Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 408 - Turd Immunity

Episode Date: May 21, 2020

Dr Steve, Tacie, Lawer B!#&%, and her sidekick Trevor discuss air travel in the age of COVID-19, reopening, vaccine trials, new drug data, and more! PLEASE VISIT: stuff.doctorsteve.com (for all your online shopping needs!) Feals.com/fluid (get 50% off your 1st subscription shipment of CBD!) simplyherbals.net (While it lasts!) noom.doctorsteve.com (lose weight, gain you-know-what) premium.doctorsteve.com (all this can be yours!) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to Weird Medicine with Dr. Steve on the Riotcast Network, riotcast.com. We're missing contains mature contents that may be offended to some listeners. What did they wrong in? You know, your house is like another. I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got Tobolovir, stripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heartbound, exacerbating my infertable woes. I want to take my brain out, clasped with the wave, an ultrasonic, egographic, and a pulsating

shave. I want a magic pill. All my ailments, the health equivalent is citizen cane. And if I don't get it now in the tablet, I think I'm doomed, then I'll have to do it. insane. I want a requiem of my disease. So I'm paging Dr. Steve. It's weird medicine, the first and still only uncensored medical show in the history of broadcast radio. Now a podcast. I'm Dr. Steve. With my wife Tacey, the queen of me and the vicar of liquor, she who unlike lady diagnosis will be absolutely do nothing for a bottle of expensive wine, but will still demand it every time.

Hello, Tacey. Hello, Steve. Hello, everyone. A delightful interview. I mean, uh, intro. Ugh, I'm already effing up. Uh, we also have in the studio back from sabbatical. The lawyer bitch.

Hello, L.B. Hello. And, uh, we have her little bitch, uh, Trevor. Sorry, hey, sorry, Trevor. It's all good. Trevor's, uh, LB's, um, uh, legal assistant. Chief of staff. Chief of staff, that's right.

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and then cancel. All right. What are you doing? I don't know. Just turn it so that it's going straight. Should it be upright? Yeah, upright. There you go. And then put it in front of your face so it's about you can just pull it towards you. There you go. Got it. Oh, that's fine. I'll fix it later. Oh, it's okay.

It's totally fine. So it's great for you to be here. We're sort of anti-social distancing today. We have friends, guys. So excited. But lawyer bitch is my actual attorney, and we've been working on a nightmarish, horrible contract thing that I thought was just, it took such a load off of my back when I, when I, agreed to it and then, you know, of course, as attorneys will do, a good attorneys will do to protect me, she found all these things that are wrong with it. I'm sure Trevor, was it mostly you that found those and then she took credit for it or how did that work? Yeah, she argued with me about what I thought it was, but then again, she is the attorney. Yeah, okay. I was right. And you were right, of course you were. I still disagree. Ultimately, she's right.

Just say she's right. She is right. That's the thing you have to understand is her word is law, literally. Not her. Anyway. So, yeah, so now I'm feeling all crappy again, but I'm sure, well, I'll feel better again sometime. Nobody cares. She'll figure it out.

She will figure it out. I'll fix it. Yes. And don't forget Dr. Scott's website at Simply Herbal. No, he doesn't deserve it. at at simplyerbils.net for Dr. Scott. And check us out at Dr. Steve.com. And also we got an email taste.

Oh. It says, Dr. Steve, I've been listening to you since the Saturday night virus shows. On your last show, you mentioned Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit conducting their double-blind placebo-controlled study for frontline officials. This is, if I recall, it was the hydroxychloroquine study. And I work in Detroit and out of respect for you and all the work that you've put into the podcast. I'm sure when he says you, he means you taste. I submitted my name for the study.

I hate needles and getting blood drawn, but I can handle that to help out science. So I'm going to give him one of these. And one of these. Give yourself a bill. Good for him. Thank you for mentioning on your show and thank you for years of knowledge. you more than likely won't, but if you mention this on the show, please don't use my real name. Thank you, Dr. Steve, signed David O. Selsnick, Social Security, number five.

Oh, okay. I just made that last part of it. So, no, that's cool. So at least one person was listening there. And I signed up for this study, but then, and I got accepted into the study. And then they said, oh, so you need to be at the clinic to, you know, this week at 9 a.m. and I realized it's in Detroit. So I thought that they were going to farm it out to other locales,

but no, they wanted to just keep it local. And that's what Trump's been on for two weeks a week and a half. Yeah, so he says. Who knows? I haven't seen the prescription. I do not know, but I'm taking him at his word. And people are like, oh, well, he's, you know, and it's like, come on, he's got a physician. It has to be written by a physician.

So some physician wrote this for them. And, you know, Michael Jackson could sort of con apparently, allegedly, con a physician into giving him propofal inappropriately. But I'm assuming that at that level, they've got a certain level. It's a military doctor. That this person felt that it was appropriate because there were people in the White House who had tested positive. And they don't have anything else right now for prophylaxis. It's unlikely to do any harm. Hydroxychloroquine for all the hype that you hear about it, Tacey's, and I'm not breaking it.

Well, okay, there are people we know who have been on this for decades. Let's just put it that way without breaking any confidences. And people with lupus and people previously when they gave it for malaria and people with, you know, autoimmune diseases. of all sorts, including rheumatoid arthritis, have been taking hydroxychloroquine for decades with absolutely no problems. Now, I mean, every drug has adverse effects.

And they were freaking out about certain sectors. We're freaking out about combining it with azithromycin and zinc. And that when you combine it with azithromycin, you're in, you will increase this parameter

on the EKG called the QT interval. So if we just talk about EKGs just for a second. So if you've ever seen an EKG, you have a little blip, and then you've got a big blip, and then after that, you got a little, you know, sort of a wider blip. And so the first blip is the P wave. That's the blip that shows the activity of the atrium of the heart.

Okay, so that's the top part of the heart. Then you get that big giant blip, and that is the ventricle of the heart depolarizing. And when it depolarizes, it contracts. And then the lower, longer blip after that is called the T wave. And it is repolarization of the heart. Okay. So you have P, and then that big spiky blip is QRS and then the T wave.

