Lads here poo pooed foreign backing for this far right “convoy” active measure. Egg on their faces now.
Great banter from Blunt
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NI are done
They have jumped the shark in Canada. Nothing like a good old fashion run on the banks.
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There’d be some uproar from the likes of @Cheasty if Trump tried to do something like this but it’s the lad with the funny socks in Canada so it’s ok.What says you @Cheasty should protesters bank accounts be frozen?
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Trump and his cult are fully behind these fascist thugs who make up this so called “convoy”, you dimwit.
You cant be protesting in this day and age
If this was an actual workers protest it would have been crushed quicksmart.
But it isn’t, it’s a far right active measure, which is why it wasn’t crushed quickly.
Unless its a protest for black lads, LGBTQ or some other woke nonsense. Actual protests for liberty is the realm of the terrorists
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Protests for black lads or lgbtq are woke nonsense?
Australia are welcoming back double-vaccinated travellers tomorrow
Australia and Canada are a joke
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Okay, I actually went through most of that stuff. Fair play to you for putting it together.
But I am no less boggled. There is not, ultimately, a scree of substantive evidence that Ivermectin could be of significant use in spancelling this virus. Nor do I get the risk factor. I can understand why some people were relaxed enough about getting the virus but taking Ivermectin, simply as a percentage bet, is beyond me.
This summary from last August seems to me accurate and levelheaded:
[i] During the first 10 years of the program, ivermectin was donated for use against river blindness (onchocerciasis). In 1998, Merck expanded the program to include lymphatic filariasis. Merck’s motto for its donation program is to provide ivermectin “as much as needed, for as long as needed.” Here, Merck’s community-directed strategy distributes ivermectin in remote communities where healthcare services are limited. As a result of the program’s success, several countries in Africa are making significant progress towards eliminating both diseases.
So, ivermectin has proven human uses, but Covid-19 is not one of them. And, the company that manufactures ivermectin, Merck, has explicitly stated this. There are several ongoing clinical trials involving ivermectin as a possible treatment of Covid-19. But, at present there aren’t any validated data on ivermectin’s efficacy against Covid-19 in people.
On its website, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention makes it clear that “data from adequately sized, well-designed, and well-conducted clinical trials are needed to provide more specific, evidence-based guidance on the role of ivermectin in the treatment of Covid-19.”
A study published in 2020 showed that at very high doses ivermectin inhibits SARS-CoV-2 in vitro. This means research conducted on cell cultures in petri dishes. But, these findings have not been replicated in vivo in humans. An initial study that suggested ivermectin reduces Covid-19 deaths was found to have widespread flaws and was retracted.[/i]
Anyway… Keep well.
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Genuine question. Why do you think this wasn’t done? The US government has spent over $3 trillion on Covid treatment and relief measures since early 2020. We are pushing up on a million dead in the US alone.
Why would a clinical trial not be funded for a drug that at least showed promise in vitro, when there was no therapeutic treatment at the time?
I have less than zero desire for a ‘debate’ but will attempt a civil answer to a civil question – while very much conscious speculation on my part is not of the remotest significance.
The likely reasons behind Ivermectin not being massively trialed ahead of a vaccine drive are complex in ways but ultimately one of them is straightforward. Folded within the logic of Ivermectin is the idea that you let pretty much everyone get Covid and then treat the infected as required with Ivermectin. The main reason Ivermectin never got much traction – entirely correctly, in my view – is because the drug was part of a belief in ‘herd immunity’ as a solution. Herd immunity, which went out the window early doors even with people such as Dominic Cummings, was always going to be a canard, practically and ethically, but when the fact emerged that people could be reinfected with Covid this canard had to be canned.
There is likewise the considerable scientific difficulty that best case for Ivermectin as a solution to Covid remains vanishingly thin. Governments could not wait around on so nebulous a prospect. Like most people, I had no problem with taking the vaccine. No way would have I taken Ivermectin if infected. Ivermectin basically appealed to groups who felt there had to be a shortcut out of the pandemic, a cheaper means of dealing with the crisis. There was no shortcut, which is why the vast majority of governments acted as they did, stalling for mass vaccination. Those statements are now historical fact.
