The title belies the truth that those doses of hydroxychloroquine were and are still not useless. It is used to treat Lupus and other conditions. The stockpiling caused prices at one point to nearly double and created shortage for people with disabilities. This needs to be considered beyond the obvious material waste. How many people need to be hurt before accountability is finally laid upon the leadership of this nation?
Huge amounts of the hydroxychloroquine debacle were dubious-- public statements about efficacy, broken early trials, etc.
But: in March, it was one of very few leads on a treatment. Building some degree of a strategic stockpile and ensuring that manufacturing was increased made sense, even if it was a long shot. It's unfortunate that this had a negative effect upon people, but if there had been efficacy having that stockpile would have been extremely beneficial.
Wrong mainstream news outlet. The stupid conspiracy theory about Trump pushing hydroxychloroquine because he owned shares in its manufacturer was mostly the New York Times' doing. (This lead to the rather unusual spectacle of Snopes debunking a nonsensical online conspiracy theory pushed by the NYT... and there was plenty wrong with it, from the utterly miniscule size of Trump's indirect shareholding via a mutual fund to the low amount of money to be made from it to the fact that apparently that company was no longer selling it in the US anyway, some of which the NYT were clearly aware of.)
They're very different contexts. Gilead doesn't have such a large stockpile or production capability for Remdesivir. Everything Gilead had was turned over to the government.
From May 3rd:
"Gilead CEO says remdesivir will be available to patients this week: ‘We’ve donated the entire supply’"
"Gilead expects to produce more than 140,000 rounds of its 10-day treatment regimen by the end of May and anticipates it can make 1 million rounds by the end of this year."
Did they stockpile PPE? It's proven effective for this pandemic and many other situations; however the feds let the stockpile dwindle for no good reason.
It's not, nobody is changing their mind. There were some efforts to reserve masks for front line medical workers. That muddied the issue, but masks protect you from spreading a sickness you may now know you have and provide a minimal amount of protection from catching covid-19.
By whom do you think they were always recommended? Because that absolutely hasn't been true for the WHO and CDC, as the links I already gave you show. The WHO has changed its position on masks, and has been in conflict with the CDC on the same topic.
That video you linked to doesn't in any way disagree with anything I've said, nor rebut the point. In fact it supports it. It's just a video of Anthony Fauci talking about why he changed his position on masks: without admitting to it directly, he 'explains' that he wanted to ensure medical workers had access to them. But he is on record as having recommended against masks in the past. Here's Snopes saying so:
In the March 2020 clip, Fauci said: “Right now in the United States people SHOULD NOT BE walking around with masks … You should think of healthcare providers who are needing them and the people who are ill.” (my caps)
He also acknowledged that masks were initially NOT RECOMMENDED to the general public so that first responders wouldn’t feel the strain of a shortage of PPE. (my caps)
Now many countries have introduced face mask requirements (which is dumb, but clearly a change of position).
Not only has mask advice changed but it's changed for dumb reasons: there's no scientific evidence masks work to stop SARS-CoV-2 transmission, especially not the cloth masks being actually deployed. This article investigates what's really known about this tactic:
It was never a lead. The first study pushing it was immediately recognized as broken. No better evidence ever came along. No plausible mechanism of action was proposed.
Maybe this was clear to some, but lots of people thought it worthwhile to fund trials.
To me 63M doses of a cheap drug sounds like a really small bet. We should be willing to make lots of them, on the slightest hope, knowing that most will be wasted. Get 50 experts and fund anything which gets 2 votes.
A policy of funding a domestic trial of anything which anyone else is trying anywhere in the world wouldn't be crazy, actually. We're not trying to only make safe bets; the cost of not having a solution is 1000 deaths a day.
> A policy of funding a domestic trial of anything which anyone else is trying anywhere in the world wouldn't be crazy, actually.
It seems rather crazy to me, but perhaps more importantly, it is a strategy that - implemented literally - would result in the US leadership being very easily led by others "anywhere in the world" in matters of drug research, a situation which would be very amenable to manipulation for profit.
That's obviously wrong. We want the US leadership to be very easily led by Fox News personalities and whatever is popping on Twitter.
I think the issue was, as another commenter stated, it has current uses for patients and the price almost doubled. So people had shortages or couldnt afford needed medicine. because of a (apparently) dubious study
Hopefully not too many people did without needed medicine.
