Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

His alien thought experiment in the “Political Takeaway” section at the bottom is a masterpiece. If you’ve struggled to explain where science lost democracy, this must be as crisp as it’ll ever be described.

Meanwhile, ivmmeta.com will get passed on from person to person that wants to sustain their delusion and the website here will be preaching to the choir.

"A lot of what you're seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science, because all of the things that I have spoken about, consistently from the very beginning, have been fundamentally based on science,"

"And that’s the reason why I say people who then criticize me about that are actually criticizing science"

It's a problem with differentiating science from the scientists, and when someone mistakes themselves for an arbiter of truth, they damage public trust in science as a concept. The scientific method, big S Science, is the best tool humans have. People are fallible, flawed, arrogant, tribal idiots, and Science lets us rise above our weakness.

Criticizing Fauci for being a weaselly political hack, repeatedly lying in public "for the greater good", lashing out with the above claims, and other serious ethical defects are fine - he's human. He is also capable and trained in understanding scientific data, and is undeniably an expert.

However, as he has made so abundantly clear, he's lost perspective and recognition of his own flaws and biases, and doubled down on the politicization of science and the pandemic response. We need apolitical dispassionate scientists with the understanding that they as people are separate from their studies and recommendations.

When the scientist starts lying to the public for reasons that amount to "I know better" or "the public is too stupid or incompetent to handle the truth," it undermines Science.

"Believe Science" should be a no-brainer. It shouldn't be a team blue political slogan, or used to defend personal failings - both of which are despicable.

This is wonderfully fun stuff to read:

This is from ivmmeta.com, part of a sprawling empire of big professional-looking sites promoting unorthodox coronavirus treatments. I have no idea who runs it - they’ve very reasonably kept their identity secret - but my hat is off to them...Putting aside the question of accuracy and grading only on presentation and scale, this is the most impressive act of science communication I have ever seen.

I asked a few questions previously on HN about Ivermectin and got answers that killed my interest in the topic (because I don't think it is relevant). But this piece is a delight.

It got political, but he still doesn't capture the gist and whole of the argument. You cannot argue against an imaginary position which he still espouses. There are just democrats and conservatives for him. That is a deep socialization which depending on age might be a permanent affliction.

But that isn't reflective of every position against a vaccination (or additional measures), it is more the explanation of a naive child. There are millions of reasons that could drive people to not play along:

- Don't trust doctors

- Don't trust politicians

- Don't trust media

- Has environment that shares the same opinions, difficult to go against the grain

- There a doctors critical of methods like lockdown and even the vaccine itself

- There a doctors that warned against vaccinating within a pandemic and their predictions became true to a degree

- Countries that didn't lock down came decently through the pandemic if they had otherwise good healthcare

- We combine vaccination with secondary measures like passes and mandatory health controls

- Covid is endemic and you will get it anyway, we still see different rules for vaccinated/unvaccinated people

- There are people unreasonably afraid of Covid

- People throw away liberties for questionable safety and will still end up getting Covid in the end

- ...

Most of it is indeed a trust issue, but the problem is that there are currently few people in the public sphere that deserve that trust. I am vaccinated, I make this statement because there are fearful people that demand that you justify yourself. I am not really inclined to accommodate them, there is a saying that "the smarter one gives in" and this is clearly a case like that.

Ivermectin wouldn't be the wonder cure, if criticism of it would be more analyzed in a way the author did. It is a good step. This is getting to a principled discussion if you just ban other voices.