So QRS is the three components of that big blip. Well, anyway, so the QT interval going from the beginning of Venet, ventricular contraction till the end of ventricular repolarization or relaxation is the QT interval. And that is the thing that can get longer and longer with certain drugs. And one of the combinations is hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. And if you make it long enough, this is what happens. You'll get a QT, a Q wave on top of that T wave. So you'll get it, the heart trying to depolarize it at the same time it's repolarizing.

and all of a sudden you get chaos. You get electrical chaos when that happens because it can't repolarize and depolarize at the same time. And that's called R on T phenomenon. When you get R on T phenomenon, you can get a weird rhythm called Torsad de Poit, which basically means turning around the point, which is a ventricular fibrillation,

and the axis of the electrical axis keeps shifting is what it is. And it can be fatal or it can be self-limited. We see this in methadone. People on high-dose methadone, not a lot. You see it about one in a million. So they looked at five million methadone users. They had five cases of Torsodd-Depause. So it is a very rare phenomenon.

But so, yes, when you take hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin together, you can prolong the QT interval. I would not just give that to somebody and send them on there, Mary Way, though anyone that's going to be put on that combination, like any other combination of drugs that can prolong the QT interval, they need to be monitored, have a cardiac monitor. So you do an EKG before, and then if you're doing it in the hospital, you have them on telemetry and just watch for it. A five to seven day course of this is so unlikely to cause Torzad de Poit, it's ridiculous.

I haven't heard of a single case, by the way, of all the people who have been treated. treated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. Because for a while there, that was all we had before remdesivir hit the market. And now we have this new three drug combo, which we're going to talk about in a minute. So they were giving it to people in the hospital. And I haven't heard of a single case of Torsad de Poy yet. Now, when you say that fancy word there, is that the same as a prolonged QT interval? It's not the same.

So the prolonged QT interval puts you at risk for the R&T phenomenon that caused. causes the Torsad deploy. Okay. So, yes, it just increases risk. And remember, life is just about mitigating risk. You don't smoke to decrease your risk of lung cancer. It doesn't mean you'll never get it, right? And if you do smoke, doesn't mean you're going to get lung cancer.

I've known tons and tons of people that smoked till they were 100 and were just fine and, you know, got run over by a car or something. So, but it increases your risk. So it's all about mitigating risk. And that's the whole world, that's what that is. There's a finite chance if you wear your seatbelt and if you get in the wrong kind of wreck, you'll get trapped in your car and you'll die in a flaming ball. But that's one in a million, whereas if you get in a car wreck and get thrown from your car because you weren't wearing it, it's one in two chance you're going to die.

So, you know, just about mitigating risk. All those contracts are about too. That's right. It's about risk management, isn't it? Yes. Because most of the time nothing's going to happen, but when it does, you've got to have a damn contract. If it's likely, yeah. Yeah.

That's scary. Terrifying. I like to think nothing bad is ever going to happen. Right. Shit happens, though. Yeah. Well, did you just make it out of? I sure did.

My God. Let's talk about that three drug combination since we're talking about COVID-19. This is Ratonavir Lopinavir, which is an HIV drug. It's a combination drug. Plus, oh shit, ribavirin and interferon

beta 1B. Okay, so the interferon is on the market. They use it for multiple sclerosis. The ribavirin is on the market. It's a pill that they use for hepatitis C. And then this retonovir, lopinivir, is also on the market that's used for HIV. So all three of these are on the market.

Now, they originally studied rotonovir lopinivir, and COVID-19 showed no benefit. But when you combine these three drugs, you decrease viral shedding to zero, 50 percent faster. So that's good. and this is on the market. We can use it tomorrow if people feel so inclined. Now, how would we determine, though? Let's just do a little mind experiment. If the rotonavir, lopinavir by itself didn't work,

maybe these two things are potentiating it, but maybe we don't need them at all. So what study would you come up with to determine whether the rotonavir lopinavir is even needed? Trevor's got an idea Okay Trevor Let's go Sounds like I'd call my cousin Kinney

And ask him what he's cooking in his basement Okay So that would be one Okay so that's one thing We're just spitballing right So you know There are no wrong answers Just dumb ones

I'm just kidding I'm just kidding Actually I'm very serious But no, it's so one way that you could do it would be to do yet another study where you've got the three drugs that we just did and compare it against the two drugs without the retonavir lopenovir. Now, if that also shows the 50% decrease, then you just throw away the retonabir. Well, now we got two drugs. Maybe you only need one of them. So now we've got another study where we're comparing one against the other.

And I would love to see one where they do ribavirin by itself, interferon beta 1B by itself, and the combination of whichever the ones that they, you know, it may be you need all three. Maybe those two are potentiating the retonovir to work, or maybe the retonovir is not needed at all. Yes, Tacey. But what about this vaccine, though?

Yes, let's talk about vaccines. And the winter. Because winter is coming. Okay. You know nothing, John Snow. I'll give myself one. That was just a bad impression. I don't know.

Okay, so let's break it down to, you ask two questions. Let's talk about the vaccines. So, Moderna is this company. They're an American bio company, right? They announced phase one data for its MRNA vaccine against this novel coronavirus. So we've talked about vaccine phases before. You do these pre-clinical studies. You kind of give it to some monkeys and just make sure it doesn't kill them.

Maybe you inject them with the virus and see if it protects them. And you go, oh, this looks good. Now we've got to try it in humans. So the first thing you've got to do is give it to about 40 or 50 humans and just make sure that they don't die or that they don't turn into I am legend. Right? And then you do that for a couple of months, and then you can determine whether you need to go on to phase two, which would be a larger study where you're looking, does it work? And is it safe? You're always looking, is it safe?

But now we're starting to look at does it work? So you give it to two, three hundred people. And then if phase two pans out, then you move on to phase three, which is thousands of people. and that when you have more people, let's say you've got an adverse effect like Guillain-Barray syndrome that only shows up one in every 500 cases. Well, if you only did 200 people,

you know, it's going to, it may just look perfectly safe. Now if you do it on 5,000 people, you should start seeing some cases here and there. You know, you'd see five cases on average in that situation. So that sort of signal that's buried in the noise will start to become more apparent as the more people that you do. Then at phase three is safe and effective, then you can bring it to market.

