donald (new term for the American leader), approves or not, but rather does the trio of hydro + zinc + arithro work together to rapidly alleviate symptoms that cause mortality? If anything else works, faster please. The opposition to hydro is driven by ideology, and never medical science. Sans, zinc, hydro may be useless. Because my enemy built and used MP-40 submachine guns, would not cause me from using one, as needed. 


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Aug 1, 2020, 4:52:37 PM8/1/20
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Yeah Jason, it's shouldn't be about ideology, but results. However, human nature is what it is, and often "faith" overwhelms facts. If someone hates Orange Man enough, and see Covid as something secondary or tertiary, they won't care. Even Scott Adams (Dilbert) was vehemently contemptuous of Hydroxychloroquine as useless or damaging, and spoke against it as of three weeks ago. Adams, changed his opinion based on new studies. Adams is not a physician or a scientist but always uses their papers and voices in his analysis. 12 min video follows. Adams is big league in math and science, but was an investment banker as first background. 

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Jason Resch

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Aug 1, 2020, 5:36:28 PM8/1/20
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I agree it is unfortunate that what should purely be a medical/risk management decision has become politicized.

Fortunately the Ohio's governor intervened to make the pharmacy board reversed their ban. Whether any particular treatment is effective or not, the decision must remain one made by the patient and their doctor, in my opinion.

Jason

spudb...@aol.com

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Aug 1, 2020, 8:29:57 PM8/1/20
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Myself as well Jason. The pharmacy board appeared to be a political response here, rather than medical. If Hydro doesn't help it doesn't, and if it does it does. 

Bruno Marchal

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Aug 6, 2020, 5:18:53 AM8/6/20
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My point was logical, and I agree it is wise to not follow an advice by someone who has lied, … even just once, actually.

Here we do have a problem which is that the FDA has lied a lot also since long, so we are a bit in between the pest and the cholera.

Bruno









John K Clark


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Bruno Marchal

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Aug 6, 2020, 5:33:37 AM8/6/20
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On 31 Jul 2020, at 22:06, spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

You really must read up on your history more Bruno, That term comes from the nazis and not I. Here is a 2015 Scientific American article reviewing a book by Philip Ball,  The Struggle for the Soul of Physics. 

I am accusing the politicization of medical science

That has been aggravated by the “marijuana conspiracy”. The book by Jack Herer remains a chef-d’oeuvre of investigation. He cites all its sources, and I have verified all of them. 

The problem is that when we do money with medication, there is an incentive to make people sick, and to avoid efficacious medication. Like the slogan sum up well: a cured patient is a lost client...




and the observations of physicians who have claimed that hydro can be helpful.

I am not an expert to really judge this, but I know enough of logic to find mistakes in some critics against Didier Raoult (in France, a well-known pro-hydorxychoroquine). Then I learned that in many countries they are using hydroxychloroquine, with a success which seems better than with remdesivir. None of them are pananacea, and hydroxyhlorquine has to be used with a lot of care, at the benign of the infection, according to Didier Raoult. 




I  have no opposition to anything that can help, whether Donald Trump likes it or not?

OK?




The opposition here is more concerned with defeating the president in the election, blaming him for democrat arson and looting, so as to secure the election for their leaders, Kamala Harris, the real presidential candidate, and Joe Biden, their figurehead. Thus, if orange dude recommended aspirin as a blood thinner for suspected heart attacks, those here, would oppose it vehemently.

It is not a good strategy. 

At the same time, I understand the urge to get rid of Trump, Barr, Pompeo, McConnell … None of those people defend any Republican ideas, and they lie all the times, especially Barr, … It really look like all bandits side with Trump, so, optimistically, Trump’s possible (hopefully) defeat might be a quite positive events. After, we will have to deal with the extreme left, which is as grave if not graver than the extreme right…

Bruno






Bruno Marchal

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Aug 6, 2020, 5:57:49 AM8/6/20
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You assume that Trump want save life. But apparently, Hard Kuchner did organise a national testing plan, and this rather early, like in many countries. Then, according to some source (I will search them again if interested) Trump and its acolytes have developed the belief that the virus spread mainly in the dem states, and Trump would have decided to not implement the testing, as he would have thought that he would benefit from this in the election.  Maybe Trump defended HDC because it does not cure (?!?).


To be sure the WH denies this:


Trump is a member of the international prohibitionist club: health is the last of their concerns.

Bruno




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PGC

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On Thursday, August 6, 2020 at 11:33:37 AM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 31 Jul 2020, at 22:06, spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

You really must read up on your history more Bruno, That term comes from the nazis and not I. Here is a 2015 Scientific American article reviewing a book by Philip Ball,  The Struggle for the Soul of Physics. 

I am accusing the politicization of medical science

That has been aggravated by the “marijuana conspiracy”. The book by Jack Herer remains a chef-d’oeuvre of investigation. He cites all its sources, and I have verified all of them. 

The problem is that when we do money with medication, there is an incentive to make people sick, and to avoid efficacious medication. Like the slogan sum up well: a cured patient is a lost client...




and the observations of physicians who have claimed that hydro can be helpful.

I am not an expert to really judge this, but I know enough of logic to find mistakes in some critics against Didier Raoult (in France, a well-known pro-hydorxychoroquine). Then I learned that in many countries they are using hydroxychloroquine, with a success which seems better than with remdesivir. None of them are pananacea, and hydroxyhlorquine has to be used with a lot of care, at the benign of the infection, according to Didier Raoult. 

With your personal standards of effectiveness and that of guys like Raoult. Personally, I find that anything that doesn't satisfy the standards of randomized proper placebo controlled trial (even if for ethical reasons, you permit respirators etc. as standard of care for placebo) does not qualify as effective beyond doubt. If such trials properly conducted and controlled were to prove HCQ as effective, I would change my view.

Sure, if people want to take it with these nuances in mind, then no problem. What is concerning is the sense of false hope (and cash extracted from patients from drug makers and doctors) in the argumentation that this "really" has significant or sufficient effectiveness, when such trials are not completed as of today to my knowledge and people remain largely unaware of the nuances/degrees of effectiveness. In this kind of uninformed, hysterical environment, the argument can be made that Raoult is acting irresponsibly, as people are largely unable to differentiate on effectiveness and he uses his expert status to advance what is still a personal view until arguably higher standards of trials/effectiveness prove or disprove the claim. PGC

Bruno Marchal

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Aug 6, 2020, 6:15:44 AM8/6/20
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Agreed. That is the main mistake, but we have been trained for this by the prohibition. No government should ever been allowed to decide which medication can be taken or not. The government can enforced medical prescription warnings accompanying the selling of a product, traceability information, etc. but not if something is a medication or not. That is a question for doctor and/or individual people.




It should be the doctor and patient, who make the risk-management decision of whether to use a certain medication or treatment or not, based on the specific circumstances of the individual, not a blanket edict made and enforced by unelected government officials.

Even if elected. Science is not democracy, and health is a personal concerned. Like Washington said a long time ago, prohibition of food and drug can only lead to bad medication and bad food, and will make the stomach of people in a disarray similar to the mind of people in a tyranny. (Something like that).

The general idea to make something illegal because some of its use can be dangerous is laughable. If true, we can forbid windows, car, matches, and, may be forbid babies to gout of their mother’s womb.

Bruno




Jason

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PGC

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On Thursday, August 6, 2020 at 11:18:53 AM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 31 Jul 2020, at 16:20, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 9:19 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>  it is invalid to say that A is false because P asserts it

There is more to intelligence than just deduction, there is also induction which is at least as powerful. If everything P has asserted in the past has been shown to be false and now P asserts A then you can conclude that A is probably, although not certainly, also false. That's why most intelligent people wouldn't accept medical advice from somebody who in the past has asserted that vaccines are made from space alien sperm to make people less religious, and ovarian cysts are caused by woman dreaming about having sex with deamons. But Trump is fine with taking such advice because Trump is not intelligent.

My point was logical, and I agree it is wise to not follow an advice by someone who has lied, … even just once, actually.

That is very Christian if it is read literally. In a violent world, everybody is plausibly placed into positions of knowingly making untrue statements. E.g. somebody taking some medication for a certain condition or suffering in an environment in which its use is prohibited, has self-preservation arguments for not telling their community and lying about the fact. A lie is always somehow discursively situated along frames of force, violent histories etc. Their examination imparts some intuition as to whether lies can appear more justifiable with respect to certain discourses or not. Merely a general "thou shalt not lie" + number of lies in some history is not sufficient.
 

Here we do have a problem which is that the FDA has lied a lot also since long, so we are a bit in between the pest and the cholera.

With the nuance that everybody's health is exposed to uncertainty and risk. There is increased incentive for transparency on the one hand (that didn't exist in case of prohibition), but increased incentive for established authorities and interests to profit on the other. PGC
 

Bruno Marchal

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Aug 6, 2020, 6:47:17 AM8/6/20
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On 2 Aug 2020, at 02:29, spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:


Myself as well Jason. The pharmacy board appeared to be a political response here, rather than medical. If Hydro doesn't help it doesn't, and if it does it does. 


The health domain has been fully politicised since the law of prohibition.

