Pfizer is testing a pill that, if successful, could cure Covid-19 (opens in new tab)

> Get CO2 down to 450 ppm

And buildings will be much more pleasant. It's possible that people would be smarter, too (as opposed to being shut up in a badly ventilated conference room for an hour or two).

There are costs, as heat or/AC will have to run more to keep the temperature in the right range.

I assume just installing CO2 scrubbers would have no benefit though, since the CO2 level is just a proxy for how much the air is recirculating.

Yes. Or, spend less time inside. That we spend so much time inside is a unique feature of our time, and a very bad one.

Regardless of air or sunshine (which are both extremely important to our physical health), not being outside makes us unhappy. People who work outside often sing while working; when was the last time you heard someone sing in an office.

People in not too distant future will likely view with envy the readily available fresh air we currently have. Given that in a century or two the CO2 concentration in outside air may reach the 'stuffy classroom' level[1].

Imagine that, having to live and work in oxygenated habitats on our home planet.

https://www.acer-acre.ca/resources/climate-change-in-context...

That's cool and makes total sense as a measure of how "ventilated" a room is, though I'm sure it has its limits.

I've been wondering about this for a while, do you have a reference?

Do you know how humidity affects transmission?

Pre-pandemic I used to go indoor bouldering where there tends to be a lot of chalk in the air and I was curious how that affects transmission. Couldn't decide if the dryer air meant less transmission, or the larger particles meant more maybe. Couldn't find anything about it.

In case anyone is looking for a citation, here’s a recent peer reviewed study of a Taiwan university and how increasing ventilation greatly reduced tuberculosis infections.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ina.12639

Any evidence for this?

Any source for this claim? (I kind of trust you, just wondering if you have a specific source to offer)

> Borrowed from Yiddish שטום‎ (shtum, “mute, dumb, voiceless”), from Middle High German stum, from Old High German stum. Cognate with German stumm, Dutch stom, Swedish stum. [1]

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shtum#English

Fairly common in UK English, particularly in London which has long-term Jewish community.

It's slangy and self-consciously borrowed, like 'schlep' or 'schmuck' in New York English.

Ahhhhh, I had to look at the byline carefully. This article is syndicated from the The Telegraph.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...

Which explains the British idiom in a Anglo paper in a bilingual city in Canada. (Bonjour-Hi!)

I've never heard of it either. Grew up in the midwest, lived on the west coast.

I guess you could say we've been keeping schtum about it.

I don't think the other reply answered the question. Google trends show 10x as many queries from the UK than US for "schtum". So I would guess your intuition is correct.

It's a perfectly cromulent word.

Common in the wider Jewish community in the UK. Universally understood now by most british people. In widespread use. Was in Monty Python, back in the 70s.

I'm a non-native English speaker and has heard it used many times. But since I'm Swedish it's also instantly understandable for me and so easier to remember maybe.

In fact, Biontech, the actual company behing the "Pfizer" vaccine was doing cancer research with mRNA and switched to vaccine development "to help out" because they realized that their tech could be used in this way too.

There is the Hygiene Hypothesis, which is the reverse: Decreased exposure to some pathogens, especially when young, can make the immune system overly sensitive and thereby increase the risk of atopic and autoimmune disorders.

A lot of people wonder this first part and the answer is definitively no because immune systems generally don’t work that way. It’s (mostly) not something general purpose like a bicep. Getting sick with one diseases mostly does very little for you with most other diseases.

You can lift weights at the gym and build your arm muscles, then use those muscles to lift or push other things more effectively, because muscles are general purpose tools.

Most of your immune system is more like a key. It’s specific to one thing. There are some exceptions but overall the fewer viruses you encounter the better.

As for the exercise: yes. There’s already preliminary evidence that exercise is highly coordinated with covid outcomes.

Are people still using lots of hand sanitizer? Why?

My infant daughter just wrapped up a run of about three or so weeks of “a cold.”

