Posted on 04/08/2020 9:48:36 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Thirty residents of a Texas City, Texas nursing home are being treated for the coronavirus with hydroxychloroquine. The nursing home houses one of the largest outbreaks in the Houston area.
Out of more than 100 coronavirus tests that were administered to residents and staff at the Resort at Texas City, a nursing home, 83 tested positive for COVID-19. There are 135 beds in this facility in Galveston County. A staff member became ill with the coronavirus and that prompted the mass testing. Now 30 residents are being given hydroxychloroquine as treatment. On Monday, Governor Greg Abbott said that the drug began being administered to the residents Saturday. He said there are no conclusions yet but he will do updates as warranted.
Nana and Pop-Pop are human guinea pigs, essentially, as the medical experts try to get a handle on treatment for the coronavirus. President Trump says, “What have you got to lose?” while Dr. Fauci cautions about the inconclusive test results to date. Those who are testing positive are caught somewhere in the middle of that. Hydroxychloroquine has been used for years against malaria and is prescribed to those with lupus and arthritis. My husband has taken it because his work frequently has taken him overseas to places where exposure to malaria is a concern. He says it makes him feel sick but he never contracted malaria.
In this case, Dr. Robin Armstrong is conducting the treatment of these 30 patients. He is the nursing home’s medical director. Armstrong is also a Republican activist and serves as a surrogate for the Trump campaign. He serves on the advisory board of the Black Voices for Trump coalition and is one of Texas’ two Republican National Committee members. I give this information about Dr. Armstrong because apparently his political activity is important to the Texas Tribune, as they included it in the piece about the drug’s use. Perhaps he has been inspired by President Trump’s advisers who are looking to hydroxychloroquine as a viable drug treatment. Armstrong says it is still too early to tell if the treatment is working. Some patients have experienced improved oxygen saturation but it is too soon to know if that was caused by hydroxychloroquine.
The hydroxychloroquine was donated by Amneal Pharmaceuticals, a donation of 1 million tablets the New Jersey-based company made directly to Texas. The process of securing that donation began a couple of weeks ago.
The donation from Amneal Pharmaceuticals went to the Department of State Health Services pharmacy, which has been distributing the drugs to hospitals upon request, according to a department spokesman, Chris Van Deusen. The department has given 10 bottles to the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.
Hughes said the donation began coming together at least a couple of weeks ago through a colleague at his law firm who knows an Amneal board member. The board member said the company was following reports of shortages of the drug and wanted to give it away to people who needed it, Hughes said. The senator then got in touch with state officials like Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, who Hughes said helped him navigate the bureaucracy of getting the donation into the state’s supply.
“We want to make sure that docs have every possible tool to fight this virus,” Hughes said. “Hydroxychloroquine is not a silver bullet, but many doctors say it’s helping their patients, so let’s make sure they have access to that.”
New York doctors are also using hydroxychloroquine now though initially, Governor Cuomo was hesitant to do so. The Food and Drug Administration began sending thousands of doses of hydroxychloroquine last month.
The FDA is approving the use of the drug on an emergency basis. Dr. Fauci continues to express caution. He says the drug’s success has only been shown anecdotally.
“It was not done in a controlled clinical trial, so you really can’t make any definitive statement about it,” Fauci said at the time. “If you really want to definitively know if something works, you’ve got to do the kind of trial where you get the good information.”
Guidance has been given by the Texas Pharmacy Board to pharmacists and it is clear that hydroxychloroquine can only be given with a prescription from a doctor. This is something advocates have said from the beginning – the drug is only available through a prescribing doctor.
The Texas Pharmacy Board on March 20 issued a guidance to pharmacists saying they would only be allowed to dispense the drug as well as other antimalarial medications to COVID-19 patients with a “written diagnosis from the prescriber consistent with the evidence for its use.”
The guidance also limited new prescriptions to no more than a 14-day supply and required a new prescription for refills so as to “prevent the stockpiling of the drugs and to ensure that reasonable quantities are available for all patients that require therapy with the drugs, including patients with a COVID-19 diagnosis.”
The rule did not stop doctors from prescribing the drug for an off-label use, and it did not apply to patients already established on the medication.
“This drug is widely being used to treat COVID-19 although its effectiveness is unclear,” said Dr. Philip Keiser, the Galveston County Local Health Authority. “This drug is licensed by the FDA and doctors have the ability to use it in their best judgment.”
The experiments with hydroxychloroquine in Texas and New York are on the cutting edge of treating this coronavirus. They will provide valuable information going forward. We can thank Nana and Pop-Pop for being our guinea pigs now in order to treat the virus in future pandemics.
Fauci is lying when he says that there are only anecdotal reports of HCQ and CQ’s success.
There are many small scale studies showing that they work, or help, especially if administered early.
Fauci’s problem is that the studies aren’t gold-plated, double-blind, placebo-controlled, and FDA-approved. But then, neither were the smallpox vaccine, aspirin or penicillin or half the stuff in our formulary.
I think that included Tetanus, yet everyone gets a tetanus shot, and a booster every 10 years.
RE: Person one comes down with the WUHOO flu. They use Hydroxychloro on that person. Person gets better as a result- Score + one.
Have you heard the MSNBC folks? Their response is — these people who got better WOULD HAVE GOTTEN BETTER without the HCQ anyway!
Friends I know who recovered from CV with Hydroxychloriquine, Azithromycin, and steriods.
