Covid just liberal hoax claims Eric Trump

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Tessa K
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Re: Covid just liberal hoax claims Eric Trump

Post by Tessa K » Tue May 19, 2020 5:17 pm

Grumble wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 1:18 pm
EACLucifer wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 12:43 pm
I suspect Trump's chloroquine obsession is probably more to do with pretending to be clever and informed. By his twisted logic, it's win-win; if it works, he's the genius who knew all along it would work, if it fails, the deep state and media were so obsessed with undermining Trump they sabotaged a cure.

Of course, this could easily be giving him too much credit. It could well be that rather than evil and cynical, he's just too thick* to realise there's not much money to be made from an old, off-patent drug.

*This doesn't mean he isn't also evil and cynical, of course.
I don’t think he’s pretending from his POV, he genuinely thinks he knows more than anyone else and he twists what actually happens around in his head to fit with his confirmation bias.
And if he doesn't get infected he'll say that's why.

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Re: Covid just liberal hoax claims Eric Trump

Post by jdc » Tue May 19, 2020 8:03 pm

Tessa K wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 11:18 am
Asked what was his evidence of hydroxychloroquine's positive benefits, Mr Trump said: "Here's my evidence: I get a lot of positive calls about it." He added: "I've heard a lot of good stories and if it's not good, I'll tell you right I'm not going to get hurt by it."

Though some people in the White House have tested positive for coronavirus, the president said again on Monday he had "zero symptoms" and was being tested frequently.

He added that he has been taking a daily zinc supplement and received a single dose of azithromycin, an antibiotic meant to prevent infection.
So much for 'evidence'.

Someone should explain to him the difference between a virus and bacteria.
He's not the only person who thinks azithromycin may exert anti-viral actions (a bunch of researchers seem to be quite taken with this idea and have been chucking azithromycin on bronchial epithelial cells from COPD donors - and they had another go here with rhinovirus-infected bronchial epithelial cells from asthmatic donors).

A different group had a look at flu sufferers https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3954629/ (got nowhere with their primary endpoint but did score a consolation goal with "an early resolution of some symptoms" which was one of their 3 secondary endpoints).

Nothing there that supports what Trump's done afaict but taking an antibiotic for a viral infection isn't necessarily nutty in every case. Just most of them.

Wondering now if Trump has COPD or asthma. Not hoping that he has though. Oh no.

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Re: Covid just liberal hoax claims Eric Trump

Post by Bird on a Fire » Tue May 19, 2020 8:52 pm

jdc wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 8:03 pm
Wondering now if Trump has COPD or asthma. Not hoping that he has though. Oh no.
COPD wouldn't surprise me given that he's an obese old man who doesn't seem able to walk even short distances.
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Re: Covid just liberal hoax claims Eric Trump

Post by AMS » Tue May 19, 2020 10:26 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 8:52 pm
jdc wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 8:03 pm
Wondering now if Trump has COPD or asthma. Not hoping that he has though. Oh no.
COPD wouldn't surprise me given that he's an obese old man who doesn't seem able to walk even short distances.
COPD is very strongly linked to smoking (90% of cases?) - was Trump a smoker?

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Re: Covid just liberal hoax claims Eric Trump

Post by jdc » Tue May 19, 2020 11:16 pm

AMS wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 10:26 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 8:52 pm
jdc wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 8:03 pm
Wondering now if Trump has COPD or asthma. Not hoping that he has though. Oh no.
COPD wouldn't surprise me given that he's an obese old man who doesn't seem able to walk even short distances.
COPD is very strongly linked to smoking (90% of cases?) - was Trump a smoker?
Apparently, "he doesn't drink or smoke. He has abstained from both for a lifetime."

Although if that's come from Trump it's presumably a lie.

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Re: Covid just liberal hoax claims Eric Trump

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed May 20, 2020 12:19 am

AMS wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 10:26 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 8:52 pm
jdc wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 8:03 pm
Wondering now if Trump has COPD or asthma. Not hoping that he has though. Oh no.
COPD wouldn't surprise me given that he's an obese old man who doesn't seem able to walk even short distances.
COPD is very strongly linked to smoking (90% of cases?) - was Trump a smoker?
Ah, fair enough. Apparently snorting Adderall is more his thing.
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Re: Covid just liberal hoax claims Eric Trump

Post by Millennie Al » Wed May 20, 2020 1:29 am

Little waster wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 8:47 am
Fortunately it has been precedent since LBJ for POTUS to put all his wealth into a blind trust for the duration of their presidency to avoid any suggestion of a COI and, more pointedly, to insulate the President from any potential breach of the Constitution's Emolument Clause.
The emoluments clauses are actually pretty stupid. Firstly, the foreign one. This is based on the assumption that an office holder is faithless, disloyal, and purely mercenary, and that the correct way to deal with this is to ensure that the only bribe they get is their salary. This clause affects Trump when he owns any foreign business and that business in any way benefits from a foreign government, resulting in him benefiting. For example, he has shareholdings in companies that own foreign golf courses, so it is claimed that if any such company benefits from the UK furlough scheme for its workers then this counts as a foreign emolument. This is quite obviously craxy. While it would certainly be possible for a foreign government to channel a bribe through a company, this scheme is quite obviously one open to all and not intended to be a bribe in any way.

