You All Suck (#40 - "The Cure" vs. "A Therapy")

"There are some people in this Age of COVID-19 who, by their very utterances, have become proof that stupid will never be cured, and in doing so, make a very convincing case that in our quest for a cure to COVID-19, they should be rounded up and used as human guinea pigs. This would make them far more useful than their current, self-appointed, role as amateur internet epidemiologist  ..." -- The Overlord

Before we begin, a disclaimer:

The Overlord is not a doctor. He is not a research scientist, nor a biologist. Neither is he an expert in pharmaceuticals, toxicology, chemistry,  nor infectious diseases. What he is, however, is a witness to the treatment of a confirmed coronavirus, more than passingly-familiar with respiratory diseases because he cares for one so afflicted, and he speaks often and in-depth with the best doctors and respiratory therapists on Planet Earth who all work in the best hospitals in all of New York City.

Normally, this could be  taken to mean "any hospital NOT run by Andrew Cuomo or Bill DeBlasio", but in this particular instance, refers to to the good people at the Weill-Cornell Medical Center of New York Presbyterian Hospital, and the Neurology Department of the Hospital for Special Surgery.

The Background

Mrs. Overlord suffers from Myotonic Dystrophy. It is a form of Muscular Dystrophy. It has affected the muscles in her torso, particularly the six muscle groups that are essential to correct and proper breathing. These are: deltoids, laterals, intercostals, pectorals, sternocloidmastoids, scalenes, and the diaphragm.

She has almost died twice in the last five years due to pneumonia.

As a result, she requires oxygen 24 hours a day, uses bi-pap therapy 8-10 hours a night, and undergoes rigorous physical therapy twice a week simply to try and maintain muscle mass and function.

It also means she is very susceptible to respiratory infections. She's had quite a few of them, but few were as frightening as the Coronavirus she contracted in January, 2019. Take note of the date: January 3, of 2019, almost a year before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19. Because that was the last time she was in a hospital with a respiratory illness.

I'll skip the filler, and get to the heart of the matter: she was given a "cocktail" of anti-biotic azythromycin, the anti-viral remdesivir, and the crux of this post, hydroxychloriquine.

And she recovered.

I know, from experience, that hydroxycholoriqine, given therapeutically, works on illnesses resulting from exposure to coronavirus. In fact,the entire world does. The entire world has known this for many years.

To be completely truthful, it does not work for every case. For example, it is known that giving HCQ to insulin-dependent diabetics is a bad thing. HCQ does not play nicely with insulin. Likewise, it is a no-no for people who have certain levels of heart muscle damage caused by previous heart attacks, very bad cases of coronary disease, congenital heart problems, and (according to one doctor I've spoken to) people who have had heart surgery. The Medical Profession is aware of  all of this, too.

In fact, it was only this year that while the Dr. Fauci's of the world were telling you that HCQ was the deadliest substance EVAH! in the universe, that the various and sundry guilds of the United States medical profession were lobbying Congress -- quite hard -- to make HCQ available OVER THE COUNTER.
Last month.

The Medical profession is also aware that HCQ has been given to people who suffer from arthritis, lupus, and other inflammatory diseases, often for many years, with no ill effects. American hospitals are positively lousy with the stuff, having stockpiled it in anticipation of outbreaks of West Nile virus, Yellow Fever, Zika virus, and other maladies.

Strange behavior from a profession convinced the shit is an automatic death sentence, no?

The Problem

When I hear the medical profession has suddenly changed it's collective mind upon the efficacy of a proven therapy -- suddenly demanding "studies" that one presumes have already been done (considering HCQ has been in use since 1934, and coronaviruses were first identified, likewise, in the 1930's).

One would also presume that cases in which the drug failed would have been rigorously investigated during all that time, as well. Indeed, if one researches with something other than a simple Google Search (which is heavily biased to only show the most-recent, and politically-acceptable -- to Google -- results), one discovers that not only have the studies Fauci now claims are necessary already been done, they've been repeated many times over the ensuing nine decades.

