Why Nobody was Charged in the Death of Ashli Babbitt:

 

 

Arkansas Inmates with COVID Treated with Ivermectin

 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ivermeticin-inmates-covid-19-arkansas-fda-warnings/

A detention center in Washington County, Arkansas, has been using the anti-parasite drug ivermectin to treat inmates who have COVID-19, local officials say, even though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has specifically warned against it. The FDA says the drug, which is frequently used as a dewormer in animals, is not an approved or recommended treatment for COVID-19, and "can cause serious harm."

Eva Madison, a county elected official, raised the issue during a finance and budget committee meeting Tuesday night. Jail officials were presenting their 2022 budget, which included the jail's physician, Dr. Rob Karas, asking for a 10% increase in the medical services contract.

Madison informed committee members and the jail officials that a county employee, who has opted to stay anonymous to the public, told her that he had been sent to the jail's clinic to get tested for COVID-19. When the person tested negative, they were given a $76 prescription for ivermectin. He was concerned about the prescription and asked his primary care physician about it, and the the physician told him to "throw that in the trash," Madison said. 

Madison told CBS News on Wednesday that after learning of the prescription, she contacted the county sheriff, Tim Helder. 

"The sheriff defended it, said that Karas has been regularly prescribing ivermectin at the jail during the pandemic," Madison said.

"He's state licensed, board approved," one of the officials said.  

 CBS News has reached out to the Washington County Sheriff's Office and Karas Health Care for comment. 

Madison said that when she spoke to Karas, he confirmed he had been prescribing the medicine to detainees at the jail, and that he and his family members were also taking it. She said he cited the National Institutes of Health, which said in February that laboratory research suggests ivermectin may inhibit viruses in test-tubes. However, the NIH also said no clinical trials have reported a benefit for human patients with those viruses. The NIH says there is "insufficient evidence" to make a recommendation on ivermectin and that it is not approved to treat any viral infection.  

While researching this story I had an epiphany: what if journalists just reported the facts and left the moralizing to the reader? What if there was a collective set of ethics that forbade biased reporting? What if people didn't care about a narrative, and just wanted to read the facts? 

Anyway, I read every article I could find on this story and I couldn't find the answer to the most obvious question: what kind of results has the physician produced treating COVID patients with ivermectin? 

The sheriff defends the doctor's treatment. The "state licensed, board approved" doctor is treating himself and his family with ivermectin. The inmates aren't responsible for the complaint.

I'm not advocating for the use of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID, because I'm not a doctor. But, if I were a journalist and was I writing this story, I most certainly would have asked the doctor about the success rate he had treating his patients with ivermectin. Who wouldn't ask that question? 

Inquiring minds want to know! 

UPDATE: 

https://www.kark.com/news/health/coronavirus/ivermectin-being-given-to-inmates-at-washington-county-jail/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_medium=referral

 

Sheriff Tim Helder said during the meeting that Karas Health has been an amazing partner for the jail during the pandemic.

“They are the ones who have been in the trenches in the middle of this COVID issue that we’re dealing with,” Sheriff Helder says. “Whatever a doctor prescribes, that is not in my bailiwick I haven’t been to medical school.”

The sheriff said during the meeting that only one person of over 500 positives have been admitted to the hospital.

Karas Health Care made a Facebook post on July 16 that stated in part, “if anybody you know test positive send them our way and we’ll get them started on doxy, singular, ivermectin, vitamin d, vitamin c and zinc and do our best to keep them out of the hospital.

A comment was made on the post and Karas Health Care responded with: “Yes we have been using ivermectin for prevention since January. I restarted for myself last week.”

Interestingly, the national media opted to omit the most relevant part of the story: the success rate of his treatment plan. The "news" that was relevant in their mind was "look, we have a dissenter!" This is how out of touch with reality these people are (and the reason nobody trusts them). The masses just want ethical, unbiased reporting. The reporters just want to enforce a narrative that chastises non-conformists. Why else would censorship exist? 

 

Potential Re-Purposed COVID-19 Therapeutics: Pepcid AC and Aspirin

 https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-08-heartburn-drug-doctors-covid-.html

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, doctors in Wuhan noticed something surprising. Many of the elderly patients who survived the virus were poor: not exactly the demographic you would expect to fare well in a health crisis.

A review of the survivors' medical records revealed that a significant number suffered from chronic heartburn and were taking an inexpensive drug called famotidine, the key ingredient in Pepcid. (Wealthier patients tended to take the more costly drug omeprazole, found in Prilosec.)

Was an over-the-counter acid suppressant helping people survive COVID-19?

The team's analysis, which appeared in the journal Signal Transduction & Targeted Therapy (from the Nature publishing group), showed that the data supported findings from other smaller-scale studies. When delivered at high doses (the equivalent of about 10 Pepcid tablets), famotidine appears to improve the odds of survival for COVID-19 patients, especially when it is combined with aspirin. It also seems to hinder the severity of disease progression, making patients less likely to reach the point where they require intubation or a ventilator.

