At least this is what one doctor in NY is telling us. I was agreeing with a fellow Briefer last night that immediacy and panic helped sell $2.8T in 4 recent laws. The Chinese and French said hydroxychloroquine might be useful against COVID-19 so it makes sense to test it. What doesn't make sense is for all medical trials to only consist of hydroxychloroquine, Zinc Sulfate, Azithromycin based on the unsubstantiated claims of one doctor and the President's hunch about this stuff, even if his brother was a doctor.
If my doctor came to me and said we want to try a combination of drugs that we haven't tested individually and hope something works, I'd get a new doctor and tell him I am not panicked by immediacy.
In full disclosure, your doctor would also tell you that the three together are most effective in the earlier stages of the disease, before people have gone so far down hill they need a ventilator. By then much of the alveolar damage is done.
Now, let's define "untested". Where all three have been used before the patient going on a ventilator, there has been report of good results.
Where one or two of the three drugs has been used, or just the hydroxychloroquine, the results have not been as good.
Why? For starters, it is the Zinc, admitted to the cell by the action of the hydroxychloroquine, which inhibits viral replication, stopping the virus from reproducing and saving the cell.
Without it, there is no active ingredient to stop the virus. The Azithromycin has a mild effect on the immune system, helping prevent cytokine storm, acts to stop bacterial opportunistic infections, and may interfere slightly with viral replication as well.
What IS evident without going to the trouble of killing people with placebo studies, is that if you leave one of those three legs off the pharmacological stool, you will end up flat on your ass. Leaving the zinc out condemned these people to death. What's more, an opportunity was lost, not only to save lives, but to fully test the regimen as it was announced by the doctor who came up with it, a doctor who explained in simple terms what each of the three medications did to work together to defeat the virus. All the more shameful, imho.
If you want an "approved method", as in
FDA approved, I must ask if you know how long it takes to get FDA approval for a drug or combination of drugs for a specific use, or what is involved.
Tiered double blind studies, which have patients who get the drug and patients who do not, must be conducted in order to establish efficacy vs doing nothing. Side effects must be documented and analyzed statistically. These tests and the write-ups can take a year or more. Some of the patients will receive placebos instead of medication, and may very well die as a result.
Considering this is a novel virus, one that has never been seen before (except, perhaps, inside a Chinese lab), there is NO "FDA approved" regimen of treatment. This is ad-lib, improvisation, trial and error, call it what you will, but we know that opening pathways into the cell but not putting zinc through them to stop the virus, even with Azithromycin, doesn't work. I guess the VA proved that.
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But there is huge money in developing and requiring a vaccine, while people lose everything they own on lockdown (or the country is bankrupted bailing them out). There will be properties to be picked up for pennies by the banks, and resold for enormous profit, while the value of the dollar may even crumble to the point it is no longer the world's reserve currency. The effects of that are guaranteed to be devastating on a scale and scope that will make The Great Depression take second place. And then there is the political value (for some) in saying "We did what you said and it didn't work." as if that was a shield for criminal incompetence.
