Dec 11, 2022·edited Dec 11, 2022Liked by Austrian China
with the constant chant of "DON'T LOOK THERE" the western population is similarly oblivious to various facts, remedies, and side effects to the vaccine - see Celine Dion for example. i have heard that many chinese will still hold on to the fear of the virus - because once the government tells you something it is very difficult to walk it back - look at what happened when they told chinese that everyone should own a car - to help the auto industry - then 5 years later the traffic had turned roads into parking lots.
I have a question: "What if the people were getting sick because they have been under the very tremendous pressure that you have described and that the daily life, in which they were use to find more or less homéostasie has been ruined?" Thus, their immune system is more or less impaired.
I like your perspective but could not agree with ivermectin and hydroquinone are effective to COVID 19. Neither drug is recommended by WHO. I thought that is a big claim that they can save lives. So I took a look at your references. The website c19early.org has a few concerns IMO. It is a pooled study meaning you are aggregating studies that could have dramatically different conditions together. The hydroxy chloroquine's "effectiveness" they claimed all include zero effect in the confidence interval, basically they cannot rule out the possibility that HCQ is ineffective. The ivermectin page has an even interesting results. All early treatment studies referenced in the study individually show their effectiveness's confident intervals cover zero effect yet the pool study showed a strong positive results. Apparently they are weighting each study by patients number which is a loaded assumption.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Based on the available data, one could certainly argue the point – and countless people have been doing just that for almost three years now. However this is not our intention, and we actually retroactively revised a few words in the text to reflect this.
First hand experience is of course always the best guide, but if someone lacks that and also has no friends with any actual direct experience, then he needs to come to his own conclusions based on whatever data points he deems relevant and credible. Someone who swears by the WHO will probably agree with you. The people who wrote the Alibaba handbook on treatment for Covid-19 in April 2020 and specifically recommended chloroquine will probably disagree with you.
Our point here is that very few people in China are even aware of his discussion, or that hundreds of millions of people outside China have used these approaches to treat Covid-19. Given the circumstances, these days this is knowledge which would likely be of great interest to many people in China. Will the word get out in the next month or two? Only time will tell.
Another aspect you might want to keep in mind is that for people with access to first hand and (to an extent) second hand experience, third party studies only play a supporting role when it comes to such matters. Seeing is believing, as the saying goes.
Understandably, most mainland residents lack such knowledge, so for them assessing the options is a lot harder. Reading studies is not something which most people are going to do. Moreover, when in doubt most people do whatever the state medical establishment tells them to do, so for them all these questions are irrelevant.
For the remainder who are looking for alternatives, what they CAN do however is to appreciate the fact that there ARE a number of such studies in existence, and that at a minimum they clearly many people DO consider these treatments effective. That gives them some options which they did not have before.
I agree with you that alternatives are important. But if the alternatives are only noises then it may be better not to look at the alternatives. Because they do not contribute additional information but a waste of time.
The key point of scientific research including medicine, is repeatability. "Seeing is believing" is true. But others seeing the same at their sides by repeating the same conditions is also important. Unfortunately medicine is a field with a lot hidden effects so that statistics are important because you want to rule out the possibility of positive effect by chance. If you have first hand and second hand experience but cannot reproduce at other places. This is "not repeatable" and is only your own conclusions rather than the public consensus.
You made a few of bold statements in your article about HCQ and ivermectin. I wouldn't say they are wrong because WHO says otherwise. As long as we have data support then even WHO could be wrong. Because they are both bold statements so the need bold proof. If there is no creditable proof then those statements shouldn't be made (there are other ways to rephrase a controversial issue). Unfortunately by examining your links I don't feel like they have bold proof, not the detail methodology about how they "pool" those results together. I am not a doctor but happen to work in the statistics field so I could be wrong but in my opinion, those statements are more like opinions instead of facts.
I think for op-ed or news, first hands/second hands observation are important and third sources are just "supporting docs". But in any scientific fields, unfortunately "reproduction by the third party" is very important, at least equally important as the first/second hand observations.
In particular, ivermectin's performance as a prophylactic appears spectacular and repeatable, with only one small study having a confidence interval crossing the zero line for lack of events https://c19ivm.org/meta.html#fig_fp A low-cost drug with a well-established safety record and an 83% relative efficacy should not be banned, ridiculed or "not recommended".
Maybe... Of all three studies, two of them are "open labeled", which means both the doctor and the patients know what drug they get/take. The only one left is Chahla et.al. Their treatment is a combination of both ivermectin and Iota-Carrageenan. So it is hard to tell which effect is from which, on top of a small sample of ~200 patients.
So it may have effect but the evidence is not strong enough. An ideal study would be a larger pool of patients with double blinded study but apparently it is harder to do.
with the constant chant of "DON'T LOOK THERE" the western population is similarly oblivious to various facts, remedies, and side effects to the vaccine - see Celine Dion for example. i have heard that many chinese will still hold on to the fear of the virus - because once the government tells you something it is very difficult to walk it back - look at what happened when they told chinese that everyone should own a car - to help the auto industry - then 5 years later the traffic had turned roads into parking lots.
