5 ms·

Too many "promising" studies like cannabis, vitamin D, chloroquine, ivermectin, etc have been later fact-checked by the CDC as bad science, to rely on anything

Too many "promising" studies like cannabis, vitamin D, chloroquine, ivermectin, etc have been later fact-checked by the CDC as bad science, to rely on anything but the CDC's word (or Fauci). Until the CDC says so I won't believe it. Right now it seems like mass vaccination is our only way out of this pandemic and back to normal.

MikeKusold 5y ago
The American Chemical Society is a pretty reputable source.
- mikeyouse 5y ago
  Edit: Thanks jinto36 -- I was wrong on JNP -- ACS is actually a co-publisher. More to the point -- the dose always seems to be the issue -- no affect until you're past 10 micrograms/mL (https://pubs.acs.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/achs/journals/content/jnprdf/0/jnprdf.ahead-of-print/acs.jnatprod.1c00946/20220112/images/large/np1c00946_0003.jpeg https://pubs.acs.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/achs/jou...) but that's hundreds of times higher concentration than almost any available method of consuming CBD (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2018.01365/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2018.0136...). Doesn't seem too useful unfortunately. Original Comment started with this: Its just a link on the ACS website -- it was actually published in the Journal of Natural Products.
  - jinto36 5y ago
    ACS is the parent/publisher of the journal.
- tradesurplus 5y ago
  Evaluate the methodology first, then the authors, then the publication source; scoring accordingly.
aaomidi 5y ago
I would not listen to a federal govt source's opinions on weed, tbh.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
  That is painting with a very broad brush. For better or worse, federal government is huge. It is not exactly a monolith. It is made out of people and, not surprisingly, not all of them agree with one another.
  - aaomidi 5y ago
    Except when the CDC is saying something, it's on behalf of the federal govt. They're also limited in what they can or can not say because of how they've classified weed. So, if it's coming from an official US govt source and its about MJ, I'm going to be extremely skeptical of it. If they didn't want this reputation, they can actually go ahead and fix the criminalization now, but they're not. So...they deserve that reputation
colecut 5y ago
Since the vaccinations are stopping the spread?
- unethical_ban 5y ago
  They very likely are stopping the death, yes.
- tzs 5y ago
  They reduce chances of hospitalization by at least an order of magnitude, and the chances of death by even more. COVID is almost certainly never going away. It will become endemic, joining the other endemic viruses such as the couple hundred cold viruses (including 4 other coronavirus that were once deadly pandemics) and the various flu viruses we reluctantly live with. Something we all get several times over our lifetime, that most of the time just make most of us pretty miserable for up to a week or so. How many people die during the transition from pandemic to endemic depends greatly on how risky it is to acquire your first immunity, and how strong that first immunity is when it comes to preventing hospitalization and death. The lowest risk way to acquire that first immunity is by vaccination. It's also the way that provides the highest chances of strong immunity--when you acquire it by an actual infection it depends on how severe the first infection was. So yes, mass vaccination gives us the best chances of returning to normal sooner with less death along the way.
  - hammock 5y ago
    >They reduce chances of hospitalization by at least an order of magnitude, and the chances of death by even more Want to point out this was your response to the question, "Since the vaccinations are stopping the spread?" in case you wanted to re-read your answer.
    - vmception 5y ago
      That was the answer. People vocally cynical about the vaccines have always been using a strawman argument, in case you need a refresher a strawman argument requires two things: 1) creating a standard that was never used by the proponents 2) criticizing the made up standard to discredit the proponents on a medical level, it is clear this wasn't to stop the spread, it was to slow the spread as vaccinated infected have smaller viral load for shorter time period compared to unvaccinated infected, as well as reduce severity and deaths of those that contained a viral load. On who we call the "proponents" for this topic, I will concede that I've heard many local influencers, radio hosts and others reduce this to "stop the spread" in reference to any viral mitigation measure, such as masks, distancing, quarantine, and vaccination all part of an amorphous overarching program. But its clear that the people that latch on to "stop the spread" as a reference to the vaccine as a technical term advancement would never have looked at the technical supporting data due to either trust issues with the institution or plain ignorance of how it works. The researchers and their research has always been clear about what performance to expect from the vaccines (except duration of effectiveness which is unknown for both the vaccines and natural immunity, compounded by the variants)
glitcher 5y ago
Well it is a single scientific study. To believe it as fact would be a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. I agree with the spirit of your comment in that I would hold out for more scientific replication of these results to increase my confidence beyond the level of simple curiosity.
