First Human Trial In Europe of a Coronavirus Vaccine Has Begun In Oxford (bbc.com) 183
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The first human trial in Europe of a coronavirus vaccine has begun in Oxford. Two volunteers were injected, the first of more than 800 people recruited for the study. Half will receive the Covid-19 vaccine, and half a control vaccine which protects against meningitis but not coronavirus. The design of the trial means volunteers will not know which vaccine they are getting, though doctors will. The vaccine was developed in under three months by a team at Oxford University. Sarah Gilbert, professor of vaccinology at the Jenner Institute, led the pre-clinical research.
The vaccine is made from a weakened version of a common cold virus (known as an adenovirus) from chimpanzees that has been modified so it cannot grow in humans. The Oxford team has already developed a vaccine against Mers, another type of coronavirus, using the same approach -- and that had promising results in clinical trials. The only way the team will know if the Covid-19 vaccine works is by comparing the number of people who get infected with coronavirus in the months ahead from the two arms of the trial. That could be a problem if cases fall rapidly in the UK, because there may not be enough data. Researchers say they hope to have one million doses ready by September, and to dramatically scale up manufacturing after that, should the vaccine prove effective.
"A larger trial, of about 5,000 volunteers, will start in the coming months and will have no age limit," the report adds. There's also another team at Imperial College London that hopes to begin human trials of its coronavirus vaccine in June.
The vaccine is made from a weakened version of a common cold virus (known as an adenovirus) from chimpanzees that has been modified so it cannot grow in humans. The Oxford team has already developed a vaccine against Mers, another type of coronavirus, using the same approach -- and that had promising results in clinical trials. The only way the team will know if the Covid-19 vaccine works is by comparing the number of people who get infected with coronavirus in the months ahead from the two arms of the trial. That could be a problem if cases fall rapidly in the UK, because there may not be enough data. Researchers say they hope to have one million doses ready by September, and to dramatically scale up manufacturing after that, should the vaccine prove effective.
"A larger trial, of about 5,000 volunteers, will start in the coming months and will have no age limit," the report adds. There's also another team at Imperial College London that hopes to begin human trials of its coronavirus vaccine in June.
Is this an actual drug trial? (Score:2)
The VA 'study' gave every patient the identical dosage, and all got the drug as they were, to borrow a phrase, already 'knocking on heavens door.'
The dosage has to be appropriate for each subject (a 100 pound woman got the same dosage as a 300 pound man, and the subjects need to get the treatments earlier (not after you roll them into hospice care).
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No, this is not a drug trial. This is a vaccine trial.
Academic study? (Score:2, Insightful)
Has that been subject to independent academic study?
Has it been compared with Trump & his supporters tendency to lie?
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/Whoosh parrot much.
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I think you mean just faux.
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Dude, a lot of have been discussing the (un)trustworthiness of the Chinese governments during most of january. Shall we shut up about that for now and fix the rather urgent problem at hand?
We'll get back to that issue when we've dealt with the virus.
Re:Is this an actual drug trial? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not racist. It's an accurate observation of Chinese culture. I've lived, studied and worked in China. My children were all educated there and speak Mandarin. I still work with Chinese every single day and lying is just something that comes with the Chinese package. Accept it and move on.
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So pretty much the same as the average western internet commentator / social media user then.
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No, the GP isn't wrong. It's something that was observed in Vietnam during the Vietnam war too.
Many Western soldiers came to the view that you just had to assume the Vietnamese are lying to you all the time, because it was so normal to them. The reason being that through so many decades of war and oppression they'd seen nothing but punishment for honesty such that lying simply became easier. "Do you support Ho Chi Minh?", you'll answer no to the Americans or ARVN, and yes to the Viet Cong or NVA, do anythin
Re:Is this an actual drug trial? (Score:5, Interesting)
I also lived and worked in China for years. My wife is Chinese. My kids speak fluent Mandarin.