Probably there will be some suffering relating to stockpiling of steroids (dexamethasone, methylprednisolone), that we're now learning -do- work in the severely ill, too.
Sure, that's bad. There's no point spending money chasing existing stock of the drug within the country, if it's useful it will all get used anyway.
But a $100M or whatever check to ramp up production, or to buy wholesale stock from elsewhere, that would have been worth writing on day 1. Even on extremely flimsy evidence, given the huge daily costs of this thing. Run the careful trials at the same time as building a huge factory which you probably won't need.
The issue im presenting is they are buying them to be prepared to treat Americans IF it worked. But because they bought so many so quickly, it put Americans in a position where they weren't able to have medicine they needed. The government has a responsibility to balance current needs with possible immeidate future needs, it doesnt seem like they did.
It would be interesting to understand better how shortages came about. Was there enough time for a global price rise to have filtered through to retail customers?
Or was there enough retail panic-buying to generate shortages? If everybody with a prescription tried to buy 3 months worth, because they are scared of shortages, then I bet there would be shortages. (Isn't that exactly what happened with toilet paper?)
I suspect it was panic buying that drove prices up. You can't go and just buy 63M doses on the market as there isn't that much lying around normally - it was probably produced to order. I know Novartis donated 30M pills and was offering to supply 130M.
That's simply not true. There are conflicting reports to this day. It has unfortunately become politicised to the point we will never know.
Even if it does no good, there was reason to think it may. It's not proper to criticize a decision based on information that was not available when it was made, and that's all that's happening now.
There's so much of this from armchair experts. Unfortunately, very few of them will ever get out there and try their hand at making deliberate decisions under limited information.
Try cross-country sailplane flying. Try investing in the stock market. Go on a long sailing trip with no one to make decisions for you. Do some competitive multiplayer gaming. Try to be your very best at an activity that requires making the best possible decision based on uncertain information, adapting as that information changes and owning your mistakes.
Things look completely different when the outcome is known, when you see it on video afterwards. You need to have been in such a situation yourself to know, to have seen with your own eyes the same situation with and without the benefit of hindsight. It's startling. Just having an IQ of 120 isn't enough to appreciate this.
I would love to get the answer to whether hydroxychloroquine reduces the severity of Covid19 when given during the earliest stages of the disease. It's sad that we may now never get a good enough controlled trial that settles the question. It's a disgrace when the science is politicized to such a degree.
> It has unfortunately become politicised to the point we will never know.
It's not politicised outside of the US. It was known to be junk science before Trump picked up on it. There is still some proper science to be done in clearly disproving all the junk claims, and don't worry, it will be done. But proper science takes time.
People outside the USA do have strong opinions about Trump for better or worse.
The Lancet is a medical journal edited by a British guy who posts strongly left wing and anti-Trump stuff to Twitter all the time. The Lancet published a paper claiming HCQ was dangerous that fell apart immediately, and should never have been accepted at all (e.g. it claimed to be based on the medical records of hundreds of hospitals and something like 90% of all US COVID cases, which is implausible).
Why did such a terrible paper get published? Probably because it appeared to strike a blow against Trump's credibility which the Lancet's editor so desperately wanted. In the end it blew up in his face, though.
> People outside the USA do have strong opinions about Trump for better or worse.
Yes, and people are saying "Trump is an idiot, and he's promoting something that doesn't work". I haven't seen people argue that "Trump is an idiot, therefore HCQ cannot work" (nor the opposite).
> Probably because it appeared to strike a blow against Trump's credibility which the Lancet's editor so desperately wanted.
That sounds like it might be a good point, I'm not familiar enough with the details, and especially not with the editor's motivations.
?? We had computational and in vitro studies showing significant efficacy against SARS-CoV-2 at attainable serum concentrations, and had seen efficacy of HCQ against other viruses in humans. Obviously in vitro data is not the same as efficacy in people, but positive, high quality in vitro data is incompatible with "no plausible mechanism of action."
Early human research was tainted by being not randomized and tainted by clinician opinions of efficacy, which kept us from knowing for sure for quite some time that what worked in the petri dish didn't work in humans.
> No better evidence ever came along.
Yup, which is why we have largely abandoned the idea...
>The first study pushing it was immediately recognized as broken.
