WHO Sees First Results From COVID Drug Trials Within Two Weeks (reuters.com) 82
The World Health Organization (WHO) should soon get results from clinical trials it is conducting of drugs that might be effective in treating COVID-19 patients, its Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Friday. From a report: "Nearly 5,500 patients in 39 countries have so far been recruited into the Solidarity trial," he told a news briefing, referring to clinical studies the U.N. agency is conducting. "We expect interim results within the next two weeks." The Solidarity Trial started out in five parts looking at possible treatment approaches to COVID-19: standard care; remdesivir; the anti-malaria drug touted by U.S. President Donald Trump, hydroxychloroquine; the HIV drugs lopinavir/ritonavir; and lopanivir/ritonavir combined with interferon. Earlier this month, it stopped the arm testing hydroxychloroquine, after studies indicated it showed no benefit in those who have the disease, but more work is still needed to see whether it may be effective as a preventative medicine. Mike Ryan, head of the WHO's emergencies programme, said it would be unwise to predict when a vaccine could be ready against COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus that has killed more than half a million people. Earlier this week, the WHO also warned the some countries may have to reinstate lockdowns as coronavirus pandemic accelerates.
Re:WHO? Give me a fucking break. (Score:5, Insightful)
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That would be to easy. ...
I mean science and such
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I would not trust the incompetent Chinese toady WHO to tend to a flea bite, much less manage a COVID vaccine programmer.
I'm guessing you also support the orange man.
Funny you should mention drug trials and HCQ (Score:1, Informative)
Turns out HCQ works [henryford.com]
"Treatment with Hydroxychloroquine Cut Death Rate Significantly in COVID-19 Patients".
Strange that was not also reported as it was a real study and not a scam paper like the one claiming it did not work... and that so few are willing to believe such good news for humanity. I wonder how many people have died at the hands ofd those naysayers who claimed it would not and could not work...
Re:Funny you should mention drug trials and HCQ (Score:4, Insightful)
Your "real study" was a retrospective analysis. Something that might merit a clinical trial, which this actually was. It makes sense to give more weight to the actual clinical trial.
Re: Funny you should mention drug trials and HCQ (Score:3, Informative)
And this HCQ "trial" also includes a steroid which a randomize blind study found had the same effect.
They showed zero evidence that it was the HCQ (which failed a randomized trial) and not the steroid (which passed a randomized trial).
It was like giving 10 people a bicycle and water and 50 people a Lamborghini and Gatorade and saying that Gatorade had a significant impact on speed of travel.
Citation Needed (Score:2)
And this HCQ "trial" also includes a steroid which a randomize blind study found had the same effect.
Not mentioned at all in the summery of the paper I linked to, do you have any link that mentions what you are talking about?
Re: Citation Needed (Score:3, Informative)
The paper you linked to was the study press release so lol, yeah they didn't include that criticism in their study or press release. Probably because not including it looks bad.
Of the people they studied more than 3/4 were also given a steroid. The sample size for their given steroid normalized group was 80 with hcq and 80 without hcq. So a total study size of 160.
Study data:
Given Steroid 1530 (77.1%) 203 (36.5%)
By comparison the randomized double blind hcq study was in the thousands. So far larger
Nice try (Score:2, Informative)
First link doesn't even work, steroid study in second link is unrelated to what I posted.
You also completely ignore the many, many flaws found with your fetishized "randomized double blind hcq study was in the thousands", which was anything but in all regards [npr.org].
I find it pretty hilarious you are defending something even the authors of the paper decided was too broken to defend. Maybe they know a littlest more than you?
Next time, do please do your research, and check your links, before you post more misleadin
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First of all, both of my links work. So maybe you should turn off your ad blockers (or maybe you're running a fact blocker which would explain a lot...) before being a dipshit.
your fetishized "randomized double blind hcq study was in the thousands", which was anything but in all regards.
Secondly I did my research you're just an ignorant troll.
There are two double blind studies on HCQ
It doesn't prevent COVID-19 after exposure:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/... [nejm.org]
It doesn't increase survival rates:
https://www.recoverytrial.net/... [recoverytrial.net]
âWe have concluded that there is no beneficial effect of hydroxychloroquine in patients
hospitalised with COVID-19. We have therefore decided to stop enrolling participants to the
hydroxychloroquine arm of the RECOVERY trial with immediate effect. We are now releasing the
preliminary results as they have important implications for patient care and public health.