The same result always occurs: patients who get HCQ have improved chances of survival from a corona infection than those who do not. In fact, the data indicates that the sooner you give HCQ, the better the outcome.

And coronavirus already has a 98% recovery rate, except for those who fall into a few, distinct categories -- the elderly, those with compromised respiratory systems (like Mrs. Overlord!), diabetics, people with kidney disease, or a combination of "co-morbidities" that simply makes a coronavirus the straw that broke the camel's back. Chances are (were) those people were never recovering, for all their poor health, in any case.

So why all the hate on HCQ?

The Theory

The Overlord's Superior Mind (tm) operates upon the belief -- backed by his extraordinary powers of observation, experience. and general awesomeness  -- that the root of the hatred is political.

To begin with, we need to look at where the "hotspots" are, and sadly, where the majority of deaths have occurred. This would be major cities that are either hubs for international air travel (see: Rome, Madrid, London), or terminals of those routes (see: New York, Newark, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago). These were the routes the disease most likely took into the country.

Next, we need to look at where the highest percentages of illegal aliens, or even resident aliens, who come from countries where coronaviruses are as common as dogshit on the sidewalk (this would be East Asia and The Middle East) are -- again, we name New York, New Jersey, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, and we can add a few others where this pesky disease has become a nuisance, like Detroit, Atlanta and Minneapolis, which, coincidentally, happen to be major hubs for DOMESTIC air travel.

Next, we need to look at the hospitals that failed to combat the initial outbreak. We find that in the overwhelming majority of cases, these all had the same things in common -- they were public (i.e. government-run) institutions; they were surrounded by and mostly served lower-income communities with a high population of the elderly (who can't afford to move to better neighborhoods) and illegal aliens, and where serious health problems proliferate (i.e. lower income people tend to have higher rates of morbid obesity, diabetes, COPD and emphysema, AIDS, Hepatitis, Asthma) and where nutrition, general hygiene and sanitation lack (crowded public housing projects, for example).

Next, we correlate the hotspots and the shitholes where the Huddled Masses (tm) have accumulated to the political leadership that prevails. We find that ALL OF THEM are run at the state or city level, or both, by democrats.

From these, we can produce a profile of the typical COVID-19 fatality, with the following common characteristics:

1. The Elderly

2. Lower-income and underserved by government-run hospitals.

3. Areas with high numbers of Middle Eastern or East Asian immigrants.

4. democrat (small 'd' intentional) political leaders who stand on a platform centered on government-provided health care, expansion of Medicare and Medicaid, Open Borders, "a commitment to Diversity" and environMENTAL credentials which include high levels of support for high-density Urban Living, use of Public Transportation over the Privately-Owned Vehicle.

Here in New York City, the hardest-hit hospitals, like Elmhurst in Queens, serves communities with names like "Koreatown", "Little Egypt", and "Chinatown" (just about every borough in this city has a Chinatown, and the sight of the Masked Asian has been ubiquitous for the better part of three decades in this City).

So, a disease which spreads rapidly enters the country and finds a new home in our major cities, carried here by airliners traversing Open Borders, brought by The Diversity, that quickly spread through crowded Urban Areas, aided greatly by Public Transportation, that overwhelmed under-funded, under-staffed, under-equipped government-run hospitals with a flood of sick illegals, Medicare and Medicaid patients.

You're wearing a mask and out of work right now because everything the left has advocated for in the last 40 years has suddenly turned out to be everyone's nightmare -- government hospitals that can't handle a pandemic, even after decades of anti-terrorism funding and planning; events that call into question the wisdom of high-density living and public transportation; a government health care system that had to be propped up by sending the State Police into functioning private and for-profit hospitals to steal equipment and drugs for the failing state-run ones.

A governor -- Andrew Cuomo -- who, after bald-face lying about being able to support both Illegal Aliens and American Citizens with his (just-had-it's-budget-cut-and-closed-16-hospitals-and-clinics) "best medical system in the world" in January 2020, is screaming for "ventilators" and PPE in March. Only to discover he had them, but the government either sold them or secreted them away in warehouses IN ANOTHER STATE.

