So if we wait around for a vaccine we're looking at 18 months mostly cooped up

[conuly]

Which is awful. Of course, other people are suggesting we say "Fuck it, let the geezers die" and just go back to "normal".

This is a terrible idea in many, many ways, but if I know one thing it is that there is no shortage of powerful people who like to promote terrible ideas. If the unthinkable happens and the awful plan ever gets put into place, about how long would it be until everybody was either immune or dead, do you think?

Comments

[melannen]

I'm not sure why nobody's talking about the possibility of a treatment (I guess the quinine debacle has shut a lot of that down, sadly?) but I think there's a reasonable chance we'll find an effective antiviral before a vaccine makes it through testing. Especially since it's increasingly likely this virus won't make a great vaccine. (It'll help! But it won't stop it.)

Otherwise... yeah. Fast serology testing will help a lot, I think.

[lightbird]

I agree that there's more hope for getting an effective antiviral sooner than getting a vaccine.

From what I have read quinine may be helpful, but they just don't know for sure. There's been some indication of it but they need more evidence and more testing. Unfortunately Trump as usual just went ahead with it and pushed it despite the experts clarifying that it's a 'maybe' not a 'certainty' and that they need to do much more testing before they definitively declare it as an effective treatment.

[conuly]

Maybe he's got buddies in the quinine industry too.

[lightbird]

Yep, there was an article about his connection to one of the pharmaceutical companies, Sanofi I think. I have to see if I can find it again.

[melannen]

He's apparently Mar-A-Lago buddies with a big donor named Joe Pizza who sells the stuff, but honestly I can't tell what's a joke in this timeline anymore.

[conuly]

Why can't he be friends with people in the ventilator, mask, and windmill industries!?

[brokenallbroken]

He's a shareholder in Sanofi, a major manufacturer.

Hydroxychloroquine causes heart problems

[melannen]

From what I've seen in my "bad science" blogs and podcasts, that original study that claimed a large effect was a very bad study by any metric (and in ways that can't be excused by "we are in a hurry because of pandemic.") Like "we took anyone who got worse out of the study, so look, everyone still in the study got better!" bad.

I think there's some evidence from other studies that it might have a small but statistically factual effect, but it's not going to be anything that noticeably reduces the load on ICUs - just on the level of "slightly less chance of dying if you're already really sick" level, and even that's hard to say. It makes sense because quinine works at least a little against a lot of viral sickness. But it has some pretty drastic side effects at clinical doses - iirc a couple of the follow-up trials stopped early because people were vomiting while intubated, and, nope, augh.

But there are people testing literally *every* already-proven-safe drug against the virus, and some other people who were already nearly there on an anti-coronavirus drug after SARS before they lost funding, so I think there's a reasonable chance, as long as people like Trump and the idiots who published the chloroquine study don't make it impossible to that kind of research well.