And then you do phase four studies, which are post-marketing studies. That's when you're giving it to millions of people. And then you can really start to see the really rare stuff show up. So Moderna did phase one. They started it much earlier in the year. And what they did, since this is phase one, they weren't really looking at efficacy. But what they did do was look for the presence of neutralizing antibodies. And what they found was the people that they gave this vaccine to, I'm looking at the numbers here.

This is where I could have used you guys to look at this. But I think it was close to 100% of the people developed antibodies as if they had had coronavirus. And that's what we're looking for. And this is a spike protein, sorry, vaccine, if I understand it correctly, which means that the protein that the virus uses to attach to human receptors is what they're blocking. And we may also make antibodies to the other side of that protein that the body normally wouldn't see because it's stuck on the virus, you know. And maybe those help, maybe they don't, when you've got a live virus going on. But, yeah, they said elicit in neutralizing antibody tighter levels in all eight initial participants. And then full protection against viral replication, the lungs of a mouse challenge model.

And then they anticipate dose for phase three studies, you know, between 25 microgram and 100 microgram, expected to start in July. So when we get this thing started in July, then they've got to follow people for a long time because, you know, right now we're at 0.8% of people in the country even are known to have this virus. So if you give it to a thousand people, how are you going to even know it works? You know, oh, so, yeah, they all didn't get it. Well, they might not have gotten it anyway. Right. because so few people get it. So you need to give it to thousands of people.

And really, to me, since this is a global emergency, I'm advocating that we do challenge studies. Now, this is a whole other deal altogether. So you take Trevor, you know, most expendable. And you give him the vaccine. And a week later, he comes back and you shoot, you know, COVID-19. viruses, SARS-COV-2 up his nose. And then see if he doesn't get it.

You isolate him for 14 days. And if he doesn't get it, then that looks pretty good. Now, some people may have natural immunity. So you do this with 100 people. Maybe hell, do it with 1,000. You could get 1,000 volunteers to do that. Pay him some money. And you do it to 1,000 volunteers.

If all 1,000 don't get it, you go straight to market. You know, after you, you've got to still do safety. studies on it, but that would speed this thing up immensely because then you're looking at your data comes back in three weeks instead of three to six months, you know? Sure. I guess a government entity could do that because they'd have immunity, but I can see all the pharmaceutical companies, not once. Well, you know, that we, okay, so let's talk about the legality of that, and then Trevor

had something he wanted to say, but so they have this vaccine fund. that apparently people are, you know, vaccine, people who have an adverse event to a vaccine are paid through that fund. And my understanding was the reason they set that up wasn't because there's some vast conspiracy to hide vaccine payouts. But because knowing that every medical thing is going to have adverse effects, that if they didn't have that fund, the vaccine companies wouldn't make vaccines because they'd be getting. sued all the time. Right. You know, so they have this fund. I wonder, would it not work for something like this? I don't know. I have to look it up, but I'm going to look it up right now. Okay, because that would be interesting that if they were indemnified and it all came out of this fund that's got billions of dollars in it. Because you're right, we want them to do these

trials. We want them to try this. Well, if they're contracted by a government agency to do it, they usually get some sort of immunity from that. Yeah, yeah. So, really, the CDC would just have to contract them. Yeah, okay. I mean, it's a global emergency. We need for these manufacturers to do this, to do the studies and to not fear reprisals if something goes wrong. But if someone's harmed, they need to be made whole to the extent that they can. And we want them to make money off of it, too, just don't profiteer off of it.

You know, there has to be some incentive for them to do it. other than just doing good because altruism in the you know if you're a follower of iron rand you know altruism and go fly so that's your son oh no I've already talked to the other son okay who forgot the other son they're not playing well together oh you got him what's that yeah I will I yes I will order pizza thank you buddy in I'm 28 minutes and 15 seconds I I will order pizza. Okay, listen to it sounds like, he sounds like Darth Nihilis. Are you, do you have your brother? No, he forgot him. Okay. He forgot him.

Please go get him right now because he's been waiting there. Thank you. Goodbye. That's just too funny. Yes, that's why I left because one son called, that said the other son did not pick him up. Yeah, but he's literally a minute away, so, you know, it's no big deal. You can stand out there for a minute. Well, our little experiment failed.

It didn't fail. It didn't fail. It just wasn't perfect. It wasn't a failure. It wasn't hard, Steve. It wasn't hard. So anyway. Now, Pfizer has a vaccine candidate.

They think that they may have it on the market by October. So that would be awesome. Good. So if we get a drug like Favapyrivere, which I've been pushing on this show for a while, just because I'm interested in it. It's a drug that's in Japan that's already on the market. It's gone through all the safety trials. They're in post-marketing right now for influenza in Japan.

And there was some evidence in a small trial that it was effective for preventing progression of disease in COVID-19. So if this pans out, the new future, once this happens, is you get sick, you go get tested for COVID-19. Oh, you've got it. Here's your prescription for Favapiraviravir, go take it and isolate yourself. He's still going to have to do that to not spread it to other people. And you don't go to the hospital and you don't die. And if we have that scenario pan out, this is over. You know, we all go back to normal again.

So that's, I'm kind of holding my, I've got my fingers crossed for that one. I'm not saying it's going to happen. And there is an NIH study that is now looking. treatment of mild disease with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin people are going well they didn't put the zinc in that's okay they could do a zinc arm so easily it's no big deal zinc's not a big deal and uh if if that pans out we go back to normal too the the hydroxychloroquine studies that they did in people who had really really bad disease didn't pan out but maybe you got to give it earlier you know so there's a bunch of stuff on the on the horizon go back

go to the laugh button channel on YouTube and look for Dr. Steve's COVID-19 situation reports. And I talked a lot about the new medications and this three-drug combo and some of the new vaccines on there. It's at YouTube. It's 15 minutes long. And it's every week on Sunday. So, all right? All right. Now, Tacey, you wanted to ask about winter?