After the second week, a handful of Covid tests, and one fever, we took her to the doctor and asked why this cold was lasting so long.

Our pediatrician was like “not cold, colds. She probably had 3-4 viruses back-to-back.”

I had no idea this was a thing - he called them “daycare viruses.”

"The most commonly implicated virus [in the common cold] is a rhinovirus (30–80%). Other commonly implicated viruses include human coronaviruses (≈ 15%), influenza viruses (10–15%), adenoviruses (5%)." [1]

So yeah, this wouldn't be a cure for common cold. Maybe it could be a pill people could take with a 10-20% chance of curing it, if they're lucky.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold#Viruses

200 pills then

Not disagreeing, but a downside of isolation turns out to have been that, now we are effectively Covid free here in Melbourne, hospitals are filling up due to (sometimes serious) other diseases, including cancer, that people left untreated during the various lockdowns.

This is leading to very long ambulance waits at hospital entrances and lead to at least one death when an ambulance wasn’t available. (Sorry that I don’t have time to find a link right now)

To be clear I fully support the government action in Victoria, life is pretty much back to normal here, and looking overseas it seems hard to believe how fortunate we are, but it was not without unexpected consequences.

Probably staying at home also reduced traffic accidents and other mobility related deaths.

Vaccines work because they keep the immune system active and primed to recognise the disease being vaccinated against.

> we also need to get ill to keep our immune system active and healthy.

This... is exactly what (many) vaccines do.

Viruses (or bacteria) don't "evolve to bypass" vaccines, antibiotics, or anything else. They generally have a pretty constant mutation rate, the vast majority of which are deleterious.

The more people that have a virus, the more copies are out there mutating, and the more mutations (in total) you'll see.

If you introduce negative pressure, like a vaccine or antibiotics, some of those mutations that were previously deleterious will turn out to be a net benefit. E.g: A thicker cell wall in bacteria makes it harder to absorb nutrients, but also increases the dose of antibiotic it can survive. These mutations happen all the time by chance, but in the absence of the vaccine/antibiotics, they are less fit and will tend to die off.

A vaccine that eliminates a virus is likely to result in less infections. Less infections means less mutations means less chance for a dangerous variant. If some variants do evolve that escape the vaccine, odds are good that they will be less dangerous than the original, not more.

Flip it around as well. Take for example Zika. When passed from mother to unborn it can cause various brain abnormalities. But perhaps eons ago a virus is what made homo sapiens more intelligent. If a virus can mangle the brain it can also nudge it in a positive direction.

Finally, human DNA is peppered with traces of viruses.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/virus-genes-hu...

Don't think it works like that. Nothing is stopping other viruses from infecting you while you are infected.

One worry is that if a vaccine allows for transmission but doesn't generate anything when it comes to effects from the virus, it'll let the virus evolve more dangerous mutations without becoming an issue. This could be potentially dangerous to people who are unvaccinated or if it manages to get past the vaccine. I'm probably pretty in favor of keeping the common cold as it's never killed anyone and helps train the immune system

Considering the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic occurred in a less populated world not connected by robust air travel networks and still managed to spread to every country in roughly the same timeframe would indicate that neither total population nor air travel are variables in the spread.

The day the US stops air travel, many (myself included) will understand the severity of a proposed pandemic.

Since domestic air travel continued unabated and without direct testing to board a flight, it’s not hard to see how many people got the idea that this pandemic wasn’t all that serious.

Dr Fauci never once suggested it - to the best of my knowledge.

It is also the very first time we are doing it.

Maybe not THAT bad.

If it works, not very well. There were some very small underpowered studies that showed promise. Then large RCTs were done and it didn’t work. Brazil would certainly not be in the situation it’s in right now if ivermectin cured covid.

https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/ivermectin-why-potential-c...

It's weird how often on threads about covid, an entirely new HN account turns up to extol the virtues of Ivermectin. I'd say the chances of that being a coincidence are estimated to be 1 in 85 trillion.

