Optical Mouse Inventor, Infoseek Founder Hunts For a Covid Cure (ieee.org) 93
Steve Kirsch has been interested in repurposing drugs since he was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer years ago. In an interview with IEEE Spectrum, he talks about his efforts to raise funds for Covid research, to get the word out about promising drugs, and to light a fire under the FDA. "If these guys were [working] in Silicon Valley, they'd be fired," he says. Specifically, Kirsch believes that fluvoxamine will be a game changer for treating Covid-19, as it's an inexpensive, easy-to-take pill with few side effects and has proven to prevent severe illness and death from the coronavirus. Here's an excerpt from the interview he had with IEEE Spectrum: Kirsch: We applied for an Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA [for fluvoxamine] in late January. Lately, we've been just trying to find out how that's going, like, 'What do you guys think? Can we have a conversation? We've got new data.' But they won't talk to us, they say it's in process, that we'll hear from them soon, likely in five weeks from submitting our request. But five, six weeks have come and gone, and we've heard nothing back on our application. Meanwhile, people are dying. If these guys were [working] in Silicon Valley, they'd be fired.
Spectrum: And you got banned from Medium for writing about it.
Kirsch: It's a Catch-22, you can't talk about it until it works but it can't work until you talk about it. I wrote on my Medium blog that fluvoxamine was successful in treating Covid, and that doxazosin [another drug, used to treat high blood pressure among other things] has a 75 percent chance of preventing hospitalization. I was reporting actual results of peer-reviewed studies. In response, Medium removed six years of blogs that I'd written about technology and banned me for life. In my appeal, I said there was no evidence that disputed what I said, and Medium never produced any evidence in response.
Spectrum: You did get covered on 60 Minutes. [On March 7, the news magazine reported on the successful use of fluvoxamine off label to treat a COVID-19 outbreak at the Golden Gate Fields thoroughbred racetrack, with lots of puns about long shots and dark horses.]
Kirsch: Yes, but you could easily watch that 60 Minutes story and believe that we need more data before people should start using fluvoxamine. But a panel of key opinion leaders from the NIH, CDC, and academia met in January and recommended that fluvoxamine be added to the NIH guidelines. They also recommended that doctors should talk to patients about using fluvoxamine for COVID in a process known as "shared decision making." And If you look at the website c19early.com, which rates the drugs with the best evidence, you'll see that the highest-rated FDA-approved drug is fluvoxamine. We shouldn't be ignoring it. Instead of doing nothing, we should be using the drug with the best evidence so far. If you were drowning and someone threw you a life preserver that had only been used 20 times, you don't throw it back complaining there isn't enough evidence that it works.
Spectrum: And you got banned from Medium for writing about it.
Kirsch: It's a Catch-22, you can't talk about it until it works but it can't work until you talk about it. I wrote on my Medium blog that fluvoxamine was successful in treating Covid, and that doxazosin [another drug, used to treat high blood pressure among other things] has a 75 percent chance of preventing hospitalization. I was reporting actual results of peer-reviewed studies. In response, Medium removed six years of blogs that I'd written about technology and banned me for life. In my appeal, I said there was no evidence that disputed what I said, and Medium never produced any evidence in response.
Spectrum: You did get covered on 60 Minutes. [On March 7, the news magazine reported on the successful use of fluvoxamine off label to treat a COVID-19 outbreak at the Golden Gate Fields thoroughbred racetrack, with lots of puns about long shots and dark horses.]
Kirsch: Yes, but you could easily watch that 60 Minutes story and believe that we need more data before people should start using fluvoxamine. But a panel of key opinion leaders from the NIH, CDC, and academia met in January and recommended that fluvoxamine be added to the NIH guidelines. They also recommended that doctors should talk to patients about using fluvoxamine for COVID in a process known as "shared decision making." And If you look at the website c19early.com, which rates the drugs with the best evidence, you'll see that the highest-rated FDA-approved drug is fluvoxamine. We shouldn't be ignoring it. Instead of doing nothing, we should be using the drug with the best evidence so far. If you were drowning and someone threw you a life preserver that had only been used 20 times, you don't throw it back complaining there isn't enough evidence that it works.
