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

Good news for the immunocompromised: Vaccines may not work for you, depending on exactly why your immune system is defective, but the US government has ordered a whole bunch of the new AstraZeneca monoclonal antibody cocktail that is supposed to last for six months. It's is available for use now, and doctors are beginning to administer it prophylactically to their high-risk patients.

Bad news for the never-infected and never-vaccinated: For you, Omicron is not at all a "less virulent" natural way to get the benefits of vaccination. Yes, it's much less serious for the previously infected or vaccinated, but that's because of their T-cell immunity, not any inherent difference in this variant. Almost everybody dying these days is unvaccinated. Going to an "Omicron Party" is essentially the most dangerous vaccine possible. The FDA would NEVER approve a vaccine that had that hospitalization and death rate, not to mention the risk of Long Covid.

NIH has put out a flow chart for physicians treating the high-risk Covid patient who is not hospitalized and not (yet) on oxygen. This is an attempt to disrupt viral replication, in order to prevent progression. In order of preference (subject to contraindications):

1. Paxlovid: 89% reduced risk, prescription filled at certain pharmacies, supply limited
2. Sotrivamab: 87% risk reduction, IV infusion, supply limited
3. Remdesivir: 87% risk reduction, three days of in-office IV infusions (some being done at home)
4. Molnupiravir: 35%? risk reduction, pregnancy test required for all women of child-bearing age

Risk reduction is for hospitalization or death within 28 days. I'm glad they finally figured out the correct timing for Remdesivir. The EUA for it makes it approved only for hospitalized patients on oxygen (when it's pretty useless). So NIH is recommending off-label use! The EUA reflects the FDA's fixation on using "heroic measures" only to save the seriously ill, and ignores the multi-phasic nature of Covid-19.

All of these are going to work better if started early. If I had a positive test and no immunity, I would act immediately to get one of these started.

So here’s the biggest problem with vax only as I see it.
Since vaccines are being unevenly distributed thruout the world as a consequence of the hoarding of wealthier nations, we keep getting mutations out of the underdeveloped regions having high immunocompromised populations.
As each mutated variant strikes it produces more comorbidities in our population. As CDC director Walensky cheerfully pointed out, sars is hitting those with comorbidities hardest.

In essence, the politicians and CDC seem to have embraced a strategy that is self defeating. Monoclonals are great but access is uneven, as are their effectiveness with different variants, as we learned with the Cron.

Then there’s the notion of treating the infection vs. avoiding the infection altogether. While I see much enthusiasm for pushing of products to treat infection in the hyper capitalized western sphere, avoidance and mitigation has been incompetent and borderline criminality negligent. As I see it, the Anglosphere had taken a market approach (as it does with most everything now, TINA!) that may prove less costly in the short term but will produce profit in the short term for those organizations and individuals championing mitigation avoidance and post infection treatments.

Another look at the long tail effects of letting criminal incompetence fly the plane.

“ With millions of individuals affected, nervous system complications pose public health challenges for rehabilitation and recovery and for disruptions in the workforce due to loss of functional capacity. There is an urgent need to understand the pathophysiology of these disorders and develop disease-modifying therapies.”

Nervous system consequences of COVID-19

And while the costs of the incompetence of the current PMC will be externalized on the individuals, their families and communities, profits accruing to shareholders (monoclonals are over 2k a pop with the government buying millions of doses. Ivermectin, on the other hand, is dirt cheap) in the long run it will effect the macro of our society. In this, like every other challenge facing our society, IBGYBG will be the guiding philosophy.

Fluvoxamine seems to be a lot more useful for treatment than ivermectin, and I see it online from China for as little as $5 per kilogram. But that's for bulk powder. Any Indian Pharmaceutical company could crank out tons of tablets price competitive with ivermectin. It's completely off patent and generic.

As for "vaccinating the world", the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine was designed from the start to cost about $2 each to make, and has already been technology-transferred to any country that has the infrastructure to make it. That includes detailed instructions and viable cultures. Likewise the Baylor vaccine is being transferred to an Indian vaccine maker, with zero patents or royalties. It too, can be transferred for free to any country that has the infrastructure to make it, and it is done via yeast cultures: So simple any country that can brew beer should be able to make it!

Regarding treatments to avoid Long Covid following infection, I don't think any trials have been done, but Dr. Griffon reports that anecdotal info from the many physicians he talks with (as well as his own Covid patients) shows that vaccination within 30 days after infection seems to reduce your chances of getting Long Covid a lot. 30-60 days, less. And beyond that, not much at all.

