Scientists deliberately gave people Covid – here’s what they learnt | Hacker News Reader

Scientists deliberately gave people Covid – here’s what they learnt

nature.com

20 pointswalterbell12 comments

What strikes me, this was done in early 2021, yet the propaganda machine is still going strong with that whole persistent cough and fever thing... It's like there are entire establishments trying to guard information from normal people for some reason.

Case in point: I have just moved out of the UK last week, and to my surprise, Google is slowly starting to return better and better search results. I (suspected) I had two flareups of herpeses after both my pfizer vaccines when I was there, so I searched then on Google, zero, whole result pages filled with nhs links and other websites with copy-pasted content from nhs and the likes (90% telling me to go see a doctor...). I was going crazy, joking with friends that the vaccine might not be what they're telling us it is, given the wide range of 'undocumented' side effects I got from it.

Now that I'm searching from Moldova, actual first result was a paper documenting two doctors with herpes zoster after vaccination. Apparently it does happen, from both the vaccine and the infection. Guess I'm not crazy.

I've often gotten a cold sore after a virus, I always just assumed it was probably that immunity is a bit wonky after an infection. In fact I think "cold sore" is so called exactly because a cold can set it off. I'd be extremely surprised if Covid was any different, if for no other reason than many colds are also coronaviruses.

Also to add a data point, 7 of the first 10 results for "herpes covid" from a UK IP are papers about it, including the first 5. The NHS page comes in at result 7, one is (allegedly) a science news website, and number 10 is a general news website.

Googling exactly "herpes covid" from my IP, gives 10/10 papers on the first page. On second page, I got 4 more papers, a paper disproving it, one reuters article about misuse of antivirals, and 4 articles about new drugs. This is fun.

Thinking now, I might have been in some kind of Google-bubble at that time, since I started my search with symptoms at first, and later I started making connections. So I guess Google decided I need to see a doctor :)

Very interesting experience with Google. Were you logged in both times or it was anonymous search? Did you try to somehow refresh your IP address

I've been logged in into the same google account for at least 10 years.

Google knows exactly who I am, and what I am/want/etc. Yet the moment I landed in the UK, suddenly, I'm English, most of the times getting just *.co.uk results, as if the rest of the world doesn't exist anymore.

I'll be honest, it was helpful to know at what hour the Iceland and Aldi next to my house will open/close, and I didn't even had to tell it my address or turn my location on (this is amazing actually), and when it suggested where to find a dentist since I didn't know the city... But that's pretty much it.

Interesting, although the study seems to raise as many questions as it does answers. https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1121993/v1

Edit: changed 'more' to 'as many' to remove negative connotation

What questions come to mind? I was surprised by the high percent who lost smell, I'd have thought that was closer to ~20% or lower based on personal collection of stats from people I know who've had it. In this study, nearly 67% of those who were infected lost smell.

I modified my comment so to not sound as critical regarding the study. I am glad to have this information. My questions would most likely require a larger sample size and more data. I'd love to know more about participant phenotypes, BMI, and medical history. I'd also like to see a comparison of other early treatment protocols and how they stack up to remdesivir(which was used in the study).

Perhaps it was because the method they were infected? I do not think it will represent common way of getting infected that most likely was via aerosol.

actually this is some of the first data I've seen that "makes sense" and "helps explain a lot of curious things we've observed".

The real point of this study was the demonstrate that we can infect healthy people with COVID, which means now there will be larger challenge studies that ask more probing questions. The folks who ran this trial risked their careers that nobody in the trial would die from COVID!

It still can happen that somebody dies during one of such future trials. I think that this possibility should be accepted if it is for gaining important knowledge about deadly virus but these studies should be very well prepare and vetted that they really will provide this information and will be not for nothing.

Yes, as the trial size increases, i think the probability of a patient dying due to the challenge approaches 1.

With regards to trials and deaths, I used to work in gene therapy and the entire field more or less stopped for 20 years when a single patient (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Gelsinger) died in a trial. However, in most large trials, there will always be a few deaths that woudln't have occurred without the treatment (or challenge).

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