CV19 - Cure worse than the disease? (Vol 13)

CV19 - Cure worse than the disease? (Vol 13)

TOPIC CLOSED
TOPIC CLOSED
Author
Discussion

CellarDoor

874 posts

87 months

Thursday 29th July 2021
quotequote all
TheJimi said:
Boringvolvodriver said:
.
This, however -

Boringvolvodriver said:
However, a lot of stuff doesn’t make sense to me about why governments across the world are acting like they are doing.
Is a position I've found myself in, quite frequently. The vast majority of the time, I can see the logic processes and rationale behind most of the decisions that have been made, even if I strongly disagree with them.

However, there are also more than a few aspects that really have me at a loss, and lead me to wonder what else is driving such decisions and ideas.


Edited by TheJimi on Thursday 29th July 10:49
I'm an open minded person and have found it interesting to reflect on the past year. In hindsight, I find the entire situation quite concerning:

- illogical decisions and procrastination from governments in terms of containing a contagious virus.
- a lack of transparency from decision makers with lots of conflicting information, u-turns and scaremongering.
- large portions of the population following advice from authorities without any reservation and getting incensed by those that wish to discuss potential risks and alternatives.

The overall reaction doesn't bode well for the future.


77th Brigade

1,071 posts

36 months

Thursday 29th July 2021
quotequote all
A few things seem obvious:

- There is a nasty virus.
- We have to deal with nasty virus.
- Normal planning for dealing with nasty virus is badly affected by:

--- Incompetence.
--- Politics.
--- Very large vested interests trying to take advantage of the situation either financially, politically or societally.

I believe that we're in a world of st of our own making.

Tuna

19,930 posts

283 months

Thursday 29th July 2021
quotequote all
Boringvolvodriver said:
However, a lot of stuff doesn’t make sense to me about why governments across the world are acting like they are doing.
This is the biggest problem, that the government cannot be frank. Here, I'm not just talking about our government, but all governments.

The harsh reality is that they are there to limit social and economic damage. That means making choices that absolutely will harm people - and often making those choices without absolutely certainty of the outcome.

Western governments can't explicitly say "we've chosen to try to limit economic damage, so we're going to let a certain number of people die from the virus"
Australia can't explicitly say "We've chosen to keep virus deaths to a minimum, so we're going to keep the economy halted indefinitely"

(paraphrasing, but you get the idea).

And of course people have different priorities and ideas. Some will say the economy is less important ("they're just fat cats concerned with lining their pockets") and some will say it's more important ("small family businesses are being destroyed, and with it peoples lives are being ruined"). There are also incidental statistics (suicides, mental health problems, long term regional damage...) that are hard to process.

So we end up in a situation where the government is telling us a sanitised version of the truth, that they want to "protect us all" and similar phrases. Some people react (very) badly to that, but the sad fact is that the people in power end up making a calculation - what is the least damage, what options are available to them to achieve that, and how can they encourage people to follow those choices. It's cynical and imperfect, but not malicious. Of course some people will see the imperfection and decide that it is malicious and unfair.

Take the lifting of lockdown. It wasn't that there was scientific evidence that this is the point at which the vaccination programme has done it's work. We've not "overcome" the virus. However, the choice they face is opening up in the summer holidays when schools are shut and people are outdoors - so the virus can spread more slowly, or opening up in September, when flu season is starting, schools are back and we're all indoors, or not opening up at all. They took a calculated risk that getting it over with now was the least worst option, but they can't possibly say "we're going to see a few thousand more deaths yet". No-one wants to face that, and telling them that doing it later would be worse doesn't help.

Note that I'm not saying they're right in this case (though I'm optimistic we might be seeing some evidence soon), but that they made a choice between "some deaths", "more deaths" and "long term economic damage". That's not a choice you can explicitly talk about, because for some people, they are going to be burying family and friends as a result and no amount of "logic" can undo someone's death.

So governments appear to be acting contrary to "the science", or to common sense simply because they can't say out loud the choices they're having to make or the guesses on incomplete information. It's one of the reasons we have governments, to make choices that we as individuals are very poor at making.

