Ivermectin currently sits at an average efficacy of 65% after 81 studies.
So in reality, this study that WSJ cites should be added to the pool of efficacy, and not used to completely debunk Ivermectin.
https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/05/09/update-on-ivermect...
- Lack of preparation.
- Not enough resources allocated to research.
- Too much reliance on Pharma and particularly Vaccine producing companies.
The best research is still done mostly via foundations or private funding. Some of the most interesting work is still ongoing.
At the UK Recovery Study: https://www.recoverytrial.net/
They are investigating several treatments including Ivermectin. Results so far here:
https://www.recoverytrial.net/results
Also the PRINCIPLE Study is investigating Ivermectin with no published results yet. They were able to publish some results for other treatments already.
Principle Results:
https://www.principletrial.org/results
The EU also has EU-Response initiative with Study results here:
> - Not enough resources allocated to research.
How do you prepare for something that you don't know is going to happen? How would you have prepared for a major coronavirus outbreak before covid, for example?
Some might even argue that it's precisely because of the research done in preparation for a new pandemic, which included studying novel coronaviruses using something that Fauci says was definitely not gain-of-function research, that we got this particular one in the first place :-)
> - Too much reliance on Pharma and particularly Vaccine producing companies.
Yeah, I think this is the mainstream scientific orthodoxy now. But then, it probably makes the most sense in terms of how we understand the human body works. What would you have done differently — reallocated the resources to study drug repurposing?
The pandemic was predicted many years in advance, by many people: https://www.businessinsider.com/people-who-seemingly-predict...
The fact it was a coronavirus coming over from animals was also highly predictable, given SARS and MERS. There is a fantastic book called Spillover by David Quammen which lays all this out and explains why it was virtually guaranteed to happen.
Statistical extrapolation and lessons from previous disasters. We don't know when a flood will happen, but we know what a floodplain looks like.
> How would you have prepared for a major coronavirus outbreak before covid, for example?
Execute on the preparatory plans generated after H1N1, as one example.
You can't really target a specific pathogen directly ahead of time, but for example, monitoring can buy weeks of time to deal with infections that are doubling in days.
Ensuring that the public is reasonably skilled in thinking, journalists are skilled in both thinking and telling the truth, people are reasonable satisfied with their relative lot in life (minimize wealth inequality, etc) lest they have something to get revenge for any way they can, etc would all have gone a long way toward minimizing the problems we experienced during covid.
Unfortunately, we didn't do any of these things, and now people are even angrier.
Don’t we always prepare for something we don’t know is going to happen? In the case of Covid, it was actually being developed by humans in labs that were likely carelessly released into the world. Perhaps preparing to not develop and release dangerous pathogens is a start.
- Make sure Schools, Companies, Public Institutions have to go once a year, through an audited test trial. Demonstrate they can run their business with no personal physical contact and they can manage the appearance of a Biohazard level 4 virus.
- For companies delivering physical good rehearse you procedures for delivery product without physical contact.
- Make sure the each Country has stocks of drinkable water and food supplies for 1/2 years
- Each Country should make sure they have enough medical equipment for first response teams to handle up to Biohazard level 4 virus.
- Be ready to separate your medical care between institutions providing regular medical care and choose hospitals or field hospitals that will handle infected patients.
- Identify the Research groups and Specialists able to work with priority on medical research and don't outsource the research to commercial vaccine producers. A scientific research group at an University like Oxford is an acceptable team, Pfizer is not.
- Discuss the legal implications of medical mandates and open a public discussion of what measures will be acceptable, and what measures will be too much. Don't use a pandemic as an excuse to massage some groups authoritarian inclinations.
- Create a public dashboard of public acceptable metrics that measure each Country preparedness for a pandemic or by that measure, for other natural disasters.
- Make an effort to collect worldwide samples that can be use to research still unknown virus.
- Do not engage in ethically challenging, gain of function research ;-)
- Use 0.01% tax on corporate revenue ( not profit ;-) to budget a disaster fund.
- Could go but would say for now would say, update this one doc from 2007... https://www.humanitarianresponse.info/sites/www.humanitarian...
So my question is, POST Pandemic ( if we can already say that), which government, has currently in place any initiative that looks remotely like any of the points above?
It’s a good comment re reducing the parasite load to improve health, but as others pointed out that’s not common in the countries initially hit by covid. Once politics and hearsay took over, logical discussion ended. For any viral infection, the recourse is vaccination, antivirals and reducing the symptoms. The rise of mAB meant that the effect of vaccination could be immediately applied, which was a new improvement for treatment. Vaccines and antivirals take time to develop, mAB require survivors and they’re all “foreign substances and/or proteins”. The woo and political folks don’t want that.
The world is very lucky covid was much closer to the flu than Ebola. Unless the “oh, sh*t” response would have broken through and kept people rational. And keep in mind that “a really strong immune system” often leads to a cytokine storm that burns out the lungs.
I never had Covid. Or if I did, it was so mild I never noticed. So, I really have no dog in this fight. But the way the media handled this coverage was really, really off-putting.
First, if it doesn't work, just say that. "It doesn't work". "Ivermectin is not an effective treatment for Covid". That's all that was really necessary, right?
But no, there was this whole ridiculous crusade of "It's a horsey drug for horses! If you take it, that means you're a horse!". Which, after two seconds of consideration, was patently absurd. It's an extremely commonly prescribed drug for people. And there's plenty of drugs that are used for both people and animals. Ketamine. Antibiotics. We give antibiotics to horses too. So does that mean if you take antibiotics you're some whackjob taking horse drugs?
So now you have the media constantly repeating something which anyone with two brain cells can discern is a blatant lie, and they somehow wonder why people don't trust them?
I haven't read any story that said: "It's a horsey drug for horses! If you take it, that means you're a horse!"
That’s been said multiple times. By government agencies and media conglomerates. Amazing what you can find when you look for it.
Literal talking point from the FDA https://twitter.com/US_FDA/status/1429050070243192839?s=20
Debacle with CNN and Joe Rogan https://news.yahoo.com/lie-joe-rogan-accuses-cnn-151300650.h...
Obviously they didn’t use those exact words, but any time it was mentioned they were sure to include something like “…which is used to treat livestock…”, when that is not really relevant since it’s also widely used for people.
FYI there is no horse version of drugs. It would be a logistics and production nightmare to produce two kind of medicine like that.
If a medicine has a chemical compound (like for example Amoxicillin) then it is good for both your fish and for you generally speaking.
It really doesn't make sense to collectively blame "the media" because some of them say silly or incorrect things sometimes. The word itself -- a plural -- tells you there isn't a cohesive "the media" to blame anyway. Who are you actually talking about when you refer to "the media"?
Now, if you’re a medical doctor like he is and you spend hours poring over the studies, you can eventually conclude that they’re all flawed in various ways, and there’s not really an effect.
If you’re a layperson and you see that there’s studies published in peer-reviewed journals, but the media is telling you you’re a stupid redneck who’s just a sucker for “conspiracy theories” you’re going to figure they’re just insulting and dismissing you, as they have been consistently doing for years. When those same outlets say the claims about Ivermectin are “baseless” you’re going to wonder why those 26/30 studies don’t constitute a “base” and maybe suspect that there is something else going on.
So, at the end of the day, it is really irresponsible of any media outlet to marginalize and dismiss people, who are trying their best to make sense of a confusing and stressful situation.
