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You can't get EUA for the vaccines if there's a working treatment. The doctor who promoted Hydroxychloroquine and zinc treatment, Dr. Zelenko, is still banned

by desine 5y ago

You can't get EUA for the vaccines if there's a working treatment. The doctor who promoted Hydroxychloroquine and zinc treatment, Dr. Zelenko, is still banned from Twitter for spreading COVID disinformation. There's both actual conspiracies in this world, and well poisoning to damage the conversations. When you look at the amount of money these companies stand to make from producing billions of vaccinations, you should not be surprised.

enkid 5y ago
Source for the EUA stuff? Source that HCQ and zinc are viable treatments? The problem isn't that some of these things might be viable, the problem is we don't know which of the literally hundreds of treatments are actually going to be viable when going through the proper testing and approval process. You can't just scream conspiracy when there much better explanations
- desine 5y ago
  >Source for the EUA stuff? https://www.fdanews.com/ext/resources/files/archives/e/Emergency-Use-Authorization.pdf https://www.fdanews.com/ext/resources/files/archives/e/Emerg... (PDF warning)(section III, the first list, point #4) >Source that HCQ and zinc are viable treatments? Dozens? Hundreds? of doctors speaking out, including videos posted to youtube, that they saw great effectiveness in the trial. The people promoting it weren't a bunch of nobodys, despite what the nightly news told you. There were plenty of frontline workers with actual experience. But that likely won't satisfy your request for a source - which is fine. We all appeal to authority as we see fit. I saw many actual doctors saying "this is effective", and I saw many large corporations working together to shut that conversation down. Do you have any evidence it's not effective?
  - belltaco 5y ago
    >Do you have any evidence it's not effective? Do you have any evidence snake oil isn't effective? Burden of proof is on the people claiming a magic cure. Anyway here are a couple of studies that show it's not effective. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jmv.27122 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jmv.27122 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2777389 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2777389 Here's a good take by someone that does research on new medicines. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/07/ivermectin-as-a-covid-19-therapy https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/07/iv...
    - vixen99 5y ago
      And there are papers which show that it does. Rather than descend into a 'my list of papers denoting effectiveness is bigger than your's suggesting the opposite' contest, I suggest you go to http://www.freefullpdf.com/#gsc.tab=0 http://www.freefullpdf.com/#gsc.tab=0 and do some objective searching yourself preferably without a prior agenda.
  - zarzavat 5y ago
    You are seriously proposing that if an effective treatment had been found in 2020, that the US government would have denied EUA for vaccines while the rest of the world got to work vaccinating their citizens?
  - enkid 5y ago
    A number with a question mark behind it is not evidence, and even if hundreds of doctors did speak up about it, hundreds of doctors thought Cholera was caused by miasma instead of bad drinking water. Hundreds of doctors thought bleeding was the universal cure all. Hundreds of doctors thought washing their hands was useless. Some random number of random doctors saying it may be effective is not evidence of it's effectiveness. Your document also doesn't say what you think it does. If it did, we wouldn't be able to have multiple vaccines approved. Is there any evidence that the FDA would interpret a non vaccine as an alternative to a vaccine, when there's no issue with granting EUA to multiple vaccines? I doubt it, but would love to see what you have.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    We have to do this again? Hydroxychloroquine was debunked months ago. "Among patients hospitalized with mild-to-moderate Covid-19, the use of hydroxychloroquine, alone or with azithromycin, did not improve clinical status at 15 days as compared with standard care. (Funded by the Coalition Covid-19 Brazil and EMS Pharma; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT04322123. opens in new tab.)" https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2019014 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2019014 "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. (Funded by David Baszucki and Jan Ellison Baszucki and others; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT04308668. opens in new tab.)" https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2016638 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2016638 "Neither HCQ nor HCQ/AZ shortened the clinical course of outpatients with COVID-19, and HCQ, but not HCQ/AZ, had only a modest effect on SARS-CoV-2 viral shedding. HCQ and HCQ/AZ are not effective therapies for outpatient treatment of SARV-CoV-2 infection." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589537021000535 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258953702... "Among patients hospitalized with Covid-19, those who received hydroxychloroquine did not have a lower incidence of death at 28 days than those who received usual care. (Funded by UK Research and Innovation and National Institute for Health Research and others; RECOVERY ISRCTN number, ISRCTN50189673. opens in new tab; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT04381936. opens in new tab.)" https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2022926 https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2022926 Shall we discuss creationism?
    - jeremys00 5y ago