âA total of 1542 patients were randomised to hydroxychloroquine and compared with 3132
patients randomised to usual care alone. There was no significant difference in the primary
endpoint of 28-day mortality (25.7% hydroxychloroquine vs. 23.5% usual care; hazard ratio 1.11
[95% confidence interval 0.98-1.26]; p=0.10). There was also no evidence of beneficial effects on
hospital stay duration or other outcomes.
4,700 randomized patients > 160 patients in an uncontrolled study.
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You missed the best part. Although the age ranges overlap, the media age of the patients in the various arms differed considerably. The median age in the "no treatment" arm was 68.1 years, but the median age in the HCQ arm was only 63.2 years. COVID-19's fatality rate increases rapidly with age. Even if the rest of the treatment protocol hadn't been wildly d
Wag that finger elsewhere first. (Score:2, Informative)
Your "real study" was a retrospective analysis.
From the summary "Earlier this month, it stopped the arm testing hydroxychloroquine, after studies indicated it showed no benefit...
That study was from even shakier grounds and turns out to have been almost entirely falsified [news-medical.net] (read to the end, I was lazy and pulled the first link I found but there are even newer articles pointing out even more egregious flaws).
How odd you let that fabrication slide while giving me grief at what tase of trials the paper I posted
Re: Wag that finger elsewhere first. (Score:2, Informative)
The "real" study on HCQ wasn't the study that was retracted, it was a randomized blind study that ended up being released because they suspended the trial early to check the data early based on what turned out to be a potentially fraudulent study.
0) randomized hcq study started
1) questionable restrospective hcq study released.
2) blinds lifted on randomized study to make preliminary analysis.
3) preliminary results released of randomized study showing no benefit.
The quick succession of announcements was easy
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2) blinds lifted on randomized study to make preliminary analysis.
The "blinds" don't have to be lifted to make a preliminary analysis. A double-blind study means that the person receiving the medicine and the person giving out the medicine doesn't know which one is placebo and which one is medicine. The principal investigator on the study can look at the information whenever desired.
Re: Wag that finger elsewhere first. (Score:2)
And the creation the protocol and even selection of subjects for a double-blind study is fairly involved.
This is more akin to the unicycle/beer vs Lamborghini/Gatorade effect on travel speed example posted earlier and saying the Gatorade made the difference.
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âOn Thursday 4 June, in response to a request from the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the independent Data Monitoring Committee conducted a further review of the data. Last night, the Committee recommended the chief investigators review the unblinded data on the hydroxychloroquine arm of the trial.
- RECOVERY Trial Press Release
I suspect the analysis was going to be blinded. Aka "Substance A, Substance B, Substance C, Substance D" and they unblinded Substance B as HCQ and Substance D as Control to focus specifically on HCQ even though they had intended for the analysis to also blind the data analysts as well.
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Re: Funny you should mention drug trials and HCQ (Score:2)
Re: Funny you should mention drug trials and HCQ (Score:1)
Stupid mod knows nothing about medical trials. This is a 100% purely factual statement.
Medical trials for new drugs always target white males, the results of which do not always apply to non white males. Non white and non males have complained about this for decades. It is a good thing when a cohort of non white or non males are in medical studies, you dumb ass mod.
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Why are people so hung up on making this drug work?
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Why are people so hung up on making this drug work?
Possibly because Dear Leader promoted it heavily. Then the news filtered in that it wasn't helping, and it was causing some people heart problems. Now some people are trying to minimize the bad news.
Re: Funny you should mention drug trials and HCQ (Score:1, Insightful)
For the same reason just as many are hung up on having this dirt cheap, well known and easy to produce drug fail.
Politics.
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That analysis of the research is actually wrong. For example, consider Cowling et al, 2008. This study was about people living together. It basically showed that no intervention helps under those conditions. Amusingly, people who were told to wear masks and/or wash their hands actually got sick twice as often as people who did neither. But far from proving that face masks aren't effective for airborne viruses, what that study actually proves is that influenza is not airborne. It is spread through dro
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For a virus supposedly based on HIV it's weird how it doesn't contain any HIV genetic material nor does it even function in the same way aside from both are RNA viruses.
RNA viruses: not even similar there (Score:2)
aside from both are RNA viruses.