I think you are probably thinking of the first Raoult study but there was a lot of history before then including plausible mechanisms and even somewhat positive double blind trials done in Wuhan in February. It's still used in places like Thailand where they have sane policy and basically no more local transmission.
there have been efficacy all along against lupus/etc. Yet ephemeral unproven chance of efficacy against coronavirus was chosen over well known benefit for the already suffering people. That looks extremely illogical and kind of cruel to me. Not surprising though given that it isn't logic nor compassion that drives the government actions these days.
Unproven chance of reducing mortality and reducing overload on critical health care system was chosen against well known disease management with multiple alternative drugs.
Not that even this was intended, but it's unsurprising that efforts to stockpile and allocate supplies don't work perfectly.
Central Asian countries, Uzbekistan in particular uses chloroquine (not hydroxy) to treat Covid patients. The official sources are highly unreliable, but overall the death rate is very low, even if you multiply it by 100.
Not just that. People in CA with lupus (husband of a coworker) were told (by Kaiser) they would no longer be able to get the drug, which is very important to their health. Really disgusting how this whole thing played out.
I have an immediate family member with rheumatoid arthritis who struggled to fill their prescription through Kaiser because of this as well. It caused a lot of stress in my family. If they were unable to fill their prescription and had complications as a result, they may have needed to go to the hospital, which is not something you want to in the middle of a pandemic when you have an autoimmune disease...
OT: Does anyone know of a good way to find out what a drug will cost at a Kaiser pharmacy on a Kaiser insurance plan?
I've got Kaiser and the pharmacy is unable (or unwilling) to tell me, given a drug, dosage, quantity, and my Kaiser ID how much it will cost unless I actually try to have the prescription filled there.
For some drugs, Kaiser is the way to go. Lipitor, e.g., is free.
For some, taking the prescription elsewhere and using a GoodRx coupon instead of insurance is better. E.g., irbesartan is $46 for 90 days mail order via Kaiser (mail order is cheaper than in-person), but only $22-31 at several other well known pharmacies with a GoodRx coupon.
I've heard that if you get a printed prescription from your Kaiser doctor, instead of having the doctor send the prescription electronically to a pharmacy, you can take the printed prescription and your Kaiser card to the Kaiser pharmacy and then they will tell you what it would cost without you having to actually have it filled to find that out, but I've not had a chance to try this to see if it is true.
HR reports to me and my HR person is very good and uses Kaiser a lot for expensive meds. She's never found a way to do what you want, either for herself or for our employees.
And there are mechanisms for getting meds back into the pharma distribution system. Some small wholesalers specialize in stock from failed pharmacies, and even from fire sales.
The Twitter character limit prohibits going in depth. That is the opposite of what I am looking for. Also, the lack of threading discourages having branches of discussion for the lesser important points.
Are they actually useless? I recall there was substantial controversy around studies not specifically pairing Hydroxychloroquine along with Zinc, which is needed for it to be effective. I think https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.02.20080036v... was one of the few studies that specifically incorporated zinc. Does anyone know where that line of scientific study ended up?
Yes they have, from the onset. It was only considered BECAUSE there was a plausible mechanism.
HCQ is able to transport zinc ions across cell boundaries, which is critical to getting zinc bioavailable within a cell. Zinc disrupts the viral RNA copying which is part of the replication process. So zinc + HCQ should slow down the progression of the disease by decreasing viral load.
Notably most studies did not pair HCQ with zinc, and most focused on near-terminal patients for which slowing down viral replication would be too little, too late.
If I get Covid19 I plan to request that treatment. I'll doctor shop if need be. OTOH I think I already had it back in early March, but nobody really wants to test for it.
The AAPS, a non-profit organisation based in Tucson, Arizona, has a "few thousand" members, according to executive director Jane Orient. It opposes mandatory vaccination, previously waged a campaign against healthcare reforms introduced by former President Barack Obama, and has been pushing back against state restrictions on use of hydroxychloroquine as a preventive therapy for the coronavirus.
Hoarding? It is available in the US by prescription only. The only hoarding that could occur is by the people best qualified to control its use - medical professionals. The government screwed that up too by trying to prevent them from prescribing the medication unless the government approved. The artificial shortage of this drug came from clueless politicians and media promoting its unproven effectiveness causing an unnecessary spike in demand.
and the government started consuming supplies, and doctors started prescribing it in bulk for friends and family who had no need.
Meanwhile people who did actually need it because, you know, actual reasons, suddenly found that there was none available anywhere.
So large groups of people were buying up the supply, without any actual need for themselves. That's hoarding. It's even worse though, because they can't return those drugs, so yay!