      Hey mate for what it's worth and you might say not much and may be right, the argument I ear goes as follow: the trials showing the ineffectiveness of HCQ use protocols that are inconsistent with the protocols the advocate of HCQ propose. To my understanding, the proponents tend to say that HCQ is effective when administered as soon as first symptoms (day 0 to 3 I believe). There are also dosage issues and combinations with other drugs, and they say that HCQ is ineffective administered late. In the first paper you propose, patients treated are already hospitalized (day 14 or fewer still probably not day 0 to 3). The fourth paper states (when following the link the to protocol) that hospitalisation is a condition for eligibility. That's not first symptoms. The third papers talks about "initiated medication a median of 5.9 days after symptom onset". So not 0 to 3 days? The second paper you propose talks about administering HCQ as post-exposure prophylaxis. It seems outside of the scope to me. There are other issues on this debate, dosage, drug combinations, I can't talk about that, this website does: https://hcqmeta.com/ https://hcqmeta.com/ This person resumes the argument this way: https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/how-to-rig-research-the-who-edition-105 https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/how-to-rig-research-... (Note that the fourth paper on your list is the RECOVERY trial he's no a fan of) What do you think about this? Also what about intelligent design?
- alaxsxaq 5y ago
  This is from the FDA website. "Under section 564 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act), when the Secretary of HHS declares that an emergency use authorization is appropriate, FDA may authorize unapproved medical products or unapproved uses of approved medical products to be used in an emergency to diagnose, treat, or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions caused by CBRN threat agents when certain criteria are met, including there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives." You should probably drill into this if you are interested, but the phrasing most often referenced by people talking about effective therapeutics and the lack of approval by the FDA is, "there are adequate, approved, and available alternatives."
  - enkid 5y ago
    Can you point to anything that says the FDA would consider HCQ or any of these other drugs as alternatives to vaccines? They are not the same, and though they could both treat COVID, my reading is not that this would limit vaccine emergency authorization if there was a non vaccine treatment. This is especially true considering there are multiple vaccines approved under emergency use which would be direct competitors. So, nope, I don't buy it from just this wording. I need something saying specifically that alternative treatments would stop a vaccine being approved.
    - Dma54rhs 5y ago
      I believe it means vaccines should go typical testing and vetting process, not the emergency shortened, is what the op wanted to tell.
      - enkid 5y ago
        I understand that's what op is trying to say, but op isn't providing sufficient evidence for that. Non vaccines are not alternatives for vaccines. And we have EUAs for things that would be alternatives to each other, multiple vaccines. So there's not reason to think a viable treatment for COVID would prevent a vaccine from getting a EUA.
    - 5y ago
belltaco 5y ago
Dr. Zelenko held studies that 'showed' that HCQ had 100% cure rate by excluding people that moved to an ICU from the treatment group. The studies turned out to be complete bunk. He's a fraud.
- wrycoder 5y ago
  https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/03/04/hydroxychloroquine-for-covid-lifesaving-or-useless/ https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/03/04/hydroxychloroquine... Two observational studies, both carried out in New York (Carlucci et al. and Derwan et al.), appear to show promising results in patients treated with a combination of hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and azithromycin. The first, involving 932 paitents, showed a 55% reduction in relative risk of death among those getting zinc in addition to hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, as compared with those just getting hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. The second, involving 518 patients, showed an 80% reduction in relative risk of death among those getting the full triple therapy, when compared with a reference sample that didn’t get any of the drugs. That seems impressive. However, these are low quality observational studies that are seriously limited by the methodology used. The scope for confounding effects is huge. Therefore, these studies should be considered exploratory and hypothesis generating. They certainly should not be considered evidence of any cause and effect relationship.
  - belltaco 5y ago
    >https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/us/coronavirus-doctor-zelenko-malaria-drug.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/us/coronavirus-doctor-zel... >In an interview on Friday, Dr. Zelenko said that he was guilty of nothing more than sloppy wording. >“I’m a clinician, not a researcher,” he said. “I don’t understand fully the language of clinical research.” Yet he went on TV and on large podcasts and talked like he was an expert on clinical research.
    - cheaprentalyeti 5y ago
      Well, Jack Dorsey kicks people off the internet as if he's a clinician and they're not.
birken 5y ago
Pfizer, a company that has contributed probably trillions of dollars to global GDP over the past 6 months, is massively underperforming the stock market when you compare pre-pandemic to now [1]. The stock price in theory should price in all the future cash flows from the vaccine. What is your basis that the pharma companies are making tons of money on these vaccines? It isn't like the vaccines are pure profit. The pharma companies have to develop them, they have to produce them, they have to distribute them, and if they charge too much they get into massive political trouble. It seems like it is basically a giant marketing effort for pharma companies where everybody in the world is benefiting. 1: For example, from Feb 1st, 20 to today, Pfizer is up 10% and the Vanguard total stock index VTI is up 35%
- ds206 5y ago
  "everybody in the world is benefiting" Did the patent issues get resolved? Last I heard, the drug companies didn't want to share because of reasons.
  - _Microft 5y ago
    The parent commenter might have wanted to say with that that the vaccines help end the pandemic. The world benefits from that because we are losing massive amounts of money per day while still being stuck in the pandemic.
- redrain 5y ago
  > What is your basis that the pharma companies are making tons of money on these vaccines? I am not sure, but doesn't companies make a lot of money if their product sells a lot? I thought it was basic economics. Do you really need to look at the stocks to understand it?
- tonfa 5y ago
  Isn't Pfizer mostly handling manufacturing and distribution for biontech?
sveiss 5y ago
