591–600 of 805 posts
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I feel like your underlying assumption here is that the average human has a similar level of intelligence and critical thinking skills as the average HN community member. At the risk of coming across as extremely snobby, that just isn't true at all.
Humility is the truth. Thus, the simple man has a higher level of intelligence and critical thinking skills than the average HN community member.
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I think you missed the point of the comparison. It wasn't a real claim that they are literally the same person. It was a joke that that the study was so suspicious and potentially fraudulent that the author could be a criminal drug dealer...
Sure it’s a joke. A very bad, tasteless, and racist joke. I get it!
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Fauci admits to lying about masks and explains why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLXttHlUgK8 Maybe you think Fauci changed his mind based on new evidence on mask effectiveness, but he literally says he advised against masks due to a fear of PPE shortages, and not due to changing evidence. So either way he lied: either he lied about mask effectiveness thus spreading health misinformation, or he lied about why he ad…
And your parents told you that if you ate spinach you'd be just as strong as Popeye. Were they lying? Yes, absolutely. Were they wrong? No, eating greens is good for you. You have a peculiar standard for truth, it seems to depend on which side of the debate someone is for the person to be held to the 'lily white' standard or the 'can shoot someone on broadway and get away with it' standard. Riddle me this: If Fauci h…
Yes, they were wrong to lie. Not that your false equivalence is in any way relevant because Fauci is a public servant of the people, and parents are not servants of their children.
> You have a peculiar standard for truth, it seems to depend on which side of the debate someone is for the person to be held to the 'lily white' standard or the 'can shoot someone on broadway and get away with it' standard.
There's nothing peculiar about wanting public health officials to not deceive the public about public health, which is their duty. What bizarro world do you live in where this is ok? In no other country on Earth did public health officials do this, even though they were facing their own PPE shortages.
> If Fauci had said 'masks work but we need you all to hang back and not buy them because we need them for the medical profession' resulting in a mass run on masks resulting in even larger numbers of death in care workers how would you view him?
I would view him as an honest public health official who did his duty, which is how I view the public health officials in my country who didn't lie to us, and where no such disaster happened.
> Is there any way in which according to you he could have discharged his duty without engaging in lies (white or otherwise) to get to a desired effect without further collateral damage?
Yes, and this has been explained ad-nauseum by people with legitimate criticisms of Fauci, although of course, even such legitimate criticisms are simply brushed off as partisan posturing, just like you're trying to do now.
During the PPE shortages, there was plenty of coverage about how to make your own mask. Plenty of commercial outlets voluntarily limited PPE purchases. Non-binding recommendations from public health officials could have encouraged such policies, and also provided official guides on making masks until PPE supplies were replenished.
Now I want you to look in the mirror and ask why you're trying to cover for him? What public purpose does it serve? This public servant lied to the public, and has lost the public trust even according to polls. The only people covering for him are die hard Democrats because he gave Trump the proverbial middle finger. Is that "credential" really more important for a public health official than the public trust?
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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…
Why not pray for satan with a goat sacrifice? That also doesn’t harm you and has similar quality of evidence for working. But my point is that there are literally infinite things that could cure covid, but in the end only empirical evidence is meaningful. But we have to choose our “fights” and methods with not even a probably way of effect are more than likely useless.
If they were miracle drugs as described the effect would be so large that those studies would be unnecessary. But here we are, and study it we will.
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> The real story (in my opinion) behind Ivermectin are the studies not being conducted. Here you have a ton of studies claiming to have found benefit with a worldwide, massively available drug that has practically zero risks for most people (and it's an extremely well understood drug) and we don't have first world countries conducting RCTs to understand it better. First world countries are in the process of conductin…
> First world countries are in the process of conducting RCTs testing Ivermectin, for example the activ-6 and covid-out studies in the US. ... "in the process of"? How long has ivermectin existed? How long has the pandemic been around for? How long has ivermectin been claimed to have huge benefits for, regardless of the source? Isn't it possible that there are some other reasons why RCT's haven't been conducted yet b…
This came out of UK research at the start of the pandemic and has easily saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
The ivermectin notes that spurred this on was an Australian in-vitro study that noted that ivermectin had activity against sars-cov-2 in high dose, in-vitro.
It was promptly lost in the noise because basically everything, even high dose H20, can be shown to have in-vitro effectiveness against viral replication, and there were more promising avenues of research.