Edited by Tuna on Thursday 29th July 11:23

Brave Fart

5,680 posts

110 months

Thursday 29th July 2021
quotequote all
CellarDoor said:
I'm an open minded person and have found it interesting to reflect on the past year. In hindsight, I find the entire situation quite concerning:

- illogical decisions and procrastination from governments in terms of containing a contagious virus.
- a lack of transparency from decision makers with lots of conflicting information, u-turns and scaremongering.
- large portions of the population following advice from authorities without any reservation and getting incensed by those that wish to discuss potential risks and alternatives.

The overall reaction doesn't bode well for the future.
biglaugh Well that's an accurate summary in my opinion. Forgive me, but I'd add a fourth: the mainstream broadcast media has been biased to a scandalous degree, especially the BBC, who have become an agency of the government when it comes to coverage of covid. ITV have been no better, Sky and Channel 4 even more hysterical, and only talkRADIO have broadcast any alternative to the official narrative - and even they were got at by OFCOM a few months back and were forced to moderate their output.

Several people that I know - middle aged, middle class people - rely entirely on the BBC and ITV for their "news". This partly explains your third point; that people have complied without questioning the "rules". Well, if you believe everything the BBC says, you would comply, wouldn't you? And yet posters like Tuna have the nerve to complain that some folk seek alternative opinions. rolleyes

Boringvolvodriver

8,619 posts

42 months

Thursday 29th July 2021
quotequote all
77th Brigade said:
A few things seem obvious:

- There is a nasty virus.
- We have to deal with nasty virus.
- Normal planning for dealing with nasty virus is badly affected by:

--- Incompetence.
--- Politics.
--- Very large vested interests trying to take advantage of the situation either financially, politically or societally.

I believe that we're in a world of st of our own making.
I will add

—- a population, large numbers of which, don’t appear to have the ability to think critically and would on the face of it are easily led (or brainwashed perhaps?)
——a MSM and journalists who don’t appear to be able to do their job


bodhi

10,333 posts

228 months

Thursday 29th July 2021
quotequote all
The bit I've never understood about this whole fiasco is the whole therapeutic discussion. The vaccines have been pretty effective and were developed in record time, yet as we are seeing they aren't quite the silver bullet they were claimed to be - transmission is still happening, people are still getting ill, and there is a section of the community who either can't or won't have the vaccine, for numerous reasons.

Typically with that other famous respiratory virus we have vaccines for that as well, but they are backed up by all sorts of remedies you can get over the counter, which tend to nurse you back into good health. Yet, every time someone has identified an equivalent for SARS2 - be it HCQ, Ivermectin etc they are pretty much instantly trashed, and from what I can tell, never really given a fair crack of the whip. We had remdesivir, which quickly turned out to be useless, and a couple of steroids that we can use when people make it to ICU, but nothing we can take to stop us ending up there in the first place.

Money clearly isn't an issue at this point, so where are the treatments? Where is the news of a "Nurofen COVID" being launched? Pfizer have recently announced they've made something silly off the vaccines ($35 billion iirc), it can't be beyond the wit of the impressively intelligent researchers working in pharma to develop a medication for a virus which isn't that different to some of the normal cold viruses that circulate. I mean ok "there's no cure for the common cold", but there are plenty of things you can take to get through it.

Where are they for COVID?

Brave Fart

5,680 posts

110 months

Thursday 29th July 2021
quotequote all
Tuna said:
<edited for brevity, sorry>
So governments appear to be acting contrary to "the science", or to common sense simply because they can't say out loud the choices they're having to make or the guesses on incomplete information. It's one of the reasons we have governments, to make choices that we as individuals are very poor at making.
I take your point, but I fundamentally disagree that governments should behave in this way.
You are saying that governments cannot tell us the truth because, to coin a phrase: "You can't handle the truth!"
Well, I think we can, and I think treating citizens as children 1) perpetuates the problem, and 2) gives rise to conspiracy theories and "alternative" views that you complain about elsewhere.

Be honest, set out the issues, explain your policy, and trust the people. That's what I would like to see, but I'm not hopeful that will ever happen.

Carl_Manchester

12,102 posts

261 months

Thursday 29th July 2021
quotequote all
scottyp123 said:
You seriously reckon that anyone that isn't powerfully built will have very serious consequences if they contract covid? 67,000,000 people in this country and even at it worst peak 66,962,000 never got anywhere near a hospital, are there that many powerfully build people in the UK.
That's a different question to the one I was answering and that question is one of the main reasons for the thread.

I was responding directly to the question about the vaccines still having a significant impact on hospitalisation and death rates with Delta.



Boringvolvodriver

8,619 posts

42 months

Thursday 29th July 2021
quotequote all
Tuna - I would prefer it if governments were Frank and truthful with what they told us rather than treat us like they have done.

I accept that the situation was constantly changing although it wouldn’t hurt to treat us like adults and maybe , just maybe, when they have got it wrong, apologize rather than try to cover it up with lies.








Tuna

19,930 posts

283 months

Thursday 29th July 2021
quotequote all
bodhi said:
The bit I've never understood about this whole fiasco is the whole therapeutic discussion. The vaccines have been pretty effective and were developed in record time, yet as we are seeing they aren't quite the silver bullet they were claimed to be - transmission is still happening, people are still getting ill, and there is a section of the community who either can't or won't have the vaccine, for numerous reasons.

Typically with that other famous respiratory virus we have vaccines for that as well, but they are backed up by all sorts of remedies you can get over the counter, which tend to nurse you back into good health. Yet, every time someone has identified an equivalent for SARS2 - be it HCQ, Ivermectin etc they are pretty much instantly trashed, and from what I can tell, never really given a fair crack of the whip. We had remdesivir, which quickly turned out to be useless, and a couple of steroids that we can use when people make it to ICU, but nothing we can take to stop us ending up there in the first place.

Money clearly isn't an issue at this point, so where are the treatments? Where is the news of a "Nurofen COVID" being launched? Pfizer have recently announced they've made something silly off the vaccines ($35 billion iirc), it can't be beyond the wit of the impressively intelligent researchers working in pharma to develop a medication for a virus which isn't that different to some of the normal cold viruses that circulate. I mean ok "there's no cure for the common cold", but there are plenty of things you can take to get through it.

Where are they for COVID?
Medicine isn't engineering. You can't "crank out" a fix.

They will absolutely be monitoring effects of just about every remedy out there on the market - the pharma industry is quite good at that, spotting when one medicine has an interesting side effect on another group (or in extreme cases, unexpected benefits - like Viagra).

But that sort of evidence takes months or even years to gather. It's a statistical nightmare, and when the progress of the disease in a single person can take months, it will naturally take multiples of that to test, prove, identify causes and symptoms.

On top of that, some things are just physically impossible to change. At the base level, the chemical reactions you're trying to alter may be sufficiently close to reactions your body depends on that you cannot disrupt them. The cure really would be worse than the disease. Or we just don't have the means to repair stuff that's broken.

Ntv

5,177 posts

122 months

Thursday 29th July 2021
quotequote all
APontus said:
Tuna said:
Forgive me, but how do you know what the "facts" are - this thread and many other discussions online are filled with people using long words they read on the internet to try and divine signs from partial data of unknown origin that support whatever theory they've decided is right.

There is an industry around false information. Not just for the virus, but just about any piece of health or financial information. Anything that can be used to influence your behaviour can and will be "weaponised" by people who want to sell you stuff or take your money, or just irritate the government.

For the virus there is no "both sides". There is the incomplete (but growing) scientific evidence, and there is mumbo-jumbo and guesswork.

There's an interesting piece of work doing the rounds looking at where people get their information from, and it turns out just a handful of people produce over half of the virus (mis)information online. ( https://252f2edd-1c8b-49f5-9bb2-cb57bb47e4ba.files... ) - the people involved have, between their many fake accounts, nearly sixty million followers and generate hundreds of thousands of articles, papers and posts giving "facts" about the virus. This stuff is endemic, and constantly evolving.

There are huge motivations for these groups to push alternative theories about the virus, vaccines, "cures" and the government's response. Not only are they massively incentivised to lie about these things, they are in an "arms race" to make those lies as believable and subtle as possible. Sure, the easy stuff about 5G nanobots from Bill Gates is good for a laugh, but then little bits of misinformation about clotting rates, or signs of vaccine resistance are put out there and how do you know if they're "true"?

Sadly it's not as if you can look at the qualifications of the people involved - particularly in America, the health industry is worth billions, and Doctors are more than happy to use their qualifications to endorse messages that ultimately line their pockets.