> You can't get EUA for the vaccines if there's a working treatment. Veklury (remdesivir) was approved by the FDA for the treatment of Covid-19 in hospitalized individuals on October 22, 2020. This was a full approval, not an emergency use application: https://www.fda.gov/media/137574/download https://www.fda.gov/media/137574/download We've continued using the vaccines under the existing EUAs even after a treatment was approved. The FDA has granted additional EUAs for other treatments, even after that date: four more, not counting a sedative agent, per https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-legal-regulatory-and-policy-framework/emergency-use-authorization#coviddrugs https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-... . In fact, the FDA has even granted an EUA for a vaccine after approving Veklury: the Janssen/J&J vaccine received its first EUA on February 27, 2021. https://www.fda.gov/media/146303/download https://www.fda.gov/media/146303/download Even if ivermectin was a perfect treatment for Covid, and even if an approved treatment would pull all the vaccines off the market -- despite that not happening after the FDA approved Veklury -- by the time ivermectin made its way through the approval pipeline to be labelled for this indication, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines would very likely have received approval as well. So there's no "billions of vaccinations" at risk should another treatment be found to be effective and approved.
- azinman2 5y ago
  Not to mention it’s good to have treatment options in addition to a vaccine. Vaccines aren’t full-proof (treatment options are then good), some people legitimately can’t get vaccinated, and should there be a mutation the vaccines can’t handle then you still want treatment.
- epicureanideal 5y ago
  This is exactly why instead of censoring podcasts like Bret Weinstein when he brings on guests to discuss ivermectin, other experts should engage in debate with him. When people who are credible scientists (like many of his guests) get censored it can reasonably look suspicious. I'm not saying he's correct, I'm just saying the right answer is debate. A person who is willing to have a calm, 3 hour discussion on a topic is not the kind of person who needs to be censored.
weaksauce 5y ago
> You can't get EUA for the vaccines if there's a working treatment. Per the FDA: ""Under section 564 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act), when the Secretary of HHS declares that an emergency use authorization is appropriate, FDA may authorize unapproved medical products or unapproved uses of approved medical products to be used in an emergency to diagnose, treat, or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions caused by CBRN threat agents when certain criteria are met, including there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives."" And that falls apart under some scrutiny... it says "adequate, approved, and available alternatives." "adequate" being efficacious which is debatable without testing. "approved" which that drug is absolutely not approved for covid use. "available" being enough supply which is debatable if it turns out to be effective and widely used. I see no reason why the EUA for the vaccines would be threatened by this drug also being used in an EUA fashion. if they are going for actual approval for that drug it would take as long as the vaccine to get. > When you look at the amount of money these companies stand to make from producing billions of vaccinations, you should not be surprised. I think that when you look at everything through the conspiratorial lens... all you see are conspiracies.
- adrianmonk 5y ago
  Also, I simply wouldn't assume the FDA considers a treatment (this drug) an alternative to something that prevents the disease (vaccines). They both are used for the same disease but in different ways. They are only alternatives in a very broad sense.
  - weaksauce 5y ago
    yeah agreed. literally the only people I've seen push this kind of nonsense are antivaxxers and conspiracy theorists. I don't understand why they need it to be true so badly; doesn't pass any of the sniff tests under even a little scrutiny. Even if it fit all those criteria for being an alternative it's not like it's some kind of thing that couldn't be amended if they really needed/wanted to. saddens me how reactionary everyone is. Edit: also I forgot to make the point in my replay above... it's not like having three vaccines under is preventing another vaccine from getting EUA so even under this logic framework it is nonsense. are they hinging it on the fact that it's an approved drug for some other disease?
azinman2 5y ago
Lots of others have debunked this here. Yet with all this conspiracy stuff there’s a big elephant in the room that no one seems to ever talk about: Covid is a global virus. The FDA can block and approve whatever treatments in the US, but it has no authority in Brazil or Thailand. If all these conspiracy drugs worked well yet the FDA blocked it for some malicious intent, the rest of the world would approve and use it. Particularly since these conspiracy drugs have all been around forever, are generics, and exist globally. Yet we aren’t seeing this emerging despite massive world wide deaths.
- ds206 5y ago
  Well, all the data we have is from outside the U.S. so I guess U.S. doctors in-the-know are trying to discuss it but getting shut down on U.S.-based social media.
- monoideism 5y ago
  Wrong - there are countries it’s being widely used in. For example, India and many Easter European countries (and some S. American???). We need effective vaccines and therapeutics. I don’t understand this push to discredit any therapeutic before reasonable research has even been conducted.
  - leesalminen 5y ago
    > I don’t understand this push to discredit any therapeutic before reasonable research has even been conducted. It’s simple. Money. Companies like it and want more of it.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > I don’t understand this push to discredit any therapeutic before reasonable research has even been conducted. No such thing exists. There are literally dozens of therapeutics in trials , and a few actually approved and in non-trial general use (dexamethasone, remdesevir, and favilavir, in various jurisdictions) — for both, see [0] — the ones that tend to get strongly negative treatment are hydroxychloroquine (not actually in trials) and ivermectin (in Phase 2/3 trials), both on the basis of unsupported scams around both earlier in the pandemic, not any general aversion to therapeutics. [0] https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/covid-19-therapeutics-tracker https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/...