Then it pops out again after the anti-fact brigade lost the evidence pile-on with both hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin and along comes a study that immediately gets trumpeted as revolutionising the treatment of covid but it turns out has horrific methodological and statistical problems, and the scientific world gets to work trying to establish the facts, and so far things don’t look good for ivermectin as a treatment.
Yet there’s still a global conspiracy of top level research scientists and doctors trying to suppress these easy wins and maximise worldwide misery.
You seem like you like to do your own research, how do you process those facts?
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It was ~5 meters and that wasn't the point. Did the GPS system know your position with a much greater accuracy ? Yes. Did the GPS system by design not provide this accurate information and instead sent something less accurate? Yes. How do you call that thing where you tell a partial truth? At best, a half truth. For example the US government remarks about masks in February 2020 (I think it was February), were partly…
Saying "your location is somewhere within X, up to ~5 meters" isn't lying. It's not even a half truth, but it's still pretty far from the point here. It's trusted because it's been far more trustworthy than public health guidance and policy. And the same goes for airplanes, brake pads, and other tired comparisons. Trusting one does not imply one should trust all other proclaimed experts in all other fields in all oth…
That's a tautology. It's more trustworthy because it hasn't been politicized.
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Or why they don’t trust doctors in general, because medicine is a very inexact science filled with lies and half truths along with real truths? I get that might be unnerving to many (even if medicine is overall beneficial), but these people really sound like a classic case of “perfect is the enemy of good.”
A doctor I know described it like this: "Doctors are like monkeys with hammers trying to fix computers. We bang against stuff and will try a lot of things if we don't know what you've got. We may even get it right. But if you have a broken leg, an appendix that needs removal, a clear case of something that can be treated with anti-biotics, then we can perform small miracles." I don't know enough of the profession to…
In one case it took nearly 2 year to arrive at a correct diagnosis and corrective action, which involved both medication and surgery.
In the other case the person was moving into liver failure, and placed on the transplant list. Luckily a family friend worked for the same healthcare organization as an IT professional, and knew exactly what to do. She marched the patient into the ER, had her sit down in a wheel chair, and made it crystal clear that she was going to be a gigantic PITA until they found out what was killing the patient. Within the day they had a plausible answer, and confirmed it with lab results within the week as I recall.
It shouldn't be this way, but unfortunately in US healthcare it is. Having an uncommon illness is an absolute nightmare, one that destroys entire families finances if not outright killing people.
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You could try spreading the truth instead of bullying people? I do care about my mothers health you know. And if a doctor isn't convinced by a large number of studies I want them to explain why not rather than call me a conspiracy peddler. The way someone gets ivermectin is to walk a doctor through the evidence they've seen and then ask them to prescribe it.
If you care about your mothers' health then you shouldn't engage in quackery. > The way someone gets ivermectin is to walk a doctor through the evidence they've seen and then ask them to prescribe it. That is factually incorrect, no doctor in their right mind will allow the patients to effectively prescribe their own controversial and in some cases downright dangerous medicine.
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Nor you can assume any sort of effect on curing COVID without a fair and square trial. The default null hypothesis is that it doesn’t work, period.
As the blog post indicates, there is data proving a positive effect. That's not in question. The author is simply speculating why that is the case at this point, the specific reason for the positive effect.
No, there is data that might point to a positive effect, that's something completely different than data that proves a positive effect.
Note that this is exactly how these things happen, someone writes something with a particular audience in mind and then others will come along, cherry pick it, distort it and then pass it on as fact. You are step #1 of the Chinese Whispers game and it has already meaningfully changed.
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So why didn’t you post this reply one comment up when he calls the public morons? Instead you choose to correct the person who says the public is actually smarter than we think? I’m not implying you meant anything by it. But it should be noted that people here are arguing, and you’re coming down with a sort of correction that could be applied to either side of the argument. You appear to take a side by choosing this…
Where, exactly, did the previous comment call the public "morons"? Are you discarding any other interpretation of that comment in order to avoid any nuance?
You can pretend there is "nuance" to saying that the common man would be hurt and confused by facts. I see this plainly as calling people morons in a polite manner. Sorry if it hurts your sensibilities that someone would lay bare the underlying meaning of a comment.
Also, please by all means ignore the actual point of my comment, which is, why do people go around correcting a specific comment when that applies to at least one more comment up the chain. Any replies re: "morons" will be ignored.