I’m sick and came to the doctor to get tested for covid, strep, and flu, since those are going around my work. I asked the doctor if I could get paxlovid if the covid test was positive, and he goes “Oh I don’t think you’d need it”
Motherfucker almost everyone who catches covid should be fucking taking it wtf is wrong with you. Oh I’m young and otherwise healthy? Yeah and I’d like to fucking stay that way thank you very much, and I’ll take any reduction in the chance of becoming permanently disabled.
Also of the medical professionals I saw today, they were only wearing surgical masks, not N95s and I can’t comprehend it. Why in the hell would you go into the room of a likely covid case not wearing an N95 are you insane?
I’m so fucking sick of being the only person in this entire town that’s actually worried about catching this disease, even the fucking doctors don’t care anymore. I work in a research facility attached to a hospital and when I go to the food court and shit at best like 1/25 people are wearing masks. In a hospital.
Thank you Mr Joe Brandon for ending the pandemic, you’ve truly cemented your place among history’s greatest killers.
I've got a friend who is a pulminologist and he strongly disagrees. As he explained it, paxlovid has its own side-effects, there isn't a limitless supply of it, and if you're young and healthy and vaccinated already you're not going to see a meaningful reduction in symptoms. So the value-add of taking it relative to the self-inflicted suffering generally isn't considered worth it unless you're in an at-risk category.
I'm hard pressed to name anyone who hasn't caught it at least once by now, save for my 76 year old mother who was practically a shut-in before the disease started. I got it the first time from a foster kid I was caring for who got it from daycare (which are all basically petri dishes particularly given how understaffed they've become). I got it the second time from my friends' kids, during D&D, because public school is basically just daycare with more standardized tests now. We all came through it without long-term issues, because we were all vax'd, got bed rest during the peak of it, and we took care of one another.
At some point, you've got to trust the guy who writes the pharmaceutical prescriptions or whats the fucking point of doctors at all? This isn't a panacea for the pandemic. Because it doesn't interact well with other medications, it is absolutely NOT for everyone. And its generally not wise to over-prescribe something this new out on the market anyway, for a whole host of reasons.
That does seem dumb as hell.
If it makes you feel any better, other countries have people with more sense. I visited Japan in February, and practically everyone there was masked all the time everywhere.
Frustrating as hell that more people don't. But that's a much different issue than whether your doctor should issue you anti-virals.
Fauci lied about the effectiveness of masks to preserve supply and turned half the US into anti-maskers, even though there's now a shitton of masks (with N-95s still being expensive instead of free like they should be). Pfizer could certainly maintain an artificial scarcity to jack up the Paxlovid price even more, but if more people are buying Paxlovid, they'll make more Paxlovid. It's pretty horrible that Pfizer has exclusivity to manufacture Paxlovid, and that exclusivity doesn't expire until 2041.
This is inaccurate. Getting COVID depletes your T-cells for 2 years if you don't take Paxlovid, young & healthy or not. So the first COVID infection will likely be less severe, but depleted T cells means that the 2nd infection, 3rd infection etc. will be more severe.
Also, "healthy" is misleading, because it implies that being physiologically healthy is sufficient to be able to raw-dog COVID and turn out okay anyway. Anecdotally, my young and physiologically healthy, vaccinated friend got COVID in summer 2022. Neurologically speaking, though, he's on the autism spectrum, has major depression, OCD, and Tourette syndrome, which makes him high risk for more severe symptoms. I pushed for him to get Paxlovid, but a family member in the medical field convinced him that Paxlovid was unnecessary, citing reasoning similar to what you suggested above. He got long COVID, has trouble thinking and focusing, and now, 14 months later, it hasn't gotten any better. He has to deal with long COVID from that single COVID infection for life, all because someone convinced him that a young, physiologically healthy, vaccinated person like him didn't need Paxlovid.
