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NPR has an interview about Dr. Anthony Fauci. The interviewee is Michael Specter, writer for the New Yorker and bioengineering instructor at Stanford University. He also wrote about Dr. Fauci in "The New Yorker".
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/16/8348731...
https://bioengineering.stanford.edu/news/michael-specter-how...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/how-anthony-fa...
One point they make: we have no business being surprised by biology like this. We have the scientific knowledge to be prepared, and have had it for a long time.
One passage caught my eye: "These were absurd and outdated rules." The one example they gave, "if you were on one experimental drug, you couldn't take another one in a trial", may have been absurd for AIDS, but doesn't seem so absurd in ordinary situations, where the primary goal is to test the safety and effectiveness of an experimental drug. The New Yorker article went into some detail about this issue, and maybe they are right. (Outdated? Or wrong originally? "Absurd" suggests the latter.)
Other issues of "absurd and outdated" things come to mind, including things that are so fundamentally right, that their absence would be akin to killing someone to prevent him from being murdered, or logically that "evil is better than good".
Comments
Bizarre State of Affairs
Presidents before Trump had a long history of preparing us for exactly what has happened and that bloody fool Trump has done his best to dismantle it all. I think that perhaps a previous example of one like him would be Herod. Or a member of French Nobility said, "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche", or Let them eat cake.
For me, the most amazing part of all this is despite his crimes, he is still in power. I sometimes wonder if some Demonic power has all the leaders of the world, especially America, in a semiconscious thrall?
Drug Trials are Wrong
Too many volunteer for those things thinking this is their one chance to have a life or be cured of whatever. It's a lie perpetuated on the desperate and possibly ignorant. Their "TRIAL" means half the test subjects receive what everyone thinks is the good stuff. The other poor slobs receive a placebo.
This is so, they claim, to see if the drug works. WTH?
We put wings on an airplane (human) to see if we can make it fly (drug test).
On the second airplane (human) we don't add wings (placebo).
It's a test to see if wings (drug) makes a difference as we launch both with a catapult.
Before I looked into their trials I signed up and then started researching how trials are conducted. Fifty fifty odds I might be taking what would help or I'd just be wishing my life away on a placebo, opened my eyes to how trials are conducted. Human lives are damn cheap if they are the half who are the "control" and their problem means death if they aren't receiving the drug that might possibly save them.
"IF" I thought I had caught that manufactured "bat virus" I'd take the malaria shot treatment despite what the government and FDA thinks and any drug trials they can kiss my..., I've researched and read the horror stories about government and clinical trials for X years. Money is the primary cure for these people. Unless they can patent it and sell it, they don't care if it works or not.
Our healthcare system, our government is broken. In the middle of this life and death situation, many of the municipalities and gov. organizations are talking about increasing taxes because this pandemic has meant less income for them as our nation spirals into a self imposed financial crisis they created.
God help us all
Barb
Life is a gift. Protect it, treasure it because it was a gift to you.
Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl
Experimental trials
For life or death drug trials, good trial protocols will cancel the trial if the experimental drug shows overwhelming efficacy compared to the placebo and the placebo receiving members then get the new drug also.
Just like anything in life it is a case of risk vs benefit.
For non-critical drugs, especially one that are lifetime drugs such as psychoactive ones then the scientific experiment standard of control vs non-control is a no-brainer.
If you want to try non-standard drugs, then there are absolutely ways to go ranging from off-label use to outright being your own guinea pig but you take your own life into your own hands at that point. If you don’t want to take the risk then skip the trial and go to someone who will give it to you. But, since the drug is still unproven, you may even die from the complications of an unproven drug instead of your illness.
Hopping from one unproven drug to another in desperation is understandable if you have a terminal illness that gives you very little time to live but the vast majority of drugs do not fit into that category.
Clinical Trials
I was recovering from a heart attack in a bed in ICU when a doctor approached me about being part of a clinical trial. Since I had been resuscitated after my heart stopped I felt I owed science one and agreed to take part.
The study involved months of obtrusive and sometimes quite painful tests. I cheerfully donated many hours of time and travel to the cause of advancing stem cell research.
For months I put up with the hurry up and wait that is our medical system. I learned how to bring work with me so as not to completely waste the downtime involved when things took ten times as long to accomplish as they should have.
I was one of those who had received the placebo, yet the doctor had used a secondary procedure when he placed the stent in me that proved to be quite effective and positive.
The nurses were universally compassionate and appreciative. The doctors treated me like a lab rat.
In the end there was some sort of record keeping snafu that invalidated my months of effort.
Jill
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Yikes!
Yikes!
-- Daphne Xu