Evidence for God from Science

RickD wrote: ↑Fri Jul 31, 2020 2:25 pm FWIW,

My wife has a nurse practitioner friend who has been treating some of her patients with Hydroxychloroquine, and she said it definitely is helping them.

I know you may not want to hear that, so you can brush it aside if it doesn’t fit in your anti-Trump narrative.

Ed said about Hydroxychloroquine:we have the global scientific and medical communities saying that the stuff is unproven at best and deadly at worst

edwardmurphy wrote: ↑Fri Jul 31, 2020 5:10 pm

RickD wrote: ↑Fri Jul 31, 2020 2:25 pm FWIW,

My wife has a nurse practitioner friend who has been treating some of her patients with Hydroxychloroquine, and she said it definitely is helping them.

I know you may not want to hear that, so you can brush it aside if it doesn’t fit in your anti-Trump narrative.

So there's one piece of anecdotal evidence that hydroxychloroquine isn't useless. Meantime, yesterday I read an anecdote from a doctor who said that he'd treated 12 patients with hydroxychloroquine and they all died. Long story short, I supposed the possibility exists that it might have some use as a Covid treatment, but that's not where the preponderance of evidence points. Beyond that, Trump actually said that it could be used to prevent Covid, which hasn't panned out, and Dr. Stella called it a straight up cure, which it plainly is not.

I also need to push back on the implication that my skeptical view of hydroxychloroquine is political. That's utter and complete [nonsense]. As things stand we have the global scientific and medical communities saying that the stuff is unproven at best and deadly at worst and the President implying that it's a miracle cure. So let's apply Occam's razor, which says that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Which explanation is simpler - that hydroxychloroquine isn't an effective treatment for Covid-19 and Trump and his enablers are blowing smoke, or that there's a massive, global conspiracy encompassing the WHO, CDC, every government in the developed world, and the overwhelming majority of the world's scientists and doctors, and aimed at making Trump look bad by suppressing an effective Covid treatment?

Take a minute and reason it out.

RickD wrote: ↑Sat Aug 01, 2020 4:42 am That was one piece of anecdotal evidence along many others. In the last 5 months or so, I’ve heard interviews with many different doctors who all said that it has worked for them. The example with my wife was the first where we personally knew someone who it’s worked for.


So, I’m hearing from doctors that it does work, at least in certain cases.

Which is against your claim.

Don’t think it’s political? You just wait to see how they’re gonna force push the untested vaccine on all of us.


Edit:

Ed said about Hydroxychloroquine:we have the global scientific and medical communities saying that the stuff is unproven at best and deadly at worst

I hope for you and your family, you keep that in mind when they try to force , the unproven at best, deadly at worst, vaccine on you.

edwardmurphy wrote: ↑Sat Aug 01, 2020 10:41 am The "untested" vaccine is currently being tested. That's why it's going to take 12-18 months to get it out, assuming they manage to pull it off at all. By the time it's released it will have been tested.

Regarding Trump's efforts to pimp hydroxychloroquine, the issue is that he's making false claims. As you mentioned, there have been reports that the drug can sometimes be useful as part of a treatment plan. As I've mentioned, those reports have been countered by reports that it doesn't work and studies that have reached the same conclusion. Trump has been pushing a third narrative - that hydroxychloroquine can be taken as a preventative measure (it's not) and that it's a cure for Covid-19 (it's not).

No, it wasn't Trump saying that it was a cure, it was Stella Immanuel, but Trump amplified her message in a way that allowed him share the claim without taking responsibility for it. It's a classic BS propaganda move. "What, I just thought she made an interesting point." Yeah, [nonsense]. Long story short, Trump is the leader of the United States and tens of millions of people assume that he's well informed and the information that he puts out can be trusted. That's power, and with power comes responsibility. Or at least it used to.

Long story short, Trump ought to shut up about hydroxychloroquine and leave treatment to the experts.

Abe, first off, there's an edit button. If you post, then have another thought, you can use the edit button to add it. You don't have to post 6 times to share 6 thoughts. Nothing else you wrote merits a response.

edwardmurphy wrote: ↑Sat Aug 01, 2020 2:00 pm Nobody ever said "Quarantine the healthy people."

What they said was "We have no way of knowing who is sick, who is healthy, and who is an asymptomatic carrier, so we need to lock everybody down until we can flatten the curve and hopefully get enough testing capacity on line to be able to identify and contract trace so that we can move to a targeted quarantine."

Do you see the difference?

edwardmurphy wrote: ↑Mon Aug 03, 2020 7:43 am Ok, let me try it a different way.

Abe, among others, has been making the argument that, most likely as part of a sinister plot, our medical and scientific experts insisted that the healthy be quarantined. They insist that that's wrong, because in the past people always quarantined the sick and let the healthy go about their business. Abe is wrong across the board. Historically the people who were typically quarantined were the new arrivals, especially if they were coming from an area where there was known to be sickness. In times of plague medieval ports quarantined newly arrived ships. In the US newly arrived immigrants went through smallpox quarantine on Ellis Island before being allowed to enter New York proper. Quarantining the potentially sick is an age old practice, and people insisting otherwise are either ignorant of history or outright lying.

When the US partially locked down back in March the idea wasn't to quarantine the healthy, it was to quarantine the potentially sick. You're probably going to tell me that I'm playing games with semantics, but I'm not. During the pandemic everyone was potentially sick. There were people who looked healthy, felt healthy, and might even have been healthy, but who nevertheless carried and transmitted the virus. We couldn't reliably say who was who because we didn't have enough tests and a lot of them apparently didn't work anyway. Your son might have been healthy, or he might have been an asymptomatic carrier whose test produced a false negative. They didn't know, so they erred on the side of caution. I get that that's [love] maddening - I'm here in Covid Land with the rest of you - but in our current reality it makes sense to be cautious.

Nobody ever said "Quarantine the healthy people.

RickD wrote: ↑Mon Aug 03, 2020 9:26 amAnyone who is asymptomatic, not sick yet, not going to get sick, etc., are HEALTHY! And the healthy are being quarantined.

edwardmurphy wrote: ↑Mon Aug 03, 2020 11:15 am

RickD wrote: ↑Mon Aug 03, 2020 9:26 amAnyone who is asymptomatic, not sick yet, not going to get sick, etc., are HEALTHY! And the healthy are being quarantined.

I don't think we know enough about the virus to say for certain that asymptomatic people are in the clear, but I agree that they do seem healthy. That's not the point though - the goal isn't so much to isolate the sick as to isolate the potentially contagious. If we can't tell the truly healthy from the contagious asymptomatic carriers then our only real option is to assume that both everybody is in the latter group, even if they present as being in the former.

And yes, I 100% agree that this [love] sucks!

RickD wrote: ↑Mon Aug 03, 2020 2:23 pmSo you’re saying that since we don’t know who’s positive and asymptomatic, who’s presymptomatic, and who’s truly negative, then just assume everyone is “potentially contagious”?