One of the most dangerous phenomena COVID-19 can trigger in your body is something called a cytokine storm, which is a potentially fatal amplification of an immune response. When you become sick, your immune system releases inflammatory proteins called cytokines that tell your immune cells how to fight the infection. But in more severe illnesses, cytokine production can spiral out of control, becoming dysregulated.

"Basically, your immune system goes haywire and starts attacking things like your otherwise healthy lung tissue because it's so desperate to kill off the invading virus," Mura said. "Your own physiology essentially uses a sledgehammer against the pathogen when a fly swatter would suffice."

The team's theory is that famotidine suppresses that reaction. Although it was developed with a specific purpose in mind—blocking the histamine receptors that help produce acid in your stomach—famotidine, like all other medications, can cause side effects. Mura and his colleagues believe that interfering with cytokine storms might be one of them.

"It may well be a case of famotidine having a beneficial off-target effect," Mura said. We generally think of side effects as a bad thing, but in some cases, they can be harnessed to treat other conditions. In the future, it's possible that famotidine could be re-purposed in this way. 

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-06-widely-indigestion-drug-curb-covid-.html 

A widely available and inexpensive drug that is used to ease the symptoms of indigestion may prove a worthy contender for treating COVID-19 infection in those whose disease doesn't require admission to hospital, suggest the findings of a small case series, published online in the journal Gut.

The effects were felt within 24 to 48 hours of taking famotidine, and a rigorous clinical trial is now warranted to see if the drug could be an effective treatment for COVID-19, say the researchers.

Famotidine (Pepcid AC) belongs to a class of drugs known as histamine-2 receptor antagonists, which reduce the amount of stomach acid produced. Famotidine can be taken in doses of 20-160 mg, up to four times a day, for the treatment of acid reflux and heartburn.

The researchers report on 10 people (6 men; 4 women) who developed COVID-19 infection, all of whom happened to have been taking famotidine during their illness.

Their ages ranged from 23 to 71 and they had a diverse range of ethnic backgrounds and known risk factors for COVID-19 severity, including high blood pressure and obesity.

All started taking famotidine when they were feeling very poorly with COVID-19, the symptoms of which had been going on from 2 up to 26 days at that point.

The most frequently used dose was 80 mg taken three times a day, with the average treatment period lasting 11 days, but ranging from 5 to 21 days.

All 10 patients said that symptoms quickly improved within 24-48 hours of starting famotidine and had mostly cleared up after 14 days.

Improvement was evident across all symptom categories assessed, but respiratory symptoms, such as cough and shortness of breath, improved more rapidly than systemic symptoms, such as fatigue.

Seven of the patients didn't experience any side effects while on famotidine, and in the three who did, these were mild, and all but temporary forgetfulness were known side effects associated with taking the drug. 

https://hartfordhealthcare.org/about-us/news-press/news-detail?articleid=28305&publicId=395 

The over-the-counter heartburn medication Pepcid might be one of the oddest answers to the COVID-19 question, with a preliminary Hartford Hospital research study showing benefit for patients with the virus.

Dr. Raymond McKay, a cardiologist at the Hartford HealthCare (HHC) Heart & Vascular Institute, is the primary investigator of the “Famotidine (Pepcid) Study,” which recently released data based on research involving 900 hospitalized HHC patients.

“There are many, many medications currently being tested to see if they have any therapeutic benefit in patients infected with COVID-19. Surprisingly, one of the most interesting drugs is Pepcid,” Dr. McKay said. “Researchers became interested in Pepcid following a recent report out of New York City and Columbia University suggesting that it was associated with a lower in hospital mortality in their COVID population.

“Because of that report, we decided to look at what impact Pepcid may have had in patients hospitalized with COVID-19 at Hartford HealthCare.”

They found that 83 of the approximately 900 HHC patients were treated with Pepcid at some time during their hospitalization. In those, the researchers pinpointed two results Dr. McKay called “basic” and “surprising.”

The findings:

Patients taking Pepcid were 45 percent less likely to die in the hospital and less likely to have combined adverse outcomes leading to death. The patients were also 48 percent less likely to need help breathing from a ventilator.

Pepcid use led to lower levels of certain blood tests associated with poorer outcomes from COVID-19. 