Something good could still come out of this. The gov't should "donate" these doses to millions of lupus and RA patients. But nah, that'd be considered socialism.... /s
The US is doing something similar with vaccine candidates. Kickstarting massive production before the trials complete so that if it works the doses are ready to go.
BARDA is awarding grants like $483 million to Moderna to start manufacturing even if the vaccine is never approved.
It may be totally appropriate for the government to make multi-billion dollar speculative investments in therapies that could help us more quickly restart the economy, the closing of which is costing trillions of dollars.
These investments, like all central planning approaches, will distort the free market and likely cause a misallocation of resources. For example more work on COVID therapies at the expense of cancer therapies which could ultimately lead to more deaths overall. But the cost of the shutdown dwarfs all of that, so basically anything that could expedite full reopening is worth the risk.
When disaster preparedness pays off everyone feels great. When disaster preparedness that doesn’t pay off is ridiculed as wasted investment, we get situations like we had with the National Stockpile, and what happened in CA with their disbanded disaster response field hospitals.
We need to accept the government wasting money in disaster preparedness if we want to ever actually be prepared. Otherwise it’s like complaining about the insurance premium because the house didn’t burn down.
We're also making hundreds of millions of doses of vaccines that may not work just like HCQ. Is that dumb? I certainly don't think so. It's a fast moving situation and if something MAY show promise, it makes sense to obtain a ton of it.
It’s better to have a stockpile of things that might work than to not have a stockpile of something if it’s revealed to work and suddenly there’s a scramble for that resource.
Widely known and used in Eastern Asia side. You need to have friends in medical fields from that region to know. The western side is basically disinformation itself because of democratic-republican tussle during current year election agenda. Western countries mortality are significant higher in those countries choosing to not use it. I suggest you contact any of your friends working in medical fields working in Eastern Asian side to know a clearer picture.
I find it disgusting how politicized this particular drug became. I think people really decided that it was either useless or miraculous simply because of Trump's excitment about it. There was a period of time in March when this was an early leading candidate for treatment and the government acted proactively. I don't think this was a bad decision, even if it was incorrect in hindsight.
> I find it disgusting how politicized this particular drug became.
I cant fucking stand this type of shit anymore. No critical thinking, just attach some initial opinion about something based on how its been politicized and never think about it again. It's either Trump is God is said ots good so it's good, or Trump is the devil and said it's bad so its bad. Then just dismiss any sort potential evidence to contrary as propaganda / conspiracy / etc.
This is the democrazy we chose. It's not going to last very much longer. It is nearly impossible to make rational, level-headed decisions. Federalist 10 was prophetic.
It highlights the importance of good leadership, which in this case does not happen to include going on TV and blabbering about drugs you know nothing about.
If the president was able to keep his mouth shut these HQ studies could have continued uninterrupted and the conversation around HQ wouldn't be such a political mess.
>>If the president was able to keep his mouth shut these HQ studies could have continued uninterrupted and the conversation around HQ wouldn't be such a political mess.
What they're saying is, the studies could have continued uninterrupted anyway. It doesn't actually matter what Trump thinks or says, he doesn't control individual studies.
On the other hand, people who hate Trump like the editor of the Lancet actually did manage to interrupt studies. After publishing the now retracted "HCQ is dangerous" paper, lots of studies were suspended worldwide.
>It doesn't actually matter what Trump thinks or says [...]
Yes it does. The president went on TV and blabbered about things he knows nothing about and turned HQ into a political issue.
His inability to shut up and listen to public health experts, his need to stroke his ego and insert himself into every situation, makes the president the fons et origo, the problem in the first place.
Remember when "the buck" stopped with the president? When the president was a respectable, thoughtful person? When the president wouldn't do something as foolish and irresponsible as telling Americans to try a drug he heard about on cable news?
He could have done one thing to improve America's response to Covid-19: shut up and listen to experts. But there's something innate in this president, his comically obvious case of narcissistic personality disorder, that doesn't let him do that.
Useless for what?
That HCQ is useless for severe cases where patient require artificial ventilation is nothing new, it has been highlighted by scientific HCQ proponents from the beginning (eg. see Pr Raoult studies, Spain prophylaxis trial for medical staff, ...).
Severe cases are not overwhelmed by the virus but by their own immune system response... in fact there is a lower viral load during the lethal phase of the disease.
