Well, you're absolutely right. Something that seems promising in vitro is not always useful in vivo. A drug that works great on a cell culture may never even reach the cells in question when applied to a living body, which is basically a giant maze.

However, that's not what I meant. Look at those links I posted again. Many trials have failed to post any results at all, even over a year after their completion. Not positive, not negative. Nothing. No data. That's so frustrating to see.


Isn't there anything that can be done in terms of surveillance and early treatment before they become critically hypoxic?


That's the wrong way of thinking about things. If there's no outreach at all, then people will become hostile and angry, simply because their bread and circuses are gone and they have no valid explanation for why this is the case, other than "there's a spooky pneumonia around".

I have seen so many instances where people go over the topic of COVID-19 death certificates, hear that a PE, stroke, or myocardial infarction killed someone who was sick with COVID-19, and then angrily grumble something about how hospitals are inflating COVID-19 numbers by designating deaths from infarcts as COVID deaths. I've spoken with a nurse who I see on my commute periodically, and he told me about a COVID-19 patient he saw who needed both her legs to be amputated from the knees down because of clots. People don't even comprehend the notion of an airborne virus that causes aggressive coagulopathy that can progress to disseminated intravascular coagulation. It does not compute.

I know they're trying to prevent a panic, but at this stage, more information is better. It has to be. What's going to fill the void if no one comes forward with answers? Long rants filled with angry and paranoid speculation? Mass unrest?


It is good to hear that the protocols for the ventilators have been adjusted and that mortality is dropping. Perhaps I came off as a little hyperbolic about them. I will have to correct that.

See? It's hard even for me, someone digging relentlessly into all this, to get up-to-date information on how patients are responding to adjustments in the protocols. Imagine the kind of dread and desperation for good-quality answers that the public must feel. Imagine how someone whose loved one is dying in the hospital feels. They don't know anything at all.

Back in February of 2020, I realized there was a shortage of PPE and equipment for healthcare workers that was about to make the following weeks and months into a living hell. I tried emailing HHS and the CDC about my concerns over supply shortages, but they never got back to me. Then, there were indeed shortages.

What we have is a crisis of trust. Public officials have done everything in their power to make millions of people very distrustful of them. The constant vacillation is appalling. First, masks are derided as useless, and travel bans are called racist. Then, they're mandatory; put these diapers on your face and cancel your travel plans. First, COVID is mostly transmitted by touch surfaces, then they say droplets, then they say aerosols. Two weeks to slow the spread and then it'll all be over, but it's actually two years and it's still going. The whole point of the stimulus checks was essentially to keep Wall Street afloat in the midst of an ongoing economic downturn due to the pandemic log-jamming just-in-time logistics, but we're told that this is to help people back up on their feet. Meanwhile, trillions of dollars were transferred from working-class people to the very rich.

Everything that they have done seems almost calculated to induce existential dread. People are demanding answers, but are receiving pepper spray and a truncheon to the face instead. Democracies have transformed, almost overnight, into brutal authoritarian hells. Everyone in the Anglosphere is watching Australia with open-mouthed horror and wondering if we're next.

How many people have lost their jobs over this? How many have slit their wrists in the bathtub or ODed on the sofa because they couldn't take it anymore?

Maybe if people hadn't been lied to and had their trust abused so flagrantly, we wouldn't be in this mess. People don't like to be turned into outcasts and pariahs in our own damn countries.


Very disappointing. I would have hoped that there would be something even better than dexamethasone for treating COVID-19 hyperinflammation by now.

A lot of people don't realize that antivirals can range from mildly toxic, like Ivermectin, to highly toxic and injurious to the liver and/or kidneys, like Kaletra and Remdesivir. Antivirals generally work by inhibiting the cellular machinery that viruses hijack to make their proteins. However, our own bodies need that machinery to express our own genes, too.

These patients' own bodies are killing them. It's not even really the virus itself; it's a SARS-like over-exuberant immune response, like carpet bombing an entire city with B-52s to kill a few guerrillas. Everything is a balancing act when one proposes to suppress the immune system. Too much suppression, and the patient ends up with co-infections, as was seen in India when the heavy use of steroids led to mucormycosis. Disabling the armaments of phagocytes, suppressing DAMPs, and preventing the activity of inflammatory transcription factors like NF-kB, AP-1 and STAT is not always beneficial.

Some inflammation is good, just not the crazy inflammation seen in COVID-19.


I am aware of the reports of lessened morbidity and mortality. What I'm worried about is ADE and the possibility that mortality from vaccine-related complications might eclipse any benefit over time, thus rendering the short-term benefits worthless. Yes, you're right in that quality, well-designed trials that produce good data are important, absolutely. However, all we have so far is a limited slice of time. We can make predictions, but we don't quite know what this picture will look like a year from now.

I keep hearing reports that adverse effects from the vaccines are being suppressed and kept hush-hush. Reports to the VAERS system are not being filled out, and even then, with the limited data available, the adverse events from COVID-19 vaccines seem to greatly outstrip vaccines for other diseases in previous years. The anecdotal reports are appalling. One news station asked people what their experiences were with COVID-19, and if they'd lost family from the virus. They instead got replies from hundreds of people claiming their family members were injured by the vaccines.

Lots and lots of people are very scared.