Dear Diary,
For posterity I’m going to get down some of the theories, older and newer, about the origin, treatment, and future of corona virus that have circulated and continue to circulate in various media venues.
Early on there was hype about hydroxychlorquine, a drug used for autoimmune patients, being curative for corona. I’ll admit that I was excited about this one because I’ve taken that drug for years (with no side effects) and had some in the closet (albeit expired). This idea lingered for quite some time, and was made stickier by presidential proclamation that people should “give it a try”–a suggestion met with significant scorn by the medical community, as it caused a run on the drug (keeping it from lupus and RA patients who genuinely need it on a daily basis), and can have some nasty cardiac side effects, and has been proven ineffective by various randomized trials.
A number of different anti-virals have had their moment on the cat walk. People were excited about Remdevisvir, a drug originally created to combat Ebola. The randomized trials that have come out so far suggest that it might shorten the course of the disease, but today it’s not clear it effects mortality.
HIV drugs have been tried, with varying reports about their success.
There is a theory that blood type matters. In particular, people with type A are at higher risk for serious infection, and type O have a relatively lower risk. The idea is that genes that control blood type also affect immune function, and could potentially affect the receptor on cells to which the virus binds. (I wish I could ask my father about this one!!) But this is just a theory, and about every two weeks there is an article claiming that it’s true (and was also true for SARS-Cov1), and then an article saying it’s not true. Jury is still out on this one (or hung?)…time will tell.
There’s been some anxiety over quickly dropping antibody rates in people who’ve overcome the virus once. This became a drum beat for a while, which was slightly muffled by the further investigation of T cell derived immunity. Part of the panic is that vaccines rely on the durability of antibodies to work…so if antibodies don’t stick around, what does that mean for the frequency and effectiveness of vaccines?
And there’s also the suggestion that some people may have a more mild reaction to the virus if they’ve had the type of common cold (also caused by a corona virus) that cross reacts with Covid-19–which essentially means that their lingering antibodies mistake Covid-19 for the common cold virus they defeated.
I’m sure there are more…and the lunatic fringe has cooked up many theories, none of which are entertaining during the pandemic, making it hard to see why we’d preserve them….
Until tomorrow