The goal of prohibition was, right at the start, “political”. In fact the goal was to harass the Mexicans. It was pure unedulcorated racism, with the help of the (alcohol) prohibitionists who was looking for new substance to forbid (after the failure of alcohol prohibition). 

Prohibition is an antic technic to control people and arrest them arbitrarily. A famous use seems have to been done in Turkey, where a sultan made tobacco illegal … with a death penalty, and this only to kill all its opponents.

Prohibition is a nonsense. Even in a prison, you can’t control the drugs, so outside it …

Jack Cole, a founder of LEAP (cops against prohibition), said that God is the first prohibitionist (you will not eat this fruit), and God did not succeeded, despite its infinite power, and the fact that the population number was 2. 

Prohibition is just a technic to transform a free-market into a market driven by crime. It has been, and still is, the golden goose of the terrorists and the criminals. I read sometime ago that more than 90% of the benefits of prohibition and drug dealing is used to corrupt politicians for … continuing the prohibition.

Bruno




spudb...@aol.com

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Aug 6, 2020, 5:52:54 PM8/6/20
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If you are saying that Hydro either works or it doesn't I am in total agreement. The main thing since March has been not hydro, by itself, but in combination with zinc, which has long been used for the proverbial common cold, (sometimes works!) and even pneumonia's. Getting zinc in the cells is the claim. By itself, hydroxychloroquine is jack. Now, if hydro + zinc is ineffective, then screw it. The campaign against hydroxychloroquine is not medical science, but the technique of US political theorist, Saul Alinsky:  6. “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They’re doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones. 

Now the best thing is to find drugs that really work in fighting the infection, and yes, finally some vaccines! Beyond this, it is worth it for me as a taxpayer, to pay the billionaire pharma boards of directors all the cash they need (want) to give us all a break. This would be worth a tax increase if needed. 

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On Thursday, August 6, 2020 at 11:33:37 AM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:
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spudb...@aol.com

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Aug 6, 2020, 6:06:14 PM8/6/20
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I cannot help but agree with you on this Bruno. If we all agreed on politics, we wouldn't (as a species) developed the A-bomb, radar, the jet plane, missiles...
Beyond this, there are many mutually, beneficial areas of research and development (including medical science) that we as a species, again, are underfunding. But, we have to be coldly rational about this, to all work on this together. There must be a reasonably rapid ROI (return on investment) like a vaccine, for example, to return the global economy to "normal."  Also energy (yes, we have ITER in France but we need something quicker!) like solar (Perovskite solar), battery storage, Hydrogen (Europe's fav), transport, space, machine intelligence. 


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Brent Meeker

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Aug 6, 2020, 6:52:08 PM8/6/20
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8 | DISCUSSION As hospitals around the globe have filled with patients with COVID-19, front line providers remain without effective therapeutic tools to directly combat the disease. The initial anecdotal reports out of China led to the initial wide uptake of HCQ and to a lesser extent CQ for many hospitalized patients with COVID-19 around the globe. As more data have become available, enthusiasm for these medications has been tempered. Well designed, large randomized controlled trials are needed to help determine what role, if any, these medications should have in treating COVID-19 moving forwards. While HCQ has in vitro activity against a number of viruses, it does not act like more typical nucleoside/tide antiviral drugs. For instance, HCQ is not thought to act on the critical viral enzymes including the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, helicase, or proteases. Despite in vitro activity against influenza, in a large high quality randomized controlled trial, it showed no clinical benefit, suggesting that similar discordance between in vitro and in vivo observations is possible for SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-273 (Table 3).


Additionally, HCQ and especially CQ have cardiovascular and other risks, particularly when these agents are used at high doses or combined with certain other agents. While large scale studies have demonstrated that long-term treatment with CQ or HCQ does not increase the incidence of infection, caution should be exercised in extrapolating safety from the studies of chronic administration to largely healthy individuals to estimate the risk associated with short-course treatment in acutely  and severely ill patients. Furthermore, the immunologic actions that make HCQ an important drug for the treatment of auto-immune diseases might have unintended consequences when it is used for patients with COVID-19. The effects of this immune modulation on patients with COVID-19 are unknown at this time, including a potential negative impact on antiviral innate and adaptive immune responses which need to be considered and studied. For all these reasons, and in the context of accumulating preclinical and clinical data, we recommend that HCQ only be used for COVID-19 in the context of a carefully constructed randomized clinical trial. If this agent is used outside of a clinical trial, the risks and benefits should be rigorously weighed on a case-by-case basis and reviewed in light of both the immune dysfunction induced by the virus and known antiviral and immune modulatory actions of HCQ.

https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1096/fj.202000919

Brent

Bruno Marchal

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Aug 7, 2020, 6:38:28 AM8/7/20
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On 7 Aug 2020, at 00:52, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

8 | DISCUSSION As hospitals around the globe have filled with patients with COVID-19, front line providers remain without effective therapeutic tools to directly combat the disease. The initial anecdotal reports out of China led to the initial wide uptake of HCQ and to a lesser extent CQ for many hospitalized patients with COVID-19 around the globe. As more data have become available, enthusiasm for these medications has been tempered. Well designed, large randomized controlled trials are needed to help determine what role, if any, these medications should have in treating COVID-19 moving forwards. While HCQ has in vitro activity against a number of viruses, it does not act like more typical nucleoside/tide antiviral drugs. For instance, HCQ is not thought to act on the critical viral enzymes including the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, helicase, or proteases. Despite in vitro activity against influenza, in a large high quality randomized controlled trial, it showed no clinical benefit, suggesting that similar discordance between in vitro and in vivo observations is possible for SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-273 (Table 3).


Additionally, HCQ and especially CQ have cardiovascular and other risks, particularly when these agents are used at high doses or combined with certain other agents. While large scale studies have demonstrated that long-term treatment with CQ or HCQ does not increase the incidence of infection, caution should be exercised in extrapolating safety from the studies of chronic administration to largely healthy individuals to estimate the risk associated with short-course treatment in acutely  and severely ill patients. Furthermore, the immunologic actions that make HCQ an important drug for the treatment of auto-immune diseases might have unintended consequences when it is used for patients with COVID-19. The effects of this immune modulation on patients with COVID-19 are unknown at this time, including a potential negative impact on antiviral innate and adaptive immune responses which need to be considered and studied. For all these reasons, and in the context of accumulating preclinical and clinical data, we recommend that HCQ only be used for COVID-19 in the context of a carefully constructed randomized clinical trial. If this agent is used outside of a clinical trial, the risks and benefits should be rigorously weighed on a case-by-case basis and reviewed in light of both the immune dysfunction induced by the virus and known antiviral and immune modulatory actions of HCQ.

https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1096/fj.202000919


Just to be sure, I have no problem with this. My point is just that today, there are studies indicating that HCQ might be slightly better than Remdesevir, and that the Media are wrong when mocking Trump on HCQ in some systematic way. Most people in the virology community defending HCQ are not favorable to the preventive use of HCQ, and propose precise protocol to be used, and actually, claims that it asks for a higher doze than its usual use, justifying a medical prescription. Only doctors could use it. And yes, that can have advert effect, but according to Raoult, they are slightly less severe than the one accompanying Remdesevir.

Some Media makes me nervous because they argument seems to be just “Trump said x” so x is stupid”, which is of course a stupid argument, even if without any other information it makes some abductive sense (I do not disagree with Clark on this).
Now, I would not take any statement made by the FDA for granted, as they have nothing to envy in Trump’s prowess in the art of lying…
Here there is a general point: a president or any politician should never mention by name a medication or an health treatment. That should be in the hand of the people and the physicians or shaman. 

The founders got it right:

"If the people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who lives under Tyranny." -- Thomas Jefferson.

"Prohibition... goes beyond the bound of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded" -Abraham Lincoln.

Bruno





Bruno Marchal

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Aug 7, 2020, 6:53:18 AM8/7/20
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On 7 Aug 2020, at 00:06, spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

I cannot help but agree with you on this Bruno. If we all agreed on politics, we wouldn't (as a species) developed the A-bomb, radar, the jet plane, missiles…

Of course that is a big IF. 

The advantage of democracy here is that we can agree on what we disagree, and make local try, and change our mind in case the results disconfirm the political idea.



Beyond this, there are many mutually, beneficial areas of research and development (including medical science) that we as a species, again, are underfunding. But, we have to be coldly rational about this, to all work on this together.

That’s the key: working together, and avoiding the pitfall of private huge interest, which makes money from diseases and catastrophes, a bit like the jail lobby makes money from “crime”, leading to absurd notion like “non violent crime” (a crime is always violent, even if the violence is not “physical”!).


There must be a reasonably rapid ROI (return on investment) like a vaccine, for example, to return the global economy to "normal.” 

In a pandemic, money is not the real problem. Whatever amount of men you put in reconstructing after an *international* disaster is good investment, unless bandits take the money for them (which is a bit the actual problem in different places).

In fact, Andrew Yang (who was a candidate for the election) got it right I think: we should implement some form of universal allocation. Then we can let people make as much money as they want, or no money at all (which benefits terribly for the long run projects). But we are still a long way from this, alas. 


