I have been running across a bumper crop of conspiracy theories about SARS-CoV-2. Pat Lang, whose opinion I generally regard highly, is convinced that the virus did not just originate in China but is a Chinese plot. Maybe he’s right or maybe he’s just lost in the “wilderness of mirrors”.
This article at Forbes, mostly devoted to the gamesmanship of Gilead’s announcements, expresses a different notion but a conspiracy theory all the same:
Bizarrely, China has just suspended one trial of the drug Remdesivir in Jin Yin-tan hospital in the outbreak capital of Wuhan and terminated another in Bin Cao Beijing, and the government report says, “The epidemic of COVID-19 has been controlled well at present, no eligible patients can be recruited.â€
It is possible the Chinese government are worried Remdesivir is too effective and have moved to shut down the trials over fears the US drug could corner the global market. However, further tests are underway on the US west coast, including hundreds of hospitals and care homes.
Studies are currently being conducted at universities like University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine – Infectious Disease, University of California, San Diego Health Jacobs Medical Center, and University of California Los Angeles Medical Center – Westwood Clinic.
Worldwide testing has begun in France, including studies in Paris, Nantes and Lille, there is testing underway in Oslo, Norway, and also in The Democratic Republic of the Congo in Africa.
I suspect that Remdesivir’s being covered on the news this morning won’t hurt Gilead’s share value, either.
My view is that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, as Freud observed about images in dreams. Maybe China is ending its trials of the drug because they have just run out of patients. That seems incredible to me but maybe it’s true. The truth will emerge in time.
However great our sense of urgency, the real world is not a movie and not everything will be revealed in 110 minutes.
Lang’s group is convinced that China’s economy is still booming and they were willing to sacrifice thousands dead to screw America. Where is China’s export driven economy sending all of their stuff if the US and most of Europe is shut down? South America and SE Asia are now driving the world economy? The nice part about conspiracy theory is that it doesn’t have to make sense.
Everyone would like Remdesivir to work, but to date what has been published are uncontrolled studies done by the drug company itself.
Steve
There are several things that make me nervous about Remdesivir not the least being that it’s being promoted so ferociously by public officials.
The results leaded from its Chicago trials seemed good, but a sentence like this is darkly amusing, but revealing of it context: “The best news is that most of our patients have already been discharged, which is great. We’ve only had two patients perish.â€
https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/16/early-peek-at-data-on-gilead-coronavirus-drug-suggests-patients-are-responding-to-treatment/
Steve: I think on an earlier thread you said Remdesivir was unavailable, so I was assuming you had gotten your hands on some. Was that the case and did it work at all?
On another site another poster who had seen someone touting it on TV was asking WTF was ‘proning’. Thanks to you I was able to explain it to him.
When I read of any conspiracy theory, right, left, or crazy, I apply Occam’s razor to it. 100%. I consider this theory Busted (stole that from Mythbusters) unless I see evidence otherwise.
I personally suspect what happened was something similar to what happened in Chernobyl; sloppy carelessness followed by an Oh F**k followed by frantic attempts to clean up, scrub evidence, cover up, lie, obfuscate, BS, and blame-casting. Recall that the first public news about Chernobyl was when a Swedish nuclear plant worker tested ‘hot’ when he went to ENTER his workplace. IMO the lab was experimenting with the critter to see what it would do and what to do if something like it showed up in the ‘wild’ (a common occurrence in China) and Hey Presto! it got out.
There are several things that make me nervous about Remdesivir not the least being that it’s being promoted so ferociously by public officials.
I’ve seen a lot of pro-Trump commenters on another blog who’ve been angry at their perception of anti-HCQ coverage. They attribute this to “Orange Man Bad†bias. I think much more likely that there are financial interests at play even if anti-Trump bias happened to mesh with those interests.
Plus of course it was too soon to go all-in on HCQ, which may help but is unlikely to be a panacea.
Me, too. Means, motive and opportunity are not enough.
Assume the initial outbreak was an accident, either a natural consequence of disgusting Chinese dietary habits or a release from a lab. Which Chinese actions since then are NOT consistent with a desire to see this spread worldwide and ruin as many nations as possible?
Releasing the genome on January 12. Since most countries only need a week or so to develop testing that was way too early to release. Destroying their own economy also seems like an unlikely goal. Plus, Chinese docs have published tons of stuff in our medical journals which has largely been pretty helpful.
“They attribute this to “Orange Man Bad†bias.”
I would attribute it to lack of evidence that it actually works, plus a very long history of celebrities/religious leaders/politicians pushing treatments that dont really work or are harmful. In this current round we had people pushing mercury or silver treatments again. If a treatment really works you dont generally need a celebrity to advocate for it.
Steve
Lang is very uneven and prone to conspiracies. For example, many years ago during a comment thread on his site he accused me of being not being a real person, but a pro-Israel cabal. He later apologized and we straightened things out, but I saw that pattern repeated with others. There are some views he simply doesn’t tolerate. Other times I think his analysis is very good. It really depends.
I would attribute it to lack of evidence that it actually works, plus a very long history of celebrities/religious leaders/politicians pushing treatments that dont really work or are harmful.
When Trump said it, it was after someone in the French government reported that it seemed to work. What happened then was that Trump repeated it, the press and Democrats treated it as though Trump was intentionally trying to kill people, and then Trump doubled down. The usual bullshit from the people that told us to go out and gather in large crowds to show Trump we weren’t racists and weren’t fraidy cats, and the usual bullshit from Trump of doubling down on whatever his opponents are against.
Again, I am positing that the virus escaped into the Chinese population by accident. Destroying their own economy was clearly not intended. But everything from hiding the existence of the disease early, to insisting up until January 20th that human-to-human transmission was NOT happening, to pressuring the WHO into saying the same and have WHO insist that travel bans were simply racist, to closing off Hubei to other parts of China but leaving it open to international travel, to sending out intentionally faulty tests and PPE, and on and on.
Against that you have the release of genome (which would have been sequenced fairly quickly anyway once it got to the West), and some doctors posting stuff the Chinese government didn’t want published.
All of that looks like intentional work to spread the disease. Not to mention the lies they have told about the numbers of Chinese infected and dead, which they have JUST started revising as of last night.
Tars- We never had enough to form a strong opinion. We got a few doses then it all got shunted to the big studies.
Steve
“When Trump said it, it was after someone in the French government reported that it seemed to work. What happened then was that Trump repeated it, the press and Democrats treated it as though Trump was intentionally trying to kill people, and then Trump doubled down. The usual bullshit from the people that told us to go out and gather in large crowds to show Trump we weren’t racists and weren’t fraidy cats, and the usual bullshit from Trump of doubling down on whatever his opponents are against.”
That’s exactly right. But it precedes Trump. The press just gives everyone the devil, or adulation, depending on their political views, with no consideration of the collateral damage. And can anyone name a class of people less qualified to judge anything? How many journalists have been in executive positions, serious analytical positions, design and operational control positions? Next to zero.
Name me a profession that does more damage to public policy today than the press. Only the people they cover.