Capitol Hill Blue Forums Science and Technology Health, Medicine & the healing Sciences Coronavirus: The Plague of The 21st Century?

“ Understanding the problem is the first step toward solving it.”

So close to ‘a scientific theory of disease spread’ yet so far away.

Interesting to read about other countries mitigation efforts. It’s like another world than our technocratic culture war food fight. One side believing nothing can be done to stop the spread while the other side thinks the same thing cept with vax only.

Another heterodox study that does nothing for the pharma and it’s political subsidiaries but might prove useful for mechanical engineers. Not that they’re being consulted in the Anglosphere that much in mitigation.


COVID-19 Cluster Linked to Aerosol Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 via Floor Drains

Meghan Jehn has been doing gods work from the ground up, maneuvering around the old beards debate and convincing groups and organizations of the importance for mitigation, going beyond the narrow focused, post infection debates. As though an ounce of prevention still has market value anymore as opposed to the lucre of cure. Good info that is useful:

Megan Jehn

COVID being transmitted via aerosol is not in dispute. Not many American buildings have floor-drains sans the occasional restaurant and custodial cleaning closet.

Pretty sure the WH Rose Garden in 2020 did not have a floor drains, but it did have a large group of unmasked people within inches and proximity of everyone' breath aerosols. Nor do I suspect that Herman Cain was sitting over a floor-drain during the Trump rally in Tulsa July 2020.

Interesting paper with good methodology, but It mentions residents coming and going via stairs and the front door. So I guess they were not locked down in their apartments with food being delivered. They probably used the same laundry room as well. I think there are so many other opportunities for transmission that this investigation is rather silly. You can find anything if you look hard enough.

The PCR CT values are going to reflect the fact that infected people shed virus, and that mostly ends up on the floor or other horizontal surfaces as droplets fall. I'm sure infected residents also shed aerosols, since particles of all sizes are exhaled, coughed, sneezed, etc. "Exposure" has been defined as being within six feet of an infected person for 15 minutes in an enclosed space. But these residents were effectively exposed to others' aerosols for several days, probably over 12 hours per day! This is similar to studies of secondary transmission within households: It's a very low bar to get infected from people you are living with in the same enclosed space.

Yes, aerosol transmission is possible, and very likely if you live in the same household as an infected person. From strangers you encounter, masked, in an elevator? Very unlikely. It requires very unusual circumstances, and that's why this paper is pretty unique. But even in this apartment building, they say 14 of the 19 infections were caused by social interaction with one infected individual.

But it is a very good idea to put some water down every sewer trap now and again, since they leak sewer gases into your house and stink.

Wasn’t the point of the post. It was simply injecting other disciplines into the conversation to illuminate other potential avenues of disease spread. Did you think I was arguing drains being the primary route of infection?

I like what you did there with Herman Cain. Polarized infection politically while putting an image of Herman Cain huffing on a sewer pipe in my brain. Good job soldier!

USPS has a pretty good sign up page for four free covid tests:Covid tests

Also in the ‘news you can use’ vein, a comprehensive study of prophylaxis use of ivermectin:
Ivermectin Prophylaxis Used for COV...Subjects Using Propensity Score Matching

If your fortunate enough to have a doctor practicing medicine and not a cog in a reimbursement model of health delivery it might be worth looking into for taking as a preventative.

This paper is a good example of the conflict between science and ethics, in designing drug trials. The first sentence in their Limitations section:


This was NOT a random blind trial. People who were taking ivermectin knew they were taking it and not placebo. Human behavior is a large factor in the spread of the virus, and the IVM participants may have just been more careful than the control group. They went to the trouble to get their medication, to take it despite some unpleasant side effects, and to keep that up during the study period. The control group decided not to take a drug that might prevent Covid, a sometimes deadly disease. They may have been equally casual about mask wearing, socializing in large groups, etc.

The conflict here is that "patient choice" is great ethically, but leads to a huge waste of resources scientifically. There is a random blind drug trial that has some results already in Brazil. It called the TOGETHER study. They tried (are continuing to try) various approved drugs to see if they are effective against Covid-19 disease (as opposed to prophylaxis). They have a very nice website. Here is their web page summarizing their results so far:

TOGETHER results

These are most interesting:

Hydroxychloroquine - Stopped for futility
Ivermectin - Stopped for futility
Fluvoxamine - Stopped for superiority

"Stopped for futility" means they reached the point where the statistics said the drug had no effect.
"Stopped for superiority" means they reached the point where the statistics said the drug was so beneficial it was unethical to continue the untreated control group.

This is the study that started the flurry of investigation and even recommendations for fluvoxamine. But more important, it is a high-quality random blind drug trial that said hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin are ineffective.

BTW: Ivermectin prescriptions are very difficult to get or to fill in the US. But fluvoxamine is used to treat OCD. Tell your doctor you are obsessed about Covid and want a fluvoxamine prescription. Get it filled at any pharmacy.

Meh…

Garbage in garbage out. Blind trials have been weapons used by pharma for years now in its ongoing war against off label drug use. I get the credentialed appeal with it’s supposed sanctity among certain classes but it’s not an end all be all of knowledge they would like it to be.

Frankly, I’ve been following the story of the drug that shall not be named long before it was dumped into the political culture war. One of the most absurd, along with anti masking and owning the Libs by catching covid and dying. But here we are now. Domestically, those doctors treating with the drug that shall not be named are reporting significant reductions in infection times and numbers of patients sent to ER. Again reports both nationally and internationally before it became part of the culture war effort.