by desine 5y ago

enkid 5y ago

Source for the EUA stuff? Source that HCQ and zinc are viable treatments? The problem isn't that some of these things might be viable, the problem is we don't know which of the literally hundreds of treatments are actually going to be viable when going through the proper testing and approval process. You can't just scream conspiracy when there much better explanations

desine 5y ago
>Source for the EUA stuff? https://www.fdanews.com/ext/resources/files/archives/e/Emergency-Use-Authorization.pdf https://www.fdanews.com/ext/resources/files/archives/e/Emerg... (PDF warning)(section III, the first list, point #4) >Source that HCQ and zinc are viable treatments? Dozens? Hundreds? of doctors speaking out, including videos posted to youtube, that they saw great effectiveness in the trial. The people promoting it weren't a bunch of nobodys, despite what the nightly news told you. There were plenty of frontline workers with actual experience. But that likely won't satisfy your request for a source - which is fine. We all appeal to authority as we see fit. I saw many actual doctors saying "this is effective", and I saw many large corporations working together to shut that conversation down. Do you have any evidence it's not effective?
- belltaco 5y ago
  >Do you have any evidence it's not effective? Do you have any evidence snake oil isn't effective? Burden of proof is on the people claiming a magic cure. Anyway here are a couple of studies that show it's not effective. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jmv.27122 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jmv.27122 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2777389 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2777389 Here's a good take by someone that does research on new medicines. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/07/ivermectin-as-a-covid-19-therapy https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/07/iv...
  - vixen99 5y ago
    And there are papers which show that it does. Rather than descend into a 'my list of papers denoting effectiveness is bigger than your's suggesting the opposite' contest, I suggest you go to http://www.freefullpdf.com/#gsc.tab=0 http://www.freefullpdf.com/#gsc.tab=0 and do some objective searching yourself preferably without a prior agenda.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  You are seriously proposing that if an effective treatment had been found in 2020, that the US government would have denied EUA for vaccines while the rest of the world got to work vaccinating their citizens?
- enkid 5y ago
  A number with a question mark behind it is not evidence, and even if hundreds of doctors did speak up about it, hundreds of doctors thought Cholera was caused by miasma instead of bad drinking water. Hundreds of doctors thought bleeding was the universal cure all. Hundreds of doctors thought washing their hands was useless. Some random number of random doctors saying it may be effective is not evidence of it's effectiveness. Your document also doesn't say what you think it does. If it did, we wouldn't be able to have multiple vaccines approved. Is there any evidence that the FDA would interpret a non vaccine as an alternative to a vaccine, when there's no issue with granting EUA to multiple vaccines? I doubt it, but would love to see what you have.
- mcguire 5y ago
  We have to do this again? Hydroxychloroquine was debunked months ago. "Among patients hospitalized with mild-to-moderate Covid-19, the use of hydroxychloroquine, alone or with azithromycin, did not improve clinical status at 15 days as compared with standard care. (Funded by the Coalition Covid-19 Brazil and EMS Pharma; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT04322123. opens in new tab.)" https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2019014 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2019014 "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. (Funded by David Baszucki and Jan Ellison Baszucki and others; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT04308668. opens in new tab.)" https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2016638 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2016638 "Neither HCQ nor HCQ/AZ shortened the clinical course of outpatients with COVID-19, and HCQ, but not HCQ/AZ, had only a modest effect on SARS-CoV-2 viral shedding. HCQ and HCQ/AZ are not effective therapies for outpatient treatment of SARV-CoV-2 infection." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589537021000535 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258953702... "Among patients hospitalized with Covid-19, those who received hydroxychloroquine did not have a lower incidence of death at 28 days than those who received usual care. (Funded by UK Research and Innovation and National Institute for Health Research and others; RECOVERY ISRCTN number, ISRCTN50189673. opens in new tab; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT04381936. opens in new tab.)" https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2022926 https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2022926 Shall we discuss creationism?
  - jeremys00 5y ago
    Hey mate for what it's worth and you might say not much and may be right, the argument I ear goes as follow: the trials showing the ineffectiveness of HCQ use protocols that are inconsistent with the protocols the advocate of HCQ propose. To my understanding, the proponents tend to say that HCQ is effective when administered as soon as first symptoms (day 0 to 3 I believe). There are also dosage issues and combinations with other drugs, and they say that HCQ is ineffective administered late. In the first paper you propose, patients treated are already hospitalized (day 14 or fewer still probably not day 0 to 3). The fourth paper states (when following the link the to protocol) that hospitalisation is a condition for eligibility. That's not first symptoms. The third papers talks about "initiated medication a median of 5.9 days after symptom onset". So not 0 to 3 days? The second paper you propose talks about administering HCQ as post-exposure prophylaxis. It seems outside of the scope to me. There are other issues on this debate, dosage, drug combinations, I can't talk about that, this website does: https://hcqmeta.com/ https://hcqmeta.com/ This person resumes the argument this way: https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/how-to-rig-research-the-who-edition-105 https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/how-to-rig-research-... (Note that the fourth paper on your list is the RECOVERY trial he's no a fan of) What do you think about this? Also what about intelligent design?
alaxsxaq 5y ago
This is from the FDA website. "Under section 564 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act), when the Secretary of HHS declares that an emergency use authorization is appropriate, FDA may authorize unapproved medical products or unapproved uses of approved medical products to be used in an emergency to diagnose, treat, or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions caused by CBRN threat agents when certain criteria are met, including there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives." You should probably drill into this if you are interested, but the phrasing most often referenced by people talking about effective therapeutics and the lack of approval by the FDA is, "there are adequate, approved, and available alternatives."
- enkid 5y ago
  Can you point to anything that says the FDA would consider HCQ or any of these other drugs as alternatives to vaccines? They are not the same, and though they could both treat COVID, my reading is not that this would limit vaccine emergency authorization if there was a non vaccine treatment. This is especially true considering there are multiple vaccines approved under emergency use which would be direct competitors. So, nope, I don't buy it from just this wording. I need something saying specifically that alternative treatments would stop a vaccine being approved.
  - Dma54rhs 5y ago
    I believe it means vaccines should go typical testing and vetting process, not the emergency shortened, is what the op wanted to tell.
    - enkid 5y ago
      I understand that's what op is trying to say, but op isn't providing sufficient evidence for that. Non vaccines are not alternatives for vaccines. And we have EUAs for things that would be alternatives to each other, multiple vaccines. So there's not reason to think a viable treatment for COVID would prevent a vaccine from getting a EUA.
  - 5y ago

belltaco 5y ago

Dr. Zelenko held studies that 'showed' that HCQ had 100% cure rate by excluding people that moved to an ICU from the treatment group. The studies turned out to be complete bunk. He's a fraud.