This isn't meant as an attack on you specifically, but we're now on volume 13 of a thread filled with people quoting "reliable sources" and divining the tea-leaves of home-made graphs and second-hand statistics. For most of us it is very hard to step away from an understanding that we're emotionally invested in, so having decided that a theory is valid, we resist attacks and talk about "having an open mind" or "following the science", or "looking at both sides". The harsh reality is that we don't want to look foolish or be challenged, so we look for sources to validate our theories, regardless of how sound they are.

Of course, the same people who spread misinformation will use the same logic against "the government" - how do they know what's true, how do we know they're not lying/incompetent? The thing is, we're watching the global response of hundreds of governments, thousands of hospitals and research organisations, and there is a vast amount of common ground that we can be pretty sure of. Sure, be wary of "early signs" or groups that report success from unusual choices - a lot of the experimentation at the edges will take months, if not years to be validated, and should be regarded with scepticism, but that core common ground is really pretty hard to question these days.
Firstly, you lump together people who have an agenda to promote fear of vaccination, and those who're open minded and want to become more knowledgeable.

Secondly, your position appears to be that the public are not qualified to seek out information for themselves on complex subjects in which they're unqualified. This logically means on principle we should only trust 'official' sources of information on complex topics. Is this your position? If so, where is the dividing line between a trustworthy official source and an unreliable nutjob one? If this isn't your position, what is it?
One only has to acknowledge the fact that experts can, and sometimes do get it wrong to see the idiocy of blind faith.

Anyone who has worked in complex organisations with large areas of deep expertise will know that intelligent laymen asking ostensibly simple questions is one of the best ways to bottom out issues and move forward.

And as BoringVolvo implies, our Government, to name just one has employed an army of behaviouralists to very carefully manipulate opinion.

There are simple questions we could all list now which are highly relevant to COVID's impact and yet are not covered in HMG data releases

TypeRTim

724 posts

93 months

Thursday 29th July 2021
quotequote all
bodhi said:
...

Money clearly isn't an issue at this point, so where are the treatments? Where is the news of a "Nurofen COVID" being launched? Pfizer have recently announced they've made something silly off the vaccines ($35 billion iirc), it can't be beyond the wit of the impressively intelligent researchers working in pharma to develop a medication for a virus which isn't that different to some of the normal cold viruses that circulate. I mean ok "there's no cure for the common cold", but there are plenty of things you can take to get through it.

Where are they for COVID?
This is something that should be flagged as something somewhat amoral... Governments are pushing to make this vaccination almost mandatory, the company behind it has made literally billions by selling it to them, and are also pushing for booster jabs to be implemented, meaning (you guessed it) more income! If this was about 'the greater good' and 'public health' then surely the drug companies would be using a 'not for profit' pricing strategy - ie: only recoup the R&D and manufacturing costs.

As it is, there are companies out there making a (un?)fair wedge from this, akin to say war profiteering? Whilst ordinary people are having freedoms curtailed etc. to coerce them in to taking these vaccines. It just really doesn't sit right. Especially with the news of possibly vaccinating teenagers and younger who are at vanishing small risk of severe complications with the virus.

isaldiri

18,410 posts

167 months

Thursday 29th July 2021
quotequote all
bodhi said:
The bit I've never understood about this whole fiasco is the whole therapeutic discussion. The vaccines have been pretty effective and were developed in record time, yet as we are seeing they aren't quite the silver bullet they were claimed to be - transmission is still happening, people are still getting ill, and there is a section of the community who either can't or won't have the vaccine, for numerous reasons.

Typically with that other famous respiratory virus we have vaccines for that as well, but they are backed up by all sorts of remedies you can get over the counter, which tend to nurse you back into good health. Yet, every time someone has identified an equivalent for SARS2 - be it HCQ, Ivermectin etc they are pretty much instantly trashed, and from what I can tell, never really given a fair crack of the whip. We had remdesivir, which quickly turned out to be useless, and a couple of steroids that we can use when people make it to ICU, but nothing we can take to stop us ending up there in the first place.

Money clearly isn't an issue at this point, so where are the treatments? Where is the news of a "Nurofen COVID" being launched? Pfizer have recently announced they've made something silly off the vaccines ($35 billion iirc), it can't be beyond the wit of the impressively intelligent researchers working in pharma to develop a medication for a virus which isn't that different to some of the normal cold viruses that circulate. I mean ok "there's no cure for the common cold", but there are plenty of things you can take to get through it.