Excellent observation (Score:5, Insightful)
"If these guys were [working] in Silicon Valley, they'd be fired,"
Very true. If the last few years have taught us anything, it's that concerns for things like safety, human life, and verification are *not* welcome in the cutting edge of tech.
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The biggest liar (Score:2)
And if there's anything else we can gather from the past few years is that there are no shortage of liars in the world. Who can you believe in 2021? I'd say almost nobody.
I've been thinking about this a lot over the past couple of months. I've decided that a reverse Bayes inference, of sorts, might be a good first-level rule to apply.
I look at some of the reporting and ask: "who is telling the biggest lies?". The biggest liars are then automatically discounted, and I hold the opposite position as likely true before delving deeper.
Two examples from recent articles:
Richard Stallman is accused of lots of things he didn't actually do, the biggest ones are that he's a pedophile,
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I mean if they were also working in Silicon Valley we'd have a new variant of COVID vaccines every day, once a month on Tuesday notes would come out saying how they have tweaked the formula to reduce the amount of side effects, and you'd be going to the doctor not knowing what you will get, if it will work, or if the drug just randomly caused your little toe to fall off because a BX (Body eXperience) expert decided we don't use our little toes enough anyway.
Small study evidence is not proof (Score:5, Informative)
The linked study covered 152 patients, 80 getting the drug and 72 a placebo, a size that is a long way from proving its efficacy. Key points from the abstract:
This suggests something good, but it's a very small number of results. The conclusions even say they need a larger study to establish clinical efficacy:
On top of those, the experiences were self-reported, which doesn't nullify results but it does make them less reliable, though the researchers tried to address that with repeated phone calls and follow-ups for medical records. And as for the c19early.com website, fluvoxamine has two studies covering 277 patients, presumably including this one, meaning the other was even smaller.
Maybe fluvoxamine is a good drug to use with COVID patients, but the evidence is kind of thin right now.
Re:Small study evidence is not proof (Score:5, Informative)
Lack of evidence showing its effectiveness is not evidence that it's ineffective.
Clearly it needs further study, but censoring people who talk about it is only going to delay studies. Who's going to volunteer for a study if they aren't aware of it?
Aside from proving effectiveness, perhaps the main purpose of studying and approving drugs is to detect if there are any serious side effects.
As this drug is already approved for other purposes, the side effects studies have already been done. The FDA approved it in 1994 so there are also over 20 years of actual patients taking the drug in addition to the original studies, so the possible side effects are well known.
The fact that the side effects are well known and people have been taking this drug for 20+ years would be enough to convince a lot of people to volunteer for an effectiveness study, or for sick people to potentially take the drug just on the chance it might work.
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No but in medicine you do have to prove efficacy. There is a method for doing this with larger and larger sample sizes in trials.
Re:Small study evidence is not proof (Score:4, Insightful)
The side effects for indicated use are well-known. The side effects for off-label use, especially where new or unusual drugs may be in play, may not be well-known. Rushing to use a drug with well-known side effects is how we got the hydroxychloroquine debacle, which at a minimum led to shortages for people who actually needed it for other diseases and may have caused harm in COVID patients getting it because of those known side effects.
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The side effects for indicated use are well-known. The side effects for off-label use, especially where new or unusual drugs may be in play, may not be well-known.
Indicated and off-label use produce exactly the same physiological effects. Unless off-label use includes different dosage, how are side effects would become different? Please explain your rationale.
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Tech bro suffers from inverse Dunning-Kruger again.
Re:Small study evidence is not proof (Score:5, Interesting)
This suggests something good, but it's a very small number of results. The conclusions even say they need a larger study to establish clinical efficacy
Eric Lenze, the author of the study, seems to be running a phase 3 trial [clinicaltrials.gov], so hopefully more evidence will be forthcoming.
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Not a reason to ban a guy's Medium account, though. (Although to be frank, he is probably better off without one).
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During the pandemic companies were erring on the side of caution with unproven medical claims. They were likely concerned that it could turn into another hydroxychloroquine debacle.
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They were likely concerned that it could turn into another hydroxychloroquine debacle.
What hydroxychloroquine debacle? I didn't see a debacle, I saw scientists saying "hydroxychloroquine might be a cure" then after larger studies, saying it wasn't.