Also energy (yes, we have ITER in France but we need something quicker!) like solar (Perovskite solar), battery storage, Hydrogen (Europe's fav), transport, space, machine intelligence. 

I don’t think energy is a serious problem, except for its misuse by dishonest humans. Dishonesty *is* the problem, even more today than yesterday. The root of dishonesty is the lack of basic education, and the deviance of the human science, like with the political correctness attitude, etc.

Bruno



PGC

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Aug 7, 2020, 7:09:36 AM8/7/20
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On Friday, August 7, 2020 at 12:38:28 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 7 Aug 2020, at 00:52, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

8 | DISCUSSION As hospitals around the globe have filled with patients with COVID-19, front line providers remain without effective therapeutic tools to directly combat the disease. The initial anecdotal reports out of China led to the initial wide uptake of HCQ and to a lesser extent CQ for many hospitalized patients with COVID-19 around the globe. As more data have become available, enthusiasm for these medications has been tempered. Well designed, large randomized controlled trials are needed to help determine what role, if any, these medications should have in treating COVID-19 moving forwards. While HCQ has in vitro activity against a number of viruses, it does not act like more typical nucleoside/tide antiviral drugs. For instance, HCQ is not thought to act on the critical viral enzymes including the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, helicase, or proteases. Despite in vitro activity against influenza, in a large high quality randomized controlled trial, it showed no clinical benefit, suggesting that similar discordance between in vitro and in vivo observations is possible for SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-273 (Table 3).


Additionally, HCQ and especially CQ have cardiovascular and other risks, particularly when these agents are used at high doses or combined with certain other agents. While large scale studies have demonstrated that long-term treatment with CQ or HCQ does not increase the incidence of infection, caution should be exercised in extrapolating safety from the studies of chronic administration to largely healthy individuals to estimate the risk associated with short-course treatment in acutely  and severely ill patients. Furthermore, the immunologic actions that make HCQ an important drug for the treatment of auto-immune diseases might have unintended consequences when it is used for patients with COVID-19. The effects of this immune modulation on patients with COVID-19 are unknown at this time, including a potential negative impact on antiviral innate and adaptive immune responses which need to be considered and studied. For all these reasons, and in the context of accumulating preclinical and clinical data, we recommend that HCQ only be used for COVID-19 in the context of a carefully constructed randomized clinical trial. If this agent is used outside of a clinical trial, the risks and benefits should be rigorously weighed on a case-by-case basis and reviewed in light of both the immune dysfunction induced by the virus and known antiviral and immune modulatory actions of HCQ.

https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1096/fj.202000919


Just to be sure, I have no problem with this. My point is just that today, there are studies indicating that HCQ might be slightly better than Remdesevir, and that the Media are wrong when mocking Trump on HCQ in some systematic way.

You're out of your field here. People out on the front lines shouldn't be subjecting high numbers of suffering folks to medical treatment based on some studies indicating "might be slightly better than...". As Brent quoted, it should read "Well designed, large randomized controlled trials are needed". You make it a point to advertise your humility and awareness of your ignorance as a scientist. Thankfully, Doctors around the world are not mechanists according to Bruno or Raoults and act with more humility and cooler heads relative to the studies you refer to, and interpret them as premature, until more solid evidence may change the picture.
 
Most people in the virology community defending HCQ are not favorable to the preventive use of HCQ, and propose precise protocol to be used, and actually, claims that it asks for a higher doze than its usual use, justifying a medical prescription. Only doctors could use it. And yes, that can have advert effect, but according to Raoult, they are slightly less severe than the one accompanying Remdesevir.

He doesn't provide that evidence. Not at the standards we're talking about.
 

Some Media makes me nervous because they argument seems to be just “Trump said x” so x is stupid”, which is of course a stupid argument, even if without any other information it makes some abductive sense (I do not disagree with Clark on this).

That distracts from the work and evaluations that the majority working on the field are taking every day. The entire field globally is faced with an unprecedented workload so it is hardly a surprise that people don't have the time to go on social media to pontificate about arguments. That's a problem because disinformation inflates itself with the self-righteousness of folks articulating their voices in a digitalized world. And while I'm all for liberty of expression, disinformation is a problem and unconscious folks articulating what are essentially responses of psychological shock, amplifying each others' disinformation, erodes the credibility (while drowning out in terms of pure noise) the already complex discourses/practices, that adapt and change as data keeps emerging, of the entire concerned medical fields. PGC 

Jason Resch

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Aug 7, 2020, 10:40:22 AM8/7/20
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On Fri, Aug 7, 2020, 6:09 AM PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:


On Friday, August 7, 2020 at 12:38:28 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 7 Aug 2020, at 00:52, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

8 | DISCUSSION As hospitals around the globe have filled with patients with COVID-19, front line providers remain without effective therapeutic tools to directly combat the disease. The initial anecdotal reports out of China led to the initial wide uptake of HCQ and to a lesser extent CQ for many hospitalized patients with COVID-19 around the globe. As more data have become available, enthusiasm for these medications has been tempered. Well designed, large randomized controlled trials are needed to help determine what role, if any, these medications should have in treating COVID-19 moving forwards. While HCQ has in vitro activity against a number of viruses, it does not act like more typical nucleoside/tide antiviral drugs. For instance, HCQ is not thought to act on the critical viral enzymes including the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, helicase, or proteases. Despite in vitro activity against influenza, in a large high quality randomized controlled trial, it showed no clinical benefit, suggesting that similar discordance between in vitro and in vivo observations is possible for SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-273 (Table 3).


Additionally, HCQ and especially CQ have cardiovascular and other risks, particularly when these agents are used at high doses or combined with certain other agents. While large scale studies have demonstrated that long-term treatment with CQ or HCQ does not increase the incidence of infection, caution should be exercised in extrapolating safety from the studies of chronic administration to largely healthy individuals to estimate the risk associated with short-course treatment in acutely  and severely ill patients. Furthermore, the immunologic actions that make HCQ an important drug for the treatment of auto-immune diseases might have unintended consequences when it is used for patients with COVID-19. The effects of this immune modulation on patients with COVID-19 are unknown at this time, including a potential negative impact on antiviral innate and adaptive immune responses which need to be considered and studied. For all these reasons, and in the context of accumulating preclinical and clinical data, we recommend that HCQ only be used for COVID-19 in the context of a carefully constructed randomized clinical trial. If this agent is used outside of a clinical trial, the risks and benefits should be rigorously weighed on a case-by-case basis and reviewed in light of both the immune dysfunction induced by the virus and known antiviral and immune modulatory actions of HCQ.

https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1096/fj.202000919


Just to be sure, I have no problem with this. My point is just that today, there are studies indicating that HCQ might be slightly better than Remdesevir, and that the Media are wrong when mocking Trump on HCQ in some systematic way.

You're out of your field here. People out on the front lines shouldn't be subjecting high numbers of suffering folks to medical treatment based on some studies indicating "might be slightly better than...". As Brent quoted, it should read "Well designed, large randomized controlled trials are needed".

The studies that have been done show as much as an 79% reduction in death. Should we force 79% more people die while we wait for the RCTs?

Where were the RCTs on proning, ventilators, low pressure oxygen, zinc, vitamin C, etc.? All of which are being used without controversy

Only this drug has been held to such high standards when we know it is generally safe.

We are doing and should continue to do more and better studies, but we shouldn't deny doctors and patients from trying it if they make that call based on the data that's available now.

Jason


You make it a point to advertise your humility and awareness of your ignorance as a scientist. Thankfully, Doctors around the world are not mechanists according to Bruno or Raoults and act with more humility and cooler heads relative to the studies you refer to, and interpret them as premature, until more solid evidence may change the picture.
 
Most people in the virology community defending HCQ are not favorable to the preventive use of HCQ, and propose precise protocol to be used, and actually, claims that it asks for a higher doze than its usual use, justifying a medical prescription. Only doctors could use it. And yes, that can have advert effect, but according to Raoult, they are slightly less severe than the one accompanying Remdesevir.

He doesn't provide that evidence. Not at the standards we're talking about.
 

Some Media makes me nervous because they argument seems to be just “Trump said x” so x is stupid”, which is of course a stupid argument, even if without any other information it makes some abductive sense (I do not disagree with Clark on this).

That distracts from the work and evaluations that the majority working on the field are taking every day. The entire field globally is faced with an unprecedented workload so it is hardly a surprise that people don't have the time to go on social media to pontificate about arguments. That's a problem because disinformation inflates itself with the self-righteousness of folks articulating their voices in a digitalized world. And while I'm all for liberty of expression, disinformation is a problem and unconscious folks articulating what are essentially responses of psychological shock, amplifying each others' disinformation, erodes the credibility (while drowning out in terms of pure noise) the already complex discourses/practices, that adapt and change as data keeps emerging, of the entire concerned medical fields. PGC 

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Bruno Marchal

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Aug 7, 2020, 10:53:50 AM8/7/20
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On 7 Aug 2020, at 13:09, PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:



On Friday, August 7, 2020 at 12:38:28 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 7 Aug 2020, at 00:52, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

8 | DISCUSSION As hospitals around the globe have filled with patients with COVID-19, front line providers remain without effective therapeutic tools to directly combat the disease. The initial anecdotal reports out of China led to the initial wide uptake of HCQ and to a lesser extent CQ for many hospitalized patients with COVID-19 around the globe. As more data have become available, enthusiasm for these medications has been tempered. Well designed, large randomized controlled trials are needed to help determine what role, if any, these medications should have in treating COVID-19 moving forwards. While HCQ has in vitro activity against a number of viruses, it does not act like more typical nucleoside/tide antiviral drugs. For instance, HCQ is not thought to act on the critical viral enzymes including the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, helicase, or proteases. Despite in vitro activity against influenza, in a large high quality randomized controlled trial, it showed no clinical benefit, suggesting that similar discordance between in vitro and in vivo observations is possible for SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-273 (Table 3).