Where HCQ might be useful is for prophylaxis or in early phase of the disease to quickly reduce viral load (therefore infectivity). In this setting, plenty studies are still ongoing and positive results are visible in multiple afaik.
Central Asia (Uzbekistan in particular) uses (not-hydroxy-but-good-old-plain) chloroquine to treat Covid. Death rate is low, lowest in the world actually. You cannot trust the numbers though.
It's interesting in Raoult's results that they treated 3320 patients with 18 deaths or about 0.5% and you can say ok thats quite low but maybe they were young and healthy. However if you look at the age of the deaths there zero deaths under age 60 and one under 70. It seems unlikely for that to happen if the treatment did nothing. Apparently without treatment deaths under 60 are something like 20% of the total usually. (him talking about it in French https://youtu.be/Sc1-JBX2y70?t=268)
I can't help but feel when historians look back on this that they will figure there were unnecessary deaths due to political biases.
Not useless at all. Still given off label under the supervision of a doctor. Still studies going on. The big 'study' was retracted. Could still be part of several treatment plans.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadEdit: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/05/23/hydroxychloro...
But: in March, it was one of very few leads on a treatment. Building some degree of a strategic stockpile and ensuring that manufacturing was increased made sense, even if it was a long shot. It's unfortunate that this had a negative effect upon people, but if there had been efficacy having that stockpile would have been extremely beneficial.
The company behind its production is donating its stockpile to the US Government: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandrasternlicht/2020/05/03/...
From May 3rd:
"Gilead CEO says remdesivir will be available to patients this week: ‘We’ve donated the entire supply’"
"Gilead expects to produce more than 140,000 rounds of its 10-day treatment regimen by the end of May and anticipates it can make 1 million rounds by the end of this year."
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/03/gilead-ceo-says-remdesivir-a...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-roche-hldg-novartis-searc...
https://nypost.com/2020/06/06/who-reverses-position-on-face-...
Different authorities can't even agree:
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/cdc-offer-conflicting-advice-m...
The mask situation is absurd, one more failure on top of so many others for the global health establishment.
The masks were alway recommended to slow transmission.
That video you linked to doesn't in any way disagree with anything I've said, nor rebut the point. In fact it supports it. It's just a video of Anthony Fauci talking about why he changed his position on masks: without admitting to it directly, he 'explains' that he wanted to ensure medical workers had access to them. But he is on record as having recommended against masks in the past. Here's Snopes saying so:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fauci-masks-no-longer-need...
In the March 2020 clip, Fauci said: “Right now in the United States people SHOULD NOT BE walking around with masks … You should think of healthcare providers who are needing them and the people who are ill.” (my caps)
https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...
He also acknowledged that masks were initially NOT RECOMMENDED to the general public so that first responders wouldn’t feel the strain of a shortage of PPE. (my caps)
Now many countries have introduced face mask requirements (which is dumb, but clearly a change of position).
Not only has mask advice changed but it's changed for dumb reasons: there's no scientific evidence masks work to stop SARS-CoV-2 transmission, especially not the cloth masks being actually deployed. This article investigates what's really known about this tactic:
https://off-guardian.org/2020/06/06/coronavirus-fact-check-6...
To me 63M doses of a cheap drug sounds like a really small bet. We should be willing to make lots of them, on the slightest hope, knowing that most will be wasted. Get 50 experts and fund anything which gets 2 votes.
"A lot of people are saying..."
It seems rather crazy to me, but perhaps more importantly, it is a strategy that - implemented literally - would result in the US leadership being very easily led by others "anywhere in the world" in matters of drug research, a situation which would be very amenable to manipulation for profit.
That's obviously wrong. We want the US leadership to be very easily led by Fox News personalities and whatever is popping on Twitter.
Hopefully not too many people did without needed medicine.
Probably there will be some suffering relating to stockpiling of steroids (dexamethasone, methylprednisolone), that we're now learning -do- work in the severely ill, too.
But a $100M or whatever check to ramp up production, or to buy wholesale stock from elsewhere, that would have been worth writing on day 1. Even on extremely flimsy evidence, given the huge daily costs of this thing. Run the careful trials at the same time as building a huge factory which you probably won't need.
The issue im presenting is they are buying them to be prepared to treat Americans IF it worked. But because they bought so many so quickly, it put Americans in a position where they weren't able to have medicine they needed. The government has a responsibility to balance current needs with possible immeidate future needs, it doesnt seem like they did.