Looks like Ivermectin has generated a lot of buzz that many are self medicating. The first link that google throws up when searching for Ivermectin is the FDA page "Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19" https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-shoul...

Had discussions on this with our close friends who work as doctors at the covid front line (emergency & intense care unit) in Switzerland's biggest hospital (since wife is a doctor herself we know a lot of them).

The feedback? Meh, provably doesn't work in regular doses, +-works in lab culture when dosage is 1000x the regular one with god knows what side effects, and thus no doctor here uses it. Its not some emotional dismissal, but deep study of available research by top medical virology experts in a country which has more money to spend than any other on this, and plenty of this medicine if its proved working. They discuss & evaluate daily all available information, and Ivermectin simply doesn't pass as anything even remotely working.

Now I am far from virology expert myself, but I don't mind listening to massive group of experts. I've seen some people propagating this drug, presumably in good faith. But from the outside it looks exactly like another conspiracy theory when you can't discuss with people about simple facts. All this because of some web page, youtube channel etc going mental in one single direction, about one 'expert' who discovered truth that governments and pharma corporations don't want you to know

> also proven very effective against preventing and treating sars-cov-2 virus in vivo

No. India and Brazil are giving Ivermectin liberally. See how good they're doing

> is estimated to be 1 in 85 trillion (p = 0.000000000000012).

Their estimation is BS. Or better, it's the famous "CICO" (crap in, crap out) statistics

"Oh but it won the Nobel prize". Yes and John Voigt won an Oscar, doesn't mean his performance in Anaconda was up to snuff

There's no evidence that it works. The studies used concentrations that were roughly 1000x a regular human dosage.

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/ivermectin-is-the-new-hydro...

Are you Brazilian?

OPs point is that because of covid-19 we quickly threw trillions (?) of dollars at the problem, and without covid-19 the funding/attention/determination/man-power etc would be much less.

Yes, but many of new therapies, such as mRNA vaccines, were slow to receive approval, and have been sitting on the drawing board for a decade

> no vaccine that would target at least a significant amount of strains is possible at the moment.

Why not? What are the limits of multivalent vaccines?

I've heard the claim that one of the "common cold" corona viruses, HCoV-OC43, was actually a nasty former pandemic virus (the so-called "Russian Flu" of 1889-1890, which is estimated to have killed about 1 million people).

Ok, but curing 1/4 of the common cold is still a big step. (Coronaviruses cause about 1/4 of "common cold" cases now.)

When I'm in charge of some software platform that I know has reliability or security problems that no one is willing to prioritize, I have a foolproof strategy. One, write down the list of biggest problems to solve. Two, wait for an inevitable disaster. Three, when leadership is in a panic I present my list and ask for top priority.

A lot of stuff magically happens when there is absolutely no other alternative. See – all the companies that weren't bankrupted by employees working from home even though for years executives have said that would be the case.

The problem is really of incentives and risk aversion. When there's a tough decision to make without enough clarity on the outcome, people will always prefer the status quo.

The terrifying truth is that we have no idea what the future holds and what the long-term result will be of our actions.

Since the future and the result of our actions is uncertain, society is basically executing a search algorithm. This covid crisis has focussed society on finding a local optimum. Though this focussed search will only get us so far. To find a better _global_ optimum, we need a lot of random, seemingly counterproductive search.

Don't get me wrong, I strongly dislike a lot about the current state of society. But I think it's irrational to think that we can predict what will be useful in a hundred years.

It's also a question of return on investment (not necessarily in the monetary sense). Due to the high costs of the pandemic, we've also deployed lots of resources to combat it. But that doesn't imply those resources wouldn't create more value for humanity if they weren't redirected.

Keep in mind that if the pandemic results in extermination of the common cold, in the alternative world without a pandemic we would most likely also achieve it, just slower. It isn't a matter of now or never.

Sure, all you need is a man behind a microphone to make a comment like "First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of ____". Make it a national interest, and have the "people" behind it. However, I don't think you could unite the "people" behind anything anymore. Half will be for it, the other half will be against it just because the other half want it.

