> there's little/no treatment for the infection resulting from this virus.
This is not true. Since the beginning of the pandemic front line doctors have been successfully reducing hospitalization and death through early treatment with antivirals, corticosteriods, and antithrombotics.
I guess a better way to phrase it is that there's no over-the-counter cure, and if you're at the point where a front line doctor is giving you steroids, things are already going worse than most people's vaccine side effects.
All of those medications can be prescribed prophylactically (early in the symptomatic phase) by just about any clinic.
I'm not advocating against vaccination, just pointing out that early treatment with widely available and existing medicines has also proven to be effective in reducing severe outcomes.
[1] is an interesting lit review on what drug strategies have been tried where in the world.
None of these papers seem to present strong clinical evidence that these drugs have actually been effective, vs some hidden covariate or something. A couple include interesting small-sample observational studies, but as I understand it those haven’t panned out in follow-on randomized controlled trials that have been done.
There are also a couple essentially viewpoint articles that are interesting. [2] is basically a pharmacokinetic calculation motivating further study, but no clinical data.
[4] is a hypothesis piece about hydroxychloroquine that draws on nine other studies. Haven’t been able to evaluate those because [4] is not open access, but this is one of the drugs that has not lived up to expectations in various RCTs that have been completed…
This is not true. Since the beginning of the pandemic front line doctors have been successfully reducing hospitalization and death through early treatment with antivirals, corticosteriods, and antithrombotics.
[1] Multifaceted highly targeted sequential multidrug treatment of early ambulatory high-risk SARS-CoV-2 infection (COVID-19) https://scholarlycommons.henryford.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
[2] Timing of Antiviral Treatment Initiation is Critical to Reduce SARS-CoV-2 Viral Load https://ascpt.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/psp4.1...
[3] Clinical outcomes after early ambulatory multidrug therapy for high-risk SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) infection https://rcm.imrpress.com/EN/article/downloadArticleFile.do?a...
[4] Early multidrug treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infection (COVID-19) and reduced mortality among nursing home (or outpatient/ambulatory) residents https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03069...
[5] Multidrug treatment for COVID-19 https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ddt/advpub/0/advpub_202...