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...
I've heard that sometimes in public health you have to lie to avoid the strange incentives that people acting as a massive group have. But your lies have to at least make sense. When you go around frantically pushing a narrative that is a blatant lie, you lose the public's trust. It doesn't help when half of news programs are brought to you by Pfizer - a company with a vested interest in Ivermectin not working for this purpose.
The randos on YouTube will always be there, but it's the failing of the mainstream media that anyone takes them seriously.
The absurd response seemed to be in response to absurd behaviour, as far as I can tell.
Hard to blame people for taking the horse version if that's all they could get. Also hard to blame pharmacies for not wanting to give out medicine that doesn't work, although pharmacies seem more than happy to sell other kinds of snake oil.
Secondly the whole "horse drug" came about because people actually started taking a literal horse drug when they could not get their hands on a prescription for the human version. So people made fun of them.
And yes, taking a drug dosed/mixed for horses based on Facebook posts makes you a wackjob.
Not gonna defend the media and political spindoctors. But we all know what they are about. All people had to do was listen to the medical authorities.
But no, everyone applies the "politicians/media lies" selectevly so that they can keep listening to the ones that make them feel good.
The MSM was mostly fair and accurate in their reporting. "Horse paste" was mostly a meme or a joke. The NY Times and CNN didn't make jokes about horse paste. The CDC and similar orgs all gave accurate explainers of the use and misuse of Ivermectin (and Hydroxychloroquine).
While a lot of right-wing media like FOX and OAN was absolutely endorsing it. Here's a good one where Tucker Carlson has an Ivermectin booster on his show but apparently conflates it with Hydroxychloroquine.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/biologist-tucker-ivermectin-ef...
Not to mention the former president spreading absolute nonsense about HCQ, disinfectant, UV light and whatever else popped up in his twitter feed. This inspired a lot of clapbacks from satirists and unserious opinionators, but you wouldn't see any real news being that sarcastic.
If you had stuck with left-leaning and moderate MSM, traditional news sources during these past few years you would have been very well informed.
It seems like there are often specific turns of phrase that just get widely adopted. What I cited above is one example. Another is "the deadly January 6th insurrection".
(Probably there's some right-wing phraseology around "stolen election" or "southern border invasion" or something like that. But I can't think of any specifically, so at least from my perspective they're less widespread or less sticky.)
One time we had 4 humans and several cats in the house and we could see the worms in the litter box and could see them in the human feces too so we gave everybody (humans and cats) pyrantel which is what gets used for that here.
People get ivermectin in Africa where the problem is worse, but it is going to be in an appropriate dosage and form.
Apparently not. Because that is what was said at first. And doctors refused to prescribe it because it didn't work, there was no reason for it to work, etc.
So people went down to Sneed's Feed and Seed, bought the apple-flavored paste with a picture of a horse on it and started shitting themselves in the middle of WalMart. They deserved to be mocked.
That didn’t seem to get people vaccinated.
> We give antibiotics to horses too.
Which are not the same for people and horses either.
---------
Maybe the ridiculous thing was to make Ivermectin into political calling card into first place. And in the second place, attacking doctors who say it is not tested or does not work. What about that, really.
Ivermectin is a wildly effective anti-parasitic, so unsurprisingly it reduces mortality rates in countries where the endemic parasite infection rate is something like 50 percent.
This study appears to have been done in Canada, where parasite infection rates in the general population are probably 1% or less. Hence... no demonstrable benefit to using Ivermectin!
Nonetheless, Ivermectin is safe drug to take in normal doses, and will help people that are hospitalised with COVID and are given steroids.
It's not a prophylactic and high doses are not a treatment for COVID itself.
The misunderstandings around this drug stem from misunderstandings of basic statistics and the scientific method. This is why you shouldn't get your medical advice from Joe Rogan.
The most bizarre part of this whole ordeal is how there was such a huge backlash to ivermectin usage as if it was some kind of a dangerous drug when that's clearly not the case. Even my layman's knowledge is enough to understand that much. If it's placebo at worst then why did the media try to demonize it so hard?
[0] https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)32506-6/ful...
Also no effect, as show by an appropriate study, but that didn't stop a friend of a friend from trying to obtain it instead of going to a doctor. He failed and eventually succumbed to the illness.
While the case for Ivermectin has been weakened recently, there still seems a significant body of evidence to suggest that it does work.
Many (not discredited) trials show efficacy and there is a significant observational correlation between population mass consumption of Ivermectin and better results with Covid. There are also many doctors that swear by it's efficacy from their experience.
Trials aren't perfect. The drug companies have been manipulating trial data for decades to prove efficacy when there wasn't, it probably can be done the other way as well. And the incentive is there with such a politicized drug.
That doesn't sound like any drug company in America.
It totally makes sense from pharma to prevent discovery of a functioning drug because they found a better cash cow - vaccines.
If someone else has a doctor that prescribes it to them, and a pharmacy that fills the prescription, that should not be a problem, right?
It's not like they are telling people they have to take ivermectin against their will.
What am I missing?
Talking about ivermectin is almost always done in the context of political discourse, and political discourse is a shitshow
In this particular case, (some) advocates for ivermectin promoted it as a miracle drug alternative to getting vaccinated, which became tied at the hip to anti-vaccine ideology, which is tied to particular political ideologies
So ivermectin became a subset of a larger political debate, wielded as a weapon to show that your opponents are anti science (either because it’s effective and the other side won’t admit it because they’re tied to vax; or it’s ineffective and the other side won’t admit it because they’re tied to antivaxx)
If this weren’t true nobody would have ever cared for or against ivermectin
Concerning though, was the society's attitude to the Ivermectin, an safe drug prescribed by WHO in Africa en masse, established for decades, versus an experimental vaccine-like treatment with unknown side effects and never tested at scale that was to be deployed population wide.
At the time of no studies, no information and heavy panic, one of these was condemned, likened to a horse paste for conspiracy theorists, the other revered like a God's potion.
This attitude is perfectly rational for pharma companies, for which a vaccine is a better business model, with healthy 95% of the population being customers, than a drug with sick 5% being the customers. Especially for an is off-patent drug Ivermectin which is just a pain in the ass for pharma producers, with no monopoly markup on it.
The behavior is not rational for the general populace though. Once country's biggest villains, pharma companies injecting patients unknowingly with opiods, turning them into lifetime subscribers, to world's biggest saviors like a flip of a switch.
It was interesting to observe how the pandemic was progressing with a rational attitude as somebody who went through it and developed an immunity right at the beginning. It helped me understand how the minds can be overriden at scale using tactics of fear. Helps explain other dangerous ideologies that were pushed to the populations using fear.
Vaccines and Ivermectin are old news though. Who would have though that Vladimir Putin would become the world's most successful doctor and cure the world of the pandemic overnight.
24 hours!? How is that reasonable at all?
It's worth pointing out, the study - intentionally? - offers no insights on deaths rates or length of hospital stay, etc.
The scope as is is: Test positive. Receive a treatment. To hospital or not to hospital? But why stop there?
In fact, as is, you can flip it over and say placebos are just as effective as Ivermectin, as there's no mention of a no treatment at all control. Or did I miss that?
In any case, helpful. But apparently flawed.
which got very different results
When studying the effects of invermectin, at least checking for worms in the patients' feces would have been needed.
