Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

That's actually not as outlandish as it seems. It has been observed that 15% of the population simply does not get infected no matter the level of exposure. The current hypothesis is that this is a result of a healthy microbiome, the gut.
Still a work in progress and no treatment has been suggested yet. It would be interesting if one is developed. Unlikely as big pharma will never work on it because there is no profit from a treatment that may be available from any grocery store, and they will likely suppress it with their control of msm and politicians.

 

You know what I don't get? Where's all the money from big pharma and politicians in science? I mean, there must be some payoff for scientists to keep publishing marketing brochures for vaccines.

 

Bugger me for getting sucked back in, in less than 24 hours. I'm very weak.

Protease inhibitors are an enormous class of drugs, covering everything from general broad-spectrum digestive enzyme inhibitors, to very specific and potent inhibitors of individual proteases.

The oral Pfizer drug is designed to block a very specific protease within the COVID virus, that stops it from being able to replicate. It does not affect any proteases our own cells need to survive. The chances of you just finding a drug like this in a natural product and being able to provide it cheaply aren't much different from expecting juice cleanses to cure cancer.

Ivermectin can act as a general protease inhibitor. It is not specific for any replication pathway within the COVID virus, and also inhibits proteases your own cells need to survive. In doses high enough to properly prevent viral replication, it has massive off-target effects that will also make you very sick.

I also note the Merck drug announced yesterday is very specific, targeting something called viral RNA-dependent RNA polymerase. Basically, it causes catastrophic mutations as the virus replicates, resulting in the replicants being non-functional.

Clinical trial results FAR better than even the most optimistic estimates of hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, zinc, vitamin D, invermectin, etc. But still only capable of cutting death in half, meaning it is about one-tenth to one-twentieth the efficacy of the mRNA vaccines. But the point stands, these drugs work well with minimal side effects because they are specific to COVID.

I sure as shit haven't seen my drug company cheque yet. Those bastards keep promising to pay me off, but nothing.

(just so we're 100% clear, this is sarcasm)

Drug companies, maybe. But what about all the scientists and doctors who actually run the trials, who want nothing more than to save people's lives? All the government-funded research that wants a cure as fast and as cheap as possible? The drug companies simply don't have the resources to buy off all these people.

If the existing treatments worked, real doctors would be using them, and there would be convincing data to support it. The data is really not convincing, short of extreme cherry-picking of low quality studies.

 

All that stuff about pharma companies and their profits... yeah, I know... but I am still excited about the prospect that Merk has a (possibly over-the-counter) anti-covid drug. The crux is pricing and availability.

crossposted...

I know it's a sample of one, but I do know someone who works for Merk, designing clinical trials*. I'm sure he gets paid well enough (which is something I believe that everyone is entitled to go for) but I also know that he loves the job, and believes that he is better, and more effective, at it than he would be being a physician.


*Probably not this one: I don't have a clue what he is actually working on.

 

What exactly is being implied when suggesting that "big pharma" is messing with the studies? The flaws and incomplete data are public, they're not made up, they're not competing opinion pieces on different "random websites". So is big pharma secretly running all these studies and purposely putting out bad results?

There's a big difference between big money lobbying efforts and just straight up falsifying scientific data around the world in a huge conspiracy.

 

I know a lot of people who work at drug companies, including some of my former graduate students. They are all honest and ethical scientists of the highest calibre, not the moustache twirling villains many would have you believe.

From the top down though, there are definitely commercial realities in the drugs that are developed and pushed. I think Pfizer's biggest money earner is still Viagra! That doesn't mean that all drug companies are evil and actively suppressing COVID treatments, it just means that US society is capitalist, and the company is obligated to make money for their shareholders.

The risk that a drug company could be discovered suppressing a COVID treatment that could save millions of lives..... well, that doesn't pass cost/benefit analysis, considering the potential loss of shareholder value.

 

... I grew the moustache for nothing??

In all seriousness though, anyone who actually knows a scientist would know that they aren't in it for the money/payoffs in the form of DHT amps to avoid suspicion.

 

What you need to keep an eye out for is high quality meta analysis. These specifically take multiple studies, rate them on quality, establish equivalent outputs, and summarise the results. 'Cochrane Reviews' is the most famous of them, but many many other researchers publish these.

To the best of my recollection, the most recent Cochrane review summarised very mild positives for ivermectin. But the positive effect relied almost exclusively on two studies that have since been discredited; the so-called Egyptian and Argentinian studies, which are now considered outright fraudulent.