The same people who went all GBD and herd immunity subsequently began to talk about ‘natural immunity’, which is the same glove pulled inside out. I entirely agree that taking supplements and exercising and having a good diet is laudable. I accept that some people are sincere and not foolish to emphasize boosting natural immunity. I can see why some (well prepared) people were happy to get the virus. But these factors still do not add up, in the vast majority of cases, as a plausible response to a Covid pandemic. This factor is the sovereign reality and cannot be gainsaid.
The only game in town, as a broad response, was only ever going to be vaccines. The fact these vaccines are not perfect or bulletproof does not change their status as a 2020s gamechanger. The emergence, as per historical precedent, of a more contagious but less virulent variant dovetailed with the vaccines. We are where we are. A mess – but a mess under a far greater degree of control.
Did governments, including the Irish and the British ones, display lethal incompetence? Yes. Has there been corruption on probably a mass scale? Yes. Are Pfizer et al profiteering in a lamentable fashion? Yes. Did corporate clout count in massive degree? Yes. Has this spectacle been nauseating in significant part? Yes.
Then again, I am not even slightly an idealist and expect little from most situations. You cannot divorce Pfizer et al from general capitalism. And capitalism has many lamentable facets – environmental damage, most of all – but always retains the advantage of being the least worst option at a certain level. So…
So: Ivermectin was never a runner because (a) the drug represented a bad bet in the time stakes; and because (b) the drug was part of a mass unbridled infection schema that swiftly receded to the far shores of right wing opinion and therefore became toxic to mainstream governments.
An argument could be made in a certain sense for letting everyone get Covid and devil take hindmost. Arguing for Ivermectin as a solution was never other than crackpot stuff.
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So a drug couldn’t be used because some people think other people associated it with herd immunity? I spose it’s as well lads didn’t associate the vaccine with herd immunity…the vaccine dodged a bullet there
I am not going to go back around in circles.
I perfectly well understand that ‘herd immunity’, in a general sense, just means the natural state of affairs in a society where a virus is the soft side of endemic. This scenario is distinctly different from one where a new virus appears and demands a response in a pandemic.
First off, there is plenty of evidence that the vaccines work in significant aspects. The fact that they are not perfect does not mean they are useless. I like to live in the real imperfect world. The ‘herd immunity’ – if the term is wanted – represented by vaccines was of a different kind to the supposed solution represented by Ivermectin. Put a certain way, the vaccines are herd immunity as a condom; Ivermectin, herd immunity as the morning after pill. The former option is a two way bet, protection against disease as well as against impregnation. The latter option is all in and offers no protection against the first possibility and depends on lucky timing for the second possibility.
More importantly, there is no evidence for Ivermectin as a cure for Covid-19. None whatsoever, end of day. I have looked and the evidence is simply not there.
Besides, even if there was significant evidence, Ivermectin could only be deployed after state-sponsored waves of mass infection, which would have involved many needless deaths and a generational watermark corrosive of social cohesion. There is no way round this recognition. The fact that some people thought this scenario was fine does not alter the underlying realities.
But I am not, as I say, going retracing the same circles. What either of us think is not going to change.
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1 As it happens, this analysis chimes with my (layman’s) account based on the condom/morning after pill analogy. All I would say is that my reading, which was reasonably extensive, also indicated clear scientific reasons why Ivermectin was not pursued as the major option.
2 But here we entirely agree. So does this article:
I have never been under any illusions about the human animal since I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) in the mid 1980s. I see much of the response to this pandemic in the light I see slavery, Machu Picchu, colonialism, totalitarianism, enforced famine, industrial farning, industrial fishing – the whole nine miles. Big Pharma and government corruption are just more of the human animal. And the response, on an entirely ineffectual personal level, to the human animal’s price for everything is not credibly – to me at least – devaluing life.
There is whiskey and stoicism and early Neil Young. Not much more, bar family. The answer to Albert Bourla and colleagues is not Laurence Fox and Brendan O’Neill and Toby Young. Far from it, to me.