The reason people are testing it is because it has potential anti-viral properties as well. Researchers discovered that ivermectin is a protease inhibitor - which means it can prevent viral replication when it comes to Covid. The problem, from what I understand, is that no one knows the dose required for that effect to occur, or whether the drug needs to be modified in some way to do so.
The new Pfizer anti-viral drug is based on the same protease inhibition mechanism and seems to work very well, but costs hundreds of dollars for a single round of treatment. So, finding a way to make ivermectin work would create an extremely cheap treatment.
You talk about misunderstandings but it's funny how badly you misunderstand the situation.
Sources:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsptsci.0c00108#
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/cp/d1cp0...
doses much higher than the maximum approved or safely achievable for use in humans would be required for an antiviral effect while treating COVID-19
"Dr. Mills and his colleagues looked at 1,358 adults who visited one of 12 clinics in the Minas Gerais region of Brazil with Covid-19 symptoms."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4964320/ > Eleven sites were selected for sampling. Cysts of Entamoeba coli were the most frequently found in this study (50%), followed by Hymenolepis diminuta eggs (27.6%), Iodamoeba butschllii cysts (5.6%), Ascaris lumbricoides eggs (5.6%), Taenia species eggs (5.6%) and hookworm eggs (5.6%). The highest positivity rates were found in the samples drawn from the cafeteria's eating table.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30050346/ > Results: A total of 216 slides were analyzed [sampled from public bus seats], of which 86 (39.8%) were positive for at least one intestinal parasite.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29972467/ > The aim of this study was to establish the prevalence of Schistosoma mansoni in indigenous Maxakali villages, evaluating the TF-Test® performance for diagnosis compared to the Kato-Katz technique. Stool samples from 545 individuals were processed by the TF-Test® (1 sample) and Kato-Katz (1 slide). The positivity rate for S. mansoni by Kato-Katz was 45.7%. The rate by the TF-Test® was 33.2%, and 51.9% by the combined parasitological techniques. The amplitude of parasite load was 24 to 4,056 eggs per gram of feces (epg), with a geometric mean of 139 epg.
Alternately if they gave the antiparasitic far enough before the infection, the rather complex causal sequence of "severe Covid -> steroids -> parasites multiply -> Ivermectin to the rescue" might not happen in the first place. Though that should show up by severe cases not having the parasitic reaction to begin with, if the Ivermectin cleared them out.
- So in summary, actually, now that I think about it, in a country with high parasite load, an antiparasitic having no detectable effect on survival rate of a high-stress infection seems pretty suspicious on the face of it! Really could go for a study link.
In what way will it help in people having no parasite?
It's a bit like an episode of Dr House. Trying to determine an illness solely with tests is often futile or prohibitively expensive. It can also take long enough that meanwhile the patient will die. Directly treating them "just on the off chance" can actually be a better approach, but obviously this would have to be weighed up against the side-effects and risks of the treatment and drugs involved.
Ivermectin luckily is so safe that some doctors have called for giving it to every COVID patient that goes to hospital. Saving 1% of patients is... thousands of people at the scale of the pandemic.
On that front I think it is not totally plausible that parasites explain these discrepancies. Here is a large study in the United States https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122... that found ivermectin to be effective against death.
> Moreover, both Efimenko and Nackeeran also told Reuters that other evidence available so far clearly refutes the benefits of ivermectin to treat COVID-19.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/...
You're 100% correct, of course. But the prevalent MSM response, of calling it horse medicine, was equally damaging. Since it is a well known, effective, and respected medicine used in humans, this characterization as "horse paste" made it easy to believe that it was additionally being unfairly maligned in regard to its effectiveness for Covid.
In my part of flyover country, you had to provide evidence, from a veterinarian or a sale bill from an auction house, that you owned livestock to be able to buy livestock ivermectin. Because people were buying it to use on themselves.
That's where the 'horse medicine' thing comes from. It's real.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/08/23/covid-...
I.e. it's not that ivermectin is horse medicine in all forms, but the forms of it which the people were taking in response to Trump's early promotion were horse medicine
Would a more diplomatic wording have actually helped? I don't think it would have. And trying too hard to have diplomatic neutrality will often encourage the toxic idea that every debate has two valid and reasonable sides.
In what way? Ivermectin was pitched as an alternative to vaccination, leading people to avoid the highly effective vaccines.
Is likely because of the legions of people who have been dosing themselves with horse paste.
At the time that Rogan did have the episode with Dr Kory and Bret Weinstein, Ivermectin was already very popular and he hasn't been promoting it since (yes, he may have had a guest or two that brought it up during the conversation, but it was peripheral).
The media had a collective freakout because when he got Covid he mentioned on Instagram a laundry list of medicines he's taking and Ivermectin (the human form) was among them.
Blaming him or Spotify for all of society's ills is just an attempt to prevent dissent on mainstream discourse.
That's a leap only you took so far.
In fact there’s even a paper floating around showing an anti-correlation between helminth infection and Covid-19 severity.
My point being: the “obvious” mechanism of action may not be as obvious as you think.
That is simply not true. Parasites do have an impact on the immune system and can amplify or reduce response to other pathogens. This is a very well known effect and an important area of study due to the prevalence of parasitic infections in tropical regions.
So I agree with your post both in letter of what is written and in spirit, but...
The misunderstandings around this drug also stem from the fact that its detractors were unhinged and anti-scientific. They were dismissing a large, obvious statistical effect without any argument. The publicised pushback around Joe Rogan was spearheaded by people who thought the problem was that Ivermectin is effective in horses.
I'm perfectly happy to pick this hill to argue on - the people who had hope that Ivermectin helped were the sort of people who are persuaded by evidence. It was never strong evidence, but the balance was in favour of Ivermectin for a while there for people who only looked at studies and hadn't had their attention drawn to the endemic parasite thing.
No. The extreme pushback started after higher quality studies came out that showed there was no effect and those swayed by the initial Brazilian data wouldn’t let it go. For some segment of the population it became a magical COVID cure and any high quality studies were just big pharma ignoring cheap solutions so they could make more money.
That doesn't sound very scientific to me. It sounds desperate. You can argue Ivermectin might have a good enough safety profile to have warranted experimenting on yourself. And I tend to err on the side of trusting people to understand a little about taking their healthcare into their own hands. That said, it's not exactly how medical professionals see things. And people did get poisoned here and there after all. The average person doesn't know how to self administer medicine. I think this is why the 'worth a shot' opinion on ivermectin wasn't a great idea and it wasn't because the people excited about it were better persuaded by facts and logic.
The amplification effect of steroids on parasites is backed up by research on mice [2] and an informal survey of the ivermectin/covid research shows good evidence for the same effect in humans [3]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220220090522/https://www.econo...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3110371/
[3] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...
My story (yes, I know, just N=1, but it's good to put it out there):
I found a doc to give me two prescriptions for a treatment protocol as recommended by the FLCCC. Since it was in short supply, I didn't want to waste it prophylactically. I've had IVM available to me since early sprint 2021.
If I ever got that nagging feeling in my throat like I was coming down with a cold, I just took a single dose of IVM. The next day I was always better. This happened about a half dozen times over the last almost year. Would I have gotten better that quickly without it? I don't know. I just didn't want to risk thing getting worse, and the risk calculation was obvious since IVM is so safe.