The domestic clause has a similar problem, just that the funding has to come "from the United States, or any of them", which I would imagine means that it does not apply to purely private funding.

For both clauses, a blind trust is useless for some people. A blind trust is useful where an office holder has general assets (e.g. a portfolio of stock market investments) where the money can be freely moved within a class. So, for example, if someone held shares in high tech industries, the trustee could sell Apple shares and move the money into Microsoft instead. The key principle of a blind trust is that the beneficiary does not know where their money is invested and so cannot be influenced by what benefits them personally. That is not possible to apply when an asset is something like Trump Tower. If you distrust an office holder to the extent that a blind trust is necessary, how do you avoid them acting in their own interest in other ways - for example, if they are rich, pursuing policies that benefit the rich; if they are white, pursuing racist policies that benefit whites; if they are natural born citizens, pursuing racist anti-immigrant policies?

At a fundamental level, the whole idea is misguided. Rather than electing self-serving mercenary rogues and worrying that they will not stay bribed. the solution is to elect people who are honest enough to do a good job just because it's the right thing to so. Or, as in the real world, elect power-crazed loons who cannot be bribed because what they lust after is power rather than money. Or maybe elect people whose desired reward is to be liked by the people or remembered as a good ruler.

I don't think anyone seriously believes that Trump is going to give the UK privileged treatment in return for grants or loans to his businesses here. Well, maybe anyone except a conspiracy nut - there are lots of odd people out there.

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Re: Covid just liberal hoax claims Eric Trump

Post by lpm » Wed May 20, 2020 8:27 am

I've never read anything more naive.

Everyone, American and foreign, knows to stay at the Trump hotel in Washington when meeting Trump - so that the first words you say to him are about how tremendous his hotel is. Stay anywhere else and the meeting fails before it begins. Saudi Arabia have block booked some rooms on a permanent basis as part of their flattery, Malaysia threw a massive party. The following foreign governments selected Trump World Tower for their New York office space: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Iraq, India, Thailand. Ivanka Trump got her China trademarks in record time. The benefits of offering loans to the President at preferential rates are obvious. Maybe, just maybe, the privileged treatment given to Russia - including pushing back against the sanctions placed on Russian individuals - is related to "We have all the funding we need out of Russia"...

Describing the US constitution as "pretty stupid" and "misguided" is ambitious, particularly when it comes from someone with no background knowledge of why these clauses were included and what they seek to prevent. Even if someone hasn't read the constitution, I'd expect them to have read the news - there was brief coverage earlier this year about Trump being impeached for asking for personal favours from Ukraine. The constitution is designed to protect the USA from a corrupt President who takes bribes from foreign governments via the remedy of impeachment.
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Re: Covid just liberal hoax claims Eric Trump

Post by Little waster » Wed May 20, 2020 8:54 am

lpm wrote:
Wed May 20, 2020 8:27 am
The constitution is designed to protect the USA from a corrupt President who takes bribes from foreign governments via the remedy of impeachment.
Yeah you don't have to be a US Constitutional scholar to recognise that historically the US Constitution has done a good job of preventing the US from becoming a tyranny; you just have to compare it with virtually any other "revolutionary" state to see the difference; France, Russia, China, the whole sad litany of the decolonised states of the European Empires etc.

The whole "Checks and Balances" underpinning of the US Constitution is on the basis that bad people will always get into office and the Constitution is therefore rigged to constrain how much power they can have and what damage they can do.

That doesn't mean it isn't now creaking at the seams at the moment or that the US elected officials and governments through history haven't done terrible things, sometimes perfectly constitutionally, but in over 200 years the US has never had anything like the Terror or Stalin or Mugabe.

That it is starting to fall apart only now is almost entirely down to the toxic partisanship infecting every branch of the US Government; the Founding Fathers never predicted a scenario where so many supposedly patriotic Judges, Senators and Congressmen would look at someone like Trump and en masse still decide to put their own careers and party ahead of even the vaguest of notions of National Interest, as I sarcastically noted above.

The Repugs are the most glaring example of this but I'm perfectly happy to be convinced that the Dems would have done the same had they got there first.

