[AR] Re: ... Coronavirus
- From: Henry Vanderbilt <hvanderbilt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2020 12:37:48 -0700
On 3/21/2020 1:26 PM, Henry Spencer wrote:
On Sat, 21 Mar 2020, Norman Yarvin wrote:
There's nothing set in stone about the length of time to field a
vaccine. The often-quoted 18 months (or "at least a year") assumes
the usual approval process: Phase 1 trial, then Phase 2 trial, then
Phase 3 trial -- all hurried up, but still basically business as
usual. Really we could put a lot of candidate vaccines out there as
soon as they could be fielded (starting basically now; at least one
is already in a Phase 1 trial), and collect statistics on their
safety and efficacy as we went.
And if your prototype vaccine turned out to kill more people than the
virus? That is unfortunately *not* an unrealistic possibility.
What he said. One word: Thalidomide. Don't look for widely-distributed
vaccine in less than a year, and most likely longer than that.
Our best bet is one or more of the antivirals currently in test cutting
the effective severity of COVID-19 back to an economically-tolerable
level. That could be happening right now, if the hopes for chloroquine
& variants turn out justified. A bit longer if it's something not
already in wide distribution like remdesivir.
FWIW, YMMV, I took a dose of zinc, zinc gluconate 50 mg (about 7 mg
actual zinc) right after I first noticed mild shortness of breath/spO2
92% yesterday evening. (Previous bottom extreme of my normal range was
93%, when I was being particularly sessile.) Also bit off a few mg more
and let it dissolve between cheek and gum, renewing as needed since (my
usual cold-reduction dose.) Theory being common colds are often also
small-c coronaviruses, and zinc is proven to reduce cold duration and
severity. (Been taking it for that for years, it just works.) (Also
FWIW, some of the theory I've seen on chloroquine is that it lets
accompanying zinc doses more easily enter lung cells.) Subjective
results: Mild shortness of breath abated to barely noticeable an hour
later and since, spO2 showed 92% one more time about a half hour after
zinc dose, has been 93-96% since. Gonna repeat 50 mg zinc gluconate
every 12 hours and see. (At ~14% actual zinc in gluconate, that's
~1/3rd recommended max daily dose of 40mg actual zinc.)
If I later show as actually having had the chinese virus on an antibody
test once those become available, I'll be insufferable. Meanwhile, hey,
it's the knob I've got.
Henry
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