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.
Do you think dead people really care about the science? Yeah me neither.
Who would publish it Fauci?
Good question. And side effects are being lied about. They are actually virtually unheard of, in dosages prescribed for Lupus patients. Dr. Oz had Dr. Daniel Wallace on yesterday. He said zero hospitalizations from it, no heart issues, they don’t do EKGs prior to use. Zero eye probs at 5 YEARS continuous use. 1% at 10 years. Etc.
He should know. #1 Rheumatolgy guy in US, 40 years in biz, millions of doses prescribed, thousands of patients.
P.s. sign the petition!!!
They can't. But all the live people should.
We seldom hear of blood-letting anymore. Animal entrails are not consulted for medical advice. There are few doctors who believe that bacteria are the result of disease rather than the cause. I think the lack of good science caused that result to take 70 years. How many people died because there was no hunt for anti-biotics? Hopefulness is not a substitute for discipline.
I would bet that one can still obtain diet pills that are nothing more than diuretics. Baldness cures that don't cure. Male potency concoctions that do nothing but drain people's resources.
Science is hard. It doesn't care what you want or what you need. I've explained before that I support Trump. I'm a firm believer in the Second Amendment and will never vote for a Democrat. I was very concerned that Trump may have risked too much in his support of the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine. I think it remains to be seen whether Trump's pills help him get re-elected or help defeat him.
I would never have risked what Trump risked to support that drug. But, as we all know, Trump must be Trump.
Interesting idea. Unfortunately, I think a DNR probably expects that no ventilator would be used. The results would be confused by any in the treatment group who ended up on ventilators.
When I was on a ventilator the chances of surviving were about a coin toss. Anecdotal information might indicate that 86% don't survive COVID-19. Perhaps all use of a ventilator could be considered a treatment failure endpoint.
Neither does the Chicom-virus. Live people do care, that is why the are taking the nearly 100 year old drug, they want to keep living, they would rather not die to let you attempt to prove a point at their expense.
The doctor did a pretty good job of describing and owning up to some of the shortcomings of his study. A key error he made was reporting the one group as "100%". That number should have triggered skepticism on his part.
In my opinion, he should have reported each of his results as a range of values, calculated by including the omitted patients in each of the groups.
If all six of the omitted patients were included in the group that received HCQ and Z-pack, then the range would have become 6 to 12 out of 12. In that case the worst case number for the HCQ/Z-pack group would have been lower than the best case for the HCQ alone group. That would have meant that the study makes only a very weak case that the Z-pack made a difference.
Allowing himself to put "100%" into his report caused an unjustified focus on his work. Given the other weaknesses in the study, his work is very poor. If HCQ/Z-pack is proved to be a superior treatment, then the doctor deserves to be called a successful propagandist. If HCQ/Z-pack turns out to be only minimally valuable, then the doctor is deserving of criticism for an unwarranted interference in the search for the truth.
Proving my point doesn't change the science nor does it change any particular doctor's treatment.
If the best that doctors can do is use unscientific claims, then they are fully empowered to do that, at least as far as I am concerned.
My attempt to say what constitutes good science in no way affects what, in fact, constitutes good science. It is what it is. I think that history proves that the average patient is much better served by observing scientific methods whenever possible. This in no way addresses what to do for a patient who is otherwise going to die.
Let me ask you; if a COVID-19 patient's doctor wishes to dunk his patient into ice water for an hour in an attempt to improve his patient's outcome, do you support that?
I said the TOTAL NUMBER OF INFECTIONS not just POSITIVE SPECIMENS (a much smaller number). BIG DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO.
2.6% death rate from the flu??? What planet are you living on? You’re sadly mistaken.
Here is the USA Influenza data from the CDC - estimates since 9/29/2019:
Number of specimens tested = 1.2M
Number of positive specimens = 242K
Number of deaths = 24K
Fatalities as a % of positive specimens = 10%
Number of people infected = 39M
Fatalities as a % of those infected = 0.06%
We know that MILLIONS of people have CV and are asymptomatic. This will bring the REAL CV DEATH RATE AS A % OF INFECTIONS DOWN SIGNIFICANTLY.
Yesterday Germany released a preliminary antibody study in a hard-hit area of NW Germany and discovered the CV fatality rate as a % of those infected was 0.37% (about 4x higher than the flu). The more these numbers come out we can stop the media-driven panic and reopen the economy.
Can't you find a global warming thread to harass? No one here wants to hear your version of science according to Fauci. He is a deep state hack that hates Trump and that influences his version of science.
I’m just telling you what the CDC estimate is for flu infections as of 9/29/2019. If you don’t like the CDC estimates you can take it up with them.
How many people who get sick with the flu even go to a doctor? The vast majority don’t and recover at home. Even fewer people who go to their doctor pay the $50 to get a flu test and just get a z-pack.
My point is you can’t determine the flu death rate with confirmed cases as the denominator anymore than you can use CV confirmed cases as the denominator to determine the CV death rate. The numbers will be way off and massively overstated if you do this.
I don’t know how the CDC is coming up with the 39M. Perhaps they are doing sample antibody testing. We don’t know if the CV numbers are inflated or not. A MN doctor shared some guidance from the state health dept to list some cause of deaths as CV when they were questionable.
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