Was it just a cold attacking me and not COVID? I don't know, but it was still better than coming down with a cold. Colds always take me down for a week anyway, so I saved a week of my life even if it was just a cold.
From my understanding IVM is a broad spectrum antiviral that seems to work well on coronaviruses. I'm going to keep taking it on first symptoms of a cold, just because so far I haven't had even a sniffle since I started taking it on the first sign of a infection. It may not be the thing that's working, but as you say, it's so safe, it doesn't hurt to use.
Before the downvotes: I'm not saying that this is the solution to the pandemic, and I'm not touting that it's better than other treatments or vaccines. I'm just saying that the downside to taking it is negligible, and my experience is that it did help (or at least didn't hurt). And it's cheap, so why not experiment.
If you cherry-pick your experts enough, you’ll be able to find one that agrees with you, no matter how absurd your position.
I’ll also note that much of the time the licensed doctors he invites on aren’t actually in relevant specialties at all. And in many cases they are grifters in some way or another.
There's enough people with MDs that are willing to do more or less anything for money that checking for a license isn't really much in the way of diligence.
People make unwise choices all the time, and when we try to prevent them from doing so coercively, we fall into a pit of unintended consequences. When people see powerful people suppressing a point of view, it makes it more sympathetic to many of them, even if they would otherwise have rejected it as unreasoned.
Depends on the coercion.
Taking action against false advertising of medical benefits is and should be under the purview of qualified government agencies, and should be a private cause of action.
E.g., the FDA and FTC have jurisdiction over false claims in drug and food advertising [0-2]. This is an unqualified good thing. It would be a large net benefit to society if these are also extended beyond specific paid-for standard-format advertising claims but also persistent promotion of false and unsubstantiated claims by jucksters like Joe Rogan, whether or not it is the result of direct paid promotion or just as part of his self-promoting schtick to increase it popularity with contrary opinions, and without regard to the number of people he will literally kill with his bad advice.
If you want the libertarian version, then when Jack's relative takes bad advice from adverts or some on-air huckster, then he has a cause of action to sue (and of course must establish that the relative relied on that advice and died from following the advised course of action, and that Jack has suffered losses).
Yes, countering disinformation is a thorny problem, but resorting to First Amendment absolutism is intellectually lazy at best. It feels like having a nice solid black&white answer, but it is not, since the result of the answer is the destruction of society. Bigger challenges and higher complexity society require more complex answers (and NO, simple censorship isn't the answer either).
[0] https://www.fda.gov/drugs/office-prescription-drug-promotion... [1] https://www.fda.gov/drugs/prescription-drug-advertising/back... [2] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/truth-advertising
What I think is baffling is why there was such resistance to even trying Ivermectin and other alternatives in the first place? I'm not talking about after Joe Rogan used it here, I'm talking about well before he said he used it and there were some initial reports from some Indian and other doctors that this might have been very effective in their initial usage. Sick and dying people wanted to try this out and were shut down. If we had an inexpensive and marginally effective treatment, Covid would have been over very quickly. Yet, every initial inexpensive treatment (Hydroxychloroquine) that showed some initial effectiveness was given the stiffest resistance possible.
It's the easiest risk management decision in the world to try out inexpensive (and safe in human dosage) drugs when the alternative is death, and for some reason there was supreme resistance to this. Why? It still feels like potential solutions were totally shut down precisely because nobody could really make any money off of it.
If they were severely sick or dying, it would already be far too late for an anti-viral to do anything.
I mean, you should never really take advice from any expert that isn't sitting in front of you, imo. Podcasts exist to gather views and often incorporate bias and misinformation in various forms to achieve those ends. They're no different from listening to Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow in terms of information quality; they may interview SMEs but at the end of the day the way they interview them and the subjects they focus on matter much more if you're not a discerning person on a given subject.
When I listen to podcasts, even ones that try to give good information like Freakonomics, I always listen to them for entertainment first. It's like maintaining boundaries with your information sources.
This part of your post is confusing. Your conclusion and the conclusion promoted on the JRE are the same.
Joe Rogan is a terrible person to get advice from.
But where are the good sources? Are science studies (funded by government, military or corporations) trustworthy? Is the government?
The issue is that all information has become obviously politicised. Which means it there are agendas in play foremost, rather than enabling the population to make informed decisions.
You can source your advice from any of them or a sufficient consensus. Most even publish their recommendations and findings in English too. Interestingly, none of them asked their healthcare systems to prescribe cheap-as-chips ivermectin, all of them provide free vaccination and all of them recommend face masks for the last year and a half.
Let's not act like the parasite idea is more than an untested hypothesis though.
On what evidence are you basing this? There appears to be no good reason to think so.
That being said, the WSJ article is limited to looking at hospitalizations. Full stop.
Nothing about deaths, length of hospital stay, so called long Covid, etc.
Could you elaborate on this one? Did he give any medical advise ever?
What is it about COVID that causes people to just forget to think critically about what they read?
I listened to the Mr Beast and Joe Rogen podcast the other day. The best part about it was all the times Jimmy would simply say "I don't want to speculate about that, I don't know anything about it." It was glorious, a person not providing opinion on something because they don't know anything about the topic.
I have a suspicion that, like myself, they came to this conclusion after reading this extensive post from Slate Star Codex https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...
Nor strangers on the internet. Nor cable news networks.
Everyone agrees medical advice and treatment should be between a patient and their physician…unless you are Joe Rogan and one of the hosts of treatments your physician prescribes is Ivermectin. Then it seems it’s newsworthy and fair game to cherry-pick a single prescription therapy and disingenuously frame it as “Joe Rogan takes horse dewormer”, rather than Joe Rohan’s physician prescribes anti-parasitic therapy which studies show has potential anti-viral applications and early studies showed potential benefits for treating covid, and has otherwise is generally harmless to humans based on nearly a billion doses over decades.
It's a good theory but youre technically spouting misinformation by claiming it's hard fact.
This theory was developed by Scott Alexander from SSC in his ivermectin blog post.
Joe Rogan never claimed anyone should take medical advice from him.
He had Sanjay Gupta and Robert Malone both medical doctors with differing opinions.
This is how the media is supposed to work. It's not supposed to be just the people you agree with(that's propaganda).
During a deadly pandemic that's killing millions, it's perfectly fine to only present the information that will save lives.
edit: Apparently someone else? I've seen it on Twitter before Scott's blog, but I can't find the thread anymore.
edit: It was Avi Bitterman @AviBittMD. Also linked in the article.
"Yes, the evidence suggests it but.." - "MISINFORMATION.
However, one of your comments shows the true problem. It's not FOR the media to decide. Murdoch may disagree but the media is just reflecting the establishment. You can argue about the effectiveness of said establishments because they're all dysfunctional, like any organization of any size, but to claim that we should just throw away scientific process in anathema to modern society.
There were multiple reports of people refusing treatment (and, of course, vaccines before that) because they wanted ivermectin.
Prior to that, people poisoning themselves with household products due to Trump's careless speculation on treatment.
It's ironic as those who don't trust vaccines seem to flock to the medical advice of those without any training.
The backlash has never been primarily about the dangers of ivermectin specifically, but the rejection of established protocol, scientific procedure and basically everything that humanity has moved forward with in the past century or so.