Yes. Let's talk about winter. I mean, and how they say this is going to come back. So are we looking at another quarantine? I mean, I guess it depends on treatment. There you go. I'm going to give you one of these. Give yourself a bill.

I deserve that. The answer is it depends. Yeah. That's right. So if people are dumb and they are shoulder to shoulder and, you know, not social distancing and there's an outbreak and they're still being dumb and getting too close together, then yes, we may end up going back into lockdown. But what I'm hoping is that if we can identify hotspots like they did in South Korea, we just

isolate, we contract trace and isolate those people so the rest of us can go about our business. That would be the best scenario. That is possible to do if done properly. Now, I know that some people are balking that if they go into certain restaurants in some states, they want you to sign in, give your name and address in your email. there is a civil liberty issue to that, but it's a private company, you know, it's a private entity that's asking you to do that. And they're saying, don't come in if you won't do it. They can require it.

Yeah, certainly. Because it's a private. It's a restaurant. They can require anything they want, right? But why are they requiring it? For contact tracing. So if someone turns up positive, then they can get, you know. Don't eat there if you don't want to go.

Right. I agree with that. I think it's okay to request that. And it's not a First Amendment issue because it's a private. company that's doing this or you know a sole proprietorship or whatever right so okay very good any other legal ramifications of any of these things not those lb i'm just going to call you lb i can't call you lawyer bitch because you're not a bitch you're a very nice person oh you just don't know me now trevor were you going to say something else back there and i interrupted you you was probably

so long ago you forgot oh it was about the um testing and how you would go, you would run these studies and you would test. I don't remember if it was the, you just called the challenge studies. Oh, yeah, the challenge studies, right. But so if you're having all these false positive, false negative tests, how do you properly have a... Give yourself a bill? Did you get one of those?

It's an excellent question. So what I was looking at was do they get sick? You know, that's the thing I'm interested in because this Oxford, the Oxford vaccine, those reesisos monkeys still had the virus. They had detectable virus, but they didn't get sick. When I got influenza after getting two flu shots, I got the virus and I was sick for a day,

but I didn't go to the hospital. I didn't die, and I'm an old man. So that's one kind of response where you still get infected, but you don't get sick. So you're right. The only way they could tell that would be with an antibody test. And the

combined with that RNA test where they stick the swab up your nose and test for viral particles, and that's the one that's really got a pretty high false negative rate. And a lot of that has to do with how you capture it. You know, people don't stick the

swab far enough up, and then, you know, it's the test itself isn't perfect. And some of the tests are as high as a 20% false negative rate. So you see, you these people, about 100 cases of people that tested negative one time, maybe two times, and then tested positive. And if you have a 20% false negative rate, there's a 4% chance that you'll get two negatives

in a row. And that's not zero. So, but what nobody ever asks in those situations, because everybody freaks, oh, you're not getting immunity. You may or you may not. We just don't know yet, but haven't had it long enough. But what no one ever seems to ask is those people that tested positive after they tested negative, were they sick? Were they able to transmit it to anybody else?

Did they? Yeah. And the answer so far is, no, they weren't sick and there's no evidence that they transmitted it to anybody. So they may have been shedding viral fragments, and then those will still show up as viral RNA in the PCR test. So, you know, it's just interesting. It's so new. We just don't know the answers to some of these things, you know. But so what we would do is you would do two things.

If I were running that study, doing a challenge, I would shoot you up with the vaccine. Have you come back a week later or maybe two weeks? Let it just cook in there for a little bit. Shoot the virus up your nose and then watch you for 14 to 21 days. And I would look for three things. Production of IGM antibodies. Now, those tests are pretty darn sensitive and specific. So that's a blood test.

IGM antibodies are the antibodies you develop at the beginning of a disease. Okay. And then you develop these other antibodies called IGG antibodies later. And so if you see only IGM, you know it's early, right? So I would look for that. I would look for fever, cough, runny nose, sore throat, the clinical stuff. Because those are the people, you've got to develop those things before you develop pneumonia and then end up in the hospital. never developed those, then, you know, who cares? And then the third thing would be, yeah, I would

shove the thing up your nose and see if I could recover viral particles. And to do a proper test, you would do all of that so that you could say the data is unassailable. Yes, this vaccine really works. You know, so do they get infected, but don't get sick? That's good. I would say that's positive. Those people would still need to isolate, right, because they could transmit it to other people but they don't get sick or do they get sick and they don't progress to severe disease and they don't die that would be a positive or do they not get infected at all that would be the best you know where we just start making a human shield so that we can build up this so-called herd immunity well not so-called herd immunity it's called herd immunity you know all right that is

the goal of a vaccine is to make artificial herd immunity. It's not even artificial. It's real herd immunity, but it's without people getting sick. All right. Hi, Dr. Stephen Tacey. How are you? This is David from California.

Hello, David. I'm a big fan of the show. Thank you. The prolog to my question is as follows. It has become increasingly clear that hydroxychloroquine coupled with a Z-Pack and zinc is the most effective treatment for COVID-19. Okay, I'm going to take umbrage with that. it's clear to some people. It's not yet clear to me based on double-blind placebo-controlled data.

On observational data from Didier-Ray-O, hell, it's 100%, you know. But they're, and that's interesting. Okay, so if I tell you a certain pill worked for me, that's anecdotal evidence, right? If I tell you it worked for me a thousand times, it's still anecdotal evidence. it's just a thousand anecdotal reports, right? That's the problem with observational states. I gave this to this many people, and they all got better. That is still anecdotal evidence.

Good evidence is where you give, if you got three pills, you give 1,000 people the three pills and 1,000 people three identical sugar pills, and you don't tell either one of them which is which. and in a situation where you don't know if this has any efficacy at all, then that's ethical. It's ethical to do that. If you think this thing really works, then it is unethical, then you've got to do it against some other treatment. But anyway, so, but this is the perfect way to do it.

