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Has anyone recently looked at the evidence for Paxlovid increasing chance of rebound symptoms? If it does increase chance of rebound, that would make me much less likely to take Paxlovid as a low-risk person.

(Currently dealing with rebound COVID almost two weeks after the first case, which I treated with Paxlovid. I'm losing two weekends instead of one because of the rebound and wondering whether it might have been better to skip the Paxlovid and get through the illness at one go.)

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They've looked. It was not clear that rebound Paxlovid is much more common than rebound Not Paxlovid, it's more that people didn't realize how much of a thing rebounds were.

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theres no evidence paxlovid is beneficial for low risk people. I'm also skeptical it doesn't increase rebound rates but data is not on my side there.

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“Law of no evidence.”

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Oops walked right into that one haha. I suppose I should say we have no clinical trial data for paxlovid in low risk groups?

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Disappointed there was no mention of Walensky getting her bivalent (5th) dose a month ago then getting COVID and taking paxlovid only to get a covid rebound. Makes for great content imo.

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Didn't notice. I mean, yeah, cheap shots were missed I suppose.

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Nov 3, 2022·edited Nov 3, 2022

Re: last week's call for news sources - what sort of news are you looking for? If you're interested in tracking what techies are talking about, I'll recommend https://hckrnews.com/ . This site shows the top 10/20 Hacker News posts on a daily basis, I find it very valuable to check weekly.

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I expected to see last Friday's Vanity Fair article on the lab leak theory in this week's covid post.

I considered posting it in the comments last week, but figured it was high profile enough that you would see it anyway, and my post would be noise.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/10/covid-origins-investigation-wuhan-lab

The analysis of Chinese bureaucratic messaging is... not well supported, but that's by design according to the hypothesis. My main takeaway is that a feature-length Vanity Fair indicates the lab leak explanation's progress in gaining more mainstream acceptance.

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I thought I did mention it, although not approvingly? I did see it and meant to, but was aware that the piece wasn't great.

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Was surprised The Intercept piece about the DHS didn't make it into your post. I generally trust The Intercept but there are a handful of Very Angry People on Twitter saying that The Intercept story is false. My default is that The Intercept story is mostly true and the Very Angry People have a weird, politically inspired allegiance to the DHS but I would like to hear your take on the story.

The Intercept story: https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/

Very Angry People story: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/bullshit-reporting-the-intercepts-story-about-government-policing-disinfo-is-absolute-garbage/

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I put that in the roundup rather than the Covid post, it's there.

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Do you have any thoughts on the “immune imprint” paper? https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.31.22281756v1.full.pdf

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I am expecting this to be due to selection effects and lack of proper controls. Not going to worry about the question since it seems moot now anyway (as the paper notes).

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