Great. Ivermectin’s been dumped into the culture war basket, like lost elections or global warming. So when do we get any phrophylactic kits sent out? Something even third world, underdeveloped countries have been able to do with Ivermectin.
If the US is able to buy hundreds of millions of monoclonal doses at over 2k a pop, imagine what could have been done with Ivermectin or any other readily available molecule with similar safety profiles and efficacy?

Nawp, na gunna happen. We got that there profit motive to deal with natch. What’s more, monoclonals (if you can get em and afford to have them administered) are used while an infection is acute. We can’t get it together to send out masks to people, much less prophylactics.

As far as long covid treatments yet to be developed, in a country that’s held on to profit extraction health delivery, who’s going to be getting/ affording those down the road treatments. What world are we living in to hope for treatments from afflictions rather than prevention in the first place? Wall st. World comes to my mind. Shareholder world is also hanging around.

And the the possible challenge of discovering the fountain of youth:

Evidence for Biological Age Acceleration

But let’s be honest here, as its only hitting the poor and working classes the hardest (and it is) this will be treated with disaster capitalism as it has been.

I think you are ignoring the fact that all of these prophylactics and Covid treatments, from Paxlovid to MABs, are covered by the federal government. In fact, vaccinations and treatments are a perfect example of single-payer health care. I'm confused: If you don't like the US government paying for this stuff, who do you think should pay for it?

If the US government had sent out billions of ivermectin doses instead, would you be complaining about them sending placebos to keep everybody dumb and happy? Most of the deaths right now are among people who denied the virus existed, then claimed it was just a cold, then refused to get vaccinated, and ignore their Covid symptoms until the antiviral treatment window is closed. They don't take their horse paste prophylactically, and they dismiss their Covid as "just the flu" until they are getting hypoxic. These folks would have thrown their ivermectin kits away, and claimed the government was trying to poison them.

Your not confused about my points of contention. Your simply trying to confuse them.
Let me condense them for you:

-going after herd immunity with the Trump vaccines was a flawed policy based on what we know about the limits of these ‘vaccines’.
-Pursuing those policies at the expense of public health mitigation was flawed and will have long tail effects in the population.
-As long as those effects are hidden and long term costs externalized by ‘stakeholders’ (Walensky’s word not mine) and are primarily born by essential workers and not the ruling classes, there will be no course correction.

Not sure but I think your referring to Ivermectin as a placebo and belittling my critiques as nothing more than constant complaining. Not sure why you would view my observations that way as I’ve offered studies and published articles from respected medical journals of known quality. Sure, they may not rise to the level of your preferred YouTube outlets but they have standing none the less.

From my point of view so far, you’ve had nothing but resistance to any public health measures of mitigation beyond vaccines and infection treatments. Treatments, BTW, having high costs for the government, administering costs born by the patient and limited effectiveness with the most recent variant, Omicron.



To my mind, your of the treatment of disease for reimbursements stripe, a hallmark of profit driven health care with the assistance of government corporate capture. This will lead to a bad end for a good deal of Americans. But, hey, wether it’s pandemic diseases or war, there’s money to be made and the takings are good right now so I see no end to the criminal incompetence helming our public health institutions or governance.

If past us prologue, here’s a issue being raised by that chronic complaining British medical Journal on past incompetence and corruption of an epidemic to illustrate my point on today’s pandemic:

“ In the pages of The BMJ a decade ago, in the middle of a different pandemic, it came to light that governments around the world had spent billions stockpiling antivirals for influenza that had not been shown to reduce the risk of complications, hospital admissions, or death. The majority of trials that underpinned regulatory approval and government stockpiling of oseltamivir (Tamiflu) were sponsored by the manufacturer; most were unpublished, those that were published were ghostwritten by writers paid by the manufacturer, the people listed as principal authors lacked access to the raw data, and academics who requested access to the data for independent analysis were denied.1234

The Tamiflu saga heralded a decade of unprecedented attention to the importance of sharing clinical trial data.56 Public battles for drug company data,78 transparency campaigns with thousands of signatures,910 strengthened journal data sharing requirements,1112 explicit commitments from companies to share data,13 new data access website portals,8 and landmark transparency policies from medicines regulators1415 all promised a new era in data transparency.

Progress was made, but clearly not enough. The errors of the last pandemic are being repeated. Memories are short. Today, despite the global rollout of covid-19 vaccines and treatments, the anonymised participant level data underlying the trials for these new products remain inaccessible to doctors, researchers, and the public—and are likely to remain that way for years to come.16 This is morally indefensible for all trials, but especially for those involving major public health interventions.”

Covid-19 vaccines and treatments: we must have raw data, now

It’s almost as if the Journal is implying that studies were done in order to extract profits. Balderdash!!! Who ever heard of such a thing. That sort of behavior would not be going on today!