Additionally, HCQ and especially CQ have cardiovascular and other risks, particularly when these agents are used at high doses or combined with certain other agents. While large scale studies have demonstrated that long-term treatment with CQ or HCQ does not increase the incidence of infection, caution should be exercised in extrapolating safety from the studies of chronic administration to largely healthy individuals to estimate the risk associated with short-course treatment in acutely  and severely ill patients. Furthermore, the immunologic actions that make HCQ an important drug for the treatment of auto-immune diseases might have unintended consequences when it is used for patients with COVID-19. The effects of this immune modulation on patients with COVID-19 are unknown at this time, including a potential negative impact on antiviral innate and adaptive immune responses which need to be considered and studied. For all these reasons, and in the context of accumulating preclinical and clinical data, we recommend that HCQ only be used for COVID-19 in the context of a carefully constructed randomized clinical trial. If this agent is used outside of a clinical trial, the risks and benefits should be rigorously weighed on a case-by-case basis and reviewed in light of both the immune dysfunction induced by the virus and known antiviral and immune modulatory actions of HCQ.

https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1096/fj.202000919


Just to be sure, I have no problem with this. My point is just that today, there are studies indicating that HCQ might be slightly better than Remdesevir, and that the Media are wrong when mocking Trump on HCQ in some systematic way.

You're out of your field here. People out on the front lines shouldn't be subjecting high numbers of suffering folks to medical treatment based on some studies indicating "might be slightly better than…".

If serious studies shows that a medication is better than another, why not, in case you do have confidence in those studies of course. As you say, I am not a physician, and I have no real clue which medication I would use. My point was just that it is hard to trust the FDA on this, and the media is not exceptionally valid on this.




As Brent quoted, it should read "Well designed, large randomized controlled trials are needed". You make it a point to advertise your humility and awareness of your ignorance as a scientist. Thankfully, Doctors around the world are not mechanists according to Bruno or Raoults and act with more humility and cooler heads relative to the studies you refer to, and interpret them as premature, until more solid evidence may change the picture.

?




 
Most people in the virology community defending HCQ are not favorable to the preventive use of HCQ, and propose precise protocol to be used, and actually, claims that it asks for a higher doze than its usual use, justifying a medical prescription. Only doctors could use it. And yes, that can have advert effect, but according to Raoult, they are slightly less severe than the one accompanying Remdesevir.

He doesn't provide that evidence. Not at the standards we're talking about.

He does, or at least he provided many references. I do not conclude anything about the content of those papers; My point is that such analysis exist (Jason gave some links to them). According to Raoult, Hydroxychloroquine is slightly better than Remdesevir, and less dangerous. I do have some feeling that might be true, because the countries using it do better that those without it, but this should be analysed more seriously, by taking other factors into account.



 

Some Media makes me nervous because they argument seems to be just “Trump said x” so x is stupid”, which is of course a stupid argument, even if without any other information it makes some abductive sense (I do not disagree with Clark on this).

That distracts from the work and evaluations that the majority working on the field are taking every day. The entire field globally is faced with an unprecedented workload so it is hardly a surprise that people don't have the time to go on social media to pontificate about arguments. That's a problem because disinformation inflates itself with the self-righteousness of folks articulating their voices in a digitalized world. And while I'm all for liberty of expression, disinformation is a problem and unconscious folks articulating what are essentially responses of psychological shock, amplifying each others' disinformation, erodes the credibility (while drowning out in terms of pure noise) the already complex discourses/practices, that adapt and change as data keeps emerging, of the entire concerned medical fields. PGC 

Sure, disinformation is a problem, and doubly so in the health domain, since prohibition, and more deeply, since the separation of the human science from the exact science (itself coming from the separation of theology from science). We still allow people to believe what they want to believe, and there is an obvious growing complacency with lies, as the very existence of Trump illustrates.

Bruno





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John Clark

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Aug 7, 2020, 11:41:37 AM8/7/20
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On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 6:38 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> the Media are wrong when mocking Trump on HCQ in some systematic way. 

No they are not. Only a fool would look to an imbecile and congenital liar such as Donald J Trump for medacal advice. There will always be scientific contrarians about anything but I look to the latest scientific consensus for my medacal advice, and the more recent it is the more it says hydroxychloroquine is worthless or even harmful in the treatment of COVID-19. 

 John K Clark

Jason Resch

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Aug 7, 2020, 2:11:59 PM8/7/20
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If your first thought as to the efficacy of a particular medication is to point to what a particular politician said, then I fear you may not be using the scientific method. 

Jason

John Clark

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Aug 7, 2020, 2:33:40 PM8/7/20
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On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 2:11 PM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Only a fool would look to an imbecile and congenital liar such as Donald J Trump for medacal advice. There will always be scientific contrarians about anything but I look to the latest scientific consensus for my medacal advice, and the more recent it is the more it says hydroxychloroquine is worthless or even harmful in the treatment of COVID-19. 

> If your first thought as to the efficacy of a particular medication is to point to what a particular politician said, 
 
Historically if you had bet that the exact opposite of what that particular American politician had said was true then you would've won your bet far far more often than you'd expect by random chance. However Induction is not perfect so it can't give a guarantee of future success, but it's a pretty damn good rule of thumb.

> then I fear you may not be using the scientific method. 

I believe part of the scientific method is believing that what the consensus of the scientific community says is far more likely to be closer to the truth than what a right wing fascist president with a room temperature IQ (in Centigrade) says.

 John K Clark

PGC

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Aug 7, 2020, 2:41:57 PM8/7/20
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On Friday, August 7, 2020 at 4:53:50 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 7 Aug 2020, at 13:09, PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:



On Friday, August 7, 2020 at 12:38:28 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 7 Aug 2020, at 00:52, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

8 | DISCUSSION As hospitals around the globe have filled with patients with COVID-19, front line providers remain without effective therapeutic tools to directly combat the disease. The initial anecdotal reports out of China led to the initial wide uptake of HCQ and to a lesser extent CQ for many hospitalized patients with COVID-19 around the globe. As more data have become available, enthusiasm for these medications has been tempered. Well designed, large randomized controlled trials are needed to help determine what role, if any, these medications should have in treating COVID-19 moving forwards. While HCQ has in vitro activity against a number of viruses, it does not act like more typical nucleoside/tide antiviral drugs. For instance, HCQ is not thought to act on the critical viral enzymes including the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, helicase, or proteases. Despite in vitro activity against influenza, in a large high quality randomized controlled trial, it showed no clinical benefit, suggesting that similar discordance between in vitro and in vivo observations is possible for SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-273 (Table 3).


Additionally, HCQ and especially CQ have cardiovascular and other risks, particularly when these agents are used at high doses or combined with certain other agents. While large scale studies have demonstrated that long-term treatment with CQ or HCQ does not increase the incidence of infection, caution should be exercised in extrapolating safety from the studies of chronic administration to largely healthy individuals to estimate the risk associated with short-course treatment in acutely  and severely ill patients. Furthermore, the immunologic actions that make HCQ an important drug for the treatment of auto-immune diseases might have unintended consequences when it is used for patients with COVID-19. The effects of this immune modulation on patients with COVID-19 are unknown at this time, including a potential negative impact on antiviral innate and adaptive immune responses which need to be considered and studied. For all these reasons, and in the context of accumulating preclinical and clinical data, we recommend that HCQ only be used for COVID-19 in the context of a carefully constructed randomized clinical trial. If this agent is used outside of a clinical trial, the risks and benefits should be rigorously weighed on a case-by-case basis and reviewed in light of both the immune dysfunction induced by the virus and known antiviral and immune modulatory actions of HCQ.

https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1096/fj.202000919


Just to be sure, I have no problem with this. My point is just that today, there are studies indicating that HCQ might be slightly better than Remdesevir, and that the Media are wrong when mocking Trump on HCQ in some systematic way.

You're out of your field here. People out on the front lines shouldn't be subjecting high numbers of suffering folks to medical treatment based on some studies indicating "might be slightly better than…".

If serious studies shows that a medication is better than another, why not, in case you do have confidence in those studies of course. As you say, I am not a physician, and I have no real clue which medication I would use. My point was just that it is hard to trust the FDA on this, and the media is not exceptionally valid on this.