The real debacle was the mask debacle, where scientists said, "don't wear masks, they don't help," then later saying "wear a mask."
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Early evidence suggested that hydroxychloroquine might be effective in treating serious COVID cases (which is not the same thing as a cure for COVID). People jumped on that and began getting their doctors to prescribe it to prevent getting COVID (when most of the studies were for treating extant COVID) even though its efficacy was not yet established. This caused shortages for people who actually did need it, including those with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
The mask issue was because they didn't know at
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The mask issue was because they didn't know at the time how effective masks in general were against it other than N95
That's not really true haha, we knew that they were effective in in April. People have been using these kinds of masks with effectiveness against pandemics for decades.
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Maybe fluvoxamine is a good drug to use with COVID patients, but the evidence is kind of thin right now.
Then write a rebuttal on Medium and show how he's wrong.
Disappearing him from Medium just makes it look like you are afraid and have nothing to back up your own side of things.
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Maybe fluvoxamine is a good drug to use with COVID patients, but the evidence is kind of thin right now.
Then write a rebuttal on Medium and show how he's wrong.
"Evidence is thin" is not the same as "he's wrong."
In any case, since he was banned from Medium and all of his previous posts were deleted, "writing a rebuttal on Medium" would be a one-sided argument, since you woule be "rebutting' an argument that is not there to be read, and he is banned from replying.
Disappearing him from Medium just makes it look like you are afraid and have nothing to back up your own side of things.
He disappeared from Medium because of Medium's action, not his.
This is the downside of the modern "the media are private companies not government, so they can ban anybody they like and you can't do anythi
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How about...don't read Medium because they do stupid shit like this. When we continue to support bad behavior, we'll get more of it.
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If only rebuttals actually worked. How many times were claims about hydroxychloroquine rebutted and yet people still insisted it worked and sought it out, causing problems for themselves (heart problems) and others (lupus and RA patients need it).
The "marketplace of ideas" doesn't magically fix these problems. The invisible hand of the market rarely fixes anything.
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There's nothing wrong with that. A rebuttal isn't always correct, but people deserve to hear all sides of the issue when they're important. Some of us occasionally even change our minds.
Re:Abolish the FDA. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a balance.
The FDA is the main reason we didn't have OTC thalidomide for morning sickness in the US.
This isn't to say that we're currently in the correct balance, and perhaps the win of blocking a drug that was recommended for pregnant women that caused birth defects was has created over caution (for example it's very hard to test drugs on any women of child baring age which seems like a problem), but just letting any drug be sold for whatever as long as it's pure doesn't exactly sound good either.
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It is a difficult trade-off, which is worse, type-I or type-II errors; and asks an important question, when the evidence is scant, should the default be "let people try it" or "forbid people from trying it"?
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Sorry, this should not have been marked troll. It is voicing a libertarian position that's on the fringe (that the FDA kills more people by slowing approval of good drugs than it saves by not approving bad drugs), but it's still an argument that's worth listening to, even if only to disagree.
It is a difficult trade-off, which is worse, type-I or type-II errors; and asks an important question, when the evidence is scant, should the default be "let people try it" or "forbid people from trying it"?
Neither. Not everything has a high risk if you try it, but some things do. And the risk of running out of a medication is different depending on the volume in which it is manufactured. So there can't really be a default. Everything has to be evaluated on an individual basis.
Maybe the default should be "let people try it if the manufacturing capacity can handle the extra load, the medication is generally considered to be low-risk in the dosage being tested, and the person has a medical condition that put
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The default should be "it's none of the government's goddamned business what I put into MY OWN BODY", whether that's a drug under development, or recreational intoxicants.
Found the libertarian.
Notice that this is a completely different argument than the one you made in the previous post. The argument in your previous post was that the FDA was doing more harm in slowing drug approval than good in stopping harmful drugs from being marketed. The argument in this post is that the government should not stop harmful drugs from reaching the market, because people should have the right to put harmful drugs in their body.
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"Potential" turns to "a fact" [Re:Abolish the FDA] (Score:3)
Somehow "a potentaily deadly impact" mutated into "it's a fact that the FDA kills Americans" when you cite it.