This is a trend I've observed in proponents of New Age alternative "medicine", way before COVID. They can simultaneously believe that Western medicine is "unproven" or a "hoax", and that doctors are "untrustworthy" and "big pharma" wants you to buy unproven stuff, and no amount of qualifications will convince them. Yet they have no trouble believing Bach flower remedies will cure anything, they follow homeopathy religiously, and it's enough evidence that some healer is the real deal because they heard someone at the grocery store say so and she seemed like such a nice person. Or some TV celebrity said so, and why would he lie?
For example, this article mentioning the research immediately should have a red flag for anyone that knows what the actual protocols that work/are being used for Ivermectin as 1) a preventative are, and 2) different protocol in hospital treatment - the moment you read that this trial only provided 3 days of Ivermectin once having symptoms (and where everyone involved has severe comorbidities - so improper protocol followed, inadequate dosing of Ivermectin will result in the worst outcome/non-effectiveness signal possible).
You think established protocol has been adequately applied or applied with integrity when it comes to the mRNA injections? Do you also think there's zero chance of influence or manipulation by for-profit medical industrial complex? Honest questions.
Edit to add: Ah yes, the lazy-dopamine rewarding downvote instead of engaging in discussion and critical thinking - the ideologues' wet dream and downfall of an intellectually evolving society.
This is not true.
https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-japan-ivermectinan...
Because anti-vaxxers pitched it as an alternative to vaccination, and many people listened.
It's a pretty good way to get rid of parasites, but the association with COVID caused a lot of problems.
The part "b)" about horse dewormer overdoses have been confirmed to be fake news long ago so I think don't need to dwell on that too much. I still don't know whether ivermectin is effective or not though. If it's not then I still don't understand what's the big deal. Why does it have to be smeared so hard.
And this whole "c)" thing. That's the most disturbing part to me. That's basically like religious fundamentalism to me. I just can't wrap my head around it. Why should vaccination be the only acceptable way to treat COVID and that we shouldn't even consider the alternatives as if they were some kind of heresies? I just don't understand. To me it seems like the vaccine fundamentalists are more interested in obedience than science. In science we need opposing views and this obviously means that some of those views will be proven to be false, but if you try to effectively SUPPRESS those opposing views then you can't call it science anymore. Also, there's always a good chance that the mainstream view can be false. I mean, just like with religions but that's one of those worm cans that only make people mad if we pop it open.
My whole life I was taught that trying to cure seasonal flu with vaccine is silly because the flu mutates too fast and it just leads to an endless loop of seasonal vaccines. Then covid happens and suddenly I should forget everything I knew about vaccines even though with the talk about all these booster shots it only makes it seems like the old knowledge makes more sense than this new knowledge. My brain refuses to accept this nonsense, I can't help it.
I remember when people were saying this about the George Floyd protests, to make the point that it was all media fearmongering over nothing and we'd all forget about covid in a month.
Now we're two years in and approaching 1 million deaths from covid in America alone. So that plan didn't work out.
> an experimental vaccine-like treatment
This is a very strange way to describe a vaccine.
The issue with ivermectin is that those saying it should be used along with a vaccine were vastly outnumbered by those saying it should be used instead of a vaccine. And the covid vaccine was absolutely not the only one they objected to.
Please, don't leave us hanging - i want to hear the rest! I wonder if your novel might be better suited for AO3 or FanFiction.net, though?
> Animal drugs, on the other hand, are often highly concentrated—especially those used in large animals such as horses and cows—and high doses of those drugs could be highly toxic in humans.
> In addition, animal drugs often have inactive ingredients not evaluated for use in human medicine, and FDA officials don’t know how those ingredients affect drug absorption in a human body, FDA information states.
https://www.avma.org/javma-news/2021-10-01/people-ingesting-...
By "horse version" I don't mean a different chemical active ingredient. I mean packaging, dosage, etc. E.g. for animals Ivermectin is often in powder form so it can mixed with food, while for humans it's usually a pill. That means the human version is not approved for lifestock and the lifestock version is not approved for humans. They are two different drugs in that sense.
> Recent studies have shown that helminth endemic countries showed fewer cases and deaths so far and helminth co-infection might reduce the severity of COVID-19.
from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/iid3.573.
Others:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34861106/
It's been almost 5 months since I read the article.
Scott does attribute numerous references to the original postulators after looking again.
Via Scott's article plus numerous links:
" As several doctors and researchers have pointed out (h/t especially Avi Bitterman and David Boulware)"
* https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...
Second, a viable alternative to vaccination wouldn't be a bad thing. But Ivermectin is not that. So suggesting that it is is a bad thing.
And no one is suggesting you accept vaccines as "the only way forward". Pfizer is developing a treatment for after you've caught COVID. Work is being done in that direction. Currently, vaccines are your best safety measure. That's been borne out by the data available. Any way you look at it.
You do not understand vaccines. It's incredible to me that we still have to be explaining this more than two years into the pandemic, but vaccines are not magical fixes. The COVID-19 vaccine exists to strongly reduce your symptoms in case of infection. The effect does not stay at full efficacy forever and as new strains develop over time they may become less protective still.
> Almost make me feel like they're scared of someone finding a better way out of this.
Yeah, obviously there's a giant conspiracy going on to prevent you from finding out about the magical solution to COVID-19. Can't possibly be that your understanding of how stuff works is lacking.
But pitching Ivermectin as an alternative to vaccination is bad because Ivermectin does not work and the vaccines work very well.
What's wrong with booster shots? I'm going through tick-borne encephalitis vaccination course right now, and it's 3 shots in the first 6 months, fourth shot after 3 years, and then a shot every 5 years. I also take an influenza booster annually. I'll a COVID one to the list too. Because it works!
Can you elaborate? Why does the number of booster shots tell you anything about the right way to treat this pandemic? I honestly don't follow.
If you compensate for the body weight and ensure that the gel agent the animal medicine comes in doesn't have any adverse effects on the human body (it probably doesn't) then consuming animal medicine can be an excellent way to treat parasitic infections if you're awfully poor and don't qualify for any insurance. Consuming any chemical not made for human consumption is dangerous, but if you don't have another option, it's better than doing nothing.
People ridicule the whole horse dewormer story, but it's no secret that people around the world have turned to animal medicine out of necessity due to prices of medication.
Oh, come on. The tweet links to a page that gives information that doesn't fit in 280 characters; making a sly reference to what people are talking about is hardly outrageous, and likely intended to increase distribution of the useful info in the link. https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-shoul...
The next tweet has a FAQ, too (https://twitter.com/US_FDA/status/1429050498515144708) that's quite clear that ivermectin has some uses in humans, but isn't approved or shown to be useful for COVID.
If you base your reality off single jokey tweets, that's on you.
Because people were eating ivermectin. Like the other poster says, I know it feels nice to be able to say "this was already happening", but it just wasn't. Not in as many places and covering as many businesses.
Veterinarians generally needed proof of livestock (seeing the animal) but also were just as prone to give you the meds based on your description and assessment as a farmer. Not anymore. You could walk into any farm store and walk out with antibiotics and/or wormer. Not anymore.
And it's because people were eating it. Right, wrong, or indifferent, that's the reason.
Theres been not a single study to show parasite Covid ivermectin connection.
Claiming it's fact instead of a theory is literal misinformation, even if it's a good theory.
Last I checked colloidal silver was being sold by a christian evangelist named Jim Bakker. Then there's chiropractors. Then there was the anti-vaxxers. Then the "vitamins will cure anything under the sun." Then there was things like "all-herbal fen phen" and other herbal products. Then there's that famous goop company led by a has been actress which has some questionable products, but sold to housewives. Oh and the entire premise of homeopathic medicine is a fraud.