And then at the end of the study, you look and see if the people who got the drug, and I don't know who got it, and the patient doesn't know. So there's no chance for bias in that situation. At the end of the study, you decode it and see if, if there's a statistically significant difference between the treatment group and the placebo group. And that we don't have yet. So I'm just going to throw that in there.

Yes, a lot of people feel that this is right, but that is therefore, if they feel that it's right, it's a faith-based statement, it's not based in evidence yet. Okay, so let me let him finish this point in time. The anecdotal evidence is pretty vast. There are many infectious disease physicians in the United States that has not.

minister of the drug and feel that it is the best course of action. Yes. Okay. So we do it. We do it right now. And the reason we do it is because we don't have anything else, at least until remdesivir hits our shelves. And then we have that.

So that's why so many people were doing it because we, look, you got a global pandemic, huge emergency. You've got clinicians from France who in China and other places saying, hey, we did this. this seemed to work for our patients, well, hell, you know, why wouldn't we do it? Right. But it's not based on evidence yet. Well, it is based on evidence, but it's thin evidence. I really want, now, NIH is doing this study, and that's the one I really want to see,

because they're going to do it exactly right. It's a true blinded study. But anyway, so let him continue. Study out of France, though not a double blind, showed very promising results. Yes. Several countries use this as their standard course treatment. The Italian Society for Rheumatology studied 65,000 patients on long-term hydroxychloroquine for R.A. and lupus, of those only 20 tested positive for COVID, and of those 20 all survived and none ended up in the ICU. That's interesting.

So evidence is emerging of H.C.2. That's a study I have not seen because, yes, we all been saying, look, there's all these people on hydroxychloroquine for rheumatoid arthritis. and for lupus and undifferentiated autoimmune disorder, there should be some evidence there that these people aren't getting it if this is a good prophylactic. So I haven't seen that study, but I will research it for either this week's COVID sit rep or for next week's show. Will you remind me, Taze?

Yes, he sounds very smart. Yes, he is very smart. He's asking it. More than close to a century of use, that HCQ is relatively safe. Agreed. HCQ has been also known to be an effective treatment. for SARS. My questions are with all of the, now I admit it's completely anecdotal, no double blind, adding up to HCQ being an effective treatment, does a double blind study conflict with

the Hippocratic oath? Is knowingly administering a placebo to people that a plethora of anecdotal evidence suggests would benefit from the drug actually doing harm, especially for those that end up on a vent, have lasting damage or die. You already touched on that. Yeah, we did. That's awesome. But this is a great question. So, and I'm going to say it's iffy in this case, mainly because there is no, it's not,

it's only standard of care because it's de facto. So I believe that done properly, you can do an ethical placebo-controlled trial on hydroxychloroquine, But this is what you do. You do it on mild patients, and then you have someone decode the data about halfway through, and if it's showing a huge statistical difference, and you can have an independent person do it, there can be criteria for stopping the placebo arm at that point. And as a matter of fact, that's happened in a couple of studies that were done, and I believe one of them was remdesivir, and I'm blanking on what happened.

But there was a, I believe, a placebo arm for one of the remdesivir trials, and they had to stop it because it was, you know, they decoded it and showed that there was an effect. So you can, you don't have to wait until the very end of the study to decode this, but the patients and the primary researcher can't be the ones that do that. It has to be somebody independent that's not making any communication with them unless they see a reason to stop the study. So, anyway.

The importance of double-blind studies, especially for brand new drugs, but we're not talking about a brand new untested drug that is meant to give men a boner. Yeah, no, that's right, but we are, it is untested for this situation. You know, that's the thing. So that's an excellent question. You could make the argument either way, and ethicists will be, you know, if you're going to do a study, you have to bring it before an inter-investigational review board, and the ethics of your study

have to be spoken to at all times. Explain to me, is it the placebo group that they're worried about harming? Yeah, what he's saying is, look, if you know this stuff works, which we really don't, but we think it does. But if you know something works, then giving somebody a placebo, like a cancer, you've got a stage four cancer person, and you've got a drug that maybe could prolong their life by three months, and if you don't, they're going to die. It would not be ethical to give them a placebo.

But would you be doing the study if you knew that? The answer to that? Well, you might be looking for a better gold standard. So what you would do is treat them with the standard care that might prolong their life six months or six weeks and then give them this new thing that might do three months instead of doing it against a placebo. Right. Does that make sense? And then you have to kind of infer the placebo effect. And it sucks.

It's not the best science, but you do have to take ethics into this. You wouldn't want to do a double blind. placebo-controlled study for a new pain medication on a hospice patient, for example. But in this case, we don't know. That's right. And so you can argue it either way. Well, we don't know that the hydroxychloroquine, that it would be unethical to give somebody a placebo because it may be a placebo.

Right. You know? And I think that there's some effect there. I really do. You know, the UCSF study looked at all, they mapped all the proteins. that SARS-COV-2 attacks, and then they looked at drugs that would have effects on those proteins, and what did they find? Antibiotics like azithromycin, anti-malarials like hydroxychloroquine, so it does make sense.

So if this guy were on the investigational review board, he might make the ethical argument, and they would have to listen to him that it would be unethical to do this. is a placebo-controlled trial. So ethics isn't in calculus. So it's got to be argued, and then you just got to make the best estimation. But there are fail-safs for that. If you've got a drug that's just showing, it's just blowing it out of the water, and people are in the placebo-controlled arm are going downhill,

you can terminate the trial, declare victory, and then just treat everybody. You can do that. Okay. Interesting. All right. Tacey, you got, oh, so Tacey, you haven't got to say, I've just been monologuing. Monologue away. No, no, no, no.

I don't care. I want you to monologue about your trip to South Kakalaki. So you went on an airplane ride. Yes. And left me home so that you could go party with a bunch of dudes around a fire pit. Okay, first of all, fire pits cause alcohol trouble. So I can't be around fire pits. not drink too much. I did learn that. And I knew that from here, but I just hadn't, there's

two common denominators, I guess, me and the fire pit. So, alcohol. So tell us about the fire pit. There you go. I mean, oh, so anyway. And the airlines. Tell us more about the fire pit. Okay, the fire pit was very romantic. Many, many intoxicated men and me and my friend. And, Yeah, it was just nice. I don't want to hear anymore. At one point, they played Rush, of course, which I turned that off very quickly. Really? Not a Rush fan.

