I’m sick and came to the doctor to get tested for covid, strep, and flu, since those are going around my work. I asked the doctor if I could get paxlovid if the covid test was positive, and he goes “Oh I don’t think you’d need it”
Motherfucker almost everyone who catches covid should be fucking taking it wtf is wrong with you. Oh I’m young and otherwise healthy? Yeah and I’d like to fucking stay that way thank you very much, and I’ll take any reduction in the chance of becoming permanently disabled.
Also of the medical professionals I saw today, they were only wearing surgical masks, not N95s and I can’t comprehend it. Why in the hell would you go into the room of a likely covid case not wearing an N95 are you insane?
I’m so fucking sick of being the only person in this entire town that’s actually worried about catching this disease, even the fucking doctors don’t care anymore. I work in a research facility attached to a hospital and when I go to the food court and shit at best like 1/25 people are wearing masks. In a hospital.
Thank you Mr Joe Brandon for ending the pandemic, you’ve truly cemented your place among history’s greatest killers.
With respect, you are not a doctor. You have no concept of how complex the decisions are around prescribing medications. Do you know the number needed to treat vs number needed to harm for Paxlovid?. Do you have any idea what the drug does and in which populations it has been studied?
You're young and healthy. You don't need Paxlovid. End of story. It's only indicated for over 70s / immunosuppressed / significant cardiorespiratory comorbidity to prevent hospitalisation and death. The decision of whether ir not to prescribe a drug is more complex and nuanced that "I have virus, give me virus pill". Do you really think your doctor has never heard of long COVID?
It is not just some magic pill to be thrown around "just in case" to young healthy people anxious about rare complications.
Every time you prescribe it you roll the dice. You might be selecting for a strain that is resistant to Paxlovid. You might have an unwanted side effect or allergy. You might have picked up the last pack from your local pharmacy which means the 80 year old diabetic with a kidney transplant can't get it.
This deeply underestimates how slowly medical science moves. COVID crosses the blood brain barrier and is found in every major organ in cadavers. It's like assuming a particular plastic is harmless because it isn't listed as hazardous. It just means that it hasn't been tested. Research doesn't happen if there's no profit incentive to fund it. At best you get some researcher pulling strings for their pet project.
There is no shortage of Paxlovid or vaccines, they're all rotting on the shelves.
With respect it sounds like you don't know either and are vibing off the idea of what doctors are through cultural osmosis. Speaking from my own expertise around the history of healthcare and healthcare training most doctors are terrible people and their training is incredibly hostile to patients. That's just the nature of for-profit healthcare.
You can trust doctors to do the bare minimum not to kill you but these people are incredibly neurotic, especially because they are culturally treated like Gods. There is more than enough academic literature to prove this, they're not ubermensch, they're usually rich kids that are just good at studying.
The far greater likelihood is that CCA has a bad doctor that uncritically swallows whatever the CDC tells them, ergo their doctor uncritically swallows information from a political organization responsible for killing millions through social murder.
Please hang out at a med school, talk to the students that are about to graduate. The good doctor that you're imagining in your head is incredibly rare. American doctors in particular are trained to be extremely hostile and adversarial to their patients relative to other countries.
I'm a GP Anaesthetist
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That's cool I hope you're a good one lmao. Please listen to your patients.
I don't know how much social and political training they give you where you live but when I'm organizing I see mistreatment daily and a I've come to recognize that key medical fields select for the worst possible people. I've had the privilege of knowing a respected psychologist and getting to watch him try to "fix" his autistic children and witnessed the mistreatment of countless trans patients.
Best case scenario you do everything right and your successors consider you a barbarian because you're borne out of a system that insisted black people couldn't feel pain until like 20 years ago. I'm sure you're a nice enough person but yeah I'd bet money that CCA is experiencing medical neglect rather than a carefully considered decision.
that explains the arrogance
Paxlovid is specifically to be used when there is a series of positive tests or symptoms. The doctor is premptively saying, "Nah, doesn't matter if you test positive or not, I'm not going to go outta my way to give you the drug specifically to be used to treat the illness that you've tested positive for."
You’re not a doctor
Unlike Ben Carson or the great barrington declaration smoothbrains or the ones prescribing ivermectin
Lmao fuck outta here
“Will I get reprimanded by my hospital’s board of directors if I prescribe desperately needed medication to the poors?”
“Life expectancy for anyone under the age of 40 isn’t going to decrease itself!”
Also: everyone infected with covid has a ten to twenty percent chance of getting long covid, which currently has no cure. Paxlovid reduces that chance. So prescribe it!
Many such cases of doctors assuming that long covid is some kind of psychological issue. The real psychological issue is that doctors tend to come from rich families who have nothing but contempt for workers. I know because my spouse is a nurse and I come from a family of doctors.
Cool. Explain this to the patient who wants paxlovid and let them make the decision. Problem solved! I know you’ll feel guilty about treating workers like human beings, but don’t worry, I’m sure your bourgeois puppet masters will find some other way to make up for whatever labor is spent on preventing yet more needless death and misery.