This is also a ten year old opinion article in a popular business publication catastrophizing about what might happen in the future.
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I'm happy the FDA is thorough. You want to have another batch of Thalidomide babies?
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> I'm happy the FDA is thorough. You want to have another batch of Thalidomide babies?
That's the question. We don't get to choose "perfect".
If you could save 20 million lives* would you accept some thalidomide babies?
Or would you sacrifice 20 million lives to prevent a batch of thalidomide babies?
I would say 600 babies is worth 20 million avoidable deaths. What would you choose?
* the best estimate is deaths caused by delays minus deaths avoided by delays equals 20 million since 1964. A functional FDA
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Yeah, they generally do okay, but they also make stupid decisions like the one to disallow blood donations from people who lived in certain European locations during the 1980s when Mad Cow disease was around. It wasn't until just last June that they finally loosened those restrictions. I was one of the people affected because I had lived there at the time, so for ~30 years I was not allowed to donate in the US. There were no cases of transmission through blood donation ever to back up this restriction.
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He wants faster without regard to safety? (Score:5, Insightful)
So yeah, his was one of several early versions, he patented it so others couldn't use it for 20 years, and this without pointing out that modern optical mice are descendants of the rival and superior dresign out of Xerox by Lyon and improved by Jackson which he did not beat the invention of.
Minimum wage workers and Coronavirus (Score:1)
Go to the Californian dashboard [tableau.com] to view the coronavirus deaths categorized by ethnicity and race. A disproportionately large percentage of Hispanics are succumbing to the coronavirus.
Not an unexpected number, no. In California, Hispanics tend to be over-represented in the low-level jobs, the ones that have no health insurance, don't have sick days and can't work from home. Not at all unexpected that people in these jobs have a higher rate of catching disease and a poorer outcome.
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his was one of several early versions, he patented it so others couldn't use it for 20 years
Wait, what? No. I mean, yes, but then no. Kirsch and two others founded Mouse Systems with their own money [skirsch.com], and their mouse was the one picked up by Sun and used ubiquitously from the SunVME era through literally until the UltraSparc machines, which had normal ball mice. And those might have been Mouse Systems mice too for all I know. But my 3/260 (later upgraded to 4/260) had one of these early optical mice with the reflective aluminum mousing surface. Those mice would also work on a sheet of ordinary whit
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Lyon's orginal was 1980, same year as Kirsch.
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Kirsch's design would always require a special mouse pad too, it could never have worked on arbitrary surfaces. Lyon's system was much more advanced because it could work with arbitrary surfaces - the special mouse pad was only because the early versions needed a lot of reflected light and contrast before better sensors became available.
Completely wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Vaccines are a very low-margin business. You get a shot once or twice (2-20 USD vaccine cost), and then you are immunized for life, or at least for a decade. A treatment for an illness, which does not give you immunity, in an environment were you can be expected to become re-infected with the next variant or even the same strain, is a much more lucrative venture.
Re: Completely wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Not true. Flu vaccine is once a year and many seem to think Covid will be the same.
Big Pharma likes making money, so certainly they considered this and are betting on it. With the number of different Covid vaccines that are being developed, it's clear someone thinks this is a profitable area to invest.
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Well, in the case of Covid-19, Governments paid for the upfront development and large scale trials, based on prior promising research. And maybe even some scaling up of manufacture as well.
Re: Completely wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not true. Flu vaccine is once a year and many seem to think Covid will be the same.
No one seems to think this. COVID is caused by a very particular kind of coronavirus. Immunising against "The Flu" is like saying you want to immunise against "coronavirus", no one is attempting to do that, we're immunising against SARS-CoV-2.
A good example would be the Spanish Flu. The virus was Influenza A H1N1. There's no reason to believe that vaccinating everyone against that virus wouldn't very quickly have wiped it out. Sure we may get sick from something else, but it wouldn't be the Spanish Flu anym
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A well-selected mRNA flu vaccine would be over 90% effective instead of the usual 60%.
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A well-selected mRNA flu vaccine would be over 90% effective instead of the usual 60%.
Maybe. If you can pick the right protein to target; one that does not mutate from year to year.
If you pick the wrong protein, one that has mutated between the virus sample you pick and the virus sample that is spreading in flu season, a mRNA flu vaccine could be 0% effective.