What say you Dr. Fauci? Do you need three years of clinical trials to determine that a 75 year old malaria drug is not harmful to Americans dying with CV and has actually saved thousands of lives? You look like a DNC/Soros/Gates clown.
During WW II Pacific Theater and the United Nations Korean Police Action our G.Is were given a daily Quine pill and that was the rough predecessor of hydroxycholoroquine treatment and they did just fine.
God bless Ellie Brown !!!
Retweet her tweets to President Trump !!!
plushaye wrote:
“Ellie B Brown (@Real_EllieBrown), ER Director of the Columbia Retirement Home, Seattle (a 100-year-old faith-based skilled nursing home for vets/low income) has been officially testing HCQ/Zpack for at least a month. They’ve had a lot of good results with it, and many lives have been saved (although some covid19 patients have passed on).
Ellie Brown loves the residents. She wouldn’t do anything to harm her patients. She was fighting with the Governor for more protective equipment for her staff. She’s a feisty, Godly woman with purpose. It comes across when I read her tweets.”
Every medication going back to the before the written word started out anecdotally.
Did I not read that Dr Faciusti has been associated with Gates with respect to vaccines? Imagine what the patent on a vaccine would be worth to Gates. Bonanza. Double his fortune in a fortnight.
I think Ellie retweets them herself to Potus. She’s someone I will follow on twitter even after this crisis is over. She reminds me of Gretchen of @codeofvets. They both fight so hard, and are willing to scream loudly until they make the politicians hear what injustices are going on and do something about it.
I thought it was an excellent swipe at the Texas Tribune.
With the thousands of patients recovering quickly after being given Hydrocloroquine, that is effectively a phase III trial. It works, and works for just about everyone.
No Stage III clinical trial for a cancer treatment would have more than 500-600 patients.
Hundreds of thousands have like been treated with Hydrocloroquine and Z-Pac.
I have yet to hear of even one instance where a patient has gotten worse.
Case closed.
Simple Orange man bad.
Dem and Press must do everything possible to tarnish Trumps reputation.
Are there 30 others not getting it?
The drug is one of many Quinine derivatives. We all took it as kids and it knocked the crap out of colds and chicken pox.
It didn’t hurt us.
4 way cold tablets. Too bad we can get them now.
Things that make you go... Hmmmmm????
Anyone remember these?
https://towncriernews.blogspot.com/2020/03/things-that-make-you-go-hmmmmm.html
In case you are not being facetious, I will explain some of the difficulty with this issue.
First, the word "control" in the context of a scientific experiment refers to the effort to eliminate as much as possible the effects on the outcome of anything other than the difference between one treatment or another.
This is typically accomplished by selecting two groups randomly from one population.
Some have suggested that there is an ethical problem with denying HCQ (hydroxychloroquine) to people ill with COVID-19. This presupposes that the result of the experiment would support the hypothesis that the HCQ treatment is superior to the alternative. There have been medical experiments that have had such marvelously positive results that the experiment has been halted prematurely. The criteria for halting the experiment should be spelled out before the experiment begins.
If an experimenter has such a bias in favor of one outcome over another, such that an ethical question might arise, then the ethical thing to do is to let someone else without that bias conduct the experiment. The first French study saw the doctor remove from his negative outcomes six patients.
The second point I would make has to do with the original hypothesis that the experiment is meant to test. I think the numbers commonly seen indicate that about 98% of patients recover without any novel treatment. That means that any experiment with only 50 or even 100 patients is unlikely to result in a definitive statement about the efficacy of a particular alternative treatment.
Badly done science doesn't become well done science simply by getting the right conclusion.
>>I have yet to hear of even one instance where a patient has gotten worse.<<
That might be true for you, but there have been people who’ve died while being treated with HCQ.
>>The first French study saw the doctor remove from his negative outcomes six patients.<<
I appreciate your perspective on the evidence thus far. That decision of the French doctor bothered me, although I did assume that he had a valid reason to do so and that he was attempting an honest assessment of the efficacy of HCQ.
People also keep claiming that long-term lupus patient on HCQ are not getting Covid-19, but if that were definitively true, I would think there would already be a write up to that effect, but I haven’t seen one. And you would think it would be a relatively easy check to make too, especially with all the specialization in medicine today. How hard would it be for a major hospital system to collate all of its patients on long-term HCQ for lupus or arthritis and then survey them for Covid-19? The list itself should be trivial to acquire. A major pharmacy business could also be a source, for that matter.
There is definitely a bandwagon effect underway for HCQ. Personally, I suspect it’s well justified, but there’s still that nagging doubt about it in my mind. That said, I would ask for it if I come down with Covid-19, and quickly (and zinc and zithro too.)
>>83 test positive and 30 are being treated? What does this mean?<<
Option 1: An informal trial is underway and they are being treated differently.
Option 2: Contraindications or strict DNR’s for 53 people.
Option 3: 53 are under the care of doctors that have contracted a severe case of TDS. (not as tongue-in-cheek as I’d like it to be, I suspect)
Option 4: There are indeed guinea pigs, but there are 53 of them, not 30, in an untreated control group.
Seriously though, any on strict DNR’s could be considered part of a control group of sorts.
You ever bother to read the little instruction booklet that comes with any medication prescription. If you do you probably would not take any of them. Maybe you have heard speed readers quote off the side effects of any tv advertisement of drugs. Makes you want to run out and buy some doesn't it?
In the 1950's we had a druggist that made his own cold/flu medications, called them Otto's Special. They worked in 24 hours or less every time I took them, his secret died with him I guess.
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