And then FDA approved drugs like fen phen (Wyeth) which should not have made it to market some how did, and caused heart valve problems.
Hell, when you think about it, what the fuck exactly is holy water which is used by the Catholic church?
If you can dupe people into the premise that "Magical Things are Real", then it becomes easy to take their money away from them. And right now, it doesn't seem too hard to do these days.
They cannot find a way to trust the opinion of professionals ("they are lying", "they pay them to say so", "the evidence is faked", "they want to control us", "this has toxic stuff they won't tell you about") but if the nice woman at the grocery store tells them her niece went to a healer who has a "holistic" method of curing migrane/the flu/covid/cancer then suddenly it's "it must work, don't be narrow minded!".
I would understand if they were always mistrustful of everything: the government, big pharma, the woman at the grocery store, anecdotes from coworkers. But no, their mistrust is weirdly selective.
It's just that, well, 2 years in, and "an Nth wave of COVID might be coming" is rather less newsworthy than "is the ongoing invasion of Ukraine going to lead to WW3?"
> FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine officials said in a letter to veterinarians and animal product retailers that people have become seriously ill from consuming highly concentrated ivermectin formulations, such as pour-on products, injectable products, pastes, and drenches meant for horses, cattle, and sheep.
> Poison control officials said in August they were receiving substantial numbers of calls from people experiencing side effects—mostly mild illnesses—from consuming veterinary-use ivermectin. Some poison control centers across the U.S. were receiving five times as many calls about human exposures to ivermectin in July 2021 as compared with a pre-pandemic baseline. The reports of ivermectin misuse coincided with rising numbers of SARS-CoV-2 infections.
https://www.avma.org/javma-news/2021-10-01/people-ingesting-...
But the media chose the sensational way of saying it. It was also frequently dismissed entirely as being for horses without reference to concentration levels or what it actually does.
> You might find it politically inconvenient to reconcile this with the stance you’ve chosen
You might find it politically inconvenient to reconcile this with the stance you’ve chosen but the media and your side isn't right just because the other side is wrong.
Oh, a strawman argument with bonus points for trying to look clever by pretending this is a “both-sides” situation so you can avoid intellectual engagement.
If you re-read the thread you might notice that this was specifically in response to someone who was incorrectly claiming that people misusing animal medication didn't really happen. Nobody was saying that it's never used for humans — the big questions were whether it was useful for treating COVID (no) and whether it was a good idea to take non-human formulations and/or doses well outside of the safe ranges without involving a doctor (even more strongly no).
If you want to rant about “the media” or sides, it would probably be a good first step to be specific about what you're talking about so anyone else can evaluate whatever claims you're making. “the media” covers a very wide range of voices and it's not like there's anywhere close to 100% fidelity between different parts of the media or, for that matter, the scientific and governmental voices they're reporting on.
> Ivermectin is a deworming agent most commonly used on horses, livestock and occasionally dogs and cats. It is used in smaller doses in humans as an anti-parasitic, to treat conditions including skin problems and headlice.
> Why should vaccination be the only acceptable way to treat COVID
It's not a treatment. Vaccines are prevention. We have treatments. Ivermectin isn't one of them.
> In science we need opposing views
That sounds so childish. We don't need "views" in science. We need results that people can trust.
You have my permission to try and prove ivermectin is effective. So far everyone trying has failed. That's not a view. It's fact.
> trying to cure seasonal flu with vaccine is silly
It's not. We can get rid of seasonal flu if we try hard enough.
> To me it seems like the vaccine fundamentalists are more interested in obedience than science.
"vaccine fundamentalists" suggests to me a complete disingenuous argument.
We know how to prevent covid. We know how to eradicate covid. We have watched countries do just that. Even if we don't do the things those places do, we can reduce the death count here.
But with small-minded attitudes like yours, that simply is never going to happen.
I'm not an expert on medicine and I admit I have no idea what I'm talking about but are you trying to make some kind of a point here or are you just arguing about semantics?
>You have my permission to try and prove ivermectin is effective. So far everyone trying has failed.
No I'm not qualified for that. This is why I gave you a link about COVID nasal sprays that have ivermectin in them and asked whether they're bullshit or not. Enlighten me if you can or don't reply.
>It's not. We can get rid of seasonal flu if we try hard enough.
I'm too pessimistic to fall for that kind of wishful thinking.
>But with small-minded attitudes like yours, that simply is never going to happen.
Come on. You don't want me to be open-minded. You want me to be small-minded with you. To align my views with yours. Open-mindedness requires you to accept opposing view points. What even makes me small-minded exactly? I'm not against vaccines and I'm not against ivermectin. I'm merely baffled by the anti-ivermectin narrative and the totalitarian vaccine campaigns that leave no other options except mandatory vaccines. I may be ignorant and I may be wrong but I'm certainly not small-minded.
You've been taught wrong. First, the vaccines don't "cure" flu and nobody claims they do. Second, in many countries they are recommended yearly for people at risk, like elderly people.
It's true flu has newer strains each year and the vaccine must be changed, but the rest of what you were taught was not correct.
I think the biggest pushback came from the notion that a large segment of the population appeared to be against the scientific consensus on Covid, contemptuous about risk mitigation strategies, skeptical/fear-mongering about the vaccines, and pushing conspiracy theories, and then these were the who turned around and said there's a great drug that works miracles against Covid and the government doesn't want you to have it.
Now, this may not be an accurate representation of all those who were talking about ivermectin, but they were the most prominent voices -- the "do your research" types.
The bias that this produced in others against even considering ivermectin was strictly irrational, of course, since it was against the sources and not about studies, but, that said, many of these same people had been pushing hydroxychloroquine, massive vitamins C injections, and urine therapy, all without evidence. The underlying desire for ivermectin to be real seemed (at least from the outside) to stem more from discovering some cheap secret weapon that "the scientific community" didn't want them to know about.
There are always leads, always more possibilities to try, so it's a critical scientific skill to understand how promising they actually are. Nobody will ever publish a peer-reviewed scientific paper saying "this shit is completely fucking hopeless" -- even if it is -- so you have to make that inference from a growing pile of negative evidence "we haven't been able to replicate / determine dosing / find support for" and from the shift of attention to different theories.
Multi-drug combination treatments are where studies of ineffective treatments go to die. "X didn't work, but maybe X+Y or X+Z will" is one of those low-quality ever-present followup leads I was talking about in the sibling post. To a researcher, seeing attention shift to combination treatments means that the primary hypothesis failed and people are throwing Hail Marys. It's not impossible that one of them will work, and that's why nobody will actually publish a paper saying "this shit is completely fucking hopeless," but in a situation where this shit really was completely fucking hopeless I would expect to see exactly this: a couple of positive "hail mary" results that squeak over the significance threshold with low N and low effect size.
Ivermectin does not help covid. Period. It is not contested. The people who tell you it is contested are interested in selling it to you. It is snake oil in the context of covid.
It is great for other things. But for covid it is a good indication you are a deluded idiot. (with 95% confidence)
Your study says that 183 people in Bangladesh saw their median recovery period reduced from 9 to 7 days when on both drugs, and downplays Ivermectin's influence.