Oh, not a Rush fan at all. And, no, I'm just kidding, Steve. They're just a bunch of goofy guys and me and her. Yeah, when you were gone, I just had a bunch of goofy girls over. It's totally fine. I know you know me better than that, so I'm not worried about it. There was no social distancing on airplanes, just so everyone was. knows if you're flying American you can forget it but you had to wear a mask though right you had to

wear a mask so I guess that's something on the way down there they give you hand sanitizer on the way in no they check your temp on the way in no what no really yeah on the way down the planes were kind of half full on the way back um one of the planes was completely full and the other one was just a little pedal jumper it didn't have I could make a recommendation to our brothers and sisters that are, you know, run airlines. If you want to instill confidence in people to travel, just screen people. If you're going to put them on a crowded plane, I totally agree with you on that. So let me get this straight.

I had to go to a steakhouse yesterday, and I had to sit adjacent from other people, but I can get on a plane and sit right next to everybody with the same air circulating. And also in South Carolina, you can sit at the bar that's crowded with people all over you. Interesting. Different rules. You know, Georgia reopened, what, April 30th was when their stay-at-home expired, and they have not had an increase yet. That was as of Sunday when I last looked at the data, not in hospitalizations or in a significant increase in new cases that I saw, or a trend. There was a big jump, but they'd had big jumps even before the thing, so I'm looking at trends and didn't see any.

So this can be done, but it has to be done smartly. There was bike week that was supposed to be canceled, but the bikers came anyway. Sure. You can't stop them from coming. And really, bikers, what are the, you know. They're open air. Yeah, they're open air. Yeah, with no helmets.

I mean, they didn't even need the helmets because they're in South Carolina, which is not so. That's your opinion. That's why it's there. I felt safe on the. beach because even though it was crowded because you know it's open air like you said and um everybody was staying within their groups and we were definitely six feet away from other people but it was it was crowded but it was nice to be somewhere where I didn't have to pretend that um well it was just nice to be out of the house yeah but but the airport and the airplane

did scare me I mean the airport you know it was one of those gates it's at the end of the hallway where they shove like 10 gates together and um oh yeah there's no place to sit people everywhere and and people don't understand i know they forget or they don't believe in this because there are a lot of people who really truly think this is malarkey um oh okay joe biden well i mean there are a lot of i mean i don't okay well we did say we are not going to use bad language as often anymore. You're right. And so, yeah, people just, they're not social distancing and they're forgetting, I think, is the big point.

Yeah. And they're done with it. Yeah. And I don't blame them, but just hang in there a little bit longer. This thing will be over. But, you know, I just, I don't want to go back into complete lockdown again. That's what I'm hoping to avoid. I've pledged not to go to hot yoga for another month.

Good. There you go. Which is hard for you. It's very hard, but it seems like an incubator kind of situation. Of course, by definition. Yeah. So, yeah, you're in front of an instructor who's probably breathing hard and all these people are breathing hard, and then it's hot as hell in there. And you're sweating. And hot yoga, yeah.

What do you get out of that? Strong? Do you? No, no. Yeah. Do you feel better afterward? Oh, yeah. No.

I've done it. It's horrible. It is. horrible. Sounds terrible. I've thrown up leaving. I'm terrified of it. Everybody does in the beginning. Really? He just never tried it again. Oh, you puke? I mean, I did.

I just... Yeah, you get lightheaded. I did two classes in a row, and I guess I just didn't refill all the water I was losing. And so I just... You mean you did a class, and then you immediately did another one? Well, I did like, it was a power class in a way, and then it was a stretch and flow class. And it was... A class where you sit down. Yeah, the class I was sitting down and was where I threw up.

Well, I didn't throw up in the class. Because he was still in the heat, I guess. Yeah, it was... Wow. I mean, yoga's awesome. I had my only out-of-body experience doing yoga, but I think just yoga, you know, the guy that invented, the guy or the woman who invented yoga 4,000 years ago probably had low back pain, as my guess.

Yeah. And, but I know that some of the yogies that come over here. here are horrified by some of the crap that we've done, particularly the yoga places that I guess maybe this is Pilates, but where they have pullies and they use pulleys to pull themselves into these different positions that they otherwise couldn't attain. And all the yogis I've ever talked to, and maybe one or two have said, you know, if you can't do those poses, attempting to do them is just as good. you get just as much out of it and maybe even more as the person who can just stand there

and put their knee against their ear, you know, and their legs standing straight up and standing on one foot, you know, and that the attempt is, is what's important. Is what's important, yeah. But anyway, yeah, hot yoga, I don't know. I mean, I would like to try it, but then when it comes to down to it, I'm just so chicken. How hot is it? I mean, I sweat so bad. Like a hot tub.

105 degrees she said it was 98 it's it's between 95 and a hundred five yeah and it's crowded in there too well it's not now now because of social distancing well this is silly but so I still don't go for a lot regardless and so I mean I go for a run and I'm drenched yeah and I'm in that and I'm extra drenched and they want you to they want you to move way down do they think it detoxifies you is that what they say because if that's their reasoning then I cry BS. I don't, you know, honestly, I don't know. It's power yoga, and it was started by a man in the 80s in L.A.

Is that enough for you? Right. Or at least that style. Not the hot part necessarily, but, you know, they say that your muscles will expand farther or stretch farther, which I think is true. That's probably true. At some level. Yeah, I'll give it that. I mean, I definitely was in there moving.

and bending more than I've ever moved Yeah, I bet But I was also wet Yeah Like shower wet Yeah And I didn't like that Yeah

And I mean I had a shirt on Because I'm a relatively hairy guy Yeah And like guys were in there With their shirts off And I was just nope I was stubborn

And I laid down And my shirt hit the mat And it sounded like I farted Oh my goodness I was super embarrassed Oh yeah And then you have to go It's just the mat

It's just the mat And they're like, yeah, right. And you guys don't think worse of people who sweat more than others. I don't think anyone doesn't sweat completely. Oh, look at that one. They have their sweating. I mean, you are so to the point where I have to take a shower or take a towel with me to the car because hair's, it's like I just got out of the shower. Everyone's like that.