As for aspirin:

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04365309

Brief Summary:

COVID-19 has a high infection rate and mortality, and serious complications such as heart injury cannot be ignored. Cardiac dysfunction occurred in COVID-19 patients, but the law and mechanism of cardiac dysfunction remains unclear. The occurrence of progressive inflammatory factor storm and coagulation dysfunction in severe and fatal cases of NCP points out a new direction for reducing the incidence of severe and critically ill patients, shortening the length of duration in severe and critically ill patients and reducing the incidence of complications of cardiovascular diseases. Aspirin has the triple effects of inhibiting virus replication, anticoagulant and anti-inflammatory, but it has not received attention in the treatment and prevention of NCP. Although Aspirin is not commonly used in the guidelines for the treatment of NCP, it was widely used in the treatment and prevention of a variety of human diseases after its first synthesis in 1898. Subsequently, aspirin has been confirmed to have antiviral effect on multiple levels. Moreover, one study has confirmed that aspirin can inhibit virus replication by inhibiting prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) in macrophages and upregulation of type I interferon production. Subsequently, pharmacological studies have found that aspirin as an anti-inflammatory and analgesic drug by inhibiting cox-oxidase (COX). Under certain conditions, the platelet is the main contributor of innate immune response, studies have found that in the lung injury model in dynamic neutrophil and platelet aggregation.

In summary, the early use of aspirin in covid-19 patients, which has the effects of inhibiting virus replication, anti-platelet aggregation, anti-inflammatory and anti-lung injury, is expected to reduce the incidence of severe and critical patients, shorten the length of hospital duration and reduce the incidence of cardiovascular complications.

I'm not a doctor, and I have no intention of pretending to be one on the internet. In other words, I'm not offering any medical advice. With that being said, Pepcid AC and Aspirin are both inexpensive and safe OTC medications that the above citations suggest could help aid in the recovery of COVID-19. The recommendations (Pepcid: 80mg 3 per day; Aspirin: 100mg per day) fall within the FDA guidelines of recommended use for their intended purposes, therefore there shouldn't be any issues with the safety profile of such a regimen. That is to say, worse case scenario appears to be that while you're recovering from COVID, you won't have heartburn or a headache. Best case, your symptoms improve. Win-Win.

 

 

 

 

 

Covid Censorship

 

The concept that only certain "experts" are permitted to have an opinion in a free society is truly fascinating. Knowledge should be formulated via the open exchange of ideas. Intellectual tyranny breeds dissent and conspiracies. Narratives enforced by systemic censorship come off looking a lot like propaganda. 

This isn't to say that COVID isn't real (it is, and it can be very serious). And it's not to say that vaccines are bad. But we should be able to have an open exchange of ideas on the subject (and all subjects, for that matter).  

How Many COVID-19 Cases are Asymptomatic?

 https://www.sciencealert.com/over-a-third-of-covid-infections-are-truly-asymptomatic-says-massive-new-analysis

Within months of SARS-CoV-2's emergence as a global catastrophe it was becoming clear that many who spread the disease did so unwittingly, experiencing not so much as a tickle in their throat to alert them of the danger within.

Distinguishing those who are truly asymptomatic from those who are simply yet to show signs of the virus has made it hard to calculate a precise figure on the risks of succumbing to the illness.

Now an analysis by a group of US medical researchers on more than 350 studies has found just over 35 percent of all COVID-19 infections don't proceed to a symptomatic phase.

Early estimates ranged from just 4 percent of infections being asymptomatic, all the way up to 81 percent. Even as the pandemic ensued, figures conservatively estimated fewer than 20 percent of people might be infectious without showing any signs.

Confidently nailing down a number is harder than it might seem. Without the fever, loss of smell, sore throat, aches, and cough to encourage a trip to a clinic, few people bother lining up for a test.

One of the simplest ways to capture the true spread of infection is to conduct a cross-sectional survey, randomly sampling a population to detect the presence of the virus regardless of the subject's health.

There's just one problem with this approach. Anybody who's feeling well on the day they're tested can potentially fall sick hours or days later, making 'no symptoms' look the same like 'no symptoms... yet'.

To make the challenge even harder, SARS-CoV-2 can produce a variety of symptoms, some of which we're still learning about late in the game. Going back through the literature to identify those who might have been symptomatic after all is no easy task.

It's not that scientists haven't tried. But according to the researchers who published this most recent effort, most either don't account for the bias of symptomatic individuals seeking tests more than people without symptoms, or didn't include enough longitudinal data to capture those who might have fallen ill later.

The result is likely to be an under-appreciation of the true extent of asymptomatic cases.

To address these limitations, the team systematically conducted two separate meta-analyses of existing COVID-19 studies that reported on laboratory-confirmed infections.

The first was limited to studies that included a substantial follow-up period to clear those who experienced some kind of effect from the virus later. The results of this particular analysis suggest 35.1 percent of people who might receive a positive laboratory result won't personally suffer any consequences of their infection.

The second included studies that both distinguished silent infections at the time of testing as well as conducting a follow-up analysis. The number here was 36.9 percent.

The figures are close enough to convince the researchers that their method has merit, reinforcing speculations that many of our best guesses have been too low. Even taking into account index cases that could be biasing calculations, their figures are at least one in every four cases being silent ones.

The Never-Ending Covid Variant Fear Parade

 

The Vaccine Causes the Virus to be More Dangerous