I think it is worse than that, in some ways. It is why I don’t really blame people for being anti-mask, or even mask ambivalent, even though a lot of them are just petit bourgeois and selfishly looking for their personal failings to be somehow vindicating. Fauci said that he was lying, and that it was to preserve masks for healthcare workers. But it is really unclear to me that he wasn’t just very completely wrong and saying that he lied in order to maintain a level of credibility. So, either way he is untrustworthy. People were right to be skeptical of his advice, but liberals ignored this and insisted on him being infallible. Questioning Fauci became its own political statement, and liberals identified it as reactionary.
But, the reality is that Fauci was highly inept and political and identifying his advice with “science” removed the capacity for the CDC to ever influence public behavior short of physical violence. If 50% of the country now looks at the CDC in an oppositional way, it is a collapse of credibility that renders the institution itself meaningless. It is the absolute worst outcome from a public health perspective, but another 50% of people still act as though he is good. They aren’t even bothered to see the damage it did and instead blame mostly working class people for being reactionary (when in reality, reactionaries were simply using selfish petit bourgeois impulses and mask-skepticism in an opportunistic way)
When Biden “rewarded” people who were vaccinated by ending mask mandates for them, but only working on an honor system, Fauci was parroting that shit even though there was no evidence it was a good idea, and socially it had the actual effect of ending the only pandemic measure they were willing to insist upon. It happened and then immediately we stepped into the delta wave. Liberals still became hostile when I pointed out it was Biden and Fauci making an objectively political decision that killed hundreds of thousands. That was when I realized that the Pandemic was “over” and that it had essentially become an unsolvable problem under our political-economy. Its why I basically just count my blessings that I survived and that there is little I could do.
Our social system failed, it is continuing to fail us all. Working people are mostly just responding to the material reality of that, and sometimes it is ugly. I think it just ticks off another box as to why the need to build a communist movement is an existential crisis in itself. I have given up on the pandemic in some ways, but I have become obsessed with organizing instead, because that is something that could resolve these contradictions, eventually. Anyway, sorry for the rant. I hate Fauci. I don’t get mad when people don’t wear masks. Most of the working class has been forced to contract it already by our social system, so it has caused most working class people to give up. Whether they understand it or not, they behave as if they have no control, probably because they unconsciously know they are subjects now. It is a manifestation of the callousness of capitalism and the dictatorship of bourgeois “democracy”.
It's me I've never caught it. Part luck, part being very careful.
Doctors in the US kinda suck. They are low on time due to patient:nurse/doctor ratios (due to capitalism) and end up (1) harboring a lot of ridiculously bad ideas, even when it comes to healthcare, and (2) relying heavily on computer systems and rote-memorized protocols to fill in gaps. The only time I feel okay relying solely on a doctor's opinion is if I have no other choice - no second opinion, no weeks of time to study a topic and self-diagnose about as well if not better than they can (figured out my own chronic issue this way after a battery of stab-in-the-dark tests and offers of black label meds didn't lead anywhere).
I don't expect them to, on average, have the time or environment for good critical thinking. It's structural.
Plenty of “young healthy people” are in the ground thanks to covid my very close friend among them
From personal experience when I had covid I felt like absolute dog shit started paxlovid day 2 and by day 3 felt 70% better.
I trust the for profit American health care system 0%, and I trust doctors as much as I trust pit vipers. If something is out there that is going to help better my odds I’m taking it, and fuck anyone who tries to convince me otherwise your vampire pulmonologist friend included.
The drug interaction concern is a good one but that research is publicly available for you to do.
Christ, I hate when people play these games. "Don't trust doctors, do your own research".
Research authored by whom?
My sister's father in law is an elderly GP that voted for Trump and was out eating at restaurants the week Florida came out of lockdown. Florida's surgeon general is an anti-vaxxer. The very people at the CDC who are supposed to be looking out for us recently had a conference where like 200 people caught Covid.
I, personally, am going to listen to the Doctors and Researchers who aren't flat out ignoring an ongoing mass disabling event.