Even now with three of the four arms of the overarching federal government fallen to this corruption, the other levels of the US government are still doing their job at State, City and County level and the US media still remains leagues ahead of the UK's "free press".
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Re: Covid just liberal hoax claims Eric Trump

Post by tom p » Wed May 20, 2020 10:09 am

dyqik wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 2:12 pm
tom p wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 12:27 pm
Tessa K wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 8:13 am
Eric may think it's a hoax but the Donald doesn't or why else would he be taking malaria medication that he believes will protect him against the virus? (unproven and potentially dangerous). Unless he has massive shares in the company and wants to promote the product maybe?
Chloroquine is off-patent. There's not a lot of money to be made from tricking the gullible/fascists into pestering their doctors into prescribing some.
In the US, could they apply for a patent on a slightly different formulation for treating CoVID-19 rather than malaria?
Nope.
The substance is patented. You can have a patent on delivery technology too (e.g. ADHD drug Concerta, which is ritalin, but in a very clever delivery system that releases the dose slowly through the day), but that wouldn't be necessary, useful or profitable for something like this. Plus any new delivery system for a drug that's already being used would need full approval and there's no reason the FDA would rush it through when chloroquine is already there and they have okayed it.
Maybe trump is grifting but is too stupid to know this, or maybe he's just a f.cking idiot with a messiah complex who thinks he knows how to cure the world or maybe he's doubling down on his earlier b.llsh.t to make it look like he has a cure.
But he can't actually be significantly profiting from this.

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Re: Covid just liberal hoax claims Eric Trump

Post by tom p » Wed May 20, 2020 10:12 am

sTeamTraen wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 2:48 pm
Tessa K wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 8:13 am
Eric may think it's a hoax but the Donald doesn't or why else would he be taking malaria medication that he believes will protect him against the virus? (unproven and potentially dangerous). Unless he has massive shares in the company and wants to promote the product maybe?
Apparently he does have shares in the maker (it's off-patent but clearly at least one company has to make it), presumably via his family trust. But it's something like $250 worth of shares as part of an entirely normal mixed portfolio. It seems that for once there actually is nothing to see here.
In Europe alone there are multiple marketing authorisation holders of chloroquine.

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Re: Covid just liberal hoax claims Eric Trump

Post by tom p » Wed May 20, 2020 10:15 am

jdc wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 8:03 pm
Tessa K wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 11:18 am
Asked what was his evidence of hydroxychloroquine's positive benefits, Mr Trump said: "Here's my evidence: I get a lot of positive calls about it." He added: "I've heard a lot of good stories and if it's not good, I'll tell you right I'm not going to get hurt by it."

Though some people in the White House have tested positive for coronavirus, the president said again on Monday he had "zero symptoms" and was being tested frequently.

He added that he has been taking a daily zinc supplement and received a single dose of azithromycin, an antibiotic meant to prevent infection.
So much for 'evidence'.

Someone should explain to him the difference between a virus and bacteria.
He's not the only person who thinks azithromycin may exert anti-viral actions (a bunch of researchers seem to be quite taken with this idea and have been chucking azithromycin on bronchial epithelial cells from COPD donors - and they had another go here with rhinovirus-infected bronchial epithelial cells from asthmatic donors).

A different group had a look at flu sufferers https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3954629/ (got nowhere with their primary endpoint but did score a consolation goal with "an early resolution of some symptoms" which was one of their 3 secondary endpoints).

Nothing there that supports what Trump's done afaict but taking an antibiotic for a viral infection isn't necessarily nutty in every case. Just most of them.

Wondering now if Trump has COPD or asthma. Not hoping that he has though. Oh no.
reasonably frequently a patient who suffers a viral infection will develop a secondary bacterial infection. so it could help there.

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Re: Covid just liberal hoax claims Eric Trump

Post by Tessa K » Wed May 20, 2020 3:01 pm

tom p wrote:
Wed May 20, 2020 10:15 am
reasonably frequently a patient who suffers a viral infection will develop a secondary bacterial infection. so it could help there.
True but does giving antibiotics pre-emptively do anything?

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Re: Covid just liberal hoax claims Eric Trump

Post by tom p » Wed May 20, 2020 3:14 pm

Tessa K wrote:
Wed May 20, 2020 3:01 pm
tom p wrote:
Wed May 20, 2020 10:15 am
reasonably frequently a patient who suffers a viral infection will develop a secondary bacterial infection. so it could help there.
True but does giving antibiotics pre-emptively do anything?
Well, it increases the likelihood of building up resistant bacteria. Not that I would want my mate Donald to get an antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection & die choking on pus or anything.

