Oct. 8 marked a major milestone in what we know about the efficacy of rimadasivir, an experimental antiviral drug that was the first treatment drug approved for emergency use for COVID-19 in the United States. On that day, the results of a large medical trial – double-blind, placebo-controlled and involving more than 1,000 patients – were finally published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study found that the drug actually shortens the number of days it takes to recover from COVID-19, and has fewer serious side effects than placebo control. However, researchers also showed that the drug is not exactly a game-changer. For example, it did not significantly reduce mortality. Overall, though, the study was good news.
The day before, a 74-year-old Kovid-19 patient who had taken rimadesivir returned to work at his regular office fee. That bit was probably good personal news for one man, but if you want to know how well remodevir works – and what it means to you, if you get coronavirus, the next ones are a lot more than that. . Even if that man is the leader of the free world.
He may have taken a combination of experimental drugs, but President Trump’s hospital stay was not an experiment. We learned nothing about Covid-19 or its treatment, seeing what happened to it. Is it true that you may be tempted by his experience to prove that Covid-19 is not a big deal, or if you are hunting Twitter for evidence that the drugs he has taken are having an external effect on his mental state. .
From the moment the president inhales the virus particles, his illness poses not only a physical risk to himself, but also a moral hazard for the country desperate for concrete answers to a contagious disease that has been difficult for more than seven months. COVID-19 has provided one luminal space after another. It has been almost impossible to accurately chart the probable course of an epidemic, prevent the spread of the virus, and count the number of Americans who have died without a star and a caliber of qualifications. So when the President of the United States became one of the transgender, it seemed that there was, at the very least, an opportunity to clarify a bit – to talk about the coronavirus in public and to meet everyone on the same page about the severity of the disease and its risks.
But that did not happen.
Understanding a person’s case will never help to fully understand the disease, but we can rarely do that. The White House’s lack of transparency about exactly what happened – and when – has left the country unable to agree on what really happened. It is not yet clear when the president first tested positive. It appears that no contact has been made about the president’s contacts and who may have been infected with the virus; If anyone has been there, it has been left to the media and private citizens. It’s hard to be angry at how sick he really was with angry public statements – that his doctor admitted that he was intentionally positive and enthusiastic.
Trump is not the first president to be insane about his physical health. (However, one would think that there is another reason to be transparent when the disease in question is contagious. President Kennedy Edison’s illness was not spreading around the Rose Garden.) In this case, the lack of clarity from White House confuses the virus itself . If you’re confused about whether the president tested negative before his first post-hospitalization, wait until you ask if that’s not really the right question to ask.
In part, however, the problem with Trump’s expectation of illness will clarify the vague waters of COVID-19, expecting anyone’s illness to cut the cucumber. It’s not just how science works. As Regenron’s CEO – Trump, the maker of experimental antibodies – went on to put it on Face the Nation over the weekend: Which you can get. “
That evidence is weak because medical science doesn’t work like our government system – you can’t just select individuals to represent the biology of society. Our bodies are all a little different. Our circumstances are all a little different. If a patient takes a drug and recovers, how do you tell if the drug really works, or if you just tried it on someone who would have been fine anyway? How can you tell if a drug is safe or if the patient suffers more from it than everyone else?
The answer is that you test more and more people over and over again. And you can be sure that some of them have been told that even though they got the drug they were not really, so we can also distinguish between the benefits of the drugs and the strength of our own body under the instructions. In the same way science weeds out the eels and finds out, whether any medicine really works or not. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than the option. This research is not about a strong leader, it is about the community.
But the president of the United States is a kind of end result. Even in older white men, it is not typical. He is very rich. She has access to better health care. It has handlers and an on-call physician and literally a hospital suite designed just for her. This special president is probably not even representative of all of them – in temperament, habits and life history – even your average old white male president. If it had, it would not have transmitted the virus at all. What happens to it is never to tell us what a run-in with COVID-19 looks like. What happens to it is never to tell us if a drug works or not. What happens to it is never to tell us about the side effects of rimadesivir, regeneron antibody cocktail or dexamethasone.
And that’s especially true when we’re talking about a virus that can be torn apart by a seemingly randomly abandoned family – killing some, hospitalizing others, and registering illnesses like no other.
No politician here can be our figurehead. Demagoguery does not work for the study of infectious disease.