Good luck winning an election in 2020 with that track record!

But, as an (in-)famous democrat fascist once said:

"Never let a crisis go to waste...".

And so, ship senior citizens infected with this disease to the hospitals (if they didn't have it before they went to the city hospitals, they caught it there), and then back to the nursing homes. Stop reporting on the ethnicity and national origin of cases you're supposed to be "tracking-and-tracing". Insist that everyone on Earth be tested with test kits the FDA designed poorly, and by methods that are essentially useless (i.e. don't tell you if someone has the virus RIGHT THIS MINUTE, when they're infectious, but only if they don't have it or have had it -- often many years -- in the past). Close the schools. Close businesses. Put "COVID-19" on the death certificates of those who have died of anything and everything but. Mandate PPE for people who don't need it. Needlessly quarantine people with "Stay At Home" orders. Set up checkpoints to discourage personal travel.

But by all means, allow everyone to riot and protest the death of a criminal, while denying people the right to go to the funerals of the more-virtuous, and then act shocked -- SHOCKED -- that the number of cases rises.

In other words, make the problem worse. Extend it for as long as possible. Collapse the Economy. Make people starve. Leave children uneducated (as if they were being educated before?). Deprive single Moms of the free babysitting services provided by the schools. Make them forget this all started because the Left, collectively, can't stand that they lost an election, that they hate how Trump (rightly) treats their ideological comrades in Beijing, how Trump routinely makes them look like the  pathetic morons they always were...because he usually turns out to have been right,

Why, the Proles will forget all about how badly every agency of government has responded to this thing at the federal ,state, and municipal level, and then they'll BEG to become the next Venezuela, rewarding you -- yet again -- for utter failure.

Because they'll blame The Guy in Charge.

And if the Guy in Charge should one day utter the word "hydroxychloriquine" and suggest it might be helpful, pretend he's somehow pulled the idea out of his ass in a fit of mental derangement, that no doctor has ever said any such thing to him (do you think Trump would know hydroxychloriquine from a Hydrox cookie? Obviously he got it from doctors), that the drug is a malicious toxin (then why has it been made in New Jersey for decades?), and that there is no means by which we can combat this "novel" virus.

Incidentally, it's only "novel" because it was recently discovered, but it's still a coronavirus; it will create a cold-like or flu-like syndrome that most people will easily shrug off, and which can be easily treated. Science uses the adjective "novel" for every new strain of virus it discovers. If medical science should discover a new strain of corona next week, it will be described as  "novel" in it's turn, too.

And perhaps the worst argument ever made, anti-HCQ, is the "it's not a cure" argument.

No one ever said it was.

And here, we have to make another distinction -- like the use of the descriptor "novel" -- between "A Cure" and "A Therapy".

HCQ is a therapy. Doctors use it to take advantage of one of it's side effects as an anti-inflammatory. Standard anti-inflammatories, like aspirin and acetaminophen, have a big problem when it comes to respiratory illnesses.

They metabolize into acids.

So,if you give those drugs to a patient with inflamed lungs, full of fluids (that's what pneumonia is) and struggling to breathe, you're not doing them many favors. The drugs will break down into acids which get trapped inside the fluids, making the inflammation worse.

HCQ reduces swelling without this effect. Once you have the lung swelling under control, the patient breathes easier, is able to expel carbon dioxide more-easily (it's not trapped inside swollen lung passages, poisoning blood), and you can use additional, non-invasive therapies -- like canula-delivered oxygen (the tube in your nose), bi-pap and c-pap machines (but NOT "VENTILATORS". That word refers to "Life Support", which involves a trachiostomy, which is irreversible), and without having to intubate patients, either. Intubation is a serious and potentially-dangerous thing.

And then you can begin to "Flatten the Curve", as they say.

And that's another interesting phrase, because it refers NOT to fighting the disease, but in freeing up ICU beds in (government) hospitals. It refers to a bureaucratic metric which has NOTHING to do with the efficacy of anti-COVID medicine. And if you're a bureaucrat, you don't care how those beds get freed up, even if it means killing someone's grandmother, you just need to report a "good number" to keep your phony baloney job.