It would certainly suit many authorities to be able to flip human minds overnight from believing A to believing B. Test in progress; we shall see.
without falling on your sword and admitting you were WRONG that would seem unlikely, both cannot be true.
Thanks.
I have a question: "What if the people were getting sick because they have been under the very tremendous pressure that you have described and that the daily life, in which they were use to find more or less homéostasie has been ruined?" Thus, their immune system is more or less impaired.
Maybe today's article can help answer that question: https://austrianchina.substack.com/p/beijing-goes-into-self-lockdown
I like your perspective but could not agree with ivermectin and hydroquinone are effective to COVID 19. Neither drug is recommended by WHO. I thought that is a big claim that they can save lives. So I took a look at your references. The website c19early.org has a few concerns IMO. It is a pooled study meaning you are aggregating studies that could have dramatically different conditions together. The hydroxy chloroquine's "effectiveness" they claimed all include zero effect in the confidence interval, basically they cannot rule out the possibility that HCQ is ineffective. The ivermectin page has an even interesting results. All early treatment studies referenced in the study individually show their effectiveness's confident intervals cover zero effect yet the pool study showed a strong positive results. Apparently they are weighting each study by patients number which is a loaded assumption.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Based on the available data, one could certainly argue the point – and countless people have been doing just that for almost three years now. However this is not our intention, and we actually retroactively revised a few words in the text to reflect this.
First hand experience is of course always the best guide, but if someone lacks that and also has no friends with any actual direct experience, then he needs to come to his own conclusions based on whatever data points he deems relevant and credible. Someone who swears by the WHO will probably agree with you. The people who wrote the Alibaba handbook on treatment for Covid-19 in April 2020 and specifically recommended chloroquine will probably disagree with you.
Our point here is that very few people in China are even aware of his discussion, or that hundreds of millions of people outside China have used these approaches to treat Covid-19. Given the circumstances, these days this is knowledge which would likely be of great interest to many people in China. Will the word get out in the next month or two? Only time will tell.
Another aspect you might want to keep in mind is that for people with access to first hand and (to an extent) second hand experience, third party studies only play a supporting role when it comes to such matters. Seeing is believing, as the saying goes.
Understandably, most mainland residents lack such knowledge, so for them assessing the options is a lot harder. Reading studies is not something which most people are going to do. Moreover, when in doubt most people do whatever the state medical establishment tells them to do, so for them all these questions are irrelevant.
For the remainder who are looking for alternatives, what they CAN do however is to appreciate the fact that there ARE a number of such studies in existence, and that at a minimum they clearly many people DO consider these treatments effective. That gives them some options which they did not have before.
I agree with you that alternatives are important. But if the alternatives are only noises then it may be better not to look at the alternatives. Because they do not contribute additional information but a waste of time.
The key point of scientific research including medicine, is repeatability. "Seeing is believing" is true. But others seeing the same at their sides by repeating the same conditions is also important. Unfortunately medicine is a field with a lot hidden effects so that statistics are important because you want to rule out the possibility of positive effect by chance. If you have first hand and second hand experience but cannot reproduce at other places. This is "not repeatable" and is only your own conclusions rather than the public consensus.
You made a few of bold statements in your article about HCQ and ivermectin. I wouldn't say they are wrong because WHO says otherwise. As long as we have data support then even WHO could be wrong. Because they are both bold statements so the need bold proof. If there is no creditable proof then those statements shouldn't be made (there are other ways to rephrase a controversial issue). Unfortunately by examining your links I don't feel like they have bold proof, not the detail methodology about how they "pool" those results together. I am not a doctor but happen to work in the statistics field so I could be wrong but in my opinion, those statements are more like opinions instead of facts.
I think for op-ed or news, first hands/second hands observation are important and third sources are just "supporting docs". But in any scientific fields, unfortunately "reproduction by the third party" is very important, at least equally important as the first/second hand observations.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. We will try to better explain the Austrian perspective on this in a later article.
As promised, we tried to provide an Austrian perspective on this question here: https://austrianchina.substack.com/p/sad
In particular, ivermectin's performance as a prophylactic appears spectacular and repeatable, with only one small study having a confidence interval crossing the zero line for lack of events https://c19ivm.org/meta.html#fig_fp A low-cost drug with a well-established safety record and an 83% relative efficacy should not be banned, ridiculed or "not recommended".
Maybe... Of all three studies, two of them are "open labeled", which means both the doctor and the patients know what drug they get/take. The only one left is Chahla et.al. Their treatment is a combination of both ivermectin and Iota-Carrageenan. So it is hard to tell which effect is from which, on top of a small sample of ~200 patients.
So it may have effect but the evidence is not strong enough. An ideal study would be a larger pool of patients with double blinded study but apparently it is harder to do.