Did you ever go onto a website like the Springbok casino bonus website and see a mile long page of terms, conditions, and disclaimers? The WHO is no different. In order for the WHO to CYA, “cover your ass”, the WHO cannot formally promote a cure until that cure has been formally approved by an agency, FDA or another equal one from a different country. The FDA will not formally fully approve a treatment until it has been formally tested in 3 double-blind formal clinical trials. That is not going to happen in the middle of a pandemic.
Different doctors around the world have found different combinations of drugs that can help fight coronavirus. Most of these treatments are best applied during the early phases of the virus when a person just starts to have trouble breathing. Some of these drug combinations can cause more problems than they solve when applied to a patient who is farther along in the disease or has other underlying pre-existing conditions.
The only thing that everybody can agree upon at the current time is that there is no one single drug that can cure COVID-19. All treatments that have shown success in actual patients have been a combination of drugs. So when somebody says, “Drug A does not work to treat coronavirus”, you have to ask, “what other drugs or vitamins and minerals were Drug A given with”. If the answer is, “nothing”, then you have to ignore that study, because the study is just stating what all doctors already know, “no single existing drug can help with COVID-19”, at the current time.
There is also something else to consider when reading media articles about COVID-19 when the article is coming from the United States. The United States is currently in an unofficial civil war. For a lot of people in Africa, it is not a civil war that they are used to seeing with people shooting guns at each other. The current civil war in the United States is a war of words. The weapons are the media, Twitter, Facebook, and Google.
When Trump says, “Up”, the other side says, “Down”; when Trump says “Right”, the other side says, “Left”. So when Trump says, “Drug X is showing promise”, the other side is determined to say, “Drug X did not work.” But the reality is that “Drug X worked when combined with these other drugs, vitamins, and minerals for these types of patients, but it did not work by itself or for these other types of patients.”
Just like all doctors will agree that there is no one single existing drug that will cure coronavirus, all doctors will agree that there is not going to be one single treatment that is going to be appropriate for all patients during all phases of the disease, especially when taking into account pre-existing medical conditions.
Think about it this way, Africa is still in the early phases of the disease. For every single patient that can be cured during the early phases of the disease, is a patient that is not going to need to go to a hospital, or end up in an ICU unit, or end up with intubation (needing to be put on a ventilator). That saves the limited number of ventilators for the patients where early intervention treatments did not work (or could not work due to pre-existing conditions).
The WHO’s numbers are assuming that there is not going to be any early intervention, and all COVID-19 patients are going to end up in the hospital on ventilators. Under those conditions, yes the WHO is correct. Africa is doomed. But that does not have to be the reality, and it is going to take each individual person in Africa to help NOT make it a reality.
How to make the WHO’s predictions to not become a reality
The following are a list of things that the people and leaders of Africa should do to not make the WHO’s prediction of doom and gloom to become a reality.
• The leaders of African countries need to stop the infighting. That is the biggest mistake that the US did. The leaders in the US are spending more time fighting with each than working together to help everybody.
• Citizens need to wear a face mask. Here is a video from the CDC Surgeon General in the US on how to make a face mask from a T-Shirt, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPx1yqvJgf4 and this is the link to the CDC channel on YouTube; https://www.youtube.com/user/CDCStreamingHealth
• What Israel is doing. Whenever a person thinks that they have COVID-19, they call a central hotline. A paramedic is sent to the person’s house to obtain a specimen for testing. The person does not go to a clinic, and they do not go to a hospital (if they are still in the early stages). They are given instructions, and history is taken of what public places a person has been to during the last 14 days. Do not wait. Call as soon as you experience a fever at 38 C or above or if you are having trouble breathing or feeling a tightness in your chest. Early intervention is crucial in having a complete recovery.
• 100% “cure” involves making sure that your symptoms become no more than “a bad case of the flu” with an expected recovery of 10 days while resting at home. Even antibiotics don’t kill a bacterial infection. They just stop the bacteria from reproducing, which is why a person has to take most antibiotics for 10 days even if they are feeling better.
• Stores should limit the number of people in a store at any one time.