Also, thanks for letting us know you’re a doctor. I fucking LOVE dunking on doctors! You all think you’re so fucking smart, but you’d be nothing without your family’s inherited stolen wealth 😉 . How many examples are there of people impersonating doctors for years without being found out? And whenever they ARE discovered, it’s never because they’ve harmed a patient. It’s always because some bourgeois signifier (i.e., the watch isn’t golden enough) is off.
I presume you're American because you insist wealth is a prerequisite to a medical degree. My parents were low-middle income before they retired. We ate 2 minute noodles at least twice a week and Dad grew most of the veggies. I went to a shitty public high school. I worked hard, got good grades and scored well in the entry exam. Nowhere in any of this was the question of money ever an issue. The government pays (well, loans really) the university fee and I was on welfare for the duration of my studies, which is less than minimum wage so I had a part time job as well.
Paxlovid has not been studied in the prevention of long COVID, and another closely related antiviral combination (lopinavir + ritonavir) has actially been shown to increase the odds ratio of long COVID by 92%.
I'm done arguing with non-doctors about this.
Wow, you definitely earned everything you have by the sweat of your own brow! But you’re Australian, aren’t you? Just ignore the mountain of aboriginal skeletons and the ocean of aboriginal blood underneath you. You are very much a man of the people!
“The analysis showed that Paxlovid reduced the risk of long COVID-19 by 26% over a six-month period.”
https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/paxlovid-reduces-risk-of-long-term-health-problems-death-from-covid-19/
Oops! Actually, it has been studied! And actually, it does help! You are objectively incorrect! How many people are dead or living in misery because you chose to protect your bosses rather than the vulnerable? Maybe you should have gone to medical school in Cuba, where they actually train doctors to help people regardless of how much money they have?
Please read the article and come at me with nitpicky details. You have made a terrible mistake by arguing about covid with a communist, even as I strongly suspect you stopped masking years ago and are constantly infecting the people around you with disease. As you go about your day and judge whether to provide expensive medications to save the lives of poor people, remember that it was a communist with no medical training or expertise who defeated you here, fair and square.
Must be nice knowing that it’s not just the anti-vaxx weirdos second-guessing you all the time. Anyone with any experience with doctors is constantly googling whatever you tell us because we know you work for the bourgeoisie, not for the 99%.
You know that feeling you get when you're a subject matter expert and some moron tries to argue with you by googling their own opinion and linking a news article in which one of the lead authors has declared conflict of interest by consulting for the manufacturer of the drug they wrote a paper about? Yeah, that's why I'm done arguing with non-doctors on this topic.
You are not a communist, you are just another American white boy in a Che Guevara tshirt who blames his own failure on capitalism and a system set up against them in the same way incels blame their loneliness on women who fail to see them as they see themselves. Both a conveniently external locus of control.
Thankyou for inspiring me to block hexbear BTW
How is this specific study incorrect? If you examined the data, would you draw a different conclusion?
Lol. Our entire approach to covid is causing covid to mutate rapidly and become more and more contagious and immune evasive, while rapidly making obsolete treatments we've developed over the past two years.
The Ba.2.86 variant they started detecting worldwide, while not as contagious as current circulating variants, is one of the most immune evasive ever seen.
The "let it spread for herd immunity" fuckheads turned the entire world into a big gain of function experiment.
Some people here are saying the fucked up capitalism of US medicine is that it’s not prescribing paxlovid but after reading your comment I think the fucked up part of US medical capitalism is the other commenter who linked a doctor that will prescribe it to you for $15.
Your point about carefully avoiding that we select for a resistant strain I think is especially powerful because even if an individual wants to roll the side-effects dice there is still community harm involved in that decision. You completely won me with that argument.
Which ironically enough parallels the case for continuing to mask up so people need to get their dooming under control and stay anchored in science.
Is there a viable biochemical pathway for this to develop? I don't fret about prophylactic use of hand sanitizer for fear of selecting an alcohol resistant strain, because that's not possible, or to put it more accurately, there is no plausible mutation that would lead to alcohol resistance being incorporated into the viral genome.
I’m not a medical expert but a quick google search revealed medical experts fearing that is the case
Also interestingly enough I decided to google if bacterial resistance to hand sanitizer was a thing and yes apparently some bacteria are evolving tolerance of hand sanitizer.
Life will uh find a way
Just like there were medical experts sharing that masks were not effective for the general public at the opening stages of the pandemic.
Bacterial 'resistance' to ethanol based hand sanitizer is not a thing so much as bacterial tolerance of alcohol concentrations can increase, and they can point to the specific biochemical pathways of concern (changes to carbohydrate metabolism). Which is not the case and cannot be the case for a lipophilic virus like SARS-CoV-2.
A quick glance at the literature indicates:
Yeah imma get the drug.
Seems like you didn't actually need the NNT/NNH there buddy
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