Even that isn't that much similar:
- RNA viruses tend to have a quite high mutation rate, because their various polymerases (E.g.: reverse polymerase with HIV, or RNA-dependent-RNA-polymerase (RdRp) with most RNA virsues) make mistakes and are unable to fix them (as opposed to our own DNA polymerase which has proof-reading capabilities).
- Enter the coronavirus family and their NSP14-ExoN domain - that domain adds proof-reading capabilities and the family exhibits lower mutation rater (the colleague at http: [nextstrain.org]
Bull crap: actual real-world data disagrees. (Score:4, Informative)
That video is bonkers, the actual real-world data disagrees with it.
There's a French game called "Rooster to Donkey" (it's a pun on a French saying meaning jumping between unrelated subject, similar to the English "jump from pillar to post").
In this game, the player take two unrelated words of the same lenght (like "Coq" rooster, and "Ane" Donkey), and by either substituting only 1 letter and/or rearranging the letter-ordering at each turn, and gerenating a valid word at each turn, you reach one word starting from the other ("Coq" -> "col" -> "cal" -> "ace" -> "ane")
Virus, specially RNA-based one (though not as much the coronavirus family) tend to make imperfect copies and introduce mutation every know and then: the virus that you neighbour got because they didn't wear a mask and spent the night in a densely packed pub, won't have the exact same genetic sequence as the one which was detected for the first time in Wuhan's market.
Nowadays genetic sequencing has become more affordable, and in addition to simply making tests to *detect virus-presence*, some labs like ours do genetic sequencing [bsse.ethz.ch] of the positive-tested samples. And then compare the obtained sequences.
Scientist over the planet have been playing a giant massive multiplayer game of "Coq-à-l'âne": looking wich letter changed (difference in base-pairs in the virus) and which words got rearranged (occurrence of recombination, when a virus ends up being a mix of two variants inside the same sick individual).
By doing that, it's possible to put them inside a giant evolution [nextstrain.org] tree (I am literally contributing [github.io] to our local tree-building efforts [ncs-tf.ch]).
Some other people are even adding sequence that where gathered from animals such as bats, pangolins, etc. : See it for your self here [nextstrain.org].
It is now possible to exactly follow the evolution of the virus, as it emerged in some bats, acquired a few mutations, rearranged itself, and spread through the human population, drift further as mutations come over time.
You can see a long uninterrupted chain of virus sequences from its origin to the current day, each step within the usual mutation/recombination rate of the virus.
This points strongly toward a natural virus evolution.
Had the virus been synthesized in a lab, at some you would have seen an abrupt change, a break in this change of progressive evolution:
you would have expected a virus emerging in the Wuhan market that would have had a completely unusual sequence, with vast swath of unedified new material that aren't seen anywhere else. It would not have been possible. That's not the case. We can draw the tree mentioned before, because at each step you only see the usual genetic drift. No sudden appearance of vast swath of intruding genetic material.
Unless testing HCQ with zinc, not useful (Score:1, Insightful)
HCQ is dangerous but the proposed value was helping Zinc into the cells to block receptors for viriii.
Zinc is a recognized anti-viral.
So why hold a trial of HCQ and omit zinc?
Now- that said there was at least one study with zinc which didn't show a benefit. But it was small.
Can we put this to bed so lupis and athritis patients can get medicine again?
Re:Unless testing HCQ with zinc, not useful (Score:4, Informative)
So why hold a trial of HCQ and omit zinc?
The proposed value was that HCQ (an immunosuppressant) would block the cytokine storm, which was thought to be what killed COVID victims. There were other hypotheses as well, including the zinc one, although I don't understand how HCQ would help get the zinc into the cells.
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although I don't understand how HCQ would help get the zinc into the cells.
That's because it was mean to be used in conjunction with zinc and a bleach injection. The bleach bursts the cells and then the zinc can get in and kill the virus.
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although I don't understand how HCQ would help get the zinc into the cells.
That's because it was mean to be used in conjunction with zinc and a bleach injection. The bleach bursts the cells and then the zinc can get in and kill the virus.
The mods are lacking in their sense of sarcasm. I had a good laugh with this one.
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thank you for that
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Originally, the proposed value was that HCQ, as an antiviral, would block viral replication, because it did so in vitro (in relatively toxic concentrations, mind you).
