Hard News by Russell Brown

Here's the release on the trial data being presented to the Covid-19 conference.

This whole avenue of work is super interesting and certainly shows some promise. I'm confused by

...efforts to have their work replicated in the US were stymied because all necessary resources were committed to vaccine development.

That doesn't seem credible to me. Looking at the preprint, we could do equivalent in vitro work here in NZ, so I'm be very surprised that there was no capacity to do the same in the whole of the US science system.

That doesn’t seem credible to me. Looking at the preprint, we could do equivalent in vitro work here in NZ, so I’m be very surprised that there was no capacity to do the same in the whole of the US science system.

Yes, that is puzzling. More specifically, Victor Zonana, an American who works with Hazel at Global Health NewZealand, presented the Brazilian results to the NIH in the hope of replicating them in the US and was told there wasn’t a high-containment lab available.

Great news Russell,

It's interesting that dexamethasone works, because...

Dexamethasone Enhances 1α,25-Dihydroxyvitamin D3 Effects by Increasing Vitamin D Receptor Transcription.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3196110/

And people have been talking about vitamin D for a long time, strong evidence it affects survival but no big push to get deficient populations supplemented, despite death rates correlating with both vitamin D levels and skin tone, the best-known factor affecting vitamin D levels.

Now that Fauci's on it, we'll see something happen quickly, but oh-oh - "The Iranian Drug..." I can hear that already.

Spam

I know, right? I reported it as such 2 weeks ago. And again a week ago when it still hadn’t been removed from the multiple threads it inhabits. As I noted, persistent drug ads are an especially bad look for the threads on marijuana decriminalisation.
Hopefully the neglect means that RB now has some paying work coming in again?

Once again, it's just weird that the lab research finds it's daclatasvir that is the effective component and not sofosbuvir. Sofosbuvir is a nucleotide analogue, so you could easily imagine it inhibiting the RNA polymerase in other viruses the same way it does in HCV, but dataclatasvir binds in a very targeted way to an HCV protein, specifically enough that resistance occurs rapidly if it's used on its own.