So, yes, it is true that at this moment in time there is no cure for coronavirus, but there is a range of effective therapies. Therapies are what we use to ease the suffering and improve the chances of survival and qualify of life of a patient absent a total cure. It's not perfect, but there are innumerable instances in which people routinely survive deadly maladies by use of proven therapies.

This argument, Cure versus Therapy, is one I've been having literally for months with people whenever the subject of Chinese Lung Aids is raised.

There's Too Many Idiots Who Have Escaped Their Cages
I run into them everywhere.

These are motley crew of armchair scientists. The keyboard warriors. The imbeciles for whom the best idea they've ever heard also happened to be the last idea they've ever heard. The intellectually lazy. The swallowers of Kool-Aid. The ideologues. The incompetent who claim "expertise".

They make three main arguments against HCQ (and much else) all the time. They never offer any evidence for their assertions. They have never seen -- nor ever lived with -- a coronavirus patient. They know as much about this thing as your goldfish knows about String Theory. They are possessed of a unique brand of cognitive dissonance which should be studied, and perhaps subjected to clinical trials of new anti-dipshit meds. Their arguments are one (and often all) of the following:

1. Trump said it, so it must be a bad idea. Alternately, Trump somehow stands to gain from the sales HCQ and/or "the vaccine". This is all a conspiracy to make someone rich, or to hold the population hostage with the need for the drug.

Naturally, they have no evidence for any of this. It's not an argument as much as a gratuitous smear, or an excuse to avoid objective reality. Mainly, these people are kooks of the usual sort -- conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, anti-Big Pharma types, the homeopathic boosters who believe everything can be cured with Colloidal Silver, some stupid fucking herb, "Ionized Water", "adjusting your Chakras", and pot.

Which I believe they smoke massive amounts of.

2. A really puzzling argument I've heard often and abundantly is that since there is no cure, and the therapy is not 100% effective, meaning we can't save everyone, then we shouldn't use the therapy and just wait for the cure.

No matter how long it takes.

Because they're all about "saving lives".

And if, in the meantime, tens or hundreds of thousands more should happen to die because they couldn't get access to the therapy, or it's been given such a bad reputation that people fear it, that doesn't seem to matter. It does not register that in the name of "saving lives" they are advocating that a therapy that does just that not be used.

Because the result is not perfect.

Ask them what level of success is acceptable to them -- 80%?, 90%, 95%? -- and they won't answer. They will be pleased with nothing less than 100%, because pig-ignorant mental patient.

I have encountered this attitude everywhere. Even from a doctor (who, truth to tell, I would not let lance a boil on my blind, deaf, three-legged, cancer-ridden dog's ballsack, even if she offered to blow me, pay me, and give me a replacement pooch. Affirmative Action in medical schools would seem to be a problem).

Somehow this brand of anal wart believes themselves virtuous.

3. The reflexive naysayer takes the approach that the assertion that HCQ is an effective therapy "lacks scientific evidence". Provide them the scientific evidence and it is as reflexively dismissed, as well. For the most part, this species of idiot isn't really interested in scientific evidence, mostly because s/he is not a scientist and doesn't understand science.

My own experience is casually dismissed as "lying", always because I have an "inferiority complex" and to make myself seem smarter than I am, I say things I don't truly understand.

Umm, Asshole, I have a VERIFIED IQ of 150. I work in Automation programming and Artificial Intelligence; you flunked remedial Gym at Kommunity Kollege and work at Taco Bell. 

Often I'm accused of "being a shill" for whatever or whomever. Or I have a financial stake in pushing HCQ (I don't). No fact you present, no argument you make, penetrates their thick skulls and gets inside their tiny minds. They have an agenda of their own, which usually begins and ends with ideology, and as we know, ideology is religion for the mentally stunted.

Evidently, there's a whole lot of stupid out there that may be a defense against COVID, because people this retarded used to die during these pandemics.

UPDATE: Apparently, I can't count. Removed shoes and socks and made correction to a certain number.