The theory that its immunosuppressive properties might be beneficial came a lot later, and has always been highly dubious, because HCQ suppresses CD154 expression, whereas SARS-CoV-2, as far as I can tell from the research, mainly causes CD4, CD8, and CD38 expression, with CD38 apparently being critical for stopping the virus (IIRC).
In fact,
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No but the theory was that HCQ acted as a catalyst for Zinc.
Zinc is a known anti-viral.
And I did find reference to one study that says HCQ + Zinc might reduce hospital stays.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
So don't throw the baby out with the bath water because the president is a stooge.
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Actually, it is. In vitro [nih.gov]. It just isn't potent enough in that capacity at non-lethal doses to do any good.
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"the immunomodulatory effect of hydroxychloroquine also may be useful in controlling the cytokine storm that occurs late-phase in critically ill SARS-CoV-2 infected patients"
Presumably HCQ also stops the cytokine storm in vivo, but HCQ didn't improve outcomes. This evidence suggests the cytokine storm isn't what kills people with COVID.
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Sorry, wrong article. Try this one [asm.org].
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Interestingly, that also showed in vivo action against that particular coronavirus strain, at least in mice.
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https://academic.oup.com/advan... [oup.com]
Consequently, zinc status is a critical factor that can influence antiviral immunity, particularly as zinc-deficient populations are often most at risk of acquiring viral infections such as HIV or hepatitis C virus. This review summarizes current basic science and clinical evidence examining zinc as a direct antiviral, as well as a stimulant of antiviral immunity. An abundance of evidence has accumulated over the past 50 y to demonstrate the antiviral activity of zinc agains
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If someone said "Soap AND Water is effective for removing Covid19" and then everyone studied Soap OR Water and said neither was effective, I'd have the same point.
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Now, there was a (small) study done with the above conditions but the fools did it while the moon was waning! They're just trying to make Trump look bad, mirite?
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HCQ is dangerous but the proposed value was helping Zinc into the cells to block receptors for viriii. Zinc is a recognized anti-viral.
So why hold a trial of HCQ and omit zinc?
Same reason the proponents won't do a trial of zinc and omit HCQ. HCQ is something that almost certainly won't cause much harm at sane doses and also almost certainly won't help, but by combining it with other drugs or using inappropriate dosing, politicians on each side of the faux controversy can use studies to make the other side look bad.
Meanwhile, I just assume that the politicians have no idea what's going on, and keep my eye out for studies about drugs that are actually likely to make a difference,
I hate non-news (Score:4)
Let me know the results. Learning that the WHO is conducting a trial doesn't offer any interesting information and IMO isn't news worthy. It's like those "2020 is expected to be the warmest year on record" news that appears every end of the year. Just wait for January and report how warm it really was.
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Let me know the results. Learning that the WHO is conducting a trial doesn't offer any interesting information and IMO isn't news worthy. It's like those "2020 is expected to be the warmest year on record" news that appears every end of the year. Just wait for January and report how warm it really was.
Well, some country had completely screwed up their pandemic response and now have nothing they can do except holding their collective breaths waiting for a Covid cure or vaccine.
Just like the slew of iPhone news every summer, these non-news sell eyeballs.
No one (Score:2)
WHO Sees First Results From COVID Drug Trials Within Two Weeks
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Yeah, thought not.
The study, with stats showing that 1. the proportion of people not given HCQ was extremely small and 2. an explanation of the selection methodology for administering HCQ, which by it's very nature ensures that the non-recipients are also less healthy than the recipients:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
The editorial, which draws attention to a
Should stop calling it a respiratory disease (Score:3)
It's more of a vascular disease. It causes substantial clotting, and everything seems to be a symptom of that. You can't breathe because your lungs are full of microclots. I saw two papers where they had done autopsies on patients COVID-19 had killed, and all of them showed clotting through the lungs, as well as in other organs.
The sooner we can convince people that this isn't merely a respiratory disease, and something more like an airborne mini-stroke generator, maybe the sooner the reluctant will take it seriously.
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Last I saw, aspirin was sadly ineffective as a treatment. The whole clotting chain seems to be very complicated, and it starts very early in the infection.
ignorant (Score:2)
THE WHO SEE's...
in a few weeks maybe soon they might see something...
fuck you
can't trust the WHO (Score:1)
That list is already old. (Score:1)