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Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

astralcodexten.substack.com

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Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sold out" is a real problem. More people than we want to admit see corruption coupled with big media as a enemy, not a thing to be trusted. Many ordinary people flat out do not know when to trust, so they don't. They then seek others and continue to have conversations, and they find others lacking trust resonates and that opens the door for a lot of BS normally and easily seen. Just an example of the difficulty we n…

I have slowly come to the conclusion that maybe we grew up a bit too fast with respect to media and social media in particular. In the past change to society came slow and we could internalize and stabilize it before the next round of changes appeared. Now the changes are coming so fast and are so drastic that we as society - including our legal system - have no way of keeping up with it. Technology routinely moves f…

I will end with this:

"Thinks they understand"

That will be true for very large numbers of people. Not their fault at all. It simply does not happen that a population all ends up able to sort these kinds of things out.

Implying they should is fine in the sense of self improvement, but as policy? Nope.

Perhaps it is time we, as concerned people, begin to take much harder look at our national priorities and demand the public interest be far better served than it is today.

Having done that, and sadly we are no where close to the basic consensus needed, we will find painful discussions like this one are a lot less frequent.

Know what I did not see in this exchange?

"Yes! You got there. How can we reach more people and help get past this?"

Feels a lot more like, "better late than never, and you need to do much better."

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#232
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first anti-Ivermectin argument that you want to believe, but there have been many serious anti-Ivermectin arguments in the past. It's just that you don't have the background knowledge to digest them, but that doesn't stop you from wanting to believe that there is some kind of miracle cure that 'they' are suppressing. Now consider that this is just one example of a class of such issues and that there is an…

Edit: I probably wrote this comment to aggresively, which is ironic given that that is what I am arguing against. My apologies. When you see someone you disagree with convinced by an argument, I think that should be an occasion for celebration and joy! People changing their minds to what you believe to be true is the only way to get change. It needs to be encouraged and people who manage to do this need recognition.…

I'm happy with their conversion but realize that the reason why they became converted is actually false: they now claim they are convinced by facts they very obviously still do not understand. Besides, probably the only reason they allowed themselves to be convinced is because of the fig leaf handed by the article in being able to claim to 'have been right all along'.

> Less importantly, ask them what changed their mind.

They wrote about that in this thread, and it proves that they do not understand the basic argument made, at all. As converts go, it's a pretty sad case.

The author of this article did a fantastic job, but all it has done for me is to show how hard it is for people to digest information and to draw meaningful conclusions from it.

On another note: this is why I'm not particularly hopeful about humanity getting their act together with respect to climate change.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#233
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Studies have been done. It has been found lacking. You're getting mocked because you're blind to this and sticking to something that bad actors are touting as a miracle cure, while science and medicine move on in the search for things that actually help. Like dexamethasone, remdesivir etc etc

The way you have responded is a perfect illustration of the crowd we are talking about. You are trying to make a personal offence and claims without any references. That sounds like a blind repeating of the narrative, even if it wasn't intended to be so.

I'm not "trying to make a personal offence", I am explaining why you may find people mock you. Your view of the situation on the ground is incorrect. The studies you are claiming have not been done are a mere google search away. In fact in this case the link at the top of the HN discussion contains a lot of relevant information.

Here's the major question I have for folks like yourself who are still on about ivermectin though - why?

Why are you invested in this one particular pharmaceutical? What is it that makes you think this specific chemical, which has been looked at and found not to be particularly beneficial for covid use, stands out from the other things which have been looked at and not found useful? Why are we allowed to dismiss and move on from them but not from this?

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#234
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wait? Why not take ivermectin as a precautionary therapeutic given it is well tolerated with low risk of side effects? There's a chasm between the epistemic question of "does this drug really work?" and the pragmatic question of "does a risk-reward analysis under uncertainty say that I should take this mostly safe drug that might slightly reduce my covid severity?" FWIW, I wouldn't take ivermectin either as a pro…

What other prophylactic treatments do you take in your life before or after COVID? Because in my lifetime I can think of only a small number of classes of general prophylactic treatments I've ever seen a small number of groups of people take. - Silicon valley rationalist types taking stacks of vitamins despite having no evidence on bioavailability because they are generally without side effects and who knows, you mig…

I said I don't fault people for using it as a precautionary therapeutic upon diagnosis.

I didn't say that I don't fault people for taking it as a prophylactic. I do fault people for doing that because the side effects of long term use are less known, as you say.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 the…

The attacks on Fauci are despicable. Note that he's anything but a weaselly political hack, but he did get replaced by one during the Trump reign. The man has more integrity than the bulk of that particular administration.

I'm honestly baffled by this. The man literally lied to the public and openly admitted to lying. There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of Fauci, and plenty of reasons to be question whether public health officials should be lying to the public about public health.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#236
post #97
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ivermectin is completely safe (even if it doesn’t work). The rest of treatments, well, we will know in a few years or decades.

It's actually not, as it can induce temporary blindness if you overdose on it.

But overdose is a relative term, is it actually easy to overdose on ivermectin? Depending on the drug and how much a typical dosage is, overdosing could be a simple mistake like taking a second pill or be a ludicrous amount like eating hundreds of pills.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

The (western) COVID vaccine manufacturers still make ~1000$/s in profit from them. Gates / BMGF are invested in literally almost all of them, even the obscure Indian ones, not just Moderna and BionTech

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that we didn't adopt his methods?

I don't think we adopted handwashing because of him. Actually, the reason people didn't believe him is interesting because they were using an earlier scientific method - he didn't have a good explanation for the mechanism, so they dismissed it with "correlation is not causation". We're better at using things whose mechanism we don't understand now, like Tylenol.

There is a whole industry in off-label use of medicine, and there are also quite a few studies that try to move off-label use to on-label use once the link is clear.

What is interesting (to me) is that which we now consider to be common sense was at one point controversial.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#239
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually not, as it can induce temporary blindness if you overdose on it.

But overdose is a relative term, is it actually easy to overdose on ivermectin? Depending on the drug and how much a typical dosage is, overdosing could be a simple mistake like taking a second pill or be a ludicrous amount like eating hundreds of pills.

The people who are actively promoting this stuff are exactly the people who would be at risk of overdosing on it. Because it doesn't help. So they'll take more.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The (western) COVID vaccine manufacturers still make ~1000$/s in profit from them. Gates / BMGF are invested in literally almost all of them, even the obscure Indian ones, not just Moderna and BionTech

Yes. But compared to what this crisis has cost us to date that is a very small drop in the bucket. think trillions, not billions. And it's not over yet. And Gates has so much money he's probably invested in the whole F500. But the whole Gates/Soros/whichever bogeyman you want to add here story is getting a bit long in the tooth.
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