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

Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection

journals.lww.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

601–610 of 644 posts

Re: Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection

#601

Post by manwe150 »

13years wrote: post #570
manwe150 wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard the earth was flat only a few months ago too—it does not make either claim any more likely to be true. And FWIW, I have seen many ivermectin articles on HN (check my past comments), and all seem to say roughly the same thing, so they get rather annoying in my feed at this point.

"I heard the earth was flat only a few months ago too—it does not make either claim any more likely to be true." It is not about the validity, it is that you can not even evaluate that which you have not heard. The level of censorship varies greatly by media and platform.

I would make the claim to be constantly evaluating the validity of statements I have not heard, and may never hear. This may sound like nonsense, but the flip-side of censorship is not excess of information but curation. If my news sources are trustworthy, then they are filtering useless information for me, while hopefully not belying my trust by censoring important information.

To the other poster, my argument was supposed to be obvious: it was intended to be a simplified example to elucidate concerns by comparison.

Re: Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection

#602

Post by 4bpp »

XorNot wrote: post #559
4bpp wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars are marketed by car manufacturers as a safe and reliable way of getting from A to B; Youtube is (to my best knowledge) not marketed by Google as a source of safe and reliable life advice. The better car analogy would be someone who procures metal plates, household cleaner and a school textbook with an illustration of how internal combustion engines work and winds up blowing themselves up with the creation, and e…

Which would seem to speak directly against the idea that Google aren't allowed to police the medical advice being given on their platform. After all, they're not marketing themselves as a safe source of medical advice, so there should naturally be no standards preventing them from controlling what's being displayed.

What do you mean by "aren't allowed"? I'm not disputing that they are allowed to: otherwise I would bring a lawsuit, rather than arguing against it on the internet (as I am, and I believe I am allowed to). Perhaps, though, they should not be allowed to, being the de facto monopolist on user-uploaded video in the anglophone world they are.

Re: Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection

#603

Post by foolinaround »

raphlinus wrote: post #415
xattt wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any specific “trench innovations” that come to mind?

The thing that most immediately comes to mind is Cameron Kyle-Sidell, who recognized that the standard treatment protocols were over-intubating people for hypoxemia, and that overly high pressures of ventilators were causing damage. He faced a great deal of resistance within his institution at the time, and was quite controversial in taking his case to Twitter and Youtube. Since then, he's been vindicated, and protoc…

> "hydroxychloroquine doctors" who peddle bullshit without scientific basis

as of today, the mechanism that made HCQ work has been explained scientifically, right? What is your bias regarding this?

Now, that the mechanism is better understood, the doctor who recommended HCQ has now moved on to a better suggestion utilizating the same mechanism.

Re: Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection

#604

Post by [deleted] »

vfclists wrote: post #533
drtournier wrote: post #487

I am an MD, Data Scientist and epidemiologist. There are three pieces of information which makes me feel something fishy about the study: 1. Sample sizes for all selected studies are very small, and even though they used mixed effects models to treat confounding, there is no way to check what the authors did, since they didn’t shared the code or the data, which is inadmissible since this is a meta analysis and there…

> instead of promoting practices and technologies that showed undeniable success in the real world What are the practices and technologies that showed undeniable success in the real world. What is the "real world"? Does anyone have to take your scientific credentials seriously when you make a "scientific" argument using the term "the real world"? Is there some "alternate unreal world" where these trials were carried…

[deleted]

Re: Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection

#605

Post by stewbrew »

ratsmack wrote: post #594
stewbrew wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a sea of bullshit videos, the minions who screen this stuff probably have difficulties to distinguish some phd (in what field?) choosing the wrong channel and bullshit. Anyway, the original statement was that there are no trials - this in a comment on a meta-analysis.

> the minions who screen this stuff That's quite an elitist statement. My belief is that a majority of the people that view videos of technical discussions have the capability to understand the context. The ones that do not grasp the subject are far more unlikely to watch the video.

no, it's not elitist. I assume a human does the last decision. this human doesn't care about the content of the video (like you do) but has to make a defendable decision in limited time based on limited information.

Re: Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection

#606

Post by known »

belltaco wrote: post #52
goldemerald wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While randomized trials are certainly the gold-standard for determining if you should give a new drug to treat an arbitrary disease, that process is far too conservative during a pandemic where a huge majority of the world cannot access proper medical care. Ivermectin is already massively produced, used throughout the world, and cheap to manufacture (compared to new anti-Covid drugs). Even months ago before the benef…

>The sudden drop in Covid cases in India as the clearest indicator to me. Nah that's just confirmation bias and rumors. It wasn't effective at all, otherwise India wouldn't have taken it off the recommended drugs list.

Numbers (China = 1.01 Billion, India = 270.91 Million) do not lie https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

Re: Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection

#607

Post by brokensegue »

Lammy wrote: post #529
gcbirzan wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't start with "my wife didn't get sick after getting treatment X". This is not data, this is noise.

How about “These milkmaids didn’t die of smallpox after contact with the udder pustules of this sick cow”? Maybe they’ll even name something after it!

anecdotes like this are how you generate a hypothesis.

the OP here said "So for me, my take is the drugs absolutely worked. "

They do not know this. This is not how science works. They jokingly said n=1 but given it's not a RCT it's more like n=N/A.

Re: Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection

#608

Post by jacquesm »

effie wrote: post #473
jacquesm wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded. The whole Ivermectin saga does not deserve the attention that it is getting, those that are relentlessly pushing it are causing people not to get vaccinated and that in turn will prolong the epidemic and lead to people getting ill and some fraction of those will die. I've read up on this thing as much as I could and it's quite simple: there is at this point in time zero hard evidence that it works in humans…

> are causing people not to get vaccinated and that in turn will prolong the epidemic Can you make an argument that people going for natural immunity and relying on currently used COVID treatment protocols in case they decide it is needed will prolong the epidemic more than if they took the vaccine? Maybe it will do the opposite, as 1) natural immunity may be stronger, last longer 2) some number of non-vaccinated peo…

Modulo a few hundred thousand deaths those mechanisms have the same outcome. If you're ok with that by all means, go push herd immunity through infection.

Re: Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection

#609

Post by jacquesm »

dang wrote: post #245
CamperBob2 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all know that anecdotes aren't statistical evidence. That doesn't make them offtopic. They're interesting They were interesting before they were weaponized by politicians. Then they became a threat. This crap doesn't belong here, dang. Seriously.

I don't see any reason to think that mikeytown2's comment is being weaponized by politicians or that mikeytown2 is a weaponizing politician. My purview is limited to HN and I try never to extrapolate beyond that, but as far as HN goes, we've always favored the principle that readers are smart enough to make up their own minds. I've been saying that for 7 years ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=tru…

> Second and last, if HN readers aren't smart enough to make up their own minds, then this place is fucked, so we might as well make a Pascal's wager.

That's not how this works. If you allow enough bullshit through the filter that's another example of the 'broken windows' theory: it will accelerate evaporative cooling, leading to more bullshit being posted and ending up on the homepage and so on. As moderator you are one of the very few people that can stop that spiral from getting out of control and the balance is quite precarious.

Re: Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection

#610

Post by jacquesm »

lvs wrote: post #367
dang wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've addressed that here and here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27563873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27564376

This community is not equipped to have this discussion, as evidenced by the discussion.

Seeing HN used to promote garbage is going to cause good people to leave, and that in turn is going to accelerate the degree to which garbage will end up on the homepage and so on. This is a downward spiral.
Post reply on HN