- hammock 5y ago
  Has there been any such replication of the "natural immunity protection is equal or greater to vaccine protection" study(s) yet?
  - pelasaco 5y ago
    https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...
  - jonhohle 5y ago
    As a lay-person and not an epidemiologist, what logic is there for the idea that mRNA treatments that synthesize a single protein could be better than an actual infection which produces hundreds of those proteins per replication along with dozens or more proteins that may be used by the immune system to identify the virus? Traditional vaccines at least dump most of the target viral proteins into the body. Focusing on a single protein that may mutate in the target virus has always seemed myopic to me, let alone the assumption that this approach could possibly be more effective than an immune response to the actual virus. I’m not saying that this approach couldn’t work, just that it would, by definition, trigger a subset of the immune response of a whole virus vaccine. Edit to add: by better, I mean better at triggering an immune response. I’m not arguing against the idea that a targeted, single protein approach is or is not better at reducing illness or death and therefore shouldn’t be pursued, just about the idea that recovered individuals would be less protected than a vaccinated individual on average.
    - bbatchelder 5y ago
      > just about the idea that recovered individuals would be less protected than a vaccinated individual on average. I don't think its so much about the idealized immune response, but that in general, people's immune response to natural infection seems to widely vary, with many not having much of a robust response. It very well may be that a good immune response to natural infection may be better than one from an mRNA vaccine targeting the spike protein - but in aggregate the vaccine will be more successful because its induces a more consistent response.
serf 5y ago
>Until the CDC says so I won't believe it. I lost that urge after the 'masks are only useful for medical workers' kerfuffle. now, you can explain to me how I lost something in translation, how they didn't mean exactly that , and that I am misinterpreting history -- but then I would counter with 'One of the primary jobs of the CDC is to translate medical advice into something easily consumable for the citizenry they serve.' -- and I wholeheartedly disagree that happened in any effective or successful manner across this event.
- tradesurplus 5y ago
  110% this.
- rory 5y ago
  The CDC says whatever they think is most likely to influence the public to do the whatever they think is best for public health in general. Whether or not what they say is the truth is entirely incidental.
stadium 5y ago
Did the CDC say so about this study? Source? The same CDC that said early on that we don't need masks when the WHO advised them. It wasn't to keep the general public COVID free, it was to make sure there were enough masks for healthcare workers. CDC incentives aren't aligned with individual health, it's more for social health and getting people back to work without maxing out healthcare systems. The scientific community should be fact checking and reproducing these studies. The thing with cannabis, vitamin D, ivermectin, they have been around for years and have low risk profile in human use with billions of doses. Even if it is experimental and there aren't long term studies, all the science for mRNA vaccines in humans is new and there are no long term studies. So why not throw everything at the pandemic instead of hoping and dreaming for vaccines alone to save us. We are a few mutations away from omicron contagiousness with delta symptoms. I don't see how vaccines alone are going to stop this thing. This current wave is not dropping to zero.
oxymoran 5y ago
You are too funny.
- hammock 5y ago
  Look at this great thread I started. It's like groupthink kryptonite.
tradesurplus 5y ago
The CDC now says you can cough into someone's mouth if your boss says it's alright. The last two years of second order effect guessing miss-steps has seen those at the helm of the organisation burn through generations of credibility like a hand launched bottle rocket.
JPKab 5y ago
You are welcome to outsource your critical thinking skills to the Federal government all you want. Meanwhile, in most of Europe, previous infection with COVID in the past 365 days (it was 180 days until recently, but was updated due to scientific recommendations) "counts" as "being vaccinated" when it comes to getting a green pass. But the CDC ignores this completely. That's not based on science, but convenience of achieving the policy goal and other reasons that probably are logistical in nature. It's also ironic that we are in a thread talking about cannabis potentially reducing COVID infection, and you are "appealing to authority" with an organization that, to this day, has cannabis classified as a Schedule 1 narcotic for reasons that have zero to do with science. Cannabis prohibition has been backed up by government funded, incredibly biased studies for decades. Because at the end of the day, scientists aren't going to easily be able to report study results that contradict the current political goals of the entity that funds them. Not unlike scientists working for Big Tobacco, the people paying for the work will have undue influence on steering the results of studies.