• Stores should ask if a person has been feeling sick and take each person’s temperature before allowing the person to go into the store.
• Stores should provide delivery service with the delivery person always wearing a face mask and gloves.
• Stores should take the temperature of each employee at the start of their shift, and if anybody is feeling sick, they should be sent home.
• Israel uses software called “Track Virus”. It is a map that shows what public places a person has visited who has been diagnosed with COVID-19. The software also stores locally where the person has been. If there is an intersection of the two, the software tells the person, so they can get early diagnosis and treatment. These applications show with map markers each public place a known COVID-19 patient has visited, and when they visited that location. Patient’s names are not disclosed or their addresses, so patient privacy is kept. You will have to check with your local CDC or other organization to find out if your area has a similar application.
• Closedown “wet markets”. They are bad for a number of reasons.
• Stop selling “open items”. Pre-bag spices, nuts, grains, anything that is not a fruit or vegetable that a person cannot wash. If it cannot be washed, pre-bag it. Something like an apple is fine, because an apple can be pre-washed and even peeled.
• Don’t shoot the patient. Shooting patients diagnosed with COVID-19 is the worst possible “treatment”, because people are going to become afraid to admit that they have COVID-19, so they will not call the paramedics early, they will not be given medicine to treat them early, and you will not get vital information on who they have been in contact with and what public places they have visited.
• Don’t tell people that getting COVID-19 is a punishment from God. Read: “Don’t shoot the patient” above. The same thing applies. COVID-19 is a virus. People get viruses, just like they get the flu, a bacterial infection, a stomach bug, etc. It is not a punishment from God, and it is not a death sentence, especially if you get treatment early.
It is worth repeating ... stop the infighting. That was the biggest mistake that the US did in fighting the COVID-19 virus in their country, they spent more time fighting with each other than working together to stop the virus from spreading.
And don’t shoot the patient. That is also on the list of top things that will NOT work in containing the coronavirus. In places where people have been shamed for having COVID-19 (or worse, physically threatened), COVID-19 outbreaks have been the highest and those areas have had the highest death rates. This is due to people hiding that they have COVID-19, so they don’t get treatment early, and they continue to act as if “nothing is wrong”, in other words, spreading the virus to more people.
List of cures that doctors around the world have seen success in treating COVID-19
If you look at the website, clinicaltrials.gov, there are currently 902 clinical trials going on around the world related to COVID-19. Of those, 559 have to do with intervention and treatments.
If I tried to list (and talk about) each of those 559 clinical trials, this article would become way too long.
• 13 are in early phase 1.
• 47 are in phase 1
• 229 are in phase 2
• 165 are in phase 3
• 41 are in phase 4
To quote Edison: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." That is what is currently going on with COVID-19 research.
Some of these are the same study but listed for each of the different phases. In the US, a clinical trial cannot be approved to move to the next phase until the previous phase’s data has been analyzed and approved. But in other countries, like Iran, this is not a requirement.
As for what is an official cure, there are no treatments at the current time that have gone through the required 3 double-blind clinical trials. We are in the middle of a pandemic, and if a clinical trail’s data has to be analyzed before the next clinical trial can begin.
Even assuming 10 days to do a treatment, the doctor still needs to wait 14 to 28 days afterward to verify that the treatment actually did work and it is not just a standard up and down that can sometimes exist when the body is fighting a virus.
Add on time to prepare for the clinical trial, and add on time afterward to write up and submit the data to the FDA, and each stage of a clinical trial can realistically take a month at minimum, and most likely 2 - 3 months, maybe even longer. You can now get an idea of why things take so long to go through the formal FDA approval process.
The best one can hope for is the CDC saying, “Approved for compassionate use”. In other words, there is enough evidence to say, “This is not going to kill you.”, but there is not enough evidence to say, “This will definitely help you.”
At one time, I tried to look at Wikipedia to get information about current research for COVID-19. For this pandemic, at the current time, the current Wikipedia articles are garbage. This has to do with the fact that Wikipedia only allows information to be posted in their articles that have already been peer-reviewed and have gone through the 3 double blind clinical trials. That is not a realistic goal during a current pandemic. Wikipedia’s standards are appropriate for non-pandemic, non-emergency times, but during a pandemic, during an emergency, critical information is getting lost.