 

Seriously? How very condescending of you. The doctors that use them number in the 1000's, likely tens of, they are real as it gets.
The efficacy of ivermectin was first published in 05/2020 by doctors in the Broward Hospital system here in SoFla. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33065103/ . and still on youtube, uncensored h.They had been encouraged by in vitro studies already done https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166354220302011 that showed the effectiveness and promise. They introduced it into their treatment protocols and published the white papers with highly positive results. It was later adopted throughout the hospital system. News spread and it began to be used across the world.
This was all good news to everyone except big pharm as there could never be an EUA with an available treatment. Big pharma does not have to pay everyone off, just the right people.
Despite it's success when put to use, the boot came down and the large pharmacies would not fulfill the prescriptions. They inserted themselves between the doctor and the patient and did so without a medical license. Even after the FDA publicly stated they would not interfere with the doctor patient relationship. Looks like big pharm still found the right people to pay off and the FDA was out of the loop and people died as a result. Real doctors were blocked from getting the treatment to their patients and it is still being blocked in most major hospitals in the USA.

Are you defending this practice?

 

Yes, I absolutely defend that practice. The anecdotal evidence of small numbers of doctors is not even remotely sufficient to justify ivermectin usage. Meta analysis collating data from tens of thousands of patients from properly published studies shows no medical benefit.

Medical decisions must be based on large amounts of evidence. Not just a small handful of cherry-picked uncontrolled studies.

Crawl out of the conspiracy theory rabbit hole man. This is absolute rubbish.

 

But what harm could it do? Why block it? It serves no purpose bit to support the narrative that vax only. You have someone who's prognosis is poor, the patient and the family want the drug. It is safe and is effective despite your denials. You did see the nih studies right? Meta analysis is not the only tool in the bag. To save a life, you should use all available means. There is no excuse for not using it. Even's fauci's own website touts the effectiveness.

You know, at one time I thought I had covid. My test was on Monday and I reached my doctor the day before. At that time ivermectin was not known. I brought the subject f HCQ up and he said no. I had already read quite a bit, although I had not read Fauci's paper in which he praised it (still on his website), I started to bring this up and he cut me off, rudely, and went on a Trump rant, Trump said this Trump said that and would not prescribe it. I fired him, I did not want politics inserted into discussion on my health It was likely Fauci who told Trump about HCQ.

I can't help but think politics is your driving force as well.

Medical decisions must be based on what is best for the patient. I hope you aren't practicing.

 

My very first post on this issue in this thread....

The reason you can't just give random drugs without authorization is because of side effects vs potential efficacy.

Context is vital here. The early data for HCQ and ivermectin were indeed interesting. It hasn't panned out long term in larger studies. It happens.

Whatever helps you sleep at night.

So, vaccination it is then.

 

@Beefy Quite a run of epic posts!

I would love your view on something related.

When I studied history and philosophy of science, three of the events that were often mentioned as instilling public confidence in science and the scientific process were the rollout of penicillin, the use of the atomic bomb and the moon landing.

Bringing the pandemic to heel so quickly surely is an achievement of the same magnitude, yet I don't sense any public response to the extraordinary scientific achievement. I don't see any sign of the public demanding more funding for public health specifically, or hailing the vaccine creators for their rapid and effective solutions to one of humanity's great crises. There is some recognition of the medics giving the community prevention and cure, but not of the science and the scientists who created the tools they use.

Is it a failing of scientists to communicate? Is it the emergence of an anti-science lobby (energy, tobacco, etc..)? What has gone wrong?

 

You do understand what the purpose of statistical meta analysis is, right?

 

The science involved sucks. It was driven by politics and greed, as usual.
I saw a meme, can't support the number but it went something like this.
Since 1900, 292,000,000 people have died at the hands of their governments worldwide. You get the idea.
And you think your government still cares about you and your life.

Died for a good cause, you think?
Every war is fought for power, property and riches. Every single one.
American industrialists garnered fortunes from all sides in WWII and every war since. This cannot be news to you.
Why wouldn't this entire endeavor be about the exact same thing.
You still believe in the altruistic nature of the people earning billions in this pandemic and, no, it is not just big pharma.
Some things simply never change. Stop being so gullible.

 

Probably lots of factors at work here, but I'll focus on a simplistic perspective of sci comm. One problem is that what scientists can find and what the public (including policy makers) want are starkly different. Generally, the inferences that scientists can get from their data is fraught with uncertainty, especially with non-experimental studies (common in public health) where too many factors are out of their control. But what the public want are usually black-and-white answers, even from those who claim to be doing their own research. And when there are uncontrolled variables, you can't just look at the data and make comparisons, you have to model them to filter out the noise as much as you can. The ones who are good enough to do good research AND communicate the uncertainty in their findings clearly are few and far between, and have too little time to be everybody's spokesperson.

On the other hand, you have the academics (I wouldn't call them scientists) who have learnt to just give people what they want, and happily provide black-and-white answers from murky shades of grey, and make big claims from unrepresentative and crappy data. The ones who are eager to go to press before they verify their findings and are propped up by TED talks cos TED talk organisers have no idea how to filter out the good science from the bad, all they care about is a nice story. For now, these still comprise of a small minority and are mostly tenured slobs (especially in the social sciences) who are way past their prime in research, but they get enough attention that it's easy for the public to think big claims are easy to make in science.