Some more than others. Yeah, I mean, it's still gross, though. It's disgusting. It is. No argument. Does anybody, like, you know, if you go watch a marathon, and then there's a certain number of people who have evacuated their bowels, do you ever see anything gross like that in hot yoga? No. Now, there is, I have to say, in St. Petersburg, Florida, there's a, there is a yoga studio.

You're not going to say anything actionable, right? No, I'm being careful. That has men's naked yoga. Oh, come on. So I do have questions about that. It's true, though, Steve. I've never gone because I'm not a man, but they do. And you would think things would get in the way, I would think.

What you think? Is it men's hot naked yoga? Who would want to, oh, can you imagine being in the back row of that when they're all doing the downward-facing dog? Oh, my God. No. So I'm a yoga instructor now. Did you know that, Steve? Oh, no.

Yeah, I would come to your class. Well, yeah, I don't teach hot yoga. Oh, yeah. Because I just take it. Then we would definitely come to your class. I take the regular. Anyone your teaching is hot yoga. Oh, well, whatever.

Okay. So, yeah, I don't do. I don't teach hot yoga because it's silly. But I do teach regular. Hot that yoga. Oh, that's cool. I take hot yoga because it keeps me in shape. We used to do, what's the guy's name, Steve Ross, loved him.

He did, like, hip music and stuff, and he was funny. And I did have my own one in my life out-of-body experience when I was awake and not on drugs, you know, in my life doing Steve Ross yoga on TV. Really? Yeah, he used to be on the Oxygen Channel. It was a really great show. Now, I know yoga, I mean, people, we don't know every, ever. all these yogi's opinion of him. It could be horrible, but we got a lot out of it and really enjoyed it.

Yeah. Right. There's just a lot of different sex that have kind of, you know, moved apart from each other. And that's hot yoga's based on Baptiste yoga. That's a human thing. Yeah. It's like, sorry, folks, there's no denominations in heaven if you believe in that. Well, some are for young people.

Right. Some are for, you know, our sports enthusiasts. We're just going to always divide ourselves up into little things. Kurt Vonnegut called them false carasses. Did you ever read Cat's Cradle? Yes, a long time ago, though. Yeah, you had a true carass that would be like people who are soulmates and were drawn together. Then you would have what was called a false carass, which would be people that say,

oh, we're Hoosiers. They didn't really have some connection, but there was a fake connection. So anyway. And then there was a Grand Falloon. I can't remember what that was. I need to go back and read that. Trevor, if you have not. read Kurt Vonnegut, you need to get started and we'll quiz you next time.

Yeah, get right on that. Yeah, I'll tell you what I told Kim when she hired me. I can't read. Okay, well, fair enough. I called his bluff those, Steve. She has since then I can. Oh, you just were trying to get out of stuff. He was supposed to be a billing person, so he did numbers.

And then eventually I realized that he could read, and now he has to do a lot more. Oh, you're a financial guy, though. So you'll get into this. I got a tweet from John Bollinger. You know who John Bollinger is, right? The guy invented the Bollinger bands. And because he liked my use of his statistical technical analysis technique for analyzing new case data for COVID-19 cases.

Oh, that's cool. So I used Bollinger bands for that. And you can see that also on COVID.stoutlabs.com because I talked to him about it and he started using the the Bollinger bands and on some of our previous COVID sit reps on

YouTube. Yeah. I had a very sexy conversation with the guy about that at the fire pit. For real? Yes, about you and your Bollinger bands. Really? Yes. How'd that go? Yeah, tell us about it. It was very sexy. I was like, you know,

bands. Those bands. Those finance bands. One is two standard deviations. of the 20-day, simple moving average. Yes. Hey, fellas. And one, the lower ban, okay, anyway. There's no action at a fire pit when you're bragging about your husband and his financial

bowling, bollinger, whatever, bands. Well, the German would be bollinger. Oh, Bollinger bands. But he may say blinger, I don't know. I'd like to see how many ways I can mess that word up, John. But anyway, now you were talking about the social distancing as well, Trevor. So before we close out of here. With all of this coming out with people, you know, not having the effects,

they're being able to, is it type A care, like where you carry it and you don't have symptoms? Type A. Well, no, are you talking about blood types? No, I'm talking. I don't know what it's called. Well, they were asymptomatic. A symptomatic. Yeah, there you go.

Okay. Yeah, I'm not medical at all. Well, Tacey's been plying you guys with drinks that are probably way. way, way, way too strong, too. His is. Yeah. But so with these people, especially younger, who are not showing any symptoms, they, they, because I've got, I went to Middle Tennessee and I've got a lot of buddies who live in Nashville.

Yeah. And Nashville has decided to allow people to go back on Broadway. Yeah. Are those people who then potentially came into contact with COVID-19 gets, get sick? Or, I don't know, come to some kind of knowledge of that they have it. Yeah. That because they're afraid of getting shit, you know, I mean, from other people, parents. I know my mom would light me up if I.

Oh, because you were not social distancing, and so then they don't tell anybody. And I don't go to the doctor because I live alone. Yep. And, you know, I get sick, but I think I'm going to be okay. Right. Right. Right. No, yes, of course there are those people. And some people say, hey, I can't afford to quarantine myself for 21 days. So they just go anyway, knowing that they're sick. I didn't even think of work. Yeah. There's those folks. And then, yes. Once it went to spring break, too. It's not forget about them. Yeah. And the parents who still send their kids to school because they need child care and they have to go to work, even though their kids like threw up that morning or whatever. There's nothing easy about any of this.

