Now It's Pepcid's Turn To Fly Off The Shelves

It could well be something simple and already available like that which is our best hope (until a vaccine is developed) for preventing the disease turning fatal in its later stages.

It's only quiet because Trump has ended his Corona briefings.

That won't last long.

But probably isn't. There's a lot of clutching at straws going on, and nowh ere near enough effort being put into ramping up US lock down and contact t racing to a level where the new case per day number starts decreasing, rath er than sitting close to a steady 30,000 per day.

That is an approach which has worked elsewhere. There may be some fundament al defect in US society that stops them doing it effectively, but it's most likely a deficiency in their politicians rather than the rest of the popul ation.

Yes definitely! You can sip your Pepcid/Lysol cocktail while basking in the glow of your UV sun tanner... It will be fecal transplants next. Bat guano is definitely being overlooked- you know what they say about a bit of hair of the dog that bit you.

The chances of some drug like that being effective against a virus are laughably low. But if we try 1000 such drugs, we might wind up with a life saver. Lots of great drugs were discovered by accident or by brute-force mass testing. Some day we will really understand biochemistry, but we don't yet.

Fecal transplants do fix some serious illnesses.

Institutional contempt for unapproved concepts is a great way to miss opportunities.

The NIH should have a branch that funds and later evaluates wild, out of the mainstream ideas.

They do understand it enough to know it acts as a protease inhibitor during viral replication. The protease enzymes are responsible for assembling the protein capsid of the newly minted virus particles in preparation for release from the infected cell. Then it does have the record of reducing the death rate by 50% for those impoverished Chinese, which can't be ignored.

I think they do have a group that researches the wild and wacky.

One of their institutes is dedicated to researching disease we don't know anything about- to give you an idea of the expanse of subject matter they cover.

The problem, though, of a hundred monkeys on a hundred typewriters that will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare, is that you can compute the time for a one-in-a-million chance of it happening. The universe isn't old enough.

Shakespeare did it by more efficient methods. Even if the monkeys DID do the task, who'd READ the gibberish and pick out the good stuff?

No, steering marginal ideas into 'a branch' isn't good communication (and science is a cooperative process). The various institutes of health DO evaluate ideas, and fund researches, intelligently. Efficiently, we hope.

For efficiency, I'd recommend evaluate first, fund second. Like shopping.

Yes, that's easily calculated.

Read Townes' book, "How The Laser Happened." It should have been "How The Laser Almost Didn't Happen."

You can get it for $4.

hope.

g.

Why are people so in love with the idea that "wild, out of the mainstream" drugs need to be investigated??? I suppose if you are of the opinion that there are no sciences that can apply rational thought to come up with new i deas... other than electronics, this would appeal to you. But we don't kno w anyone like that, do we?

Electronics really isn't science is it? I mean, science investigates our e xistence and develops new ideas and new principles to explain the world aro und us. Electronics uses those ideas to create better cell phones. Kinda like a tailor who only works with scraps.

Name one. Brute force mass testing would also kill a lot of patients.

One trial testing hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19 got shut down when a larger proportion of the patients taking the drug died than those in the control group.

John Larkin doesn't understand it all, so his opinion is worthless.

And we do understand why. Sampling the bacterial populations before and after the transplant does tel you what's been going on.

Being incautious about hare-brained ideas is great way to kill patients.

Just as long as neither Trump or John Larkin gets to propose any of them. There's a distinction between innovative ideas and hare-brained idiocy that neither of them seem to be able to manage.