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Re: Covid just liberal hoax claims Eric Trump

Post by Fishnut » Wed May 20, 2020 3:36 pm

Tessa K wrote:
Wed May 20, 2020 3:01 pm
tom p wrote:
Wed May 20, 2020 10:15 am
reasonably frequently a patient who suffers a viral infection will develop a secondary bacterial infection. so it could help there.
True but does giving antibiotics pre-emptively do anything?
I seem to remember the anti-malarial I was given before I went on holiday to a malarial zone was an antibiotic
it's okay to say "I don't know"

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Re: Covid just liberal hoax claims Eric Trump

Post by FlammableFlower » Wed May 20, 2020 3:56 pm

All drugs have side effects, some time those can actually be activity against a different disease - cf. anticancer antibiotics (the anthracyclines), thalidomide (leprosy, anticancer) etc.

The whole field of drug repurposing is just that - looking for new modes of action in old drugs. As they've either gone through clinical trials, or at least the early stages, a lot of the safety and tox data is known.

So whilst there's nothing to say that an anti-malarial couldn't, potentially, be work as an anti-viral... what you need is evidence that it actually will... which is what's lacking here.

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Re: Covid just liberal hoax claims Eric Trump

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed May 20, 2020 5:21 pm

Fishnut wrote:
Wed May 20, 2020 3:36 pm
Tessa K wrote:
Wed May 20, 2020 3:01 pm
tom p wrote:
Wed May 20, 2020 10:15 am
reasonably frequently a patient who suffers a viral infection will develop a secondary bacterial infection. so it could help there.
True but does giving antibiotics pre-emptively do anything?
I seem to remember the anti-malarial I was given before I went on holiday to a malarial zone was an antibiotic
That's doxycycline, which they use in areas with chloroquine-resistant malaria.

IIRC chloroquine is the preferred malaria prophylaxis because it has fewer side effects. Doxycycline can burn all your skin off and mefloquine can induce psychosis.
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Re: Covid just liberal hoax claims Eric Trump

Post by jdc » Wed May 20, 2020 5:40 pm

Tessa K wrote:
Wed May 20, 2020 3:01 pm
tom p wrote:
Wed May 20, 2020 10:15 am
reasonably frequently a patient who suffers a viral infection will develop a secondary bacterial infection. so it could help there.
True but does giving antibiotics pre-emptively do anything?
It depends on the antibiotic and the viral infection. If, as well as being an antibiotic, a drug had another property like interferon with a virus's fun then maybe. Dunno if they got beyond the stage of squirting it on cells and feeding it to mice in the case of azithromycin, mind.

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Re: Covid just liberal hoax claims Eric Trump

Post by jdc » Wed May 20, 2020 5:51 pm

Think of it as moonlighting. Some drugs have had to take on a second job to make ends meet.

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Re: Covid just liberal hoax claims Eric Trump

Post by Millennie Al » Thu May 21, 2020 2:00 am

lpm wrote:
Wed May 20, 2020 8:27 am
I've never read anything more naive.

Everyone, American and foreign, knows to stay at the Trump hotel in Washington when meeting Trump - so that the first words you say to him are about how tremendous his hotel is. Stay anywhere else and the meeting fails before it begins. Saudi Arabia have block booked some rooms on a permanent basis as part of their flattery, Malaysia threw a massive party. The following foreign governments selected Trump World Tower for their New York office space: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Iraq, India, Thailand. Ivanka Trump got her China trademarks in record time. The benefits of offering loans to the President at preferential rates are obvious. Maybe, just maybe, the privileged treatment given to Russia - including pushing back against the sanctions placed on Russian individuals - is related to "We have all the funding we need out of Russia"...

Describing the US constitution as "pretty stupid" and "misguided" is ambitious, particularly when it comes from someone with no background knowledge of why these clauses were included and what they seek to prevent. Even if someone hasn't read the constitution, I'd expect them to have read the news - there was brief coverage earlier this year about Trump being impeached for asking for personal favours from Ukraine. The constitution is designed to protect the USA from a corrupt President who takes bribes from foreign governments via the remedy of impeachment.
You list all kinds of things that Trump has done and say that the constitution protects against those sorts of thing. You then say that the remedy is impeachment, and mention that Trump was impeached. Somehow you think this is a coherent argument, yet you can hardly have missed the news that Trump was acquitted. The constitution which supposedly is so wonderfully designed that it stops abuses has completely failed. That's because it is stupid. It's based on a fallacy that mere words can control a bad officeholder. They cannot. People are controlled by reality (when they try to do something impossible) or by other people (when they try to do something bad). This is why Abraham Lincoln succeeded in abolishing slavery even though he knew that he was acting unconstitutionally.

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