By David Futrelle
Cis woman are much more likely to survive coronavirus than their male counterparts, and we don’t know why. Could if be differences in lifestyle? (Men are more prone to smoke and less prone to wash their hands.) Or could it be something more basic — like the sex hormones estrogen and progesterone — that offer cis women special protection from the deadly virus?
The New York Times reported yesterday that scientists in New York and California are testing the latter proposition, giving (consenting) male patients with coronavirus doses of estrogen or progesterone to see if this helps them survive. In the giant game of telephone that is the internet, this news quickly turned into “doctors are giving men estrogen to protest them from coronavirus,” as if this had suddenly become some sort of widespread practice.
And the people who are already obsessed with the alleged dangers of estrogen to manly men started to lose their shit.
On 4Chan’s /pol/ board, the news quickly became “Jews are injecting you with estrogen now. They don’t even hide it any more.” One anon charged that
They want [to] trivialize HRT usage, make it a regular medicine and low key put in the mind of people that masculinity is a disease. It’s no coincidence that a jewish woman is behind this.
Responding to a photo of one of the researchers, another anon wrote:
Just look at her fce, she’s a dyke who have been fantasing about feminizing men for a while and this is just an excuse.
On Twitter, meanwhile, assorted conspiracy theorists put forth similar, er, hypotheses.
You know, Q Jim, I would be surprised if that was the case. Very surprised.
It’s no shock that a Qanon conspiracist has glommed onto this news. I’m just waiting for the incels and MGTOWs to discover the story.
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@the friend Alan was asking on behalf of – Yes, sorry, CT is conspiracy theory. I was having a lazy typing moment and WTAU*
There is a conspiracy theory floating around that Trump and his inner circle have been injecting themselves with antibodies from recovered patients. That seems far-fetched, but then again, we’re talking about ghoulishly selfish people with large amounts of money.
I wouldn’t doubt that at a minimum, they’re all getting tested quite frequently and have access to concierge healthcare that the rest of us can only dream of. Still, that can only do so much against a highly transmissible virus with an unpredictable course that, even in moderate cases, seems to lay a large percentage of its victims flat on their back for a few weeks. It’s just very odd.
*wanted to abbreviate unnecessarily
@Naglfar
Yes, that’s a great way of framing it. I’m sure the manosphere would react equally maturely to the notion of reducing their testosterone. This is literally the hill they’re willing to die on.
@Buttercup
I’d think another possible explanation is that they have simply been for the most part kept away from patients and have gotten lucky in incidents where they were in close proximity. As for Pence, we’ll see if he gets sick in a few days. I won’t have much sympathy for him.
What’s also interesting is that testosterone blockers are prescribed to men for a number of reasons, including hormonal acne, hirsutism, hair loss, edema, prostate hyperplasia, various heart conditions, and hormone-sensitive cancers, while estrogen is very rarely prescribed to men. One would think they’d try testosterone blockers first. (Disclaimer: IANAD*, so there might be some details I’m missing)
But yes, the manosphere would probably have at least the same level of histrionics, if not more.
*I am not a doctor, in case there is anyone too embarrassed to ask but wants to know what it means
The Elizabeth Báthory method?
@Naglfar, I’m sure Pence is bathed in the blood of Jesus, or at least has regular transfusions of Jesus blood, so he can’t get sick.
“doctors are giving men estrogen to protest them from coronavirus,” – maybe should be “protect” instead of “protest?”
@Moggie:
There are already multiple late church leaders in the U.S. who would have agreed with that statement before they died of the virus in question.
@Jenora Feuer, obviously those weren’t true Scotsmen.
Well, I’d say it’s less ‘No True Scotsman’ for this than ‘obviously, your faith wasn’t strong enough’… basically, it’s more the whole victim-blamey thing that comes up with both religion and alternative health care, and this is both.
(The fact that it’s pretty much the same fallacy as ‘communism cannot fail, it can only be failed’ would probably make a few of their heads explode if they didn’t immediately start into a rant about how this was obviously completely different without any coherent explanations as to why.)
Considering that the death rate is low for white people, it doesn’t surprise me that none of these chucklefuck politicians running around sans mask aren’t dead yet. But it could happen eventually. When it does, it’d be nice that would mean they finally start to take the pandemic seriously. But what will probably happen is that they’ll lock themselves down on one of their large estates and force the rest of us to go back to work.
Related to the title: A pet peeve of mine is when people just say “scientist(s)” in the headlines. It’s lazy, nebulous, and there are people who rarely read more than the headlines. There is a certain type of person who knee-jerk distrusts something just because “scientists” say so. It also makes a difference whether, say, a geologist is talking about climate change (note: that happens) or a climatologist. And while the latter could be clarified within the text itself, it isn’t always.
Saying that “medical researchers” or whoever is performing this study wouldn’t fix everything – for example, people might still knee-jerk distrust certain types of scientists, and some people might think anything with a fancy-sounding name is a legitimate field of study – but it would add clarity and make it harder to believe that “science” is a monolithic, and possibly sinister, institution.
