Here is some fuel for your flamewar: this is the exact treatment Trump was riffing off of when the media collectively lost its mind and claimed that he told people to drink bleach.

It's really frustrating to see actual medical progress be pushed back in the public eye because some people have such intense dislike for someone.

"Some guy we hate said this might work - quick, write a thousand articles about how he's not smart for recommending it and bring on doctors who have no relevant experience/knowledge/credentials to 'prove them wrong'!"

This UV-A treatment looks very promising for people who have contracted a severe case of the virus. I do like how they're optimizing the UV light to try and find the best wavelength/frequency/etc. of light to avoid any unnecessary harm to the patient. It looks like from what I was reading that ventilators can cause harm to patients? I wasn't aware that was a thing!

Ventilators are nasty. Lots better than death, but they don't use them until that's the alternative for really good reasons.

The "does hydroxychloroquine work, does ivermectin work" are all valid questions. The problem is people making big conclusions on tiny studies that didn't stand up to larger statistical trials - just as we're seeing here - and also the fact that people refused to drop it once the evidence contradicted their positions.

I find the "horse paste" and "aquarium cleaner" memes to be very irritating though, they are FDA approved drugs. Yes, it hasn't gone through the human-medicine supply chain, but veterinary medicine needs to be just as pure as human medicine. Also, "aquarium cleaner" and other products are often sold wink-nudge with the tacit understanding that there are a lot of people who don't have health insurance (or have health insurance that's terrible) and can't get access to actual drugs and this is the only way for them to get access to life-saving medications. There are people who literally need to take "aquarium cleaner" to live, because they have lupus and that's what they can get. Same for "fish mox" which is routinely taken by people who can't afford to go to a doctor and get actual amoxicillin. In both cases, it needs to be very pure, if there were contaminants it would instantly kill exotic fish, just like veterinary medicine needs to be pure, contaminants will kill your dog or horse the same as a human.

Like it or not that's a grey-market supply chain that has existed for a while and nobody wants to actually address the problem of making sure that people have universal access to medical care (not just insurance, that's not sufficient as you can see right now). So people take aquarium cleaner to stay alive. Welcome to America.

The problem there is people self-administering huge doses that are far out of clinical standards. And that's something I'm perfectly fine mocking - if you are gonna self-prescribe for something the drug is not approved for, and you take a massive dose that makes you uncontrollably shit yourself, yeah that one's on you buddy. And that would happen even if they sourced human drugs from a pharmacy.

The problem as far as messaging is that the above stuff doesn't sink in with the general public. They won't listen to "the evidence says HCQ and ivermectin don't work", Republicans say it does, and they will trust Trump over doctors. But there's a chance they will listen if they get constantly mocked for taking horse paste. As far as messaging, it's probably the correct strategy even if we here all know it's not intellectually honest.

And yeah the FDA has gotten themselves in trouble with mixed messaging in the past, like saying the evidence showed that masks didn't work, in order to manipulate the public into not buying them to preserve the supply for health care providers (lmao at the idea of that ever working, and lmao that they thought they could pull it off without destroying their credibility). In this case mocking people for taking horse paste isn't really wrong though, it's a flat-out bad idea and if this is the approach that wakes them up, oh well.

Intellectually irritating but I get it. I'm not the target audience here.

> Sounds interesting — right and then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning?

You’re leaving out so much context I can’t believe you are acting in good faith.

Full quote:

"A question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposedly we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that, too. Sounds interesting, right?"

"And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful."

It’s pretty clear he is referring to the uva as the “injected disenfectant” here.

Since you're concerned with context, they'd previously been discussing actual disinfectant. The slide is pictured in the BBC's coverage: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177

> "COMMONLY AVAILALBLE DISINFECTANTS (Bleach & Isopropyl Alcohol) work to kill the virus"

UVA is a disinfectant now? To me it’s clear he’s listing things he’s heard and UVA and disinfectant are unrelated topics of discussion.

The ridicule heaped on him was not about him mentioning things that were discussed around him. It’s that he clearly had a very weak grasp of what was being discussed and couldn’t then clearly communicate that and ended up sounding completely incompetent.

The phrase “Sunlight is the best disinfectant” exists for a reason.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181017211703.h...

That's not clear, and even reading it now I didn't think of that interpretation without you pointing it out.

Fair enough. He suggested that injecting bleach could be a good idea.

