The invaluable site Science Based Medicine has a post explaining why oleandrin -- a toxic extract from the oleander plant -- is not a miracle cure for Covid-19, no matter how much the "My Pillow" guy insists that it is. Here is the gist:
This is a new twist on an old scam. The pattern, as we have reported previously, is now well-established. A CAM entrepreneur secures a supply of an obscure natural product that has little to no current market value. Once they have essentially cornered the market they then promote the useless product as an exotic natural cure for whatever.
Every part of the plant is poisonous, containing the powerful cardiac toxin, oleandrin. This can lead to cardiac arrhythmias and can be fatal.
The science made public so far is a single pre-clinical study, showing that oleandrin has anti-viral activity against SARS-CoV-2 in a test tube (the study is pre-print and has not been peer-reviewed). That’s it. This is another common feature of the snake oil industry – tout products based upon preclinical data only. This kind of data may seem promising, and allows snake oil peddlers to claim their products are backed by scientific studies. But this kind of in-vitro study tells us very little about the activity of potential drugs in living organisms. Very, very few compounds that have “promising” activity in vitro go on to become useful medicinals.
In order for a drug to be useful there needs to be a sufficient dose range in which beneficial medical effects can be achieved without significant side effects or toxic damage to any organ. Again, many promising drugs fail because they cause kidney or liver damage – or fatal cardiac arrhythmias. In fact, it’s easy to find substances which kill viruses or bacteria in the petri dish. Many poisons (or bullets) will do this. The trick is to find substances that will inhibit or kill the virus at doses lower that those that cause toxicity to human cells.
You can read the full post here.
And for your entertainment, there is a clip of "Oleana," a Norwegian folk song unrelated to oleander, after the jump.
What happens when a researcher thoroughly debunks the "unwishful thinking" of political activists pretending to be knowledgeable?
No one pays any attention (a long, well researched piece showing just how frivolous and politically motivated the objections have been to a certain treatment for COVID):
tabletmag [dot] com/sections/science/articles/hydroxychloroquine-morality-tale
In any event, if this company is "promot[ing] a useless product as an exotic natural cure for whatever" is this lawful?
Posted by: anon | August 19, 2020 at 03:01 PM