As Brent quoted, it should read "Well designed, large randomized controlled trials are needed". You make it a point to advertise your humility and awareness of your ignorance as a scientist. Thankfully, Doctors around the world are not mechanists according to Bruno or Raoults and act with more humility and cooler heads relative to the studies you refer to, and interpret them as premature, until more solid evidence may change the picture.

?




 
Most people in the virology community defending HCQ are not favorable to the preventive use of HCQ, and propose precise protocol to be used, and actually, claims that it asks for a higher doze than its usual use, justifying a medical prescription. Only doctors could use it. And yes, that can have advert effect, but according to Raoult, they are slightly less severe than the one accompanying Remdesevir.

He doesn't provide that evidence. Not at the standards we're talking about.

He does, or at least he provided many references.

Many? You're joking right? You can have a ton of references to PrEP, PEP, or alternatively conceived and designed type studies and it's everybody's right to believe in them and to take that medication if they wish. If folks want to confuse quantity with quality, that's their choice. 

It's you guys that are following references/names without a guiding principle/standard as you'll accept anything that goes in your discursive direction, with Christian "if they lied to us, then they are liars" type judgements embedded in the assumptions of your statements. What does that ever indicate?

I'll side with the more cautious and qualitative notion of effective in terms of well designed, large randomized controlled clinical trials. It's you guys that are following references/names without a guiding principle/standard as you'll accept anything that goes in your discursive direction. PGC

Jason Resch

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Aug 7, 2020, 2:51:58 PM8/7/20
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The scientific consensus is based on scientific studies, is it not?

Every single study (dozens of them) that investigated early and prophylactic use of HCQ showed a benefit, without exception.

So then, what is the scientific consensus on early/prophylactic use?

Jason
 

John Clark

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Aug 7, 2020, 3:46:49 PM8/7/20
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On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 2:51 PM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The scientific consensus is based on scientific studies, is it not?

Yes.

> Every single study (dozens of them) that investigated early and prophylactic use of HCQ showed a benefit, without exception.


> So then, what is the scientific consensus on early/prophylactic use?

"CONCLUSIONS: After high-risk or moderate-risk exposure to Covid-19, hydroxychloroquine did not prevent illness compatible with Covid-19 or confirmed infection when used as postexposure prophylaxis within 4 days after exposure. [...] Side effects were more common with hydroxychloroquine than with placebo"

 John K Clark

Lawrence Crowell

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Aug 7, 2020, 4:12:58 PM8/7/20
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This is my understanding as well, and what I get with the ProMED messages. 

The internet and digital age has boomeranged on us. There was a promise of there being a world library and a renaissance in facilitating research. Instead, besides the commercial stuff, we have become a world of lies and liars, where alt-realities, pseudo-facts and just plain rot and lies has come dominate things. We are going from the age of enlightenment to endarkenment, where things that are factually false continue to be generated and ardently defended. This is how dark ages start.

LC

Jason Resch

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Aug 7, 2020, 4:20:04 PM8/7/20
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The CONCLUSIONS don't align with what the RESULTS section said right above.

"We enrolled 821 asymptomatic participants. Overall, 87.6% of the participants (719 of 821) reported a high-risk exposure to a confirmed Covid-19 contact. The incidence of new illness compatible with Covid-19 did not differ significantly between participants receiving hydroxychloroquine (49 of 414 [11.8%]) and those receiving placebo (58 of 407 [14.3%]); the absolute difference was −2.4 percentage points (95% confidence interval, −7.0 to 2.2; P=0.35). Side effects were more common with hydroxychloroquine than with placebo (40.1% vs. 16.8%), but no serious adverse reactions were reported."

So infection rates in the control group were 14.3% and in the group receiving HCQ were 11.8%.  That's an absolute risk reduction of (14.3-11.8)/14.3 = 17.5%.

Moreover, the claim is that HCQ reduces severity of the symptoms, leading to less hospitalization and death, not that it grants immunity from contracting it.

The test did not find a negative result, it failed to reach statistical significance because their sample size was too small.  See more information about that study here: https://c19study.com/boulware.html

Jason
 

Jason Resch

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Aug 7, 2020, 4:25:25 PM8/7/20
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Using the study's own data, there is a statistically significant strong association with treatment delay and emergence of symptoms:

"COVID-19 cases are reduced by [49%, 29%, 16%] respectively when taken within ~[70, 94, 118] hours of exposure (including shipping delay). The treatment delay-response relationship is significant at p=0.002. The data is consistent with earlier treatment being even more effective."

Jason

Brent Meeker

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Aug 7, 2020, 11:39:02 PM8/7/20
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Cite the study.

Brent

Jason Resch

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On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 10:39 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Cite the study.


https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202007.0025/v1 Shows 84% less hospitlization, and 80% reduced mortality.

There's also this one: https://hcqtrial.com/ which shows 79% reduction in mortality.
 
All of these are listed on https://c19study.com/

Jason

Brent

On 8/7/2020 7:40 AM, Jason Resch wrote:
The studies that have been done show as much as an 79% reduction in death. Should we force 79% more people die while we wait for the RCTs?

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spudb...@aol.com

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I hold with anything that materially helps no matter who opposes,and who supports. If Remdesvir works better that's great!! If the collection of plasma helps, lets roll on!! The experts have shot themselves in the ass so bad (understandable) that over 120 days we have learned that Sweden, for example did about as well as anyone else, (no isolation-no facemasks) and now the Netherlands seems to be following suit. Studies that say something doesn't work, but if you try it and it only costs $20 + whatever is charged for zinc, then I say go for it? That is unless somebody's medical history indicates it's contre-indicated. My suspicion is that some of these studies are driven by ass covering for physicians who really don't want to be sued. It's like there is a market for this kind of "research." 


spudb...@aol.com

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Bruno, A. Yang could think outside the box, but that sort of left him no room within his party. If I was any good at social engineering to make a better society, I'd have gone into law, and ran for office. Alas! Or more likely, Thank God! ("You know he doesn't like to be called that!" -Battlestar Galactica, the 2nd). I figure sort of like Bjorn Lomborg, Matt Ridley, Michael Schellenberger, that we have some workable solutions, and the trick is getting these into the right hands. I am not sure Yang's enthusiasm for thorium reactors is that way forward. Because if sodium is the moderator-coolant, then we know it burns on contact with air and explodes when exposed to water. I'd settle for a nice quiet solar panel if it could collect the energy enough for my dwelling and could store it with a advanced battery, for night, clouds, winter? I have always like Carlo Rubia's idea, now being realized in your own nation, the accelerator driven reactor. 

spudb...@aol.com

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John, if we go purely by supposed scientific method (and I contend that the experts have failed us) then the consensus of say going the ALCOR choice may be view by many lab-coated experts, as unworkable. Thus, if Orange Dude said that, "Yes those people involved in cryopreservation for later restoration to a full life later, is a smart move!" Well, would you object? If he said taking aspirin if recommended by you physician seems wise, would you not take one?  This is the problem when we let ideology drive scientific opinion. Studies are excellent one way or the other, so then we must ask ourselves what precisely is being measured? What is the method? If hydro is ineffective and dangerous then down the toilet it should go. Simple. No emotion involved, and back to the enzyme design screens we all go. 
 
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spudb...@aol.com

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I tracked down this study which indicates as Zelenko in NYC, and Anthony Cordilla in LA,  have asserted that Hydro by itself is useless, but its the Zinc that suppresses virus propagation with infected cells. Look, if freaking, Hitler advocated that yes, the new jet aircraft could win the war for us, I'd have looked deeply into that. 




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John Clark

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On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 4:20 PM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

> So infection rates in the control group were 14.3% and in the group receiving HCQ were 11.8%.  That's an absolute risk reduction of (14.3-11.8)/14.3 = 17.5%.

And that is a rate that is not statistically significant, that is to say it was most likely a random artifact produced by the small sample size. And that is why every scientist who knows something about statistics was not hailing this is a major milestone in the fight against COVID-19 but instead was telling people to stop wasting their time talking about hydroxychloroquine and use that time to look for something that might actually work. Of course there are still plenty of people screaming about the wonders of hydroxychloroquine, but none of them are scientists who know something about the subtleties of statistics; they are instead Internet pundits with 20 minutes of study of the science of epidemiology under their belt, fascist politicians desperate to win reelection, and quack doctors who babble about demon sperm and vaccines made from space alien DNA.

Yes some early small scale tests hinted that hydroxychloroquine might be useful but the most important of them was retracted, to the great embarrassment of the journal involved, because the data used in it was suspect:

Retraction—Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: 

And later much larger and much better conducted trials  indicated hydroxychloroquine conferred no benefit in the treatment of COVID-19 and if anything was harmful:


John K Clark

Jason Resch

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Aug 8, 2020, 7:23:17 PM8/8/20
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I know that arguing with you is generally a waste of time, but since lives are at stake I felt it necessary to correct some of what you say below.

On Sat, Aug 8, 2020 at 7:04 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 4:20 PM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

> So infection rates in the control group were 14.3% and in the group receiving HCQ were 11.8%.  That's an absolute risk reduction of (14.3-11.8)/14.3 = 17.5%.

And that is a rate that is not statistically significant, that is to say it was most likely a random artifact produced by the small sample size. And that is why every scientist who knows something about statistics was not hailing this is a major milestone in the fight against COVID-19 but instead was telling people to stop wasting their time talking about hydroxychloroquine and use that time to look for something that might actually work.