I'm not sure it's an indictment of our pre-2020 society that we didn't try to cure the common cold sooner. Imagine it costs $20 billion to have a 90% shot at coming up with a cure. You might spend a ton of money and come up with a cure, but it's also possible that you'd spend all that money (which could have been spent on more immediate/important issues) and end up with nothing.

The situation is different when COVID is a catalyst because we are already spending $19 billion (for example) on a COVID cure, and along the way we have learned that if we spend another $1 billion there's a 90% chance we'll cure the common cold.

Having been forced into this situation, it makes sense to go the last mile. That doesn't mean the whole trip would have been clearly worthwhile from the start.

Wouldn't it be the reverse? If we're killing off the viruses that cause dangerous symptoms, wouldn't there be selective pressure towards less dangerous symptoms?

Those were already well underway.

Protease inhibitors have more of a track record in humans than mRNA, having been used widely as a treatment for HIV. Maybe we're more comfortable with our understanding of any possible long term side effects?

Yeah apparently BioNTech is working on a mRna vaccine for cancer

There is incentive to not cure mild diseases because more money can be made on palliatives.

Not when you're spending time not at school on the sofa or in bed feeling miserable and unable to do anything.

UK gave the world its traditional breakfast, USA gave the world the all-day breakfast

Can't be an English breakfast, there were no beans nor tomatoes

But baked beans and black pudding aren't listed in the protocol :(

So, I'm getting the feeling that you might not be a regular at Waffle House.

Just this morning I probably had 8oz of hash browns, three strips of bacon, an egg and half a pancake with butter. Plus a mocha frap.

Granted, I'm medically prescribed a high fat diet. But there are people who eat that way, sometimes because they work hard and are big guys, so 2000 calories a day would be a starvation diet.

Yes it's a big breakfast but if a normal diet is 2000-2500 calories per day, 820 for 1 meal doesn't seem that weird.

I think it's not so much the total calories, but the sheer amount of fat. That is, if we send the pill down your GI tract with 1/4 of grease, will it still work?

Presumably their "high-fat" condition has to be fattier than any reasonable person would eat on a regular basis, so that it establishes a useful upper bound. If it was just a couple eggs and hash browns, then finding it's still effective wouldn't be useful because some people eat fattier breakfasts than that.

That is a totally normal amount of food and drink for an active adult male to consume in a 20 minute meal. That said I do wonder if they should adjust the prescribed diet for people with different calorie requirements.

Two minutes to eat an egg or strip of bacon doesn't seem impossible.

That’s not much at all, though I cut the hash browns and up the eggs and bacon.

when i was 20, “monday”.

Farm and weekend breakfasts are like this, and standard to get at breakfast places in the US. I've had similar at a hotel in Amsterdam, honestly (though it was a buffet). It isn't really that much food or calories as long as you are hungry when it is served.

> what is this supposed to represent?

America.

Even ignoring the calories that’s a huge volume of food to eat in 20 minutes. I legitimately couldn’t eat two pieces of toast and drink 8oz of milk that quickly without getting sick.

Bacon more than 50 cal.

That's breakfast of champions right there, what we all wold like to think we could get away with eating ...

That's about a third of the daily calorie allowance for the average adult. Doesn't sound all that extreme.

This looks like a small snack. Swap the milk out for almond milk tho.

Then there's Alexander Shulgin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PiHKAL

This guy CRISPR'd himself.. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/diy-dna-hacks-wounds-take-lo...

AFAIK a lot of drugs can be fairly assumed to be mostly safe (aka won't kill you), although they may have long-term/non-lethal effects. So testing your own drugs wouldn't be creating that much corpses as long as you know what you're doing.

