The highly recommended HART bulletin this week has a piece on how the NHS is failing Covid patients by not offering any adequate early treatment, despite the now plentiful evidence of the clinical effectiveness of a number of safe, repurposed drugs.
Nearly a year and a half after the country was locked down to protect the NHS, how is the NHS performing in managing the very condition that so threatened it?
If you suspect that you or a member of your household is suffering from COVID-19 the advice is to get a test and contact NHS 111 for advice. When you do this you are asked a series of questions designed to ascertain how seriously ill you are. If you report “red flag” symptoms such as severe breathlessness or oxygen saturations below 90% quite rightly you are advised to call 999. But what about the less severe cases? The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has issued guidance to clinicians on how to assess and manage patients with COVID-19. Patients not severely ill and requiring hospital admission are managed in the community. The guidance advises symptomatic treatment such as a teaspoon of honey or linctus or even morphine sulphate tablets to suppress coughing. This in itself is bizarre advice, given that the British National Formulary (BNF) only recommends morphine for treatment of cough in palliative care with a ‘reminder of the risk of potentially fatal respiratory depression’. Paracetamol or ibuprofen is recommended for fever. For breathlessness it advises to keep the room cool and open a window. For agitation and anxiety it even recommends a trial of a benzodiazepine (a tranquiliser medication) despite this potentially leading to respiratory depression.
What does not feature in the guidance is early treatment of COVID-19 in the community. Drug treatments such as dexamethasone and remdesivir are recommended for hospital patients. There are a number of established medicines such as ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, zinc and famotidine which have been advocated for early treatment. The evidence in favour of ivermectin, in particular, is growing rapidly as this meta-analysis by HART member Professor Norman Fenton and his colleague Professor Martin Neil shows.
Similarly, early administration of inhaled budesonide (an asthma drug) has been shown to reduce the likelihood of needing urgent medical care and reduced time to recovery while a peer-reviewed study in the USA showed fluvoxamine (a common antidepressant drug) prevented clinical deterioration in outpatients with clinical COVID-19.
The U.K. has been quick to roll out COVID-19 vaccines that are still undergoing their clinical trials yet seems reluctant to explore the possibility of cheap treatments with long established safety records. Surely this begs the question why?
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It is properly typed ‘DIE Regulation’ by the way – the intent is in the mnemonic.
The marxo-fascists always want someone to DIE.
I think they want everyone to die.
Smith alleges to have been called an N-word and the person she accuses of this “strongly denied” this. An investigation “found otherwise, on the balance of the evidence”, whatever that specifically means. As already stated in the text, he was then forced to humiliate himself formally in a letter to her, banned from contacting her and sentenced to 12½ days of forced labour.
Smith is upset that the guy who believes to be innocent has not shown enough remorse despite of the letter he was forced to write and demands that he must be expelled from university instead because “Durham is a very small place. He is a very intimidating guy, and he scares me.” As he’s banned from contacting her and the university administration will certainly act on this if he doesn’t comply, Smith is either lying or scared by her own, so-far baseless phantasies.
This ‘lady’ certainly doesn’t deserve any sympathy.
I was going to write that people of Uni age should strongly consider a degree apprenticeship but you might end up at some woke corporation – probably still better off than uni though. Better still go to a college and get a trade qualification. The most non-woke bunch of people I know are the builders, plumbers, electricians etc at the golf club I swim at (where I live, golf seems to be largely a working class sport).
As a Durham alumni I can only be ashamed of what that University has become. I was once proud to have graduated. Now it’s something I try to keep quiet.
Same. They’ll be calling me up to beg for money again soon. Based on this, they can go jump off Prebend’s Bridge. So long as Durham insists on being a leftwing, political institution, instead of a calm, rational, logically based place of learning, I don’t want anything to do with it. I got my degrees back in the 80’s and 90’s when it was still a bastion of reason, but people only recognise what it is today, and that is something shameful.
Go to Uni, get to be Uni-form.
DEI – That’s Division, Exclusion and Intolerance isn’t it?
Freshers Unfair, surely?