I think you understand the difference between significant and statistically significant.  When the drug was administered within 3 days after exposure, it reduced by half the number of people who developed symptoms. That is very significant, if indeed that reflects the true rate of reduction.

However, the test size and methodology for this study left a lot to be desired. That is why, despite showing significant results, it was unable to attain statistical significance. That means a large study is needed, not that we can conclude it does or doesn't work.

 
Of course there are still plenty of people screaming about the wonders of hydroxychloroquine, but none of them are scientists who know something about the subtleties of statistics; they are instead Internet pundits with 20 minutes of study of the science of epidemiology under their belt, fascist politicians desperate to win reelection, and quack doctors who babble about demon sperm and vaccines made from space alien DNA.

You are falling back into doing politics, not science. Look at the studies. I read the abstracts of all 65 of the studies that have been done. Ignore the politicians completely when it comes to this question.
 

Yes some early small scale tests hinted that hydroxychloroquine might be useful but the most important of them was retracted, to the great embarrassment of the journal involved, because the data used in it was suspect:


That study was retracted because they demonstrably made up data. When they were called out on it, refused to show the data they used.
 


And later much larger and much better conducted trials  indicated hydroxychloroquine conferred no benefit in the treatment of COVID-19 and if anything was harmful:




Let's look behind the headline at each of those three studies.

1. The Recovery Trial: https://c19study.com/recovery.html
This was study gave the drug at a very late stage, when people were on ventilators and close to death. If you study the disease progression, it occurs in two phases. By the time the person is low on oxygen the virus is already being cleared by the immune system, it is when the disease becomes an immune disorder that is deadly. Anti-viral drugs are too late at that time, but some anti-inflammatory sterorids have shown promise at this stage: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/cheap-steroid-first-drug-shown-reduce-death-covid-19-patients

2. This is the Minessota study we discussed above: https://c19study.com/boulwarepep.html
It cut the disease rate in half when given at 72 hours after exposure, but the test was not statistically powerful enough, as in addition to being small, they combined the results with people who received the drug well after they were exposed.

3. The Barcelona study:  https://c19study.com/mitjapep.html
The article claims it showed HCQ is ineffective. Did it? No it showed death rates were reduced from 0.6% to 0.4%. A reduction by 33%. But again, their sample size was too small, this is based on 8 control cases and 5 treatment cases.


We have studies where the drug is given to people at death's door, which show it is not effective, and we have statistically weak studies (owing to the fact that a small number of people ever get the disease) where it is used prohplatically or after exposure.  In every case where it is given early or prophylactically, studies have shown a benefit.  Perhaps if you combine all of these together you can get statistical significance.  If I were exposed, I would paythe $20 for a 30% to 50% chance of stopping the disease cold.


Jason 

PGC

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Aug 9, 2020, 7:02:25 AM8/9/20
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Those websites (hcqtrial and c19study) assume novel and creative approaches to randomization, which they themselves admit:

"As for "country-randomized controlled trial", we note that the term is new, without an existing definition, so we do not know why this is problematic." 

Playing ignorant, they pretend as if they did not know that laypersons and social media would make them go viral as they attempt to mimic the language, styles, jargon of medical publications while citing cherry picked real journals and data. This is done to confer unjustified legitimacy/authority to the claim: 

"The treatment group has a 79.1% lower death rate" based on "large trial with 2.0 billion people treatment group and 663 million in the control group"; wherein the language is designed to imply the completion of a large international clinical trial, which is fictitious, even if data cited appears valid and discussion/questions raised are not without merit. This, while the standard data pertaining to detailed population description remains absent and the authors perform a bullet list "account of biases", as if it had bearing on the population description they did not provide. Different countries used differing treatment and standard of care protocols, so claims connected to a "2.0 billion people treatment group" are what they are.

Why they used the word "trial" when everything is purely observational, and therefore meant to mimic legitimacy to laypersons and peddlers of ideology... also is what it is. Indeed, those 2 websites are interesting and yours truly will pass them on to more competent folks. But not because I believe them, but because everybody here assuming themselves so sophisticated in parsing studies because of their backgrounds and MDs across Twitter seem eager to swallow this hook, line, and sinker. Talk about engineering credibility: all it takes for you guys is an anonymous, slick website with some linguistic moves, couple of graphs, and references... and you'll spam it infinitely. So keep up the spamming: THAT is the interesting data for yours truly. PGC

John Clark

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Aug 9, 2020, 8:13:14 AM8/9/20
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On Sat, Aug 8, 2020 at 7:23 PM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:
 
> I think you understand the difference between significant and statistically significant. 

If something is not statistically significant then there's no evidence it is significant. Period. The Human mind is just not very good at assessing probabilities, it's easy to reach conclusions that seem intuitively obvious but are nevertheless dead wrong, especially if the sample size is small, so it's important to be mathematically rigorous in scientific papers.

> The test size and methodology for this study left a lot to be desired. That is why, despite showing significant results, it was unable to attain statistical significance.

Tests sizes are always finite and the results would always be better if the test size was larger, but in this study for this drug the test size was the largest there has ever been, so its results supersedes that of previous studies.

 
> That means a large study is needed, not that we can conclude it does or doesn't work.

Hydroxychloroquine has now become like ESP, regardless of how many tests that indicate there's nothing there some will say we need to study it more, a true believer will never EVER say "that's enough, I was wrong, let's move on". But the difference is ESP belief may be silly but it doesn't kill people, however every time you use finite resources for yet another study of something that has already been studied to death you are NOT studying other treatments that look far more promising and might actually work. And that could kill people and probably already has.

> You are falling back into doing politics, not science.

Jason, politics is the one and only reason we're having this conversation right now, if it wasn't for Donald J Trump and his inability to ever EVER admit that he was wrong about anything, like touting a quack cure months ago, nobody would even be talking about hydroxychloroquine anymore, and scientists aren't, but politicians and Fox pundits certainly are and they will never stop.

> Look at the studies. I read the abstracts of all 65 of the studies that have been done.

One large well performed study trumps 6.02*10^23 small poorly performed ones; and the scientific community has made its decision and they've decided that enough is enough and it's time to move on; but for the true believer too much is never enough so they will NEVER say OK you've convinced me it's time to do something else, they will ALWAYS say let's study it again, and again, and again, and again. And meanwhile people continue to die.

 John K Clark

Jason Resch

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Aug 9, 2020, 1:24:21 PM8/9/20
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You, as well as most of the media write ups are confusing "did not prove a benefit" with "proved no benefit".  From one we can conclude something, the other means the study wasn't big enough and the question remains open.

The studies that had enough people die to get a statistically powerful result were all late stage studies. You need a lot fewer people who are very sick to get statistical power than when the people are not yet sick.

So it's no surprise that the first results to come in would be negative. But those studies tested the wrong thing. The claim was always that it should be given as early as possible, during the viral stage of the disease.

Proving effectiveness for early administration requires studies tens to hundreds of times larger than late stage studies because so few people die from it.

Jason

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Jason Resch

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Why is it that every study that looks at early administration or prophylactic use was either inconclusive or showed a benefit? Is it all a coincidence?  Every set of scientists was biased, and by random chance was led to an incorrect conclusion?  When 32 out of 32 studies concluded there was a positive result so long as it is not given late, and when given late, a majority of the studies showed it was still beneficial, then even though the science is not settled definitively, I think it is leaning in a particular direction.

John treats HCQ like ESP, with no science behind it. Yet in vitro studies clearly showed its anti-viral properties, especially when co-administered with zinc. There was a reason to believe it would be effective. It concentrates in the lungs, and is a zinc ionophore, and zinc interferes with RNA viral replication. Even the NIH, in 2005 concluded "Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread" for the first SARS-Cov-1 virus: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1232869/

It's good to challenge and doubt, that is what science is. But we're in uncertain times, the science is not settled on this question one way or another. 

Jason


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spudb...@aol.com

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Well here is another claim, for another drug, which uses, also zinc, plus an antibiotic. Orange Man obviously, never heard of this one. The effect seems the same or even better than hydrochloro-  Here is the reportage... Sky News (be warned!). 

I hope it works as indicated because it's also very cheap! 
-----Original Message-----
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To: Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com>

John Clark

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Aug 9, 2020, 3:01:07 PM8/9/20
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On Sun, Aug 9, 2020 at 1:24 PM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

> You, as well as most of the media write ups are confusing "did not prove a benefit" with "proved no benefit". 

I'm not confused at all. No study has proven that leeches have no benefit in the treatment of COVID-19, but there is also no statistically relevant evidence that it does, so scientists could more productively spend their time studying things other than leeches. I mean it's not as if there are no other promising leads. And this sort of thing is the rule not the exception, from cancer to aids to Alzheimer's disease to you name it the medical literature is cram full of examples of drugs and treatments that hinted in very early small scale studies that they might be beneficial but were later shown to be useless or even harmful in larger more careful studies.