"The effective dose of ivermectin required to reach IC50 at a pulmonary level is considerably higher than that used in this study. However, evaluation at higher doses requires detailed safety analysis"
Some people decided to go to farm supply stores and take the sterile bovine injectable form of IVM orally.
This whole situation would not have happened if social media, YouTube, and major news outlets didn’t make such a stink about using a drug. It has virtually no negative side-effects, over 40 years of safety track record, and is safely taken prophylactically for other uses around the world. Its efficacy has yet to be proven and there are conflicting studies on this, but its safety is not disputable.
Many doctors also refused to write prescriptions for patients who requested a drug for which there was no reliable evidence. Seems a responsible position when there are other approved treatments available.
>but its safety is not disputable
It's not just a question of safety, but efficacy.
>situation would not have happened if social media, YouTube, and major news outlets didn’t make such a stink about using a drug.
The rabid disinformation and conspiracy theories around COVID played the primary role. From anti-vaccine conspiracies to hydrochloroquine to ivermectin to the full on politicization of what should have been strictly a public health crisis.
There was a deliberate sowing of mistrust in government and public health agencies/officials, which led to a wave of aggressive anti-science sentiment and a somewhat bizarre willingness for many to try anything except approved treatments.
That was the biggest "stink". It's against this backdrop that doctors/pharmacies had to make decisions about whether to grant prescriptions for unproven treatments.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/how-iverme...
That's quite an assertion, but I notice you back it up with nothing at all.
What you describe as the libertarian version is the non-cartoon version of "First Amendment absolutism": you can say what you want, but you're not immune from demonstrable consequences of what you say. There's nothing in that position that requires or suggests that people should be coercively prevented from speech that is unpopular, incomplete, or incorrect. In that light, the objections you present mostly fail to address my point.
The only exception is your extension of the FDA and FTC rules regarding food and drug advertising to non-advertising speech, which would present a lot of practical problems, creating a vast opening for frivolous and harassing lawsuits against public figures and discouraging the expression of much valid and worthwhile opinion. I'd oppose it, and I can't imagine that it would find support outside the sort of election-year rhetoric that evaporates on contact with reality.
And not even seeking a solution.
Got it
Are you also against regulating speech that amounts to yelling "FIRE!!" in a crowded theater and/or inciting a riot or insurrection?
I could also say 'fine, if intentional disinformation kills people, that's fine, let them go at it, it is just a stupidity tax'
Except I also understand the value of a society that is at least minimally cohesive and retains a stably democratic (small-d) foundation, and see the hard evidence that active disinformation amplified by mass media, especially interactive mass media can completely undermine that, and is literally a direct threat to democracy.
I'm interested in finding a solution and it will need to be more refined than a simple absolutist edict written centuries before mass media and interactive mass media were invented.
Sure, and that's why governments around the world employ such people, in significant quantities, to do exactly that, and then tell the media what they've concluded, who help distribute that information to us laypeople.
Which is exactly what happened.
Or here's the NYT using pretty clear wording like "forms of the drug meant for horses": https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/health/covid-ivermectin-p...
There were also some less serious outlets discussing the fact that people were self-prescribing by going to veterinary sources without much context to them. These ones, due to the somewhat funny nature of the concept, tended to go more viral. Doesn't mean the more substantive articles didn't exist.
You don't want to call that a conspiracy theory, but then what should it be called?
And which media outlets have been calling people stupid rednecks? You have a grievance against "the media", but who exactly is that?
I'm really a lot more concerned with the irresponsibility of pushing ineffective medical treatments to a serious health hazard than I am with how gently "the media" tells people that their conspiracy theories are wrong.
Perhaps you should be concerned with that which causes more harm. After all, a lack of concern for what is true is the fundamental flaw with conspiracy theorists is it not?
My intention was to point out a general trend across all discourse, be that traditional media, or even between individuals.
Doubling down on blatant lies during a mass casualty event is exactly what spooked so many people and fueled the anti-vax movement.
"why would they lie? what else are they lying about? what are they hiding? whats their motive?"
misinformation thrives in a low trust environment. sure misinformation agents can sow distrust, but that should be seen as an opportunity by the institutions to set the record straight and gain trust, because if their ideas are really misinformation there should be no issue with having a conversation that demonstrates it one way or the other.
The exact wrong thing to do is double-down on lies, penalize, cancel, and censor free speech, and socially shame, berate, and hummiliate people that are just as scared, confused, and vulnerable as anyone else.
That's how you lose trust and how misinformation wins.
Your last statement relies on the assumption that the authorities actually know what information will save lives. I do not believe that is true.
I do believe in the reasoning and self preservation instincts of most people. The way these experts have acted shows very little respect for the sanctity of the individual.
"Conspiracy riddled garbage" which has turned out in more than one case to be right (the effectiveness of masking, effectiveness of social distancing, the effectiveness of lock downs). Just because the evidence currently looks to be in favor of vaccination doesn't mean we should shutdown dissenting opinions.
Millions of people have given their lives to protect the ideal of free speech and similar freedoms. I have no issue with the fact that exercising that right may cause some harm. I fundamentally believe that free speech leads to better outcomes over the long term.
Additionally, in this particular case the harm is not immediately obvious to me.
If you are in a position to affect outcomes in this area (as many on HN probably are, given ties to social media), I hope you reflect on the environment of freedom you currently benefit from. Are comfortable restricting freedoms for future generations, who's situations and trials are unknown to you?
i'm also curious if there's a source on the halving of vaccination rates?
I pick the latter. However, COVID itself was never existential (some fracction of people are immune, or get sick and then don't die, but instead reproduce, and over time, genetic immunity increases due to natural selection), although it was absolutely a threat to a healthy global economy (which in turn determines how much health care is available to society). So the calculus is more complicated. Probably, it's best to: promote the correct message, while allowing dissenting opiniions to be stated, but firmly refuted, and people who are saying things that are outright risky ("inject bleach") are shut down with the full force of law.
your example implies "free speech" = some advice that will get you killed
and "institutional message" = some advice that will definitely save your life
it also implies that "officials" only act rationally and morally.
Covid was not existential.
Here's a though experiment for you:
If a group completely blew something out of proportion with massive restrictions on the world...would you want to know about it, to regain your freedom?
Or continue to be lied to in order to save face for your ideological peer group?
It's perfectly fine to invite whoever you want on your show, unless you're Joe Rogan apparently?
Please stop with the fear based, hand wavy: 'millions have died!' to justify censorship and medical tyranny.
It's not that simple. This is:
* a novel vaccine developed with novel technology for a novel virus, where the effectiveness data has changed numerous times and breakthrough cases happen constantly and the FDA is fighting against requests to release the data that they used to approve it?
* A virus where the 'experts' completely ignored natural immunity and now years later are acknowledging that it may be as effective or more effective than the vaccine.
* A virus where every state and numerous countries have lifted all covid restrictions despite people dying in the THOUSANDS DAILY?
You should support the questioning of everything, even the earth being flat, and let the marketplace of ideas decide instead of ideological news media and medical dictators who think people are too stupid to think for themselves and/or are guided by whatever back alley deals they're making with big pharma.
And if none of this raises red flags for you then I worry that you're completely lost in the simplicity of ingroup/outgroup ideological propaganda.
Remember, Lobotomies won the Nobel prize.
> Yes, ivermectin is an anti-parasitic, and yes that's probably why there's anecdotal evidence of it working. The reason people are testing it is because it has potential anti-viral properties as well.