Yup. Chinese people lie. A lot. But they don't really see it as "lying", but rather an avoidance of uncomfortable facts.
Much of it comes down to the difference between "honor" and "face". Honor is prized in the West. It is about internal values. The honorable thing to do is to tell the truth.
"Face" is different. It is about external values. "Saving face" is about avoiding embarrassment. So they lie, even when everyone knows they are lying, and they know that everyone knows.
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Much of it comes down to the difference between "honor" and "face". Honor is prized in the West. It is about internal values. The honorable thing to do is to tell the truth.
"Face" is different. It is about external values. "Saving face" is about avoiding embarrassment. So they lie, even when everyone knows they are lying, and they know that everyone knows.
Yes, big difference, so big in fact we don't even have an expression for "saving face" in the west.
Spinless face saving is the backbone of just about ever
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Yes, big difference, so big in fact we don't even have an expression for "saving face" in the west.
Of course we have an expression for it in the west (just like Easterners also have a concept of "honor"). "Saving face" is actively practiced in the west too, but it's not seen as a positive characteristic and is almost universally reviled here.
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>"Yup. Chinese people lie. A lot. But they don't really see it as "lying", but rather an avoidance of uncomfortable facts. Much of it comes down to the difference between "honor" and "face".
It might also come from living under an oppressive, totalitarian, Communist, privacy-opposed government. So the question is- which came first? Did the culture of lying bring about that government, or the government bring about the culture of lying?
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Face came first. You can find the same culture in various forms across Asia, even in places which have never been communist, such as Japan and Taiwan.
There's also plenty of historic evidence that talks about importance of face in the past.
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The scientific "revolution" happened in China 1000 years before Europe.
No. China had some isolated discoveries, such as paper and printing. But they never developed a scientific method and a system for generating discoveries and innovations like Europe did during the Renaissance and Enlightenment.
The scientific method relies on brutal honesty.
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Saving face was mentioned by Confucius, 2500 years ago.
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Lying is rampant in Somali culture as well.
Just goes to show that "cultural relativity" is complete bullshit.
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"Face" is different. It is about external values.
"Face" is about delusion and lack of self-awareness; i.e. pretending how people see us vs how they actually see us.
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Not. [wikipedia.org]
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Corruption is not the same as lying. Corruption perception is not the same as corruption.
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Now just expand on your expectations of psychic powers to see the future, and tell us which of these will be right when you second-guess after the fact again next month.
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Dude, that sounds kinda racist - "they can't help it, its in their nature to lie..."
China straight-up lied, why is the New York Times working so hard to not call it what it was, lies in support of a systematic cover-up when hundreds of thousands of lives were on the line?
China is an authoritarian dictatorship. The entire system exists to lie (especially to their own people) and that's why they have things like censorship. The same thing happened in dictatorships in Europe and happens in Russia. The same thing happens all the time in Dictatorships in South America.
The Chinese authorities, effectively seem to have "lied" for six days and then told the truth. It's not even clear that it was a from the top lie rather than specific local officials who were going against pol
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>"The Chinese authorities, effectively seem to have "lied" for six days and then told the truth."
And then apparently reverted back to lying yet again. So even when they are not lying, it is extremely difficult to know.
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It's the same in the West. Look at Trump, he purged his administration and the wider government of anyone who isn't willing to lie for him.
You see it at he WH press briefings, the experts are stood right there listing to him tell people he think's it's a good idea to inject disinfectant and they can't just come out and say "no that's idiotic, don't do that because you will die" - they have to allow him to save face.
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How do you inject light into the lungs? And do you have any idea what UV light would do to your lungs?
MERS? (Score:2)
If they actually could confirm that their MERS vaccine worked, it should be possible to confirm this works, as even with a drop off there are going to be vastly more people infected with COVID-19 than MERS.
Control group. (Score:2)
There is already a huge control group who have not had to this vaccine/serum. So why is this sample being split.
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And as many of us have already read, Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman doesn't understand what a double-blind study is either...
"We offered to be a control group," she said. "I offered to be a control group and I was told by our statistician you can't do that because people from all parts of southern Nevada come in to work in the city and I said, Oh, that's too bad because I know when you have a disease, you have a placebo that gets the water and the sugar and then you get those that actually get the shot...W
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And as many of us have already read, Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman doesn't understand what a double-blind study is either...
"We offered to be a control group," she said. "I offered to be a control group and I was told by our statistician you can't do that because people from all parts of southern Nevada come in to work in the city and I said, Oh, that's too bad because I know when you have a disease, you have a placebo that gets the water and the sugar and then you get those that actually get the shot...We would love to be that placebo side so you have something to measure against."
How nice of her to make sure her citizens aren't the ones taking an untested drug.
Most people don't understand specialist concepts, because you need to actually understand a fairly large body of specialist information to get it.
I can guarantee that most people on slashdot will not understand specific metallurgy references for example, that are however easily understood if you ever did any hobby welding. This doesn't make people on slashdot somehow deficient, nor does it mean that them genuinely wanting to help with something and making offers that don't really make sense in context of we
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No, you have to see more of the interview to really understand how unhinged this woman is. Think a combination of Rump and Reagan's last years, with a little meth-head tossed in. I know Las Vegas is full of weirdos, but they actually elected someone who can barely string two thoughts together, three times.
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Possible, but my understanding (I will admit I googled the interview, but didn't see the entirety of it) is that her offer for help was genuine.
Consider the fact that there are countless people in this very thread talking about "double blind study" when talking about this specific study that is NOT double-blind but single-blind. Doctors know who gets the actual vaccine being tested.
Literally everyone talking about double-blind study referencing this one is just as ignorant on this specific topic as the woma
Sucking eggs. (Score:3)
Thank you for trying to teach me to such eggs, come back when you understand when and why a cohort studies are more appropriate.
My point is that there is already a huge control group of people getting infected, being monitored, so a cohort study would seem to be better.
They did not choose that approach and I want to know the specific reason why, not vague generalities about stuff I already know.
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For a double-blind study you need to have the control group that is being monitored as well so that any symptoms can be observed fairly.
<pedantic>For it to even be a double-blind study, you have to have a control group. :-)</pedantic>
Otherwise the people doing the study can be inclined for a bias, even if they want to be as neutral as possible.
On the flip side, to play devil's advocate, if you plug the numbers into a sample size calculator, a study with the rest of the population as a control requires something like one-third the study size of a placebo-controlled study to achieve the same level of statistical significance, because with a placebo-controlled study you have the odds of your experiment group not being a representative sample
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You have a 5 digit userID yet you do not know why double-blind studies are the gold standard for medical evidence?
Did you buy the account?
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All fair enough, but I expect the Oxford team are a little busy to be wading through Slashdot comments, and they're the only ones who'd be able to give a specific answer to your question.
As an aside, fairly amusing to see people banging on about double-blind RCTs, when this trial is in fact deliberately single-blinded.
Germany is also testing (Score:3)
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Straight from the headline:
>Germany's federal institute for vaccines has said it has given the go-ahead for clinical testing of a potential COVID-19 vaccine. Two phases of testing are envisaged.
This is a political decision to ok the starting of trials, not actual starting of trials. It takes quite some time from decision being made to actual trials.
See (Score:2)
The design of the trial means volunteers will not know which vaccine they are getting, though doctors will.
That means it is a single-blind study and not a double-blind one.
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>"That means it is a single-blind study and not a double-blind one."
Bingo! I thought the exact same thing and was surprised it was called a "double blind." If the researchers KNOW who is a control, it is NOT a double blind study. The whole purpose of a double blind study is to prevent any bias not only in those being studied, but by those who are doing the study.
