Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

astralcodexten.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 805 posts

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#531

Post by judahmeek »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #458
resoluteteeth wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Big Pharma isn't a singular entity.

In this case, if Ivermectin was so effective against Covid, then Merck would be commercially incentivised to prove that.

When you combine that fact with the facts that complex problems rarely have simple solutions, that such high levels of collaboration are rare, & that the same people promoting Ivermectin are also promoting theories of 2020 election fraud, it's pretty easy to doubt that this conspiracy theory is realistic.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#532

Post by toolz »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #417
peakaboo wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 1.5 years ago, ivermectin was discussed in "conspiracy" channels like Reddit, and many people were helped by it. The mass media ignored it for over a year and when they did started covering it, they said it was a horse dewormer. The fact is, what people think is trustworthy news today is pure propaganda. You cannot make an informed decision based on what you read in the mass media.. It's all completely controll…

> About 1.5 years ago, ivermectin was discussed in "conspiracy" channels like Reddit, and many people were helped by it. How were they helped by it when the evidence shows that it doesn't work for COVID-19?

how did you read this article and somehow come to the conclusion that ivermectin doesn't work for covid-19?

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#533

Post by kaba0 »

roenxi wrote: post #65
jacquesm wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been following with some amazement the number of conspiracy peddlers on HN for the last 18 months or so and one case of conversion isn't going to make me overly happy. It is a bit like the story about the lie getting halfway around the world before the truth puts their shoes on, in the extreme long term the truth will come out, meanwhile, the damage is done. This guy until yesterday wanted his mother to take som…

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.

But why do you even assume that it works? The doctor might not be able to disprove it because disproving is fundamentally hard and may not even be possible. But the direction that makes sense is that we prove if something does work/has an effect.

The zero hypothesis is the long standing default, that a random thing will not cure this illness. The alternative hypothesis is that it does cure it and then we can analyze the results based on the results of a fair trial.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#534

Post by tristor »

azinman2 wrote: post #522
tristor wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware of the demographics in Bakersfield. I live in a city with a larger proportion of the population being Hispanic than Bakersfield, hence why I am aware of how Mexican culture utilizes hyphenated surnames. Your link to demographic statistics does nothing to change my mind that this was vaguely racist (culturist?). I don't think Scott is racist, I just think this was a non sequitur that had no place within what…

It was clearly a joke. A questionable study ended up having a result from a google/twitter search of the same name made for a humorous reference. Did you take the same racist conclusion from the photo of the guy who had the 7 month PhD? This is a blog entry, not a professional scholarly work, and so it was written to be enjoyed.

> Did you take the same racist conclusion from the photo of the guy who had the 7 month PhD?

No, because the quip there wasn't based upon the person's name (which originates from their culture) and a stereotype about their place of origin. It's amazing how context is important.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#535

Post by philosopher1234 »

boston_clone wrote: post #479
iszomer wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, the GOP has leaned into anti-scientist, anti-elitist sentiments, fed by Fox News and others.. I wouldn't fault them for your view of their broad sentiments on this trend but I think if you went back over the last twenty years, these sentiments were more often aligned for the left-wing. "The real conversation has to be about what solutions we're in favor of." -- Dan Crenshaw, on the Daily Show https://youtu.be/…

The last twenty years gives us a few administrations from which we can asses policy making decisions: Bush; Obama; Trump; and now Biden. Of those four, I don't think it's possible to make a good-faith argument that Obama and Biden administrations have been more anti-science than either Bush's or Trump's. A single sound bite from Dan Crenshaw talking about shifting the focus of conversation towards solutions doesn't r…

The viewpoint you're responding to is the GOP strategy, not a viewpoint derived from facts. The strategy being, pretend both sides are equal and that any suggestion of difference in respect to valuing science or democracy is actually a bias.

Pretending both sides are the same when their differences are plain as day is both foolish and damaging.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#536

Post by philosopher1234 »

mgamache wrote: post #481
philosopher1234 wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not live in a society with two equal sides. The GOP has made destroying democracy/hating "the media" core to their platform, as opposed to centering their platform on some sort of policy goal. Do democrats hate the GOP? Sure, but their coalition is not nearly as structurally oriented around this fact.

The 2020 DNC platform was Orange Man Bad.

Anti-democracy is bad.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#537

Post by judahmeek »

mcguire wrote: post #518
dnautics wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no they don't. They just need to be honest about what they do know and what they don't and don't assert something is true when it's "we're not sure". Just do zero-order thinking. Don't patronize the public. Guess what. If you don't trust the public. Why should the public trust you?

Remember when the COVID vaccines were in trials and the news were all reporting that they were "80-90+%" effective on the then-current strains? Why, then, do I keep seeing arguments from people about the vaccines not being perfectly effective?

No, I don't remember that.

Can you link to an archived news article saying this?

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#538

Post by jacquesm »

shkkmo wrote: post #373
jacquesm wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some people want to understand. So go study medicine, assuming you have 10 years to burn and are willing to take a massive pay cut. The average HN'er probably knows how to program a computer and some of them may even know how to program one well. If a guy that runs a fishing boat with not even the most basic idea about programming, hardware, software, satellite systems, general relativity and integrating all of the…

The argument you are making is directly addressed in the article. > So “believe experts”? That would have been better advice in this case. But the experts have beclowned themselves again and again throughout this pandemic, from the first stirrings of “anyone who worries about coronavirus reaching the US is dog-whistling anti-Chinese racism”, to the Surgeon-General tweeting “Don’t wear a face mask”, to government camp…

For small values of 'distinguished':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Kory

Really, in a just world that guy would lose his license to practice medicine. I find it interesting that 'the lone voice' has such a power over 'the establishment', as though the lone voice is always right because they're the underdog.

There is an excellent movie about the theme of an infectious disease where some blogger/journalist goes all out on promoting 'Forsythia', a medication that does absolutely nothing against the disease, but that - using the exact same mechanisms as Ivermectin, HCQ and others - gets promoted to the hilt. I'm not sure if this is life imitating art or some kind of coincidence but it is uncanny to which degree the stories overlap:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1598778/

We so want to believe in that miracle cure that big pharma is denying us.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#539

Post by peakaboo »

dang wrote: post #497
peakaboo wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Would you please stop taking HN threads further into ideological flamewar? You've been doing this repeatedly and we've already asked you to stop. It's not what this site is for, it lowers discussion quality dramatically, and we ban accounts that keep doing it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sure. Enjoy the one sided "discussion".

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#540

Post by azinman2 »

danans wrote: post #491
raxxorrax wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Listen to science!" is ironically a profoundly unscientific statement.

Nobody claims it to be a scientific statement. It's just a best practice in many circumstances.

What’s a better practice is to explain the rationale per situation, what is known and what is not known. The right turned science into a culture war flashpoint, which meant the left blindly preaches “believe in science” as if it’s about faith. This is all very disingenuous and not at all what science is actually about.

It’s very unfortunate that Covid started under trump because being anti-science was part of his marketing message to his base, many because of the risk to certain jobs with caring about climate change (aka the great “hoax”) and the association of science/medicine and abortion.

Unfortunately explaining the rationale in a way that people can comprehend and not tune out is very very difficult, and far more time consuming than whatever 2 syllables Trump could come up with as a retort.

Post reply on HN