Or was there enough retail panic-buying to generate shortages? If everybody with a prescription tried to buy 3 months worth, because they are scared of shortages, then I bet there would be shortages. (Isn't that exactly what happened with toilet paper?)
Even if it does no good, there was reason to think it may. It's not proper to criticize a decision based on information that was not available when it was made, and that's all that's happening now.
Try cross-country sailplane flying. Try investing in the stock market. Go on a long sailing trip with no one to make decisions for you. Do some competitive multiplayer gaming. Try to be your very best at an activity that requires making the best possible decision based on uncertain information, adapting as that information changes and owning your mistakes.
Things look completely different when the outcome is known, when you see it on video afterwards. You need to have been in such a situation yourself to know, to have seen with your own eyes the same situation with and without the benefit of hindsight. It's startling. Just having an IQ of 120 isn't enough to appreciate this.
I would love to get the answer to whether hydroxychloroquine reduces the severity of Covid19 when given during the earliest stages of the disease. It's sad that we may now never get a good enough controlled trial that settles the question. It's a disgrace when the science is politicized to such a degree.
It's not politicised outside of the US. It was known to be junk science before Trump picked up on it. There is still some proper science to be done in clearly disproving all the junk claims, and don't worry, it will be done. But proper science takes time.
The Lancet is a medical journal edited by a British guy who posts strongly left wing and anti-Trump stuff to Twitter all the time. The Lancet published a paper claiming HCQ was dangerous that fell apart immediately, and should never have been accepted at all (e.g. it claimed to be based on the medical records of hundreds of hospitals and something like 90% of all US COVID cases, which is implausible).
Why did such a terrible paper get published? Probably because it appeared to strike a blow against Trump's credibility which the Lancet's editor so desperately wanted. In the end it blew up in his face, though.
Yes, and people are saying "Trump is an idiot, and he's promoting something that doesn't work". I haven't seen people argue that "Trump is an idiot, therefore HCQ cannot work" (nor the opposite).
> Probably because it appeared to strike a blow against Trump's credibility which the Lancet's editor so desperately wanted.
That sounds like it might be a good point, I'm not familiar enough with the details, and especially not with the editor's motivations.
?? We had computational and in vitro studies showing significant efficacy against SARS-CoV-2 at attainable serum concentrations, and had seen efficacy of HCQ against other viruses in humans. Obviously in vitro data is not the same as efficacy in people, but positive, high quality in vitro data is incompatible with "no plausible mechanism of action."
Early human research was tainted by being not randomized and tainted by clinician opinions of efficacy, which kept us from knowing for sure for quite some time that what worked in the petri dish didn't work in humans.
> No better evidence ever came along.
Yup, which is why we have largely abandoned the idea...
I think you are probably thinking of the first Raoult study but there was a lot of history before then including plausible mechanisms and even somewhat positive double blind trials done in Wuhan in February. It's still used in places like Thailand where they have sane policy and basically no more local transmission.
there have been efficacy all along against lupus/etc. Yet ephemeral unproven chance of efficacy against coronavirus was chosen over well known benefit for the already suffering people. That looks extremely illogical and kind of cruel to me. Not surprising though given that it isn't logic nor compassion that drives the government actions these days.
Not that even this was intended, but it's unsurprising that efforts to stockpile and allocate supplies don't work perfectly.
I've got Kaiser and the pharmacy is unable (or unwilling) to tell me, given a drug, dosage, quantity, and my Kaiser ID how much it will cost unless I actually try to have the prescription filled there.
For some drugs, Kaiser is the way to go. Lipitor, e.g., is free.
For some, taking the prescription elsewhere and using a GoodRx coupon instead of insurance is better. E.g., irbesartan is $46 for 90 days mail order via Kaiser (mail order is cheaper than in-person), but only $22-31 at several other well known pharmacies with a GoodRx coupon.
I've heard that if you get a printed prescription from your Kaiser doctor, instead of having the doctor send the prescription electronically to a pharmacy, you can take the printed prescription and your Kaiser card to the Kaiser pharmacy and then they will tell you what it would cost without you having to actually have it filled to find that out, but I've not had a chance to try this to see if it is true.
And there are mechanisms for getting meds back into the pharma distribution system. Some small wholesalers specialize in stock from failed pharmacies, and even from fire sales.