MikeKusold 5y ago

The American Chemical Society is a pretty reputable source.

mikeyouse 5y ago
Edit: Thanks jinto36 -- I was wrong on JNP -- ACS is actually a co-publisher. More to the point -- the dose always seems to be the issue -- no affect until you're past 10 micrograms/mL (https://pubs.acs.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/achs/journals/content/jnprdf/0/jnprdf.ahead-of-print/acs.jnatprod.1c00946/20220112/images/large/np1c00946_0003.jpeg https://pubs.acs.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/achs/jou...) but that's hundreds of times higher concentration than almost any available method of consuming CBD (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2018.01365/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2018.0136...). Doesn't seem too useful unfortunately. Original Comment started with this: Its just a link on the ACS website -- it was actually published in the Journal of Natural Products.
- jinto36 5y ago
  ACS is the parent/publisher of the journal.
tradesurplus 5y ago
Evaluate the methodology first, then the authors, then the publication source; scoring accordingly.

aaomidi 5y ago

I would not listen to a federal govt source's opinions on weed, tbh.

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
That is painting with a very broad brush. For better or worse, federal government is huge. It is not exactly a monolith. It is made out of people and, not surprisingly, not all of them agree with one another.
- aaomidi 5y ago
  Except when the CDC is saying something, it's on behalf of the federal govt. They're also limited in what they can or can not say because of how they've classified weed. So, if it's coming from an official US govt source and its about MJ, I'm going to be extremely skeptical of it. If they didn't want this reputation, they can actually go ahead and fix the criminalization now, but they're not. So...they deserve that reputation

colecut 5y ago

Since the vaccinations are stopping the spread?

unethical_ban 5y ago
They very likely are stopping the death, yes.
tzs 5y ago
They reduce chances of hospitalization by at least an order of magnitude, and the chances of death by even more. COVID is almost certainly never going away. It will become endemic, joining the other endemic viruses such as the couple hundred cold viruses (including 4 other coronavirus that were once deadly pandemics) and the various flu viruses we reluctantly live with. Something we all get several times over our lifetime, that most of the time just make most of us pretty miserable for up to a week or so. How many people die during the transition from pandemic to endemic depends greatly on how risky it is to acquire your first immunity, and how strong that first immunity is when it comes to preventing hospitalization and death. The lowest risk way to acquire that first immunity is by vaccination. It's also the way that provides the highest chances of strong immunity--when you acquire it by an actual infection it depends on how severe the first infection was. So yes, mass vaccination gives us the best chances of returning to normal sooner with less death along the way.
- hammock 5y ago
  >They reduce chances of hospitalization by at least an order of magnitude, and the chances of death by even more Want to point out this was your response to the question, "Since the vaccinations are stopping the spread?" in case you wanted to re-read your answer.
  - vmception 5y ago
    That was the answer. People vocally cynical about the vaccines have always been using a strawman argument, in case you need a refresher a strawman argument requires two things: 1) creating a standard that was never used by the proponents 2) criticizing the made up standard to discredit the proponents on a medical level, it is clear this wasn't to stop the spread, it was to slow the spread as vaccinated infected have smaller viral load for shorter time period compared to unvaccinated infected, as well as reduce severity and deaths of those that contained a viral load. On who we call the "proponents" for this topic, I will concede that I've heard many local influencers, radio hosts and others reduce this to "stop the spread" in reference to any viral mitigation measure, such as masks, distancing, quarantine, and vaccination all part of an amorphous overarching program. But its clear that the people that latch on to "stop the spread" as a reference to the vaccine as a technical term advancement would never have looked at the technical supporting data due to either trust issues with the institution or plain ignorance of how it works. The researchers and their research has always been clear about what performance to expect from the vaccines (except duration of effectiveness which is unknown for both the vaccines and natural immunity, compounded by the variants)

glitcher 5y ago

Well it is a single scientific study. To believe it as fact would be a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. I agree with the spirit of your comment in that I would hold out for more scientific replication of these results to increase my confidence beyond the level of simple curiosity.

hammock 5y ago
Has there been any such replication of the "natural immunity protection is equal or greater to vaccine protection" study(s) yet?
- pelasaco 5y ago
  https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...
- jonhohle 5y ago
  As a lay-person and not an epidemiologist, what logic is there for the idea that mRNA treatments that synthesize a single protein could be better than an actual infection which produces hundreds of those proteins per replication along with dozens or more proteins that may be used by the immune system to identify the virus? Traditional vaccines at least dump most of the target viral proteins into the body. Focusing on a single protein that may mutate in the target virus has always seemed myopic to me, let alone the assumption that this approach could possibly be more effective than an immune response to the actual virus. I’m not saying that this approach couldn’t work, just that it would, by definition, trigger a subset of the immune response of a whole virus vaccine. Edit to add: by better, I mean better at triggering an immune response. I’m not arguing against the idea that a targeted, single protein approach is or is not better at reducing illness or death and therefore shouldn’t be pursued, just about the idea that recovered individuals would be less protected than a vaccinated individual on average.
  - bbatchelder 5y ago
    > just about the idea that recovered individuals would be less protected than a vaccinated individual on average. I don't think its so much about the idealized immune response, but that in general, people's immune response to natural infection seems to widely vary, with many not having much of a robust response. It very well may be that a good immune response to natural infection may be better than one from an mRNA vaccine targeting the spike protein - but in aggregate the vaccine will be more successful because its induces a more consistent response.

serf 5y ago

>Until the CDC says so I won't believe it. I lost that urge after the 'masks are only useful for medical workers' kerfuffle. now, you can explain to me how I lost something in translation, how they didn't mean exactly that , and that I am misinterpreting history -- but then I would counter with 'One of the primary jobs of the CDC is to translate medical advice into something easily consumable for the citizenry they serve.' -- and I wholeheartedly disagree that happened in any effective or successful manner across this event.

tradesurplus 5y ago
110% this.
rory 5y ago
The CDC says whatever they think is most likely to influence the public to do the whatever they think is best for public health in general. Whether or not what they say is the truth is entirely incidental.

stadium 5y ago

Did the CDC say so about this study? Source? The same CDC that said early on that we don't need masks when the WHO advised them. It wasn't to keep the general public COVID free, it was to make sure there were enough masks for healthcare workers. CDC incentives aren't aligned with individual health, it's more for social health and getting people back to work without maxing out healthcare systems. The scientific community should be fact checking and reproducing these studies. The thing with cannabis, vitamin D, ivermectin, they have been around for years and have low risk profile in human use with billions of doses. Even if it is experimental and there aren't long term studies, all the science for mRNA vaccines in humans is new and there are no long term studies. So why not throw everything at the pandemic instead of hoping and dreaming for vaccines alone to save us. We are a few mutations away from omicron contagiousness with delta symptoms. I don't see how vaccines alone are going to stop this thing. This current wave is not dropping to zero.

oxymoran 5y ago

You are too funny.

hammock 5y ago
Look at this great thread I started. It's like groupthink kryptonite.

tradesurplus 5y ago

The CDC now says you can cough into someone's mouth if your boss says it's alright. The last two years of second order effect guessing miss-steps has seen those at the helm of the organisation burn through generations of credibility like a hand launched bottle rocket.

JPKab 5y ago

You are welcome to outsource your critical thinking skills to the Federal government all you want. Meanwhile, in most of Europe, previous infection with COVID in the past 365 days (it was 180 days until recently, but was updated due to scientific recommendations) "counts" as "being vaccinated" when it comes to getting a green pass. But the CDC ignores this completely. That's not based on science, but convenience of achieving the policy goal and other reasons that probably are logistical in nature. It's also ironic that we are in a thread talking about cannabis potentially reducing COVID infection, and you are "appealing to authority" with an organization that, to this day, has cannabis classified as a Schedule 1 narcotic for reasons that have zero to do with science. Cannabis prohibition has been backed up by government funded, incredibly biased studies for decades. Because at the end of the day, scientists aren't going to easily be able to report study results that contradict the current political goals of the entity that funds them. Not unlike scientists working for Big Tobacco, the people paying for the work will have undue influence on steering the results of studies.