So, yeah, it's, yes, those people will be undercounted. We'll never have a perfectly accurate number of how many people had this unless the federal government said, we're just going to tell, you know what, screw your civil liberties. We're testing everybody and it's mandatory. Send out the National Guard. Yeah. And if you don't do it, we're going to do this and that. And they will never do that. That could have happened.

I mean, not to test everyone, not to force you to give evidence against yourself or anything like that. but they could have quarantined everyone immediately by using the National Guard. Sure. And we talked about that. If they had, let's say you forced, if you were a totalitarian government, I don't know, like, you could probably think of one or two. And you had the power to just tell everybody to stay home. If you perfectly isolated everyone, then all the people that were exposed the day before, isolation they would be done being sick by about day 24 on average and some sooner

some later some would never get sick um it would take that long for you to even see the number of cases start to decline and then there's still going to be people that can transmit the disease so now you've got to go another 24 days at least go ahead well and wouldn't it just come back in like if you were able to protect everyone then let everyone out right then air travel opens back up and you're in the same spot so until the herd immunity or whatever you want to call it kicks in, you can't really. And at the rate that we're at, the highest I've seen anyone estimate the asymptomatic rate is like 20% of the population.

That was a real outlier. Most of them have been in the 3% to 6%, if that, and that depends on where you are. There's nowhere close enough to get us hurt immunity. Oh, okay. Nowhere close enough. If we calculated on this show, you need at least 55% of people to be immune before we get hurt immunity from this virus if one person gives it to two other people, 2.2 other people. That's what we estimated. So do we have an accurate death rate yet?

I said it was 0.8 is what we're out. Well, no, that's known cases in the United States is around 0.8% of the population. So the death rate depends on how many people are asymptomatic. So if you look at the Diamond Princess, for example, 4,000 people on the ship, 710 got it. Oh, no, I'm sorry, 710 tested positive for the virus. Of those, 46% of them never had a symptom. Yeah. Our buddy, Dr. Hopland, who we had on this show, was on the Diamond Princess.

he was in a room with his wife for 14 days she was positive she had it she had symptoms he never got it so there may be some people who have natural immunity and that's going to be hard as hell to dope out you know yeah my mom went to went to church with them oh is that right yeah yeah we did an interview with him yeah i listened to it i thought it was very good i thought it was i think the whole thing's crazy i mean i don't ever want to go on a cruise ship but No, no, I mean either. I never wanted to go on a cruise ship to begin with. Yeah, I wonder. So, yeah, have you been on one? No, I've never had been. Disney Cruise, I used to want to go on that.

Only one I've done. They do it great. 5,000 people, half of them kids, but they keep your kids and you don't see them a lot. Yeah, they do it right. Which is great, I guess. But there's a lot of Disney princesses handing you sanitizing stuff. Everywhere you go and you, there's nothing like things.

thinking there's got to be some disease on this shit for them to have to keep giving me sanitizing stuff. They don't want a single outbreak of Norwalk virus on a Disney cruise. Not that anybody else does either, but that one case where they had that shit show of a cruise where so many people got it and they were quarantining people in their room and the toilets weren't working and all. They do do it well, though. Disney, if you're going to do it. Yeah, that was not Disney, by the way. I'm not going to name the cruise. I know who it was.

Yeah, but I would, I despise cruises because of, yeah, I've always wanted to do one, but I don't know about now. I think a Panama Canal cruise would be cool, though, because it's one of the few cruises you could get on where you go out onto the deck and you can see land on both sides of the boat. That would be kind of cool. They do all those river ones. My parents are doing those a lot lately in Europe and, you know, biking. Yeah. Tacey says those are for old people, and it's like, they are for old people. The youngest person is like, my mother says the youngest person's like 65.

Well, there you go. So I probably could get some action. They do not have casinos. No, but they have bars, though, right? Yeah. There you go. They have, usually they have, I guess, balconies overlooking both sides. Yeah.

It's very expensive, though. Yeah. I figure I could get some action with some of the old bitties on that thing. Go for it, dude. Children are not allowed on those. Yeah, so I'd have to go Let's see what you can get You know Disney, Viking

All right, you guys got anything else And we'll get out of here No, we're done Well, thanks I'm done with you people Go to the lawyer bitch And Trevor Thank you

And Legal, what are you over there What do you call your, what's your job? Chief of Staff Oh, Chief of Staff Trevor, okay That's a nice title Yeah, it's actually not It's not allowed to have that

A legal assistant, okay We fight on my title a lot. No, he's sent some, he'll try to get it past me, like letters with chief of staff on the bottom. It's hilarious. Yeah, he did once. When I worked in my dad's office, I was an administrative assistant, which was different back then. This was in the 70s, and it was somebody that did, like, quotes and stuff like that. But I would put administrative ass, ASS, and put a period after it and send it.

Don't give him any ideas. Just a goop. fun. You know, and we would send these quotes out to these multinational corporations that you know, you know, Steve, whatever, you know, administrative ass on it. That's funny. Anyway, well, thank you all for coming. It was nice having somebody else in here. Tacey, it's always a delight doing a show with you, and I really appreciate you being here. Well, thank you, Steve. And we can't forget, Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg Hughes, Anthony Ikumia, Jim Norton, Travis Teft,

Lewis Johnson, Paul Ophcharsky, Eric Nagel, Roland Campos, Sam Roberts, Pat Duffy, Dennis Falcone, Matt Kleinsmith, Ron Bennington and Fez Watley, who supported this show, has never gone unappreciated. That was the dog making that.

That wasn't them laughing at Matt's name. Listen to our SiriusXM show on the Faction Talk channel. SiriusXM. Channel 103, Saturdays at 8 p.m. Eastern, Sunday at 5 p.m. Eastern, on demand, and other times at Jim McCle. pleasure. Many thanks to our listeners whose voicemail and topic ideas make this job very easy.

Go to our website, Dr. Steve.com, for schedules and podcasts and other crap. Until next time, check your stupid nuts for lumps, quit smoking, get off your asses, get some exercise, wash your hands, and we'll see you in one week for the next edition. Goodbye, everybody. You know, Oh,