HCQ is able to transport zinc ions across cell boundaries, which is critical to getting zinc bioavailable within a cell. Zinc disrupts the viral RNA copying which is part of the replication process. So zinc + HCQ should slow down the progression of the disease by decreasing viral load.
Notably most studies did not pair HCQ with zinc, and most focused on near-terminal patients for which slowing down viral replication would be too little, too late.
A group of physicians is suing the FDA for limiting access to drug: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/world/doctors-fda-acces...
The organization's general counsel is Andrew Schlafly, the son of Phyllis Schlafly, who is pretty well-summed-up by these quotes: https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/06/politics/phyllis-schlafly-quo...
Meanwhile people who did actually need it because, you know, actual reasons, suddenly found that there was none available anywhere.
So large groups of people were buying up the supply, without any actual need for themselves. That's hoarding. It's even worse though, because they can't return those drugs, so yay!
It really feels like I've been playing Death Stranding for the past few months
BARDA is awarding grants like $483 million to Moderna to start manufacturing even if the vaccine is never approved.
It may be totally appropriate for the government to make multi-billion dollar speculative investments in therapies that could help us more quickly restart the economy, the closing of which is costing trillions of dollars.
These investments, like all central planning approaches, will distort the free market and likely cause a misallocation of resources. For example more work on COVID therapies at the expense of cancer therapies which could ultimately lead to more deaths overall. But the cost of the shutdown dwarfs all of that, so basically anything that could expedite full reopening is worth the risk.
When disaster preparedness pays off everyone feels great. When disaster preparedness that doesn’t pay off is ridiculed as wasted investment, we get situations like we had with the National Stockpile, and what happened in CA with their disbanded disaster response field hospitals.
We need to accept the government wasting money in disaster preparedness if we want to ever actually be prepared. Otherwise it’s like complaining about the insurance premium because the house didn’t burn down.
Yup!
I hear people ask "Why weren't we ready for Covid?". Then in the next breath ask "Why are we stockpiling a drug that doesn't work for Covid?".
It doesn't work that way.
And at any rate, I know the gov’t has deals with pharma companies. They’ll often swap expired product so the stockpile stays current.
Why weren't we ready? Why did we waste money?
Both of those questions should be asked directly of the current administration, don't you think?
Stop trying to make an issue out of nothing.
Think PPE, potential treatments, Ventilators
Stockpiling something in the hopes that it might help is a waste of resources.
Also ventilators are very expensive and hcq is very cheap.
I cant fucking stand this type of shit anymore. No critical thinking, just attach some initial opinion about something based on how its been politicized and never think about it again. It's either Trump is God is said ots good so it's good, or Trump is the devil and said it's bad so its bad. Then just dismiss any sort potential evidence to contrary as propaganda / conspiracy / etc.
Wish there was was away to get away from it.
If the president was able to keep his mouth shut these HQ studies could have continued uninterrupted and the conversation around HQ wouldn't be such a political mess.
On the other hand, people who hate Trump like the editor of the Lancet actually did manage to interrupt studies. After publishing the now retracted "HCQ is dangerous" paper, lots of studies were suspended worldwide.
Yes it does. The president went on TV and blabbered about things he knows nothing about and turned HQ into a political issue.
His inability to shut up and listen to public health experts, his need to stroke his ego and insert himself into every situation, makes the president the fons et origo, the problem in the first place.
Remember when "the buck" stopped with the president? When the president was a respectable, thoughtful person? When the president wouldn't do something as foolish and irresponsible as telling Americans to try a drug he heard about on cable news?
He could have done one thing to improve America's response to Covid-19: shut up and listen to experts. But there's something innate in this president, his comically obvious case of narcissistic personality disorder, that doesn't let him do that.
Severe cases are not overwhelmed by the virus but by their own immune system response... in fact there is a lower viral load during the lethal phase of the disease.
Where HCQ might be useful is for prophylaxis or in early phase of the disease to quickly reduce viral load (therefore infectivity). In this setting, plenty studies are still ongoing and positive results are visible in multiple afaik.
I can't help but feel when historians look back on this that they will figure there were unnecessary deaths due to political biases.
It should be doctor and patient's choice whether to use it.
The Lancet was forced to retract an article critical of hydroxychloroquine, dubbed "LancetGate". [1] [2] [3]
[1] https://audioboom.com/posts/7605833-lancetgate-illustrates-s...
[2] https://www.hoover.org/research/lancets-covid-fiasco
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hhhG61Lx2E