Where are they for COVID?
I don't think it's such a surprise either though. Flu antivirals like tamiflu aren't particularly effective for example. unlike bacterial infections, viral infections aren't easily dealt with without destroying lots of your own cells they are replicating in.

Most medication available tends to be for treatment of symptoms rather than for the viral infection causing said symptoms. It just seems to be a class of treatments that is very difficult typically to do cheaply and effectively.

P.S Pfizer announced revenue of $33b expected for the vaccines for the year, not profit. You seem to have it slightly in for them (not entirely unreasonably in many respects) but to be fair, they took a good financial bet to put a lot of their own cash into it initially so fair play for leveraging that success now too.

Edited by isaldiri on Thursday 29th July 11:46

TypeRTim

724 posts

93 months

Thursday 29th July 2021
quotequote all
Tuna said:
Medicine isn't engineering. You can't "crank out" a fix.

They will absolutely be monitoring effects of just about every remedy out there on the market - the pharma industry is quite good at that, spotting when one medicine has an interesting side effect on another group (or in extreme cases, unexpected benefits - like Viagra).

But that sort of evidence takes months or even years to gather. It's a statistical nightmare, and when the progress of the disease in a single person can take months, it will naturally take multiples of that to test, prove, identify causes and symptoms.

On top of that, some things are just physically impossible to change. At the base level, the chemical reactions you're trying to alter may be sufficiently close to reactions your body depends on that you cannot disrupt them. The cure really would be worse than the disease. Or we just don't have the means to repair stuff that's broken.
You mean like crank out a vaccine for a 'novel coronavirus' which has never been seen before in humans, using delivery technology that has never been implemented in mass vaccination regimes in humans, less than 18 months after the initial outbreak? That kind of 'crank out a fix'

Edited by TypeRTim on Thursday 29th July 11:51

APontus

1,935 posts

34 months

Thursday 29th July 2021
quotequote all
Tuna said:
Medicine isn't engineering. You can't "crank out" a fix.

They will absolutely be monitoring effects of just about every remedy out there on the market - the pharma industry is quite good at that, spotting when one medicine has an interesting side effect on another group (or in extreme cases, unexpected benefits - like Viagra).

But that sort of evidence takes months or even years to gather. It's a statistical nightmare, and when the progress of the disease in a single person can take months, it will naturally take multiples of that to test, prove, identify causes and symptoms.

On top of that, some things are just physically impossible to change. At the base level, the chemical reactions you're trying to alter may be sufficiently close to reactions your body depends on that you cannot disrupt them. The cure really would be worse than the disease. Or we just don't have the means to repair stuff that's broken.
Your position is illogical. It supports the notion it is faster and easier to develop, test and distribute new and novel vaccines than to than test and roll out existing, widespread and incredibly cheap existing medicines that enjoy strong safety records. It also supposes the two things are mutually exclusive, which they aren't.

There has been a growing body of evidence around Ivermectin for some time, yet those (respected, definitely not nutty or anti vaccine) medical practitioners have been marginalised, banned from social media platforms and ignored by governments, regulators and the media. I note this week the Wall Street Journal is beginning to ask the same questions. Hopefully others will latch on.

Reverting to a line of 'the governments haven't rolled it out, so must know better' is a pointless catch-all that assumes governments are always effective, competent and free of competing motives. We know none of those things is universally true, let alone in the UK and US.


Tuna

19,930 posts

283 months

Thursday 29th July 2021
quotequote all
Brave Fart said:
I take your point, but I fundamentally disagree that governments should behave in this way.
You are saying that governments cannot tell us the truth because, to coin a phrase: "You can't handle the truth!"
Well, I think we can, and I think treating citizens as children 1) perpetuates the problem, and 2) gives rise to conspiracy theories and "alternative" views that you complain about elsewhere.

Be honest, set out the issues, explain your policy, and trust the people. That's what I would like to see, but I'm not hopeful that will ever happen.
Note that I'm not saying they should lie, but that I don't believe they can be explicit about some issues.

Any competent government opposition would take a single concession to explicitly listing harm as a wide open goal - and suddenly your health policy is being politically destroyed and half the country is refusing to go along with it.

