A few days ago, the President "invoked" the Defense Production Act, leaving some question in the press whether he has actually "used" it yet. The New York Post is reporting, however, that President Trump took a call from Senator Schumer formally requesting DPA action to spur the manufacture of ventilators and personal protective equipment, and was heard to agree and to instruct a subordinate to make it so.
More good news: Novartis plans to donate up to 130 million doses of chloroquine worldwide by the end of May. A little slow, but a scale that's starting to approximate what we'll need.
PS, I'd hope we could "embrace the power of and" concerning this constant rhetorical battle over whether we should be optimistic about the reports of useful treatments, or focus on obtaining solid data from double-blind tests. I'd like proof as much as the next guy, but we can do more than one thing at a time. It would be unbearably stupid to put off large-scale use of chloroquine while we conduct leisurely double-blind studies and write them up for the journals. We can already be reasonably sure we're not doing violence to the balance of benefit and harm by giving hospitalized SARS sufferers chloroquine, because the risk of suffocation is already known to be extremely high, while the risk of the drug is already known to be extremely low. Neither is 100%, but that's not the point.
Ventilators require skilled technicians or they reliably kill the patient. I hope we can produce enough technicians to operate all these things that we are mandating be produced. Otherwise it’s the classic command economy SNAFU. We will have too much of one thing and not enough of the other; and not enough of something else we needed because we spent our time and resources on something we can’t use.
ReplyDeletePlus the "success" rate of ventilators among those afflicted with this lung disease is about 5%. Even under normal circumstances it is under 50%.
ReplyDeleteAn enormously costly and ineffective approach to end stage problems.
Trum is nationalizing... but not cause of some toothless corona beer virus. He is what qanon said, the storm approaches. The storm that will wipe out the deep state with arrrsts and transparent disclosure.
ReplyDeleteAlthough on sunday there is a chance trum will get into a war disease conflict due to his astro star chart.
A lot of people think the gov cannot keep a secret. They never looked up the manhattan project.
ReplyDeleteWe can already be reasonably sure we're not doing violence to the balance of benefit and harm by giving hospitalized SARS sufferers chloroquine....
ReplyDeleteWe also can be reasonably sure--more than merely reasonably, in fact--that we'll do no harm with chloroquine since we've been dosing folks with it for decades. The only ones likely to be harmed are those few who are susceptible to the well-known side effects--which all drugs have some of.
What have we got to lose, indeed. Especially if we do use the power of and", instead of the either/or (and only the "or") that the NLMSM is so determined to inflict on us.
Eric Hines
'Not only is [chloroquine] already available, as it has been for almost a century, but Covid-19 patients are already getting it. Montefiore Medical Center in New York has already started seeing the surge of Covid-19 patients that public health experts have been warning about. The hospital is participating in the remdesivir trial and is giving Covid-19 patients chloroquine. “All of our patients get put on chloroquine, as well as on antiretrovirals. We’re using Kaletra. Different places are using different antiretrovirals,” says Liise-anne Pirofski, chief of infectious diseases at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore. “Everybody gets that, unless they have some contraindication.”' https://www.wired.com/story/an-old-malaria-drug-may-fight-covid-19-and-silicon-valleys-into-it/
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