It seems pretty thin to complain that the FDA isn’t updating their webpage with a “we’re looking into this!” anytime a new study comes out. Maybe the FDA isn’t making real-time decisions based on new data, but that isn’t clear at all from what Iggy is presenting.
Just seems like the kind of spot where you’d talk to someone with experience in this area instead of these “well I’m not a doctor but…” takes. Is the FDA aware of this study? Do they find it persuasive? If I was getting paid for these kinds of thinkpieces I’d make an effort to call and ask them.
On and the difference between .05 and .09 (rounding) is the difference between actionable or at least necessary to do follow-up vs meh, keep studying if you want to, but the fda ain’t approving that with that data.
I’d also say it’s the difference from between fouling steph curry and Ben Simmons.
Took my first two Covid tests this week at a plant site in Germany. Taking another at the airport in the morning a few hours before boarding. Quick antigen test $E29.
There’s a bit more to fluvoxamine than one RCT with promising results. There is more than one known plausible mechanism of action, there are some pretty decent retrospective observational studies. Here’s a pretty good SciAm piece on it.
Is it proven to help? No. But promising observational results, a pretty clear probable mechanism of action, a favourable RCT and very little downside to using it all add up to something I would be using if I were a doctor, and I tend to think the medical establishment is slightly too conservative about doing this.
The straightforward mechanism of action is something previous cheap-drug candidates have not had. HCQ and IVM were both like “err here’s a way it might be able to exert weak antiviral activity, I guess” which was never very convincing in the face of a virus like SARS-CoV-2. Even quite nasty antivirals like remdesivir haven’t been able to make a dent, the idea that some random repurposed drug was going to be a killer antiviral was unlikely. The proposed mechanism of fluvoxamine in simply attenuating immune response is a lot more believable.
I mean. No. That’s not how it works and for good reason.
Again, there’s massive bias towards the treatment arms in medical literature. And you don’t have anywhere close to the proper amount of evidence to say “there’s little downside”.
I don’t have any thoughts on the merits of fluvoxamine, but isn’t it more damning of the NIH if there’s just not enough evidence to say whether or not the drug works? Isn’t it their specific job to fund medical research in the public interest?
Has the NIH not been approving funding for COVID research? Were there worthy fluovaxamine proposals that didn’t get approved? And why would that be the FDA’s fault?
This is like the medical version of a Little League coach trying to cheer his team up after they get blown out. Great hustle out there. You can’t win ‘em all. Sometimes the best you can do is the best you can do. Hang with ‘em.
I guess you could say that every undiscovered drug is a “failure” of the NIH much like every undiscovered exoplanet is NASA fucking up yet again, but that seems like truly silly way to frame things.
fluvoxamine, at best, has a small affect based on the data available. It’s really super hard to figure out if things have net effects that are small or non-existent.