I am not saying it can't be a useful study. But calling it "double blind" is not only incorrect, it gives it a higher standard/value than it
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Indeed, and a large portion of people here and elsewhere talking about "double blind" and mocking people for "not knowing what it is" shows just how deeply ignorant pretty much everyone is about these kinds of complex concepts.
But in this case, from my reading of it single-blind study is more than justified. They need to have much more rapid results, and increased error margin is far more acceptable in scenario where pandemic is ongoing and every extra day matters. Double-blind confirmation run can be done
Just slam us with garbage (Score:3)
First in Europe? (Score:2, Informative)
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UK is in Europe. Are you confusing geography with politics?
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Probably not on you. Political pundits and most of the mass media love to pretend that EU = Europe.
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USA is a largest state that comprises majority of population in North American continent.
Largest nation on the European continent is Russia, both in terms of size and population. It's not in EU, which itself is not a nation.
Re: There's a lot of money riding on a vaccine (Score:3)
You seem to conflate treatment and vaccine, almost using them interchangeably.
Re: There's a lot of money riding on a vaccine (Score:5, Informative)
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it's significantly worse than the seasonal flu. it's worse than the h1n1 flu which caused the 2009 swine-flu pandemic.
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And your awareness is relevant exactly how?
Besides, flu kills far fewer people with an underlying medical condition. I can shrug off a flu without a problem, covid19, on the other hand, will probably kill me.
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Re: There's a lot of money riding on a vaccine (Score:5, Informative)
The number of people dying from covid without underlying medical conditions is extremely small. In fact in my state I am not aware of a single case.
This is probably largely because your state isn't yet testing widely enough or is testing the wrong people or some other mistake. One of the biggest mistakes people make is to compare the infection rate today with the death rate today. This doesn't work because people take about three weeks to die. You need to compare the infection rate three weeks ago with the death rate today. Probably for the healthy/unhealthy statistics it's even more unbalanced since really unhealthy people die in just a few days whilst the originally healthy fight on much longer. You may find that your state had only just started infection three weeks ago and so the healthy people that will die are still in the process.
Where there has been correct follow up with a large enough sample size, about 5% of deaths come in people with no underlying health problem [theguardian.com]. Which maybe doesn't sound much, but the death rate in unhealthy people can be so huge that 5% is actually a bigger threat to the healthy individual than any normal flu.
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Actually, you're full of shit. I imagine the hospitals in St. Petersburg must be filling up right now, Mr. Russian Disinformation Troll.
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No it isn't. In fact, it's not even as bad as a flu.
Take off the tinfoil hat.
If there are as many asymptomatic or low-symptom cases as we are finding in some places, the number of deaths by population may be less than many a decent flu year.
The big catch is the capriciousness of this virus. Will you be the patient who gets lifelong lung damage, loss of kidney function, or dementia? Will you be the odd young person whose bloodstream congeals, Andromeda Strain style, and drops dead in their twenties?
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Erm. I think you mean: "If there are as many asymptomatic or low-symptom cases as we are finding in some places, *and because we have shut down much of the world's economy for several years which has dropped the R0 to below 1*, the number of deaths by population may be less than many a decent flu year".
If we hadn't dropped the R0, this thing would have killed a lot more of us.
Re: There's a lot of money riding on a vaccine (Score:4, Insightful)
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"hoax" as in the moon landings? or that the world is round?
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Time to kill of AC posting completely.
Re:There's a lot of money riding on a vaccine (Score:5, Informative)
A virus that mutates will need regular vaccine updates.
Coronavirus mutates much slower than seasonal flu [livescience.com].
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That's not a good counter argument. The seasonal flu (specifically Influenza A) has incredibly high mutation rates as one of its defining characteristics which is precisely why we chase it around the world every 6 months. It's why the flu vaccine is so much more effective at preventing Influenza B than A.