Which, by the way, Florida is where I am. The Florida department of health is an arm of the DeSantis political machine. Doctors here are functionally pro-covid. Excuse me if I’m not lining up to listen to their opinions on this when they aren’t even masking.
Which Doctor/Research is saying everyone should take paxlovid?
As far as I'm concerned, any research that shows that paxlovid significantly reduces the chance of Long Covid. Of which there is now plenty.
The outstanding body of research says that Paxlovid carries numerous significantly deleterious side effects, as well as a multitude of complications with other prescriptions.
For the same reason you shouldn't start taking antibiotics without consulting a physician, there are numerous reasons why you wouldn't want to start treatment on paxlovid without a doctor's approval.
Yeah, no shit. Like you said, like antibiotics and every drug. Which is why I'm doing my best to avoid getting covid in the first place. And wish everybody else was helping with that. But since they're fucking not, if it comes down to risk of brain damage, heart damage, every other organ damage, I'm gonna take the paxlovid.
What deleterious side effects does paxlovid have that covid doesn’t have similar or worse effects? No one is saying that people should just be taking paxlovid all the time randomly, but there is basically no question that it’s better than just letting the virus go
I'm not disagreeing, but I am having trouble finding information about this. What are some of these side effects? I've only seen something about the first suspected case of bradycardia as a result of Paxlovid.
I also think it isn't unreasonable for people to want to take Paxlovid when we have seen the effects of long COVID on the population or loved ones and research indicating it significantly reduces the chances of having these complications. I have a friend with LC now who is unable to keep up with their previous life due to chronic fatigue as a result of covid infection.
We're at a point where we know at least some of the long term risk factors of a COVID infection and are continuing to find more while the research on Paxlovid is still in progress with some initial findings coming out. I'm not arguing there aren't problems with over prescribing a treatment, but the American medical system has made it clear that all the responsibilities associated with COVID are indiviualized now, so why should treatment choice be any different? We have to accept all the risks of covid infection without consent or accept serious repercussions in finding employment but can't accept risks of a medication to treat it? I realize this sounds like advocacy for ivermectin or that we should be taking antibiotics like candy, but there is some nuance to this and the left and right do often times identify similar problems, just drastically different solutions/causes
research authored by researchers who actually investigate the subject at hand? you know doctors aren't connected by a hivemind right?
Yes. In fact, researchers who formulated the drug to begin with. If you don't trust the folks who developed paxlovid to tell you when and how to use paxlovid effectively, why the hell are you ingesting this drug to begin with?
but that's what they are doing when they go to the source to get their information. you're conflating the doctors prescribing it with the people who developed (or at least study) it. these aren't equally trustworthy groups
Sorry I mean on this point specifically I believe NHS has a published table of drug interactions with paxlovid
Edit: NIH https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/therapies/antivirals-including-antibody-products/ritonavir-boosted-nirmatrelvir--paxlovid-/paxlovid-drug-drug-interactions/
Does your pulmonologist friend mask?
In the office, absolutely.
Not outside it?
Not when we're playing board games, no.
then their opinions on covid are worth less than dog shit lmao
Why would you wear a mask outside unless there's pollution or covid spreads through the wind, which i don't think is happening otherwise there would be more panic on here at least
Oh, I meant outside the office in their personal life. But if you're in a crowd or something you should definitely be masked.
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Pretty much all of medicine is a balance between risk and reward. This can actually be an issue sometimes with things like screenings or whatever where we pick up things that aren't actually an issue (even if they're scary) and are unlikely to pose a threat by the end of a person's natural life and then put them through an onslaught of medical intervention that hurts their QOL way more than the actual problem was likely to ever do for them.
That's not to say that screening and treating minor issues is bad or anything, just that we need caution to avoid causing unnecessary harm.
I absolutely agree.
It just becomes exhausting to hear people insist "my doctor wasn't wearing a mask at the appointment, so I know better than him on what drugs to take".
Like, do you trust the medication you're taking enough to take it but not enough to listen to the manufacturers on when and how to use it?