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All flu viruses must have something in common, something that doesn't change because otherwise they wouldn't be grouped together.
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Vaccines are a very low-margin business.
You do however make up for it in volume, especially during a pandemic.
Weird that laypeople aren't gospel (Score:5, Funny)
If there's one thing we learned in 2020, isn't it that only health and science professionals should be opining on COVID "cures"?
But maybe a little zinc, fluvoxamine, and "the light inside" will clear the 'rona right up.
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But maybe a little zinc, fluvoxamine, and "the light inside" will clear the 'rona right up.
*Stares awkwardly at the 2kg of hydroxychloroquine sitting beside me*. F**K!
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That sounds promising... (Score:2)
I think Medium was right to remove his content... (Score:5, Insightful)
If I understand things correctly, he posted on Medium saying "Fluvoxamine should be used to treat Covid because these studies say it works for treating Covid" when in fact the studies he cited did not say anything of the sort (and in fact everything was suggesting that the numbers involved were not enough to draw any conclusions one way or the other from said studies).
Assuming that's true then Medium should absolutely have removed these posts. Telling people that a drug is good for treating a particular condition when the evidence to back up that claim isn't there is definitely not good.
Re: I think Medium was right to remove his content (Score:1, Insightful)
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You can hide behind the snide "you can't force companies to host speech" all you want, the fact of the matter is that in the ecosystem of Web 3.0 where the "Links" section has been replaced with a "Friends [who also use this hosting provider]" tab and topic-sorted discovery portals have been replaced with Google's algorithm, you're siding with the censors and the book-burners.
The reality is what I wrote is legally true, you can’t force these companies to host speech or force them to associate with people. I don’t side with them, I have posted over and over again how I don’t agree with how much power companies have over what used to be public discourse and is now privately owned. The reality is you aren’t going to be able to repeal the first amendment, so the answer is to have the government host their own social media. Then they would be prohibited by law and constitution from acting against established free speech.
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Is Medium under any government mandate to publish content?
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If I understand things correctly, he posted on Medium saying "Fluvoxamine should be used to treat Covid because these studies say it works for treating Covid" when in fact the studies he cited did not say anything of the sort
No, the studies he quote did say something of the sort. They said that initial results looked promising, but larger studies were needed to confirm.
(and in fact everything was suggesting that the numbers involved were not enough to draw any conclusions one way or the other from said studies).
Saying "initial studies show it seems to work, but we need to confirm this with a study of a larger number of patients" is not the same as "nothing of the sort".
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> Telling people that a drug is good for treating a particular condition when the evidence to back up that claim isn't there is definitely not good.
Yes, that's why drug efficacy decisions are never based only on observational studies like the one(s) mentioned here. I work for a major pharmaceutical co. and lesson #1 here is: respect the research process. It's rigorous and formal for damned good reason. There be dragons.
If you want to conclude that a drug has efficacy, the only scientifically accepted
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Assuming that's true then Medium should absolutely have removed these posts
While I agree with this part, I can't agree that Medium should remove his entire posting history.
Does anyone still make a non-optical mouse? (Score:2)
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Happy Earth Day (Score:2)
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There are still mechanical gaming mice out there. I'm not sure why you would want to use one though, because you can instead get a high-performance optical mouse. Even back in the day as it were Microsoft had a laser mouse that would work on most surfaces and was fairly responsive, and I imagine that has been advanced substantially.
The problem with a mechanical mouse is that it has slop. I use a trackball, which with 3-point connection to the ball from below doesn't have that problem. The support points are
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I don't miss the slop, but I kind of miss the mass/momentum characteristics of the rotating ball.
Not that I would give up my optical mouse for that, but I did like that feel. A long as you constantly cleaned the rollers (no thanks).
Optical Mouse Inventor is a stretch (Score:1)
sorry (Score:1)
In response, Medium removed six years of blogs that I'd written about technology and banned me for life. In my appeal, I said there was no evidence that disputed what I said, and Medium never produced any evidence in response.
Sorry, that's how it works now. You can only say what we want you to say, thanks very much.
Billionaire boys (Score:2)
Billionaire boys always need new toys.