wrycoder 5y ago
https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/03/04/hydroxychloroquine-for-covid-lifesaving-or-useless/ https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/03/04/hydroxychloroquine... Two observational studies, both carried out in New York (Carlucci et al. and Derwan et al.), appear to show promising results in patients treated with a combination of hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and azithromycin. The first, involving 932 paitents, showed a 55% reduction in relative risk of death among those getting zinc in addition to hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, as compared with those just getting hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. The second, involving 518 patients, showed an 80% reduction in relative risk of death among those getting the full triple therapy, when compared with a reference sample that didn’t get any of the drugs. That seems impressive. However, these are low quality observational studies that are seriously limited by the methodology used. The scope for confounding effects is huge. Therefore, these studies should be considered exploratory and hypothesis generating. They certainly should not be considered evidence of any cause and effect relationship.
- belltaco 5y ago
  >https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/us/coronavirus-doctor-zelenko-malaria-drug.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/us/coronavirus-doctor-zel... >In an interview on Friday, Dr. Zelenko said that he was guilty of nothing more than sloppy wording. >“I’m a clinician, not a researcher,” he said. “I don’t understand fully the language of clinical research.” Yet he went on TV and on large podcasts and talked like he was an expert on clinical research.
  - cheaprentalyeti 5y ago
    Well, Jack Dorsey kicks people off the internet as if he's a clinician and they're not.

birken 5y ago

Pfizer, a company that has contributed probably trillions of dollars to global GDP over the past 6 months, is massively underperforming the stock market when you compare pre-pandemic to now [1]. The stock price in theory should price in all the future cash flows from the vaccine. What is your basis that the pharma companies are making tons of money on these vaccines? It isn't like the vaccines are pure profit. The pharma companies have to develop them, they have to produce them, they have to distribute them, and if they charge too much they get into massive political trouble. It seems like it is basically a giant marketing effort for pharma companies where everybody in the world is benefiting. 1: For example, from Feb 1st, 20 to today, Pfizer is up 10% and the Vanguard total stock index VTI is up 35%

ds206 5y ago
"everybody in the world is benefiting" Did the patent issues get resolved? Last I heard, the drug companies didn't want to share because of reasons.
- _Microft 5y ago
  The parent commenter might have wanted to say with that that the vaccines help end the pandemic. The world benefits from that because we are losing massive amounts of money per day while still being stuck in the pandemic.
redrain 5y ago
> What is your basis that the pharma companies are making tons of money on these vaccines? I am not sure, but doesn't companies make a lot of money if their product sells a lot? I thought it was basic economics. Do you really need to look at the stocks to understand it?
tonfa 5y ago
Isn't Pfizer mostly handling manufacturing and distribution for biontech?

sveiss 5y ago

> You can't get EUA for the vaccines if there's a working treatment. Veklury (remdesivir) was approved by the FDA for the treatment of Covid-19 in hospitalized individuals on October 22, 2020. This was a full approval, not an emergency use application: https://www.fda.gov/media/137574/download https://www.fda.gov/media/137574/download We've continued using the vaccines under the existing EUAs even after a treatment was approved. The FDA has granted additional EUAs for other treatments, even after that date: four more, not counting a sedative agent, per https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-legal-regulatory-and-policy-framework/emergency-use-authorization#coviddrugs https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-... . In fact, the FDA has even granted an EUA for a vaccine after approving Veklury: the Janssen/J&J vaccine received its first EUA on February 27, 2021. https://www.fda.gov/media/146303/download https://www.fda.gov/media/146303/download Even if ivermectin was a perfect treatment for Covid, and even if an approved treatment would pull all the vaccines off the market -- despite that not happening after the FDA approved Veklury -- by the time ivermectin made its way through the approval pipeline to be labelled for this indication, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines would very likely have received approval as well. So there's no "billions of vaccinations" at risk should another treatment be found to be effective and approved.