Or some would have you believe…

You might want to look at this:
TOGETHER study results

The TOGETHER study did have one trial using standard dose ivermectin, but then did another study at 400 mcg/kg which is double what the FLCC recommended as their standard dose. The results: High dose ivermectin relative risk ratio = 0.91 fluvoxamine relative risk ratio = 0.69. So it looks like fluvoxamine is three times better than ivermectin.

But even fluvoxamine is not very good compared to vaccination, a MAB that is not immune-evasive by the particular variant, or Paxlovid. And all three of those work at above 90% for Omicron for keeping people out of the hospital and the morgue.


I only resist spending a lot of time and money on measures of mitigation that don't work. The biggest failure in this pandemic is all the people who refuse to get vaccinated or wear masks when they are needed. Monitoring sewage for viral DNA is nice to get an idea of how prevalent the virus is, but it doesn't actually do anything for anybody. Contact tracing is nice, but it is extremely failure-prone for a virus that is highly contagious days before symptoms appear (and usually they don't). All your "public health mitigations" pale before the lack of vaccinations and masks.

I have nothing against public health measures that work, and public health measures that have the force of the law backing them. Another huge problem is one Party has politicized public health as "anti-freedom" for political gain, to the extent of governors outlawing mask and vaccine mandates, and a Supreme Court that seems like a Death Cult. I would be all for government sending everybody a free Covid-kit, but I would put fluvoxamine in it instead of ivermectin. Also a bunch of high-dose Vitamin D, zinc, N95 masks, etc.


The "limits" of these vaccines are that they keep most people from getting seriously ill and out of the hospital. That's all any vaccine (besides the HPV vaccine) EVER does. There is no other sterilizing vaccine. Immunity against infection contracts, and that is a natural process. We have evolved this because the most people survived when antibodies contract. Without contraction, we wouldn't have room in our circulating antibody concentration for making new antibodies to new pathogens. But we have also evolved some very good immune memory mechanisms, so we can quickly manufacture those antibodies later when we need them. We have also evolved a mechanism for making diverse antibodies that work against variants. This is why about 95% of the patients in the ICU are unvaccinated.

And vaccinations were and still are absolutely free to anybody: Both essential workers and the ruling class. So I think bringing that into the discussion is just a non-sequitur. I'm all for single-payer, but changing our health care financing system is not really going to help much right now. In fact, I think all the government coverage and support payments handed out, is going to make even more people support single payer.

Coupla things..

“ I only resist spending a lot of time and money on measures of mitigation that don't work. The biggest failure in this pandemic is all the people who refuse to get vaccinated or wear masks when they are needed. Monitoring sewage for viral DNA is nice to get an idea of how prevalent the virus is, but it doesn't actually do anything for anybody. Contact tracing is nice, but it is extremely failure-prone for a virus that is highly contagious days before symptoms appear (and usually they don't). All your "public health mitigations" pale before the lack of vaccinations and masks.”

Ivermectin is cheap. Dirt cheap. The notion of crapping on a readily available, extremely safe drug an opting for very expensive MAB’s in short supply and limited effectiveness across multiple variants is hardly defensible ‘science’. Reads as selective science to me. If other studies of other drugs come along that are as safe, cheap, available and effective for prophylactic use as the horse paste, great!! Get it out to the public then! But that’s not what’s happening. It has t happened throughout the two years of the pandemic.

MAB’s are not intended for prophylactic treatment. MAB’s are for treating the patient after they r been infected. There is no better example of an ounce of prevention costing less than the cure. A prophylactic costing pennies a dose to prevent systemic infection vs. a drug that costs over 2k a dose, is in short supply, is not administered for free, doesn’t sound like sound medicine but does sound like a profit driven model. The government has boughten millions of doses at 2k/dose of MAB’s. They could have stocked every medicine cabinet in America with horse paste (or any other horse paste comparable drug). If Peru could do it and cut mortality by 70% what’s the current administrations excuse? Perhaps Biden’s record of corruption and the appointment of a wall street guy to lead his covid task force might offer clues. But that’s speculation.

Contact tracing can be done right (effective) or wrong (ineffective). As other countries have done it effectively, again, whats the excuse for this sad administration and institutional failure. It looks as though they can’t learn, or won’t, from other countries successes. Again not following the science.

Waste water detection is a leading indicator of where to concentrate resources and activity. Contact tracing would be one of those activities. CO2 level monitoring is an indication of interior air quality. Other countries are using this indicator tool. Corsi boxes are cheap and effective for remediation of viral load. Why are they being ignored?