Unfortunately I think the current social media trend has to some extent complicated these discussions. We had two world wars that did untold human damage, but were predicated on governments convincing hundreds of thousands of people to willingly put down their lives en-masse for a wider good. I don't think you could make those same choices these days.

Unfortunately public health is about convincing enough of a population to do "the right thing" - and whilst I absolutely agree that many people can handle the truth, and we all deserve it, there isn't much evidence that you can maintain public control at the same time.

The interesting exception is China - there will surely be some interesting studies on how they appear to have controlled the virus. They have incredibly tight control over the information that their citizens receive, no significant opposition and a social sense of group responsibility that appears to make group decisions easier to enforce. The complete opposite of what we believe is "good" in the west, yet they (appear) to have done far better than us in controlling the virus.

Where does that leave our freedom, independence and "the truth"?

Frik

13,542 posts

242 months

Thursday 29th July 2021
quotequote all
APontus said:
There has been a growing body of evidence around Ivermectin for some time, yet those (respected, definitely not nutty or anti vaccine) medical practitioners have been marginalised, banned from social media platforms and ignored by governments, regulators and the media. I note this week the Wall Street Journal is beginning to ask the same questions. Hopefully others will latch on.
It's all a conspiracy!

Or maybe there just aren't enough good studies that prove its effectiveness, although some are still ongoing.

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/1...

TheJimi

24,860 posts

242 months

Thursday 29th July 2021
quotequote all
TypeRTim said:
Tuna said:
Medicine isn't engineering. You can't "crank out" a fix.

They will absolutely be monitoring effects of just about every remedy out there on the market - the pharma industry is quite good at that, spotting when one medicine has an interesting side effect on another group (or in extreme cases, unexpected benefits - like Viagra).

But that sort of evidence takes months or even years to gather. It's a statistical nightmare, and when the progress of the disease in a single person can take months, it will naturally take multiples of that to test, prove, identify causes and symptoms.

On top of that, some things are just physically impossible to change. At the base level, the chemical reactions you're trying to alter may be sufficiently close to reactions your body depends on that you cannot disrupt them. The cure really would be worse than the disease. Or we just don't have the means to repair stuff that's broken.
You mean like crank out a vaccine for a 'novel coronavirus' which has never been seen before in humans, using delivery technology that has never been implemented in mass vaccination regimes in humans, less than 18 months after the initial outbreak? That kind of 'crank out a fix'

Edited by TypeRTim on Thursday 29th July 11:51
To be fair, a lot of the groundwork had already been done for these vaccines, so it that respect, this wasn't "cranked out" from scratch in 18 months.


Venturist

3,472 posts

194 months

Thursday 29th July 2021
quotequote all
Frik said:
It's all a conspiracy!

Or maybe there just aren't enough good studies that prove its effectiveness, although some are still ongoing.

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/1...
Except there’s certainly a healthy body of evidence to suggest it is effective:

https://journals.lww.com/americantherapeutics/Full...

monkfish1

10,874 posts

223 months

Thursday 29th July 2021
quotequote all
CellarDoor said:
TheJimi said:
Boringvolvodriver said:
.
This, however -

Boringvolvodriver said:
However, a lot of stuff doesn’t make sense to me about why governments across the world are acting like they are doing.
Is a position I've found myself in, quite frequently. The vast majority of the time, I can see the logic processes and rationale behind most of the decisions that have been made, even if I strongly disagree with them.

However, there are also more than a few aspects that really have me at a loss, and lead me to wonder what else is driving such decisions and ideas.


Edited by TheJimi on Thursday 29th July 10:49
I'm an open minded person and have found it interesting to reflect on the past year. In hindsight, I find the entire situation quite concerning:

- illogical decisions and procrastination from governments in terms of containing a contagious virus.
- a lack of transparency from decision makers with lots of conflicting information, u-turns and scaremongering.
- large portions of the population following advice from authorities without any reservation and getting incensed by those that wish to discuss potential risks and alternatives.

The overall reaction doesn't bode well for the future.
Indeed.

There are so many things the government is doing or saying which dont bear even the briefest of logical scrutiny, that one can only wonder what exactly is going on and what the objective is.

Unlike tuna, i dont believe its all with the best of intentions.
TOPIC CLOSED
TOPIC CLOSED