Hydroxychloroquine is not even a controversial drug as far as the scientific community is concerned, the opinion is almost universal that it's just like most new ideas in science, it didn't work out, and so it's time to move on to other things; The drug only becomes controversial when fascist presidents and nincompoop Fox pundits enter into the mix.

> a statistically powerful result were all late stage studies.

Considered statistically powerful by people who don't understand statistics, and Humans don't have an intuitive ability to assess probabilities, we need to calculate them. For example: If AIDS is in 0.3% of the population and the false positive rate of an AIDS test is 1% and I take that test and test positive, is there a 99% probability that I really have AIDS? No, the chance would be 29.7%, (.003*[0.99/0.01]).
 
> John treats HCQ like ESP, with no science behind it. 

Not in the early days of 4 or 5 months ago, back then it was reasonable to be hopeful about it, but those who hold onto a blind belief in HCQ and refuse to even modify it one bit even now after much more information about it has come in then yes, they're just as fanatical as the ESP nuts. They will never EVER be satisfied with a negative result, they will ALWAYS want another larger study.

> in vitro studies clearly showed its anti-viral properties,

If in vitro studies were all that mattered people would've stopped dying from cancer decades ago.

John K Clark

smitra

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Aug 9, 2020, 6:23:15 PM8/9/20
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On 09-08-2020 21:00, John Clark wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 9, 2020 at 1:24 PM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> _> You, as well as most of the media write ups are confusing "did
>> not prove a benefit" with "proved no benefit". _
>
> I'm not confused at all. No study has proven that leeches have no
> benefit in the treatment of COVID-19, but there is also no
> statistically relevant evidence that it does, so scientists could more
> productively spend their time studying things other than leeches. I
> mean it's not as if there are no other promising leads. And this sort
> of thing is the rule not the exception, from cancer to aids to
> Alzheimer's disease to you name it the medical literature is cram full
> of examples of drugs and treatments that hinted in very early small
> scale studies that they might be beneficial but were later shown to be
> useless or even harmful in larger more careful studies.
>
> Hydroxychloroquine is not even a controversial drug as far as the
> scientific community is concerned, the opinion is almost universal
> that it's just like most new ideas in science, it didn't work out, and
> so it's time to move on to other things; The drug only becomes
> controversial when fascist presidents and nincompoop Fox pundits enter
> into the mix.
>
>>> a statistically powerful result were all late stage studies.
>
> Considered statistically powerful by people who don't understand
> statistics, and Humans don't have an intuitive ability to assess
> probabilities, we need to calculate them. For example: If AIDS is in
> 0.3% of the population and the false positive rate of an AIDS test is
> 1% and I take that test and test positive, is there a 99% probability
> that I really have AIDS? No, the chance would be 29.7%,
> (.003*[0.99/0.01]).
>
>>> _John treats HCQ like ESP, with no science behind it. _
>
> Not in the early days of 4 or 5 months ago, back then it was
> reasonable to be hopeful about it, but those who hold onto a blind
> belief in HCQ and refuse to even modify it one bit even now after much
> more information about it has come in then yes, they're just as
> fanatical as the ESP nuts. They will never EVER be satisfied with a
> negative result, they will ALWAYS want another larger study.
>
>>> _ __in vitro studies clearly showed its anti-viral properties,_
>
> If in vitro studies were all that mattered people would've stopped
> dying from cancer decades ago.
>
> John K Clark
>

Another thing to keep in mind here is that only a small fraction of the
general public end up becoming severely ill, and that people with
underlying health issues such as obesity, diabetes etc. dominate the
group of people who are at risk of needing hospital care. If we assume
fir argument's sake that HCQ does have an effect when taken in the very
early stages, that effect would then be irrelevant to the vast majority
of healthy people. If you are obese then it could be helpful to you, but
simply losing weight would have a far greater effect. This is why in
Britain they are staring a campaign for people to lose weight.

In general I'm rather skeptical for cures in the form of drugs for the
general healthy public. If modifying a biological mechanism would have a
benefit for the healthy population, then the question is why evolution
did not implement that modification? Usually when taking pills does help
for the general public, this is related to our modern lifestyles causing
certain deficiencies, like e.g. vitamin D deficiency. And we know that
being overweight, being vitamin D deficient, lack of exercise have
negative effects on the immune system:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-06-fat-cell-immune-response-obesity.html

"When obesity occurs, a person's own fat cells can set off a complex
inflammatory chain reaction that can further disrupt metabolism and
weaken immune response—potentially placing people at higher risk of poor
outcomes from a variety of diseases and infections, including COVID-19."

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-43308729

"Doing lots of exercise in older age can prevent the immune system from
declining and protect people against infections, scientists say.

They followed 125 long-distance cyclists, some now in their 80s, and
found they had the immune systems of 20-year-olds.

Prof Norman Lazarus, 82, of King's College London, who took part in and
co-authored the research, said: "If exercise was a pill, everyone would
be taking it.

"It has wide-ranging benefits for the body, the mind, for our muscles
and our immune system."

The research was published in the journal Aging Cell.

Prof Janet Lord, director of the Institute of Inflammation and Ageing,
at the University of Birmingham, and co-author of the research, said:
"The immune system declines by about 2-3% a year from our 20s, which is
why older people are more susceptible to infections, conditions like
rheumatoid arthritis and, potentially, cancer.

"Because the cyclists have the immune system of a 20-year-old rather
than a 70- or 80-year-old, it means they have added protection against
all these issues.""


https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100307215534.htm


"In order for the specialized immune cells (T cells) to protect the body
from dangerous viruses or bacteria, the T cells must first be exposed to
traces of the foreign pathogen. This occurs when they are presented by
other immune cells in the body (known as macrophages) with suspicious
'cell fragments' or 'traces' of the pathogen. The T cells then bind to
the fragment and divide and multiply into hundreds of identical cells
that are all focused on the same pathogen type. The sequence of chemical
changes that the T cells undergo enables them to both be 'sensitized to'
and able to deliver a targeted immune response.

Professor Carsten Geisler from the Department of International Health,
Immunology and Microbiology explains that "when a T cell is exposed to a
foreign pathogen, it extends a signaling device or 'antenna' known as a
vitamin D receptor, with which it searches for vitamin D. This means
that the T cell must have vitamin D or activation of the cell will
cease. If the T cells cannot find enough vitamin D in the blood, they
won't even begin to mobilize. ""

Saibal

spudb...@aol.com

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Aug 9, 2020, 9:05:38 PM8/9/20
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Here is another drug that allegedly opens the cell walls up to zinc and it's the zinc that prevents the virus from propagating. I have no idea if this is accurate, only that repeated studies that do not provide zinc in their testing are not useful. If they leave out the zinc, I am wondering, are they the cell biologists doing a medical study or doing propaganda? Color me, paranoid. 


Does it prove it? No, I am just wanting something that acts as an antigen to the Wuhan, and yes, a vaccine would be rather nice too! 



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Bruno Marchal

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On 7 Aug 2020, at 17:40, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 6:38 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> the Media are wrong when mocking Trump on HCQ in some systematic way. 

No they are not. Only a fool would look to an imbecile and congenital liar such as Donald J Trump for medacal advice.


I agree, and Trump’s way to use it to dismiss the danger of the covid-19 makes it very wise to not listen to him on anything. But the media lose credits by inferring that HCQ is a fraud, and they should be more serious on this, and do some minimal research.


There will always be scientific contrarians about anything but I look to the latest scientific consensus for my medacal advice, and the more recent it is the more it says hydroxychloroquine is worthless or even harmful in the treatment of COVID-19. 


Yes, but that comes from people who lie on Cannabis since about a century. And if you look at the independent (of the FDA) studies, you get that HCQ is about as helpful than the Remdesevir.

I have no opinion at all on this.  Trump is a liar, but unfortunately, in the Health domain, there is a tradition of lies. It is even normal, once you tolerate making money on health/disease: a cured patient is a client lost. One of my student has been hired by a pharmaceutical company to develop AI tools to hide better the secondary effects in the notice of the medication, in a way such that it looks legal, and this for different countries. 

Bandits and dictators love AI …

Bruno




 John K Clark

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Bruno Marchal

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That makes sense for academic research, but the real-life doctors cannot way for an academical response in urgent situation, and that is the context of the HCQ/remdesevir domain, where many argument against the work of Didier Raoult was nothing by a sort of harassment, not by its peers, but by media, a bit with the argument “Trump said it so it has to be false”. That argument certainly makes some sense, but is not conclusive, especially when the opponents (the FDA) has a tradition of lies in the domain.

Bruno




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Bruno Marchal

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The “consensus” argument makes local sense in practice, by default. But it is not part of science, which is based on systemic doubt.
Then the consensus is that God is a person, and marijuana is a drug, I mean, typically, consensus in hot domain have to be interrogated even more, and doubly so in the art of curing people, where many different type of interest, pseudo-religious and lucrative, are mixed.

A government can mandate the use of mask, like it can mandate a speed limit on the road, but it cannot forbid a product. It can only regulate it.

Bruno






 John K Clark

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Bruno Marchal

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Aug 10, 2020, 7:17:43 AM8/10/20
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This started 1500 years ago, with the abode of theology to the charlatans. The Renaissance has led the natural science come back to research and honesty, but apparently, the humans are not mature enough to let this happens in the human sciences, and that explains Shoah, Rwanda, covid-19, and now the democracy itself is under threat (the democratic system is the only progress in the human science, and it is vary fragile).