No he didn’t, read the full quote in context.

"And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning" sounds a lot like injecting disinfectant. I admit the original, rambling, confused and barely coherent reduced-vocabulary speech can be interpreted in a multitude of ways, some of which aren't insane, but this is Donnie we are talking about.

That is cherry picked from 2 full paragraphs of context, I posted it in another comment above, check my history.

I copied it out of your quote. It's there, right in the middle of his confused flow of thought. What is your interpretation? Is he still talking about light when he mentions the injection right after the disinfectant?

He's comparing the light to the disenfectant, and intrigued by the idea of "injecting" the light to do the same job that a disenfectant does on a surface.

"so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of *the light*, the way *it kills it in one minute*."

I mean, the comprehension here is not that difficult.

Maybe you need to brush up on your "Queens-speak Translator".

"And then I see the disinfectant" is a very strange construction to refer to the effect of light, but you are entitled to "your truth" it seems, at least according to the current doublethink norms the GOP follows.

Not a republican, but I find the insult ironic because "your truth" is something that radical liberals use to justify their own doublethink.

> Not a republican, but I find the insult ironic because "your truth" is something that radical liberals use to justify their own doublethink.

"I'm not a republican" ... "radical liberals justifying your doublethink..."

hmmmmmm

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

yes, extremely definitely not a republican, we can definitely tell because you said so right at the start, and it's not like people would just go on the internet and pretend to be moderates, knowing that "moderation" is a trait that many people inherently assume to be credible and balanced.

if you're gonna try to pull the "well ackshually I'm a moderate" you gotta try and sell it a little better, don't immediately leap right to the fox news political slurs in literally the same sentence as you try to frame yourself as a moderate. Kinda gives away the game a bit.

I find it surprising that Fox News political slurs are showing up even here.

k

> To kick off the flamewar: is discussing any treatment but vaccines still == "spreading anti-vax misinformation"?

Saying that a test with 5 patients of whom one didn’t survive has benefits to be harnessed is misinformation. All it indicates is that it may be possible to reduce viral load by exposing internal tissue to UVA light and that the treatment doesn’t seem to kill patients immediately.

Let’s see if they can do it with more patients and show some statistically significant results.

> To kick off the flamewar: is discussing any treatment but vaccines still == "spreading anti-vax misinformation"?

Why?

It's a fair question considering that's been a de facto rule on social media, despite people using code words to get around that.

But I am not sure that was ever the case here on HN, so I don't know why they used the word "still".

to put a stick in the eye of the person eager to jump up with copypasta about how we should be focusing on vaccines instead of other treatments, the response about how all the "treatments" offered so far are scams, the political follow ons, and so on.

Not that those people don't exist, but the whole "I bet those people are going to have this reaction" is just as much political bickering (and therefore conversation poison) as the behavior your predicting.

Misinformation is a topic of recent increased interest so citing it will likely bring more engagement.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=m...

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=m...

> To kick off the flamewar: is discussing any treatment but vaccines still == "spreading anti-vax misinformation"?

No, only if the discussions on other treatments are done without misinformation and some basis on science.

For example, it would be good if you didn't say things like "it sounds like it might be a little better than ventilator damage" when there's no data to back that up, and there's a major difference: ventilators help people stay alive. Even if the UVA treatment worked, you still need something to support patients when their oxygen saturation is dangerously low.

> No, only if the discussions on other treatments are done without misinformation and some basis on science.

And who defines what is misinformation?

Well, it's pretty easy to spot which information is not exactly right, what is unknown, and what is outright false.

It's not that difficult. Somehow the misinformation discussion gets derailed into "but what is actually the truth" empty debates, when the misinformation we are discussing is as stupidly false as "COVID is fake" or "vaccines don't work" for example.

How does one discuss a complex topic with others without some degree of misinformation being present in the conversation?

Some degree of misinformation will always happen, of course. But there's a lot of difference between "I heard that the vaccine changes your DNA, is that right?" and "The vaccine is untested and made to control you, meanwhile ivermectin is fully effective against COVID and the doctors are lying to you".

Vaccine is not treatment. Both have a role.

>Lung sunburn! Pardon me while i go scream for a minnit on that thought.

Ever thought about chemo or radiation therapy?

My lungs itch already. "sunburn itch" and glow ... ugh

It's followed by an Aloe Vera chaser.