Re:There's a lot of money riding on a vaccine (Score:5, Interesting)
We probably won't need a new vaccine. This is not like influenza, which is actually a fairly broad family of viruses that regularly spill over from *various* animal reservoirs into humans. The "flu" vaccine is actually a vaccine for three or four not particularly closely related viruses that virologists thought will be circulating this year.
It's more like measles, which is a single closely related linage of viruses that share a common "serotype" -- they hall have the same or similar enough version of proteins in their capsid so that immunity to one confers immunity to all.
Once a population reaches herd immunity, COVID-19 disappears forever from that group. It will never return. Other viruses, yes. SARS-CoV-2, no.
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COVID-19 disappears forever from that group
COVID-19 is the name of the disease. What you effectively said is once you catch the common cold you're immune from it. You may build an immunity to SARS-CoV-2 itself, but it already has mutations identified.
That said there have been no positive accounts of readmission due to catching one of these mutations. The only account of re-admission came from China and is currently thought to be a premature hospital release, i.e. patient didn't fully recover in the first place.
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Exposure and recovery do help: it's why children who are raised germ free are mor vulnerable to infection for the rest of their lives.
Re: There's a lot of money riding on a vaccine (Score:2)
With some infections.
This isn't a clear black and white area. Let's let the scientists get more information, rather than over simplifying.
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Exposure and recovery do help: it's why children who are raised germ free are mor vulnerable to infection for the rest of their lives.
Not necessarily. Exposure to disease like Dengue fever [wikipedia.org] would made it worse if you got a different type next time.
Covid-19 is so new that nobody knows how would recovered patients fare afterwards.
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... children who are raised germ free are more vulnerable to infection for the rest of their lives.
This is why staying isolated for long periods of time is a really bad idea. When your gym reopens you can harden up again in a few weeks, but let's hope that resocialization does not involve catching a batch of whatever viruses, even non-Covid, that are going around this year.
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"COVID-19 is the name of the disease. What you effectively said is once you catch the common cold you're immune from it."
It's a common mistake to compare SARS-Cov-2 to the common cold, when the latter is actually ~200 (very) different viruses.
Also, scientists claim that the SARS-Cov-2 mutation rate is actually quite low. All viruses mutate, but that hasn't stopped many vaccines from working for decades unchanged. No guarantees, but cause for optimism.
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What you effectively said is once you catch the common cold you're immune from it. You may build an immunity to SARS-CoV-2 itself, but it already has mutations identified.
I'm not sure what the point of your argument is. The common cold is caused by a wide variety of viruses that are not closely related at all, therefore you wouldn't expect immunity to a cold caused by a rhinovirus to confer immunity to a cold caused by a coronavirus and vice versa. It'd be more accurate to characterize the common cold as a syndrome rather than a disease.
It appears you think that mutations routinely defeat a vaccine. That's almost never the case, otherwise no vaccines would work. Measles
Re: There's a lot of money riding on a vaccine (Score:2)
I think this is dangerous guessing currently. We simply don't know this yet. You want to bet your family on that guess?
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I bet my life on that every time I go to the grocery store. There is no absolute safety here.
There is an element of truth in the argument that we can't do this indefinitely. That's not an justification for stopping the lockdowns *immediately* though. If we could knock this out by continuing the status quo for three or four weeks, then then we should stay the course to the end. But it's very possible that community transmission could continue for three or four months. In that case there are other danger
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You seem to have fairly faulty risk assessment, or you're intentionally trying to muddy the waters with a very large non sequitur.
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Well obviously if I don't understand risk assessment, then I wouldn't know that I didn't understand. But I'm not muddying the waters. I suspect you're reading more into my comments than I intended.
I am not for opening up states *now*. I am actually arguing against the straw man position that we can't keep this up indefinitely. But part of that is addressing the concern that we're going to be shut down permanently; while the virus controls the schedule, we could be reading that schedule a lot more more c
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Don't forget that getting light inside the body will help too!
