111–120 of 805 posts
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"Most scientists/doctors believe it to not work against Covid-19" wasn't a serious argument for you? It is a strange phenomenon that people are so ready to disagree with people who spent decades achieving exactly that kind of knowledge.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
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Sure, but my point is "consensus" doesn't necessarily mean "truth", even though the vast majority of people use the terms interchangeably. "Everyone but one person is wrong" is a situation we've seen numerous times before in the history of science. And when the matters of social acceptability, prestige, politics, and just plain ability to make a living enter into the consideration, very, very few people would even be…
The consensus in the medical world is that if there is a link it is extremely weak, far weaker than you'd need to establish that 'millions died while they didn't have to' as you write, and that if it works it probably needs very high doses, higher than considered safe. At the same time, we have vaccines, which do work (though the slow roll-out and the many, many hold outs certainly don't help, as well as that it leav…
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In the case of a pandemic it is probably pretty good advice, unless you are of the opinion that your authorities are acting against your interest. The problem with this pandemic is that a lot of people in places of power have made mistakes, sometimes really bad ones (for instance, such as pursuing herd immunity) rather than to follow the WHO expert advice. This could easily be construed as authorities acting against…
Yeah, I agree, that in the case of a pandemic, the health authorities interests are pretty well aligned with a member of the general public. However, there are always issues in this kind of situation when the authorities got it wrong. In a political environment, changing course is seen as an admission of being wrong, and a loss of face. So we continue on with the initial policy. We are currently facing this problem a…
Pursuing herd immunity is a viable strategy only if you can actually achieve it.
Sweden has done far worse than their neighbors in this respect. But given the fact that it drags on all you can say is that as long as we don't treat this as a global problem your local measures matter less than you think.
Countries that did fantastically well early on showed it could be done, but because they were the exception eventually they too became overwhelmed through imported cases. If that had not happened, which would have required a more synchronized approach, then the total damage would be a fraction of what it is today.
And this isn't over yet, not by far and it is a much harder problem now than it was in March last year.
Love the final explanation for how ivermectin can be incidentally good for COVID-19 patients, even if it does nothing to COVID-19 directly. In fact, as the author cites from another researcher, the trials are a strong piece of evidence for "add[ing] ivermectin to mass drug administration programs." In other words, global medical welfare, where we just give everyone a bunch of a cheap and effective medications to coun…
That depends on the side effects and the dose required+. So no, you can't just draw that conclusion. + edit: , etc... Thanks Cthulhu_.
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Why? I think he has a point. We live in a society that is geared around profit. That is literally how our society functions. Economic activity is incentivised by the profit motive, important national metrics like GDP focus primarily on profit driven output and growth, even engineering or medical problems are often framed in economic terms like cost/benefit. I think it’s silly in this kind of context to ignore the pro…
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That depends on the side effects and the dose required+. So no, you can't just draw that conclusion. + edit: , etc... Thanks Cthulhu_.
And of course whether parasites can adapt to become resistant (?) to the treatments.
Interesting read, I appreciate that the author isn't dogmatic and is open to discussion. However I think he misrepresent some anti-vaxxers: it's not a matter of trusting science, it's a matter of trusting scientists with heavy conflict of interest to tell the truth while most of us don't have the required scientific knowledge to evaluate if they're telling the truth. Pfizer and Moderna combined are making more than $…
But you don't have to trust only scientists directly or indirectly employed by those companies. There are plenty of subject-matter experts who work for competitors or are tenured in academia who would have very little to lose from criticising the rollout.
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Mind boggling? $1k/s is around $31 billion. First of all, just Pfizer brought in more money than that last year -- around $10 billion more. But let's set that aside for now, because they're slated to bring in twice as much this year. You think Pfizer and Moderna are somehow coordinating a global censorship campaign to defend that income? Sure, Pfizer's projects $82 billion in revenue is real money. But it's less than…
Supposedly they are not buying everyone off. Look, 2008 happened, why couldn't similar thing that happened in financial industry happen in medicine industry? The motivations, rushing of everything could be just aligned enough to cause all of this. Safety studies excluding some participants, some important data. All you'd have to pay off is to exclude certain data, for which there are ALREADY reports coming out for. F…
> "Sometimes these people even have a specific theory for why elites are covering up ivermectin, like that pharma companies want you to use more expensive patented drugs instead. This theory is extremely plausible. Pharma companies are always trying to convince people to use expensive patented drugs instead of equally good generic alternatives. Ivermectin believers probably heard about this from the many, many good articles by responsible news outlets, discussing the many, many times pharma companies have tried to trick people into using more expensive patented medications. Like this ACSH article about Nexium. Or my article on esketamine. Given that dozens of studies said a drug worked, and elites continued to deny it worked, and there are well-known times where elites lie about drugs in order to make money, it was an incredibly reasonable inference that this was one of those times.
> If you have a lot of experience with pharma, you know who lies and who doesn’t, and you know what lies they’re willing to tell and which ones they shrink back from. As far as I know, no reputable scientist has ever come out and said ‘esketamine definitely works better than regular ketamine’. The regulatory system just heavily implied it.
> I claim that with ivermectin, even the people who don’t usually lie were saying it was ineffective, and they were saying it more directly and decisively than liars usually do. But most people can’t translate Pharma → English fluently enough to know where the space of “things people routinely lie about and nobody worries about it too much” ends. So they incredibly reasonably assume anything could be a lie. And if you don’t know which statements about pharmaceuticals are lies, “the one that has dozens of studies contradicting it” is a pretty good heuristic!"
Love the final explanation for how ivermectin can be incidentally good for COVID-19 patients, even if it does nothing to COVID-19 directly. In fact, as the author cites from another researcher, the trials are a strong piece of evidence for "add[ing] ivermectin to mass drug administration programs." In other words, global medical welfare, where we just give everyone a bunch of a cheap and effective medications to coun…
In fact, as the author cites from another researcher, the trials are a strong piece of evidence for "add[ing] ivermectin to mass drug administration programs." In other words, global medical welfare, where we just give everyone a bunch of a cheap and effective medications to counteract the most prolific diseases. When they invented antibiotics, people began predicting "the end of disease." Fast forward a few decades…
I think this is an extremely jaded take, resulting from growing up in a post-antibiotics society. The risk factor for those "scary antibiotic-resistant infections" is still an order of magnitude less than the class of diseases antibiotics almost totally eliminated. In the 30 years following penicillin's discovery, deaths from bacterial infection dropped from accounting for over 22% of all deaths to just 6% [1] (MRSA deaths, by comparison, currently represent less than half a percent). "End of disease" may be hyperbole, but between antibiotics and vaccines, infectious diseases were almost totally knocked off the leading causes of death.
The only reason why we even have antibiotic resistant bacteria is because they keep getting prescribed, because they're so damn useful. "Medical stuff" does, in fact, work like that, to some extent.
[1] https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/8889467/Gottfrie...