As someone who blew the Omicron transmissibility call, seems to subscribe to a ‘droplet’ theory of disease spread and now using the same sus arguments of ‘individual behavior’ for any heterodox reporting on covid, I’m going with the front line doctors domestically and around the globe on the efficacy of this one. The numbers speak for themselves whereas credentialing and institutions (not without a whiff of being captured) can moan all they want. Brahmins have a vested interested in discounting native field acquired wisdom.

Ivermectin might be helpful, but it's so little help that real drug trials with thousands of participants just fail to find any statistically significant benefit. It may be that drug trial's following a strict protocol don't make their ivermectin treatments flexible enough to help patients. I've followed Drs. Marik and Kory for quite some time, and they have said a lot about varying their protocol to fit the patient's changing circumstances. I was a big ivermectin advocate during the first year of the pandemic, when we had nothing else. But ever since Dr. Kory admitted that ivermectin was not working so well anymore, and a number of other much better treatments have become available, not so much.

In particular, vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, Paxlovid, and Molnupiravir. I was very impressed by the Spanish studies that showed high-dose Vitamin D metabolites kept most people out of the ICU. I still take quercetin and zinc (better than hydroxychloroquine at getting zinc into cells), lots of Vitamin D, Vitamin K2, Vitamin C, magnesium glycinate, and melatonin. I'm pretty sure I had an Omicron infection last week, and it was less than a cold.

The problem with anecdotes about covid "cures" is that most people fight off the virus in about 5 days with no treatment at all. Even people who get seriously ill, mostly get better with no "cure". But they are not sick from the virus. They are almost all sick from their immune system over-reaction. This is why Dr. Marik's treatments were so much better for seriously ill patients at first. WHO had told doctors NOT to administer steroids. But Dr. Marik pioneered the use of steroids to treat acute shock decades ago. So when his Covid patients exhibited all the signs of high inflammation markers, he gave them methylprednisolone, And they mostly recovered. It was only later when the UK study published their results on the benefit of dexamethasone, that everybody else starting using steroids for the second, inflammatory phase of Covid. Dr. Marik theorized the multiphased nature of Covid progression, and he was right. Now if you look at the FLCCC protocols, they never use exclusively ivermectin and always use steroids during the post-replication inflammatory phase. They have actually deemphasized ivermection during hospital treatment and suggested alternatives.

But right from the start, I thought doctors should be using steroids when simple inflammation blood tests showed they needed them, and anticoagulents when simple coagulation tests showed they needed them. WHO was wrong, and blindly following their bad advice killed a lot of people.

I was just blown away by TWiV 855: "T time with Alessandro Sette" from the La Jolla institute for Immunology. (That's on YouTube.) His lab has done intensive studies of how T-cells work with Covid vaccines and variants. They've looked at how HLA proteins present virus protein fragments on the infected cell surface to yield literally thousands of different T-cell epitopes immune systems can react against. They also looked at how variant mutations can evade those T-cell epitopes. Unlike antibody evasion, T-cell epitope evasion doesn't seem to exhibit any evolutionary pressure: It's random. And it has no benefit to the virus when it gets transmitted to another person, because that person will have different HLA types and different virus protein fragments their T-cells reacted to when they got immunized!

All this is exactly why vaccination is so effective at keeping infected people out of the hospital despite antibody contraction. He also said they looked at immunity following infection versus vaccination. About 10% of those just infected end up with no immunity after some months because natural infection has so many variables. Vaccinated people have much more uniform immune responses, probably because they had a much more uniform exposure to antigen.

The number of experiments required to get all his data is astonishing. These people know a whole lot about this virus.

So garbage in/ garbage out. 20mg instead of 200mg, intervals of dosage, time of effectiveness, etc… all play a part in randomized, blind studies.
You know what’s another study? Field research and data. I was paying attention to a host of countries that had, still are implementing Ivermectin. I think the data coming back from the front lines was/is credible enough to take into consideration. Same holds true for the Docs I’ve followed long before, what appears to me anyhow, a FUD campaign in major media. You know that type of campaign, wether it be an effort to send a stock price, delegitimating an election, or pushing product. It was interesting to see the media go to war on something of practical purpose.

I’m not going to convince anyone who’s mind is made up, nor do I care to. Just noting another curiosity. Here’s a study that came out as few months before the FUD campaign was in full swing, reviewing much of the field data and clinical trials that were being done at the time:

Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance. Furthermore, results from numerous controlled prophylaxis trials report significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19 with the regular use of ivermectin. Finally, the many examples of ivermectin distribution campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality indicate that an oral agent effective in all phases of COVID-19 has been identified.



Review of the Emerging Evidence Dem...he Prophylaxis and Treatment of COVID-19

In a more recent note, Indiana is giving it the green light for treatment. India considers ivermectin

Vaccine data shows we get pretty good attenuation of symptoms for 10 weeks @ 3 jabs, falling off quickly after that. Quicker with fewer jabs. One wonders, with current vaccines+let er rip strategy, how long we can keep this jabbing up without T cell exhaustion? Maybe we get lucky and no more covids after Cron. Maybe not. Never understand the narrow reasoning of vax only, cept as a never ending stream of virtue signaling thru a consumer choice. Seems lazy as well.

This looks promising for public mitigation strategizing

“ Though it may seem unsavory, collecting human waste can tell us a lot about COVID-19 and give governments a leg up on containing the spread of the virus. Researchers can predict if the coronavirus might attack a community by checking sewers for viral fragments in the community’s poop”

S&T Joins Coalition Seeking to ‘Flush’ out COVID-19 in Wastewater

DHS said ‘poop’…