COVID-19 & US healthcare system - thread relapse

[hazard]

Today during the briefing:

“We’re very close to a vaccine,” Trump said, before immediately contradicting himself. “We’re not close on testing” the vaccine, he clarified.

Does any of that make sense?

Sort of. IIRC there's something like 70 different vaccines being worked at for COVID-19, many of which are taking absurdly short routes to testing for effectiveness and safety. And I mean absurdly short routes, several vaccines have already had the requirement for animal testing waved for them because SARS-COV-2 is so new a virus we don't have a test animal we can use to do the animal trials on, and the work necessary to determine which animal if any is the best option would delay the vaccine testing process by months at best.

Many vaccines are getting to the stage they can be tested however, which means that in theory we do have a functional vaccine nearly to completion. We just don't know if any of those vaccines are sufficiently safe to use compared to the risk of not using the vaccine.

The president said “you won’t even believe” how the virus reacts to sunlight.

“Supposing you brought the light inside the body - either through the skin or some other way,” Trump wondered.

Now we are trying to recreate an episode of Star Trek

Radiation therapy is very good and useful for a variety of illnesses. The sort of large area and high power irradiation of the body that would be needed to deal with a virus like this would do massive damage on its own, and that's if it doesn't outright kill you from radiation poisoning.

He also mused about ways to use disinfectants on people, “by injections inside or almost a cleaning.”

“It’d be interesting to check that,” the president said. “You’d have to use medical doctors.”

The DHS’s Bryan is asked about the president’s suggestions that disinfectants be injected into a person. “We don’t do that within our lab,” Bryan said.

“Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t work,” Trump interjected — but disinfectants like isopropyl alcohol definitely has an effect on “stationary objects.”

I am NOT taking an injection of Clorox. I don't care what the president* says.

Disinfectants also have an effect on non-stationary objects, and that effect is usually that the previously non-stationary object is definitely and fatally stationary now.

“Medical doctors,” should see “if there any way to apply light and heat to cure”, the president said. He asked Dr Deborah Birx if that’s possible.

“It’s just a suggestion,” Trump said. “If heat is good and if sunlight is good, that’s a great thing as far as I’m concerned.”

<facepalm>

Light and heat could be part of the effort to excise COVID-19 from society. It's just that when it's inside a body, the sort of conditions that would be necessary to destroy the disease would do massively greater damage to the body it's in.