Hey, it worked for Albert Hofmann!

look I'm not going to sit here and argue with some random person on the internet (and fwiw I'm atheist) I was literally in your disbelieving shoes and I still don't know how to convince people or if I even want to waste the effort trying

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7261036/figure/...

just sit back for a moment and consider the possibility you are being lied to not by consipiracy but rather much easier apathy and ivermectin actually has proven antiviral properties that actually do something, just not specifically targeted to covid19 so it's not a "miracle" by any means

I was not just sick with covid, I was at death's door. Steroids were not doing anything/enough and pneumonia/clots were destroying my lungs. This was very early on in the pandemic and there were no treatments available.

Again, I've got nothing to prove, I don't expect people are going to listen, I'm just putting this on the record. Something's up with this being not just dismissed but buried.

And it's not like Ivermectin wasn't studied. In randomized control trials and was found to be probably ineffective. Still being studied by various people. But also likely that even if it were effective the doses required would be too toxic for humans. So not a wise thing to spread around as "health advice" and presumably why Facebook etc have clamped down on this.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_drug_repurposing_rese...

Also if it worked, I'm pretty sure Merck (the creator of Ivermectin) would be all over selling it for that purpose.

ivmmeta probably has all the data you want

It's virtually impossible overdose or have bad effects from ivermectin, it's not that HCQ nonsense. Ivermectin is even given to people to self-dose in countries for it's original anti-parasitic purpose without fear of them using too much.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7261036/figure/...

A few of the more highly touted studies I read even showed that early use of hcq by mildly sick individuals at home had better outcomes when compared against already hospitalized people who were already very ill sick with covid, regardless of their later treatment. But when larger studies were done that actually tried to compare apples-to-apples, they didn't show much effect. I agree, that is an odd thing to call a "culture war", unless he meant science against wishful thinking? And hcq perhaps may even have some effect, but just not one worth the cost of the drug and the risk from missing out on better treatments that are available.

I wonder why OP wants to believe in hcq, if they'd like to respond?

Worse than innefective; some studies have found that the HCQ arm fared worse than placebo.

Not to mention the more fantastical misuses out there, such as nebulizing it straight into the lungs.

perhaps you should take a look at the link; there is even a nice meta analysis https://hcqmeta.com/

And in that vein, Trump was at one point taking hydroxychloroquine, which sure did not prevent him from ending up in the hospital on oxygen.

Ah, that also explains why when I looked at the top of the page to find which website/newspaper it is my attention was drawn to the two imposing CTAs (manage subscriptions and signup).

Also, the video covers up some parts of the text, which is the reason I want to close it.

I wonder what the metabolic argument is (if any). Maybe it's something else. Really interesting regardless -- anyone know why there's this restriction?

Might be reporter's paraphrase of "healthy adults" i.e. not obese, hypertensive, no regular/heavy alcohol or drug use, no chronic conditions, etc.

From what I have been reading, it’s saved the lives of everybody who it’s been given to so far but I haven’t seen much coverage of it outside of the stock reports.

Just struck me as odd that it’s bogged down in more testing when it seems to have a near perfect record. Blows my mind that India and Brazil aren’t begging for it considering the scope of their current situations.

After following it for the last year, suddenly seeing the Pfizer option out of nowhere just struck me as odd.

They all went through at least phase III, even Russia's Sputnik vaccine (even though they announced it as a success before they had their phase III completed).

Not sure why the downvotes, it's a legitimate question. So there's a phase to see if there are huge side-effects in humans, then a phase to see what dosage to use for effectiveness, then a larger (tens of thousands) phase to get enough data to justify using it on millions of people. I think there are normally more phases after that when you're not in a pandemic.

Which vaccine?

N=1 but I already stopped a cold that seemed to be developing this past weekend. Fairly harmless to try at the onset of feeling something starting.

Oh for sure they're doing exactly what they should do, but America will likely be approaching vaccine-induced herd immunity by the time the FDA begins to consider the results of these trials.

It may have a bigger impact in other nations, but hopefully they'll have ramped up their vaccine programmes in the next 6 months.

Oh wow schtum is German? I just assumed it was English. You learn something new every day. Ersatz is a good one, I gotta use that. Thanks for sharing :)