Vaccines and masks are not going to do it. Not by themselves. A layered approach is the only thing that will and is doing it in other parts of the world. Unfortunately for this country, we have two incompetent right wing political parties that have spent decades cashing in on copper stripping the governments institutions, rendering them incapable of action. The ‘don’t just do something, stand there’ libertarian ideal is now paying harsh dividends for Americans. Especially those deemed essential (though compensation levels for such essential work is inverse to the stated value).

Vaccines, like masks, are a constantly shifting argument. We’ve gone from herd immunity to ‘you won’t get sick and can take off the mask’ to ‘you won’t get sick with a booster and should still wear a mask’ (Rhode Island super spreader breakthrough period) to ‘you’ll get sick but not bad sick with a third jab’ and now, with information out of Israel, ‘fourth jabs aren’t effective help anymore’.


All of which ignores the long tail effects of what a covid infection can do to the individual. Hence my linking to articles showing the evidence of long term organ damage of the vacced and unvaccinated. Or the pesky issue of immune exhaustion and malfunction with repeated jabbing. But it sure sounds like a simple solution.

As far as the class dynamics of this disease, if your wealthy and sitting at home with the means to avoid going out in public and ordering in your treats, your probably fine with jabs and masking. If your not wealthy, have to interact with the public to pay the bills, your probably more exposed to long term tail effects if vax only. But it’s the wealthy classes who keep this virus moving. The poor don’t fly and the virus doesn’t walk across oceans to get here. At over 800k dead and rising, one wonders at the necessity of air travel. As long as the rich fly, this virus will benefit.

Yes, ivermectin is cheap, but so is fluvoxamine, and works three times better.

The AstraZeneca long-lasting MAB WAS specifically created for prophylactic treatment of people with compromised immune systems, who do not respond to vaccination.

Contact tracing can be done right, but I doubt it can be in America. It's very difficult with a virus that spreads with mostly asymptomatic cases, before any symptoms appear, is often mistaken as a cold, with 1/3 of the population denying it exists, refusing to respond to contact tracers, refusing to wear masks, refusing to quarantine, refusing to get vaccinated, etc. In the real world of America, more attempts at contact tracing wouldn't have done much at all with this population, half-assed "lockdowns" that were not really lockdowns, governors and judges that fight public health measures, etc. If government had tried more contact tracing, if would have been fought tooth and nail by all those forces. Want real public health? You are going to have to start with shock treatments for 1/3 of the population, recall some governors, and force some Supreme Court justices to retire. Good luck with that. Seriously, I'd support that completely.

People actually are using wastewater monitoring, improved ventilation, HEPA air filters, etc. Why do you think so many restaurants have outside tables and sell so much take-out food. Indoor dining restrictions are quite effective where anti forces don't get them cancelled.

You blame the political Parties, but those simply reflect the people. Yes, it would be nice if people were more logical. Much better policies would result if so many quit voting against their interests, manipulated by dog-whistle nonsense. Much better if so many people were not so stupid and greedy, too.

Vaccines have always been one thing: Their use has always been to keep most people from getting seriously ill or dying. That's what immunologists and vaccinologists have known for many decades. But it's not what mass media has run with. The "shifting argument" you are complaining about is a product of misrepresentation by media and politicians. The Provincetown event is a case in point: A mass gathering of mostly vaccinated people in close contact indoors resulted in some infections, but very few hospitalizations among the vaccinated. It actually proved the vaccinations were working as expected. But the press freaked out by people getting mildly infected. The CDC over-reacted to the press freak-out and started a booster campaign, because they thought vaccinated people's T-cell response might contract. (They knew antibody levels contract.) But there was zero evidence for their idea at all! Very much later a Canadian study found that boosters at 6 months gave much broader immunity to variants as well as temporarily increasing antibody levels. This was because the initial 3 or 4 week vaccination interval was much too short for good long-lasting immunity. Not to infection, but to hospitalization and death.

The very best prophylactic for Long Covid is vaccination. It even works pretty well if you get vaccinated within a month AFTER a covid infection if you were unvaccinated. Doctors are telling their covid patients this, and some of them listen. Some don't, and they get a lot more Long Covid. But they didn't listen very well before getting infected, either.

Immune exhaustion is something theorized but as yet unseen, Most immunologists are not worried. Same for "immune original sin" and "antibody-dependent enhancement".

I agree with you about rich people spreading the virus. But government attempts to shut down travel have all been way too late. And rich people are not the only travelers. A huge number of poor people travel to find work. For example, Filipinos. There is a reason the First Class sections of commercial airplanes are much smaller than Economy. As for differences between rich and poor folks in exposure, if all those who need to work in high-exposure jobs got vaccinated, they would be much much safer. Health care workers are the best example of "high-exposure" and this is exactly why hospitals want all of their workers vaccinated.