On the other hand, in just the last couple of months I've learned of two friends-of-friends in their 60s or 70s who died of COVID: both were unvaccinated, and neither pursued monoclonal antibody treatments. I don't get it. Texas Governor Abbott just announced this week that he was opening a number of outpatient antibody infusion clinics, but no one I talk to seems to have heard of the treatment at all, though it's FDA-approved and seems to work brilliantly. There's a nearly complete press blackout on the subject. It has to be administered fairly early; you can't wait until you're in dire straits and hospitalized.
Deaths are holding steady at zero since February, here.
ReplyDelete"There's a nearly complete press blackout on the subject."
ReplyDeleteI don't think either Greg Abbot or Ron DeSantis will ever see positive press. They could cure cancer, and the press would likely report it in a negative light.
"Abbott cures cancer, contributes to overpopulation."
ReplyDeleteAnother article about cases dropping in the UK after the lockdown was eased: https://fee.org/articles/covid-cases-fell-40-in-uk-after-restrictions-lifted-proving-the-experts-wrong-yet-again/
Someone with a Twitter account and a substack who reports a lot of what's going on with cases vs hospitalizations vs deaths and is now starting to look carefully at the risks for children:
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/politicalmath
I know monoclonal antibody treatment exists - know someone whose antibodies are being harvested - but I haven't read anything about it either.
My wife mentioned that a friend of hers got what I suppose must be that, and it worked wonders. She did not use that name, but she described it as an injection right up front that blunted the disease.
ReplyDeleteIt's what seems to have turned the tide for President Trump, and Ben Carson openly said he's sure it's what turned the tide for him. An ER doc I know here in Texas, a strong and healthy woman in her 40s, got it early this year and said she felt better immediately, though I'm not sure she wouldn't have done fine on her own even without it.
ReplyDeleteIt's pretty uncontroversial, as far as I can tell, not like HCQ or Ivermectin, which still get a sort of mixed press even if you discount the MSM entirely, as I do. Even the highly politicized Scientific American mostly praises them. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-monoclonal-antibody-covid-therapies-have-not-lived-up-to-expectations/
In other words, the virus is acting like pretty much every other virus. It spreads more easily but kills fewer hosts. (See: smallpox, influenza, a host of other things.)
ReplyDeleteLittleRed1
FWIW, Ivermectin works very well. Close relative got the CCPFlu and it got as far as 'very hard to breathe'--his wife, RN, sourced some ivermectin (for horses!!) at Farm & Fleet and he took a bunch.
ReplyDeleteTook 2 days and he was back to good health. He should have gotten it earlier by a day or two, but CCPFlu is hard to diagnose with certainty.
By the way, the horse-ivermectin tastes horrible.
ReplyDeleteWe keep ivermectin in the house in the form of monthly heartworm pills for the dogs. I appreciate hearing anecdotal evidence of its working, but I'd be happier with some large double-blind studies conducted by people I could trust not to have a thumb on the scale.
ReplyDeleteStill, poison-control sites report that people who accidentally take reasonable doses of pet heartworm pills (you have to wonder how they do that) don't need to worry, beyond the possibility of mild diarrhea, so if I suddenly lost my sense of taste and smell my dogs' pills would start looking pretty tempting. Human patients are prescribed ivermectin for lots of things; it's one of those miracle anti-parasite drugs that have been used for quite a long time without noticeable side-effects.
I wish I could be more sure ivermectin was getting a fair look, but the world of medical experimentation and reporting accelerated its already alarming dive into politically tainted balderdash about 18 months ago.
It's a real problem with diseases that turn ugly only in a tiny percentage of patients: if something "works," there's an awfully good chance the patient was going to get well on his own anyway. But it's pretty impressive when someone who was starting to have serious trouble breathing suddenly improves, so if the drug he took was cheap and safe, you can see why the next guy wants to try it too.
By the way, the horse-ivermectin tastes horrible.
ReplyDeleteShould-a taken it crushed up in a spoon full of sugar. That's how my father gave me aspirin when I was that young. Almost worth it, too, to watch his lips move in aping my own mouth as I took the dose off the spoon and swallowed.
Eric Hines
...so if the drug he took was cheap and safe, you can see why the next guy wants to try it too.
ReplyDeleteA large part of getting well is believing you're going to. There's a lot to be said for the placebo effect; although it would be good if some number of properly constructed studies indicated that ivermectin really does work against the Wuhan Virus.
Eric Hines
If the studies are well constructed and reach the non-approved narrative, they will be quashed.
ReplyDeleteThis is a worldwide psy-op with a dash of disease on top.
There is definitely some of that going on. A shady study that reaches the approved conclusions (or a NYT infographic) becomes CDC policy.
ReplyDeleteShady research has been a problem for a while, but this is dialed up to 11. I've barely read any sane coverage since the whole world lost its mind over President Trump "touting" HCZ and that bizarre couple ate aquarium cleaner. There are a lot of people and publishers who will never get their credibility back: they've sunk to National Enquirer levels.
ReplyDeleteI meant HCQ.
ReplyDeleteDeaths are increasing in many places over the last month, in some places exceeding any previous levels. Not only is doing better than last year damning with faint praise, it may not hold.
ReplyDeleteBsking is promising a post this weekend.
The Texas Tribune reports that in Texas 99.5% of COVID deaths from early Feb. through late July 2021 were unvaccinated people. I don't know where they got their numbers from, though. I'm convinced vaccines work, but the other measures present a far less clear picture.
ReplyDeleteMy suspicion is the "99% of deaths among unvaccinated "is pure BS- AKA lies.
ReplyDeleteAnecdote- one of the guys I read is a nurse. He reported 25 cases or so in his hospital, all unvaccinated. A few days later, after he had a chance to talk to somebody in records, he said about half were vaccinated. I suspect the hospitals are putting out false info.
There is evidence to suggest the Jab is waning in efficacy, and the recipients are getting hit harder. Israel, Iceland, Gibraltar, Malta, all the high percentage vaxxed places are getting hit hard, by reports.
The Texas Tribune reports....
ReplyDeleteThis is the same Texas Tribune that reported that Florida had 5800 kids hospitalized due to the Wuhan Virus and RSV in the last week, when in fact Florida had had 5800 kids hospitalized since the pandemic began.
This is a news outlet with an axe to grind, and they're bent on grinding it, even when they get caught so often.
Where they get their numbers is from deep rectal storage.
Eric Hines
I agree the Tribune is not reliable. On the other hand my anecdotal evidence is that all the cases (and more important all the deaths) I've heard about in my own circle of friends-of-friends since about February have occurred in unvaccinated people. I keep hearing about breakthrough cases, but the reports are always worded in such a way that you can't quite tell whether the cases are seriously symptomatic, and then the reports of symptomatic statistics, when you can get them, don't specify age, comorbidity, or vaccination status.
ReplyDeleteIt's weird, because if the journalistic-industrial complex wanted to push vaccinations hard, it looks like they'd focus on the benefits to the vaccinated cohort. Unfortunately, they seem equally interested in pushing panic and conformity in the most random symbolic behavior. Of course the notion that they'd simply report the truth as they find it is a lost cause.
The stuff I'm seeing also indicates that the vast majority of current "new cases" is in the unvaccinated folks.
ReplyDeleteRegarding those "breakthrough" cases, of course there are those. It's a sad commentary on the NLMSM that they keep making these out to be some sort of existentially serious deal. All vaccines are subject to "breakthrough" cases. All vaccines do, and all they're represented as doing by serious medical folks, is reduce the likelihood of getting the indicated disease--Pfizer's 95-ish per cent effectiveness plainly means that 5-ish per cent of vaccinated are going to get the Wuhan Virus, anyway--and reduce the seriousness of the disease in those who do get it anyway. "Breakthroughs" are utterly normal, and are not really breakthrough, in any event, at least not in the sense of the NLMSM's use.
On top of that, the panic-mongers deliberately elide the other major factor of the Wuhan Virus, vaccinated or not: 98-99+% of those fundamentally healthy who get the virus recover from it. It's just not that lethal. It has a broader range of outcomes--fatter tails in the distribution--than the flu, but between the tails it's about as serious as the flu.
My personal recommendation, though, because it's no fun even to be as sick as the flu can make us, is to get the vaccine. It's also, in the main, cheaper: there is a likelihood of hospitalization (one of those tails compared to the flu), and that's a cost that needn't be borne if it can be avoided. And there's the small population that resides in the right-hand fat tail: those with depressed immune systems and comorbidities.
Eric Hines
It's unbelievably hard to persuade people to make reasonable choices between two risks, each of which is statistically wildly unlikely to happen, and both of which are very scary, but in different ways, out on that unlikely tail of risk. It doesn't help if we're asking them to do so on the basis of sketchy, contradictory information that's being hawked by people who seem determined to ruin their own credibility.
ReplyDelete