Same goes with doctors, I suppose, but most people don’t know the names most medical specailties, so unless one used common terms like “heart surgeon” that wouldn’t add as much clarity as one would hope.
Incidentally, what does it take to kill that fucker Kissinger?
@Moggie
Would that mean injecting communion wine? Probably not as bad as injecting bleach.
@WWTH
I feel like they still won’t. Evangelical Christian preachers have died and others are still telling people to go to church. I’d guess they’ll see anyone who dies as a sort of martyr, so long as it’s not them.
@Snowberry
What annoys me is when it says “top [insert body part] doctor” as part of a clickbait headline. It has no mention of what makes them the top doctor (I doubt there is really a ranking system of “gut” doctors (also that’s not really what they’re called), and it’s almost always part of some clickbait fake wellness headline.
The Evangelicals declaring that they can ignore safety measures because Jesus will protect them from the virus always makes me think of Matthew 4: 5-7:
But that’s par for the course, isn’t it?
@Moggie — You’d have to find whoever is holding Kissinger’s contract. You know he sold his soul somewhere along the line.
Re: The ‘antibodies conspiracy theory.’
In fact, convalescent antibody therapy does work for some diseases, though I understand it’s no ‘magic bullet.’ The essence is that a recent survivor of the disease donates some blood, which is either given directly to a still-symptomatic patient, or has the appropriate antibodies extracted (less bother with blood group matching) which are then administered to the still-symptomatic as before. And it is under trial for Covid-19.
I also understand it was used during the ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic around a hundred years ago.
Thing is, nobody knows If it would prevent somebody falling ill in the first place. Or even if surviving Covid-19 confers any immunity. Something similar (can’t remember the full details) can be done with hepatitis, which quickly confers some passive immunity.
Covid-19 is a different disease though. And BoJo the Clown’s brush with death rather undermines the conspiracy theory. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
As an aside, immunotherapy techniques related to this gave rise to a ‘blood libel’ put forward by Chinese insurgents during the Boxer Rebellion.
House point for being able to say what it was.
I think the medical community have some awareness that reducing testosterone isn’t the way to go. That is, after all, one of the ways to control one of the most common problems facing cis men in the higher age bracket…. prostate issues. They get T-blockers. And this thing is hitting older cis men (who are the most likely to have already been receiving that treatment prior to infection, in relatively large numbers because a large majority of cis men over 70 has some degree of prostate enlargement) HARD.
They might also have been able to glean some data from any victims who were cis women with inoperable metastatic breast cancer and are getting testosterone to treat that, since they’re apparently bound and determined to do anything needed to keep from treating trans people like legitimate human beings in hospitals. Heaven forbid…
Buttercup:
I understand most networking events have been canceled since before the US epidemic really got going. I suppose rich white people are generally relatively well protected (socially, medically etc.), despite occasional shows of personal recklessness.
As of now, apparently most Americans haven’t been infected yet. Confirmed cases are 0.3 % of the population; I’d guesstimate the real rate is probably less than 10 %. The epidemic will likely continue to be mismanaged for many months, infecting potentially more than half the population, including quite a many rich white people.
@WWTH : for what it’s worth, there have been at least one white male politician of importance that died from COVID in France. Still not a lot of them compared to the risk they take.
@Naglfar:
I’m not a Christian, so I’ll just point to the advice from America’s best Christian:
@Kevin
AFAIK it doesn’t seem to, so I’m not sure how well antibody therapy would prevent infection in others.
@Seth S
It’s possible that the low coronavirus survival rates for older men are related to lower testosterone, but it could also be another effect of aging, seeing as older women aren’t doing as well as younger women (but better than old men) and children seem to be much less affected despite prepubescent children having very low testosterone.
The reason I think it’s unlikely to be estrogen or progesterone that helps is because postmenopausal cis women seem to have a better prognosis than cis men of the same age range, and postmenopausal cis women would have much lower estrogen levels than their younger counterparts.
@Naglfar
We don’t have definitive proof that it does, which has led to potentially misleading headlines from the likes of the WHO, but we also don’t have good reason to think it doesn’t, and at least some immunity would be the default assumption.
@Nagflar : not quite. Apparently, there’s a permanent immunity on most recovered cases (like usual), but we aren’t 100% sure, and there’s some sign it might not be alway true. It’s not really that scientists think there is no immunity.
Dunno where the previous post have gone, but just in case : in France there have been one somewhat important white male politician casualty. Still a lot less than expected given how stupid risky they tend to be with the COVID.
@Ohlmann
Ah, that makes more sense. Thank you for the clarification.
Trump appears to be going full on Gulf of Tonkin.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/30/donald-trump-coronavirus-chinese-lab-claim
@Alan Robertshaw
I don’t want to speculate about conspiracies, but if I was, I would wonder if Trump created the virus or was at least connected to its creation. He seems to strongly be helping it spread.