azinman2 5y ago
Not to mention it’s good to have treatment options in addition to a vaccine. Vaccines aren’t full-proof (treatment options are then good), some people legitimately can’t get vaccinated, and should there be a mutation the vaccines can’t handle then you still want treatment.
epicureanideal 5y ago
This is exactly why instead of censoring podcasts like Bret Weinstein when he brings on guests to discuss ivermectin, other experts should engage in debate with him. When people who are credible scientists (like many of his guests) get censored it can reasonably look suspicious. I'm not saying he's correct, I'm just saying the right answer is debate. A person who is willing to have a calm, 3 hour discussion on a topic is not the kind of person who needs to be censored.

weaksauce 5y ago

> You can't get EUA for the vaccines if there's a working treatment. Per the FDA: ""Under section 564 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act), when the Secretary of HHS declares that an emergency use authorization is appropriate, FDA may authorize unapproved medical products or unapproved uses of approved medical products to be used in an emergency to diagnose, treat, or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions caused by CBRN threat agents when certain criteria are met, including there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives."" And that falls apart under some scrutiny... it says "adequate, approved, and available alternatives." "adequate" being efficacious which is debatable without testing. "approved" which that drug is absolutely not approved for covid use. "available" being enough supply which is debatable if it turns out to be effective and widely used. I see no reason why the EUA for the vaccines would be threatened by this drug also being used in an EUA fashion. if they are going for actual approval for that drug it would take as long as the vaccine to get. > When you look at the amount of money these companies stand to make from producing billions of vaccinations, you should not be surprised. I think that when you look at everything through the conspiratorial lens... all you see are conspiracies.

adrianmonk 5y ago
Also, I simply wouldn't assume the FDA considers a treatment (this drug) an alternative to something that prevents the disease (vaccines). They both are used for the same disease but in different ways. They are only alternatives in a very broad sense.
- weaksauce 5y ago
  yeah agreed. literally the only people I've seen push this kind of nonsense are antivaxxers and conspiracy theorists. I don't understand why they need it to be true so badly; doesn't pass any of the sniff tests under even a little scrutiny. Even if it fit all those criteria for being an alternative it's not like it's some kind of thing that couldn't be amended if they really needed/wanted to. saddens me how reactionary everyone is. Edit: also I forgot to make the point in my replay above... it's not like having three vaccines under is preventing another vaccine from getting EUA so even under this logic framework it is nonsense. are they hinging it on the fact that it's an approved drug for some other disease?

azinman2 5y ago

Lots of others have debunked this here. Yet with all this conspiracy stuff there’s a big elephant in the room that no one seems to ever talk about: Covid is a global virus. The FDA can block and approve whatever treatments in the US, but it has no authority in Brazil or Thailand. If all these conspiracy drugs worked well yet the FDA blocked it for some malicious intent, the rest of the world would approve and use it. Particularly since these conspiracy drugs have all been around forever, are generics, and exist globally. Yet we aren’t seeing this emerging despite massive world wide deaths.

ds206 5y ago
Well, all the data we have is from outside the U.S. so I guess U.S. doctors in-the-know are trying to discuss it but getting shut down on U.S.-based social media.
monoideism 5y ago
Wrong - there are countries it’s being widely used in. For example, India and many Easter European countries (and some S. American???). We need effective vaccines and therapeutics. I don’t understand this push to discredit any therapeutic before reasonable research has even been conducted.
- leesalminen 5y ago
  > I don’t understand this push to discredit any therapeutic before reasonable research has even been conducted. It’s simple. Money. Companies like it and want more of it.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > I don’t understand this push to discredit any therapeutic before reasonable research has even been conducted. No such thing exists. There are literally dozens of therapeutics in trials , and a few actually approved and in non-trial general use (dexamethasone, remdesevir, and favilavir, in various jurisdictions) — for both, see [0] — the ones that tend to get strongly negative treatment are hydroxychloroquine (not actually in trials) and ivermectin (in Phase 2/3 trials), both on the basis of unsupported scams around both earlier in the pandemic, not any general aversion to therapeutics. [0] https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/covid-19-therapeutics-tracker https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/...