Personally, I have actually found the archives more informative than current articles. Somebody will post, “A Doctor in Hong Kong did this drug combination and showed success in curing COVID-19 patients.” This information was added on February 3, 2019. But it was quickly deleted by a “regular user”, because it did not meet Wikipedia’s medical reference standards.
Regardless of how successful or unsuccessful the treatment turned out to be over a larger group of people, it was showing a direction that did end up showing success from different doctors from different countries. I sometimes wonder if that information had not been “lost” in the bowels of Wikipedia, would other doctors have started doing more research in that direction earlier and potentially have saved more lives.
That is speculation that one can only make a guess about, but it does show a flaw in Wikipedia when trying to deal with a current event of the magnitude of COVID-19. How does Wikipedia balance between “making sure important information is not getting lost” vs. “How to include current information that will withstand the test of time”?
Maybe the solution is to follow the standard that Fox News did during the Trump Impeachment Trial. Fox News’ main article about the impeachment trial did not follow their standard article. Instead, they did a mini-blog article. It looked like a bunch of Twitter articles within the main article.
As new information was learned, it was posted with the date and the time. I actually found that style of the article more informative than a lot of traditional articles on the same topic. Yes, it is not a traditional encyclopedic article, but how does a person honestly write an encyclopedic article about something that is going on right now? Do these type of articles even belong in Wikipedia?
I would argue yes because many people use Wikipedia as more than just a traditional encyclopedia. They use it as a repository of knowledge. Eventually, current events will become historical events, and traditional encyclopedic articles will be created. But I will argue that a current event that is changing so rapidly does not fit the traditional encyclopedic model, but yet still belongs in a repository of knowledge.
As for how this affects African countries, Africa is at an advantage over other nations. A lot of African nations were the last to be hit, so a lot of African nations have the advantage of learning from the mistakes of other nations. What has worked? What has not worked? What just needs to be tweaked to meet the local needs of different local African communities.
Summary
The WHO is a political organization and when medicines and politics are mixed together, things get messed up.
The US CDC and the WHO organization do not always agree. So when doing your own research, I would personally recommend looking at both sites, as well as Africa’s own CDC website.
Don’t be stupid. There is no “miracle drug”, especially when the person is trying to sell you the “miracle drug” is not willing to tell you the active and inactive ingredients in the miracle drug. A company in Madagascar was trying to do that, and it turned out that their “miracle drug” was bleach that would kill you.
There are also people who are purposely trying to spread misinformation for their own purposes. Some is because they are just evil people. Others because they want to make a quick buck at the expense of others. Others because they just want attention, and do not like that a virus is getting more attention than they are. Yea, people in this world are really really stupid.
As for what does work, If a combination of existing drugs seems to be working, it may be okay to take, but only when it is prescribed by a competent doctor that knows your specific medical history. What might be the right choice for Patient A, may not be the right choice for Patient B. This is due to how far along the virus is and any pre-existing conditions the patient has. The earlier treatment is started, the higher the probability that the treatment will work.
Finally, any “new drug” MUST be approved by the FDA after going through 3 rigorous double-blind clinical trials that have been peer-reviewed and FDA reviewed.
That is why most doctors are working with existing drugs being repurposed in different combinations. The ones that the FDA can prove will not “kill the patient” can sometimes be quickly approved for “compassionate use”, but it will take longer to prove if it may or may not actually cure you.
Claims on vitamins, minerals, and dietary supplements do not require FDA approval. The FDA and the US Federal government can only investigate things AFTER a consumer reports concerns to the FDA or US Federal Government. If you are unsure about something, and it has not been prescribed by a competent certified doctor that knows your personal medical history, call the FDA and ask them about it.
As horrible as it is to say, some of the “cures” that some people are trying to sell today are actually poisons that will kill you. Yes, technically it will also kill the virus, but killing the patient in the process is not what most people want in a medical cure. Play it safe. Listen to the doctor that knows you, and call the FDA if you have any concerns or questions about any type of treatment.