Bruno




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John Clark

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Aug 10, 2020, 7:45:02 AM8/10/20
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On Mon, Aug 10, 2020 at 7:13 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> The “consensus” argument makes local sense in practice, by default. But it is not part of science, 

No. Science could never work without a web of trust, that's why science journals exist and why some are more respected than others. A scientist builds on the accomplishments of previous scientists, without that there would be no foundation, they would have to reinvent the wheel every day and start out at square one. Science would never get anywhere

> marijuana 

I don't know why you keep talking about marijuana. For decades the scientific consensus has been that for recreational use marijuana is not harmful, or at least it's far far less harmful than alcohol or tobacco, and for some medical conditions marijuana is actually beneficial. But the politicians and right wing pundits don't care about science or logic and they have more power than scientists. Much more.

John K Clark

Jason Resch

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Aug 10, 2020, 1:24:20 PM8/10/20
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On Mon, Aug 10, 2020 at 6:00 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:


I have no opinion at all on this.  Trump is a liar, but unfortunately, in the Health domain, there is a tradition of lies. It is even normal, once you tolerate making money on health/disease: a cured patient is a client lost. One of my student has been hired by a pharmaceutical company to develop AI tools to hide better the secondary effects in the notice of the medication, in a way such that it looks legal, and this for different countries. 


I learned recently that in China, people pay their doctors for each month they are healthy, and pay nothing when they are sick:


Perhaps that is a better model.

Jason 

Jason Resch

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Aug 10, 2020, 1:29:07 PM8/10/20
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Lot's of great information Saibal, thank you. I agree there are many measures we can do individually to lower our personal risk.

I have been supplementing with D3 since this began. I am surprised the media has not been pushing this more, given the widespread deficiencies generally. One study found something around a 10 - 20 fold reduction in COVID deaths (after controlling for age and other factors) between those that had normal levels of vitamin D and those who were deficient: https://emerginnova.com/patterns-of-covid19-mortality-and-vitamin-d-an-indonesian-study/

Jason

PGC

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Aug 10, 2020, 4:05:33 PM8/10/20
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Again, you do not appear aware of current events: Since about 2 weeks Raoult is suing Martin Hirsch for "dénonciation calomnieuse". 

Apparently, some of his peers in France do not share his views. His supporters will see this as vindication and proof of systemic corruption of the medical profession in France and the world, while his peers, that view his claims with skepticism, see it differently.   
 
a bit with the argument “Trump said it so it has to be false”. That argument certainly makes some sense, but is not conclusive, especially when the opponents (the FDA) has a tradition of lies in the domain.

Any system finds itself in a constant flux either towards or away from truth. All human systems or organizations, defined as a collection of persons performing some discreet function that distinguishes itself from the broader environment, are therefore liars by default. Would everybody be in a better position because they judged their governments as corrupt, thereby refusing to use streets, roads, infrastructure, water, food, internet, and health services on the basis of past discrepancies with truth?

The establishment of doubt as an absolute scientific principle appears simplistic to me. Doubt is but of one of many instruments to arrive at what is constitutive for science: analysis that aspires to objectivity and unbiased evaluation of issues to explain, describe, and, when necessary, to judge them. Critical scientific thinking is more than just an absolutized notion of uncertainty. Particularly in some emergency situation, pure uncertainty leads to lack of any judgement or decision to act. Worse, when it is applied simplistically in some crisis, it delegitimizes everybody as disinformation (which can perfectly be disguised as doubt, as it often is) tends to do. PGC

Brent Meeker

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Aug 10, 2020, 6:55:19 PM8/10/20
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So Chinese doctors never order tests and tend to say, "It's nothing.  Take two aspirin and call me in a month."

Brent

Jason Resch

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Aug 10, 2020, 10:14:47 PM8/10/20
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If they die or get worse, they lose a paying customer.

Jason


Brent

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Bruno Marchal

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Aug 12, 2020, 4:18:50 AM8/12/20
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On 10 Aug 2020, at 13:44, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Aug 10, 2020 at 7:13 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> The “consensus” argument makes local sense in practice, by default. But it is not part of science, 

No. Science could never work without a web of trust, that's why science journals exist and why some are more respected than others. A scientist builds on the accomplishments of previous scientists, without that there would be no foundation, they would have to reinvent the wheel every day and start out at square one. Science would never get anywhere


No problem with this. My point was just that the argument “everybody nearby believes this” is not a valid argument.
In practice we need trust in the work of others, but eventually, every now and then, someone comes with a new idea (like relativity, quantum mechanics) or new interpretation or cromprehesnion of old ideas (like with Mechanism which resurrect somehow Plato (against Aristotle) in metaphysics.



> marijuana 

I don't know why you keep talking about marijuana. For decades the scientific consensus has been that for recreational use marijuana is not harmful, or at least it's far far less harmful than alcohol or tobacco, and for some medical conditions marijuana is actually beneficial.

Yes. We know this since 5000 years actually, according to Chinese scientists.



But the politicians and right wing pundits don't care about science or logic and they have more power than scientists. Much more.


Indeed. That’s part of the problem. It is not the politicians, but the corrupted one. I heard that more than 95% of the benefits of illegal drug dealing is invest in the perpetuation of the prohibition, despite we know today that the problem of drugs comes only from its prohibition, or from indecent posologie. Recently the doctors got an incentive by “big-pharma” to double the dose of opiates, and this has led to the “opioïd crisis”.

Bruno






John K Clark

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Bruno Marchal

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Aug 12, 2020, 4:24:19 AM8/12/20
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It is certainly worth consideration, but I can imagine this being misused too, doubly so in a non democratic state.

Here, I do believe in some repression, and money based on lies should be punished, and stopped immediately. But once the bandits are in power, that can take time…

Bruno




Jason 

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Bruno Marchal

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Aug 12, 2020, 4:33:47 AM8/12/20
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On 10 Aug 2020, at 22:05, PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:



On Monday, August 10, 2020 at 1:05:19 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 7 Aug 2020, at 20:41, PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:




Many? You're joking right? You can have a ton of references to PrEP, PEP, or alternatively conceived and designed type studies and it's everybody's right to believe in them and to take that medication if they wish. If folks want to confuse quantity with quality, that's their choice. 

It's you guys that are following references/names without a guiding principle/standard as you'll accept anything that goes in your discursive direction, with Christian "if they lied to us, then they are liars" type judgements embedded in the assumptions of your statements. What does that ever indicate?

I'll side with the more cautious and qualitative notion of effective in terms of well designed, large randomized controlled clinical trials. It's you guys that are following references/names without a guiding principle/standard as you'll accept anything that goes in your discursive direction. PGC


That makes sense for academic research, but the real-life doctors cannot way for an academical response in urgent situation, and that is the context of the HCQ/remdesevir domain, where many argument against the work of Didier Raoult was nothing by a sort of harassment, not by its peers, but by media,

Again, you do not appear aware of current events: Since about 2 weeks Raoult is suing Martin Hirsch for "dénonciation calomnieuse". 

Apparently, some of his peers in France do not share his views. His supporters will see this as vindication and proof of systemic corruption of the medical profession in France and the world, while his peers, that view his claims with skepticism, see it differently.   

I am unable to interpret this. French politics is stacked in between the Muslim Brotherhood (ignored by the left in America, but those are authentic nazi, since 1942) and “big-pharma” (which controls a lot in some European countries, like Belgium and France).



 
a bit with the argument “Trump said it so it has to be false”. That argument certainly makes some sense, but is not conclusive, especially when the opponents (the FDA) has a tradition of lies in the domain.

Any system finds itself in a constant flux either towards or away from truth. All human systems or organizations, defined as a collection of persons performing some discreet function that distinguishes itself from the broader environment, are therefore liars by default.

Being wrong does not mean being lying. If a sincere “flatist” says that Earth is not flat, he is lying, despite saying the truth.
Lying is just saying the contrary of our own belief with the intent to manipulate some other.




Would everybody be in a better position because they judged their governments as corrupt, thereby refusing to use streets, roads, infrastructure, water, food, internet, and health services on the basis of past discrepancies with truth?

The establishment of doubt as an absolute scientific principle appears simplistic to me. Doubt is but of one of many instruments to arrive at what is constitutive for science: analysis that aspires to objectivity and unbiased evaluation of issues to explain, describe, and, when necessary, to judge them. Critical scientific thinking is more than just an absolutized notion of uncertainty. Particularly in some emergency situation, pure uncertainty leads to lack of any judgement or decision to act. Worse, when it is applied simplistically in some crisis, it delegitimizes everybody as disinformation (which can perfectly be disguised as doubt, as it often is) tends to do. PGC

There is no need to abslotise doubt. I insist on doubt only because 1500 years of separation of theology and science makes some people believe that science = truth (when science = doubt) and that religion is necessary bs, which does not need to be the case, as everyone has a religion when the term is used in the platonic sense. Doubt is important, as public certainly is close to madness, more so in the fundament ontology problems.

Bruno




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