Maybe we'll use fiber optics?
Re:Too late... (Score:4, Funny)
I prefer a rib spreader.
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Errr...that's not where he wanted to inject the sunshine.
I expect ... (Score:2)
I expect we will now see a run on light beer, does Corona come in light version?
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Yes, it's every bit as bad as the regular, but not nearly as nasty as the one that comes with lime in it.
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He also suggesting blasting people with UV light. Now given that he is obviously quite familiar with the effects of UV light on the skin you would think he'd know better... Unless his tan comes from a bottle perhaps.
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That's why he's frequently referred to as 'orange man', because it's a spray tan. Even on the golf course the only time he gets any sun is when he steps out of the cart to screw up his swing while some sycophant tosses a ball into the middle of the fairway for him.
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Re:Too late... (Score:5, Informative)
Watch the video, you ridiculous sycophant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
He literally talks about injecting disinfectants.
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This will lead to deaths, and prison for trump (or mental institution)
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Taken out of context. "Trump then clarified his remarks: “It wouldn’t be through injections, you’re talking about almost a cleaning and sterilization of an area. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t work, but it certainly has a big affect if it’s on a stationary object.”"
This is seems to have full coverage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] at about 24:24 the now wide spread clip starts and at at 27:20 he walks off the stage (to return later) . If you or anyone else who've seen the full press conference (I admittedly have not) could help find the quoted text above it would be appreciated.
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And so, after the "fine people" hoax, "covington kids" hoax, and a few dosen other "we clipped one minute out of context, and we add the worst possible interpretation BEFORE you watch it to make sure your mind is guided to the desired interpretation to make it look and sound like something that is not even in the ballpark of what was happening", it still works. The same people who just know that Trump is both fascist and weak leader, both stupid and evil genius, both is full on American nationalist and want
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THIS is why the major networks have stopped streaming his briefings live.
Because they can take snippets out of context and write dubious articles like the BCC one and attack the President with them.
Is his speculation wild and wrong? Probably.
Did he tell people to drink bleach? Of course not.
But like you said, TDS will make people read 1 word and assume the worst.
Re:Too late... (Score:4, Informative)
And for the record, I did 15 minutes of digging, and as usual, turns out Trump was talking about the actual things he was briefed on.
UV irradiation of blood:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
Hydrogen peroxide in human body a potential treatment:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/heal... [msn.com]
His choice of words in long live event was pretty bad which allowed the media to clip that one minute and pretend that he said something that he didn't actually say, but when you consider that those are long events where he has to talk, that's normal. It's just that some of us have learned from "fine people hoax" that every time we see a minute long clip of Trump talking freely with context of "he said something horrible!!!!oneoneone" go and look at the whole thing.
But when you really want the narrative to be true, it's really hard to convince you to not be utterly unreasonable. We see this on the political right with "liberals DESTROYED" compilations, and we see this on the left with these ridiculous one minute doctored clips (again, twitter inc. definition).
I'm just sick and tired of this.
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Interesting links.
And I agree, we see some of this on both sides.
The problem is the speed of information and social media which compounds the idiocy.
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I'm going to continue with my previous answer here, having done 15 minutes of digging on the internet:
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
Trump is talking about things he was specifically briefed on:
UV irradiation of blood as treatment for coronavirus:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
Hydrogen peroxide in human body as potential treatment for coronavirus:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/heal... [msn.com]
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I don't think bringing in TDS (the ability to believe Trump) helps make your case.
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1) This is England, the FDA has no part in the trials
2) You don't know anything about microbiology
3) You don't know the difference between making a few micrograms of something and having to figure out how to make grams (and then kilos) of the stuff.
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3 weeks is not a long time normally because the FDA and similar agencies move at the speed of a glacier
This has nothing to do with the USA, it's a British university. In the USA you're still at the stage of having your leader suggest injecting yourself with household disinfectant, that's how far behind you are.