And then you said:
> Yes, some people are interested in Ivermectin as a protease inhibitor. But the reason the de-wormer came to prominence in the first place was because some lower quality studies found it has a positive effect on COVID-19 outcomes.
> Yes, ivermectin is an anti-parasitic, and yes that's probably why there's anecdotal evidence of it working.
and then shit on it for not discussing their pet theory:
> it's funny how badly you misunderstand the situation
The famous study done in Brazil was a fraudulent one, without authorization from the public health agency, where the patients that took Ivermectin had a 2 to 3 times higher mortality rate (very likely due to unrelated issues), but the numbers were cooked to make the drug look useful. That's the one with thousands of people that registered an effect.
There is also another one, with dozens of people that got an week effect. This one is most likely spurious.
Can you link the follow up study confirming this?
But I guess it was not replicated.
It didn't happen (large scale intentional lying), but if my government openly lies, I will complain about it up and until they restrict my freedom of speech, and I'll use the mechanisms I know (using social media, salon discussion websites, etc) to promote my message.
See the chart (oddly) titled "Over Half of Joe Rogan's Fans Are Vaccinated Against COVID-19" about 2/3 down.
Avid fans: 55% vaccinated, 45% unvaccinated
Nonfans: 76% vaccinated, 24% unvaccinated
1 in 10 people are avid fans (3 in 10 if you include casual)
7 in 10 are under the age of 45 - negligible covid deaths, so we'll look at the 3 in 10 over 45
~20% could have been vaccinated if they didn't listen to JRE
it's estimated that ~200k lives could have been saved by the vaccine [0]
so
.1 * .3 * .2 * 200k is the number of deaths attributable to Joe Rogan
[0] (i'm extrapolating the ratio at the time to todays 1M deaths) https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/covid19-and-other-...
2) Is there a secret handshake or QR code we should be using to separate this new sort of "good doctor" whos prescriptions are good from these "bad but qualified doctors" whos prescriptions are bad? I have naively gone all these years believing that qualified doctors could prescribe treatments but it seems that there is some uncertainty on that point. How would you separate the two without relying on your own opinion?
3) If we are relying on our own opinion anyway and doctors can't agree, why is it the case that patients with the prescription can't make their own decisions based on their own risk tolerances?
4) Doesn't the prescribing doctor have a better understanding of the patients needs and situation than a pharmacist? The pharmacist isn't exactly doing an in-depth interview to make their decision, they stand at a counter and hand out drugs.
I'd put it to you that the behaviour of this hypothetical pharmacist refusing to fill a prescription ... is pretty poor. Verging on outrageous.
2) Who said anything about picking good/bad doctors? The prescription and the patient are what's being evaluated. A good doctor can make mistakes; a bad doctor can write plenty of reasonable prescriptions worth filling.
3) Because we've tried that as a society. It's where the term "snake oil salesman" originated. We decided correctly that it was a sucky setup.
4) My pharmacist has caught a drug interaction my doctor didn't. They likely have a more accurate record of what I'm currently taking, as well. You seem to be mixing up pharmacists and pharmacy techs; perhaps a visit to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacist would be appropriate.
And even at the time large metaanalysis studies were saying it was useless
But more importantly, medicine isn't in the business of selling sham cures. People can always take homeopathic cures or vitamin D if they want that.
Well now I'm getting conflicting messages about its safety, compared to the user I originally responded to:
> It has virtually no negative side-effects, over 40 years of safety track record, and is safely taken prophylactically for other uses around the world. Its efficacy has yet to be proven and there are conflicting studies on this, but its safety is not disputable.
But regardless we come back to my original point - should it be handed out like candy just because they asked for it? Especially when its efficacy was questionable?
Don't like to defend Joe Rogan, but he literally had the guy that laughed him off at CNN (Sanjay Gupta).
While he is often pushy with dumb ideas he will often have guests that contradict him. I stopped listening to him regularly because hearing his opinion along so many guests gets kind of old, and he isn't the smartest guy in the world so it gets boring even faster. But I wouldn't characterize him as closeminded.
I reserve the same right to call out Joe Rogan when he's wrong. He is not special.
I am unaware of any situation outside of pure mathematics where logic is the sole arbiter. I am curious to hear about such situations, though.
Rogan has millions of listeners who take advice from him and shape their worldviews around his. For many people he is more authoritative on health than public health officials like Fauci, even while not having a fraction of the experience or expertise.
>How come people don't push more on the 'experts' like Wolensky or Fauci
There's been no shortage of criticism of Fauci and others, to include character attacks, conspiracy theories and death threats.
I believe he has had on: Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Dr. Michael Osterholm and and Dr. Peter Hotez. That doesn't look to be cherry-picking experts to push an absurd position.
So? Some experts are more experts than others?
I don’t really like this need for people to hear only what they want to hear and get angry when people say something they don’t like. Rogan lets people on and lets them talk. Sometimes it’s interesting , sometimes it’s not, sometimes it’s right, sometimes very wrong. I much prefer Rogan over all the people on big news that constantly spin things one way or the other to get more viewers. The mainstream news has lost the ability to give straight news.
If people want to get protected from wrong information a good start would be advertising. Maybe the woke people at Spotify should start there.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5DuxGhOJSa7X0AKvJGwwta?si=P...
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5VSukFrMYGae1ILd0e4HuR?si=B...
3. So why are pharmacists immune to being snake oil salesmen but perfectly qualified doctors giving out prescriptions can be snake oil salesman? Is there something wrong with the system that qualifies ordinary doctors?
4. Are you suggesting that the reason the pharmacists were overriding this prescription is because there is an interaction with Ivermectin? I feel pretty confident you'd come off the worse if we check, but I'll admit I haven't.
3. Strawman. I don't doubt that there are ivermectin-flogging pharmacists just like there are ivermectin-flogging doctors. Your question was "why is it the case that patients with the prescription can't make their own decisions based on their own risk tolerances?"
4. Your question was "Doesn't the prescribing doctor have a better understanding of the patients needs and situation than a pharmacist?" I answered that; they do not always, no; this fact is part of the reason they exist.
This goes a lot smoother if you follow the chain of the questions you asked through to my answers to them, rather than mixing up the context with a blender.
Overruling a doctor's prescribed treatment is a pretty extreme action. Drawing a rough parallel to abortion, I can see how they might choose not to carry Ivermectin and call it a day. But if they are selectively not filling prescriptions for political reasons, that is outrageous. There is no evidence that Ivermectin will cause patients harm. If they then took horse paste, there is evidence that the pharmacists stubbornness is causing more harm. It is better for people to take drugs under the supervision of a doctor.
3. You've had 2 goes at answering the question and you are struggling to even take a credible guess at how the prescription might have caused harm. And we know a doctor might think it is a fine thing to prescribe speculatively. But I think you have more problems than just that - it looks a lot like you're comfortable with the idea that a pharmacist can overrule a doctor and a patient based on gut feel and no evidence. Literally no evidence, given your responses so far. Are you really comfortable with that crazy stance? You don't think it is reasonable that patients trust and follow their doctors advice?
4. So in this specific case, do you think that the pharmacist suspected an interaction? Because I feel pretty confident you'd come off the worse if we check, but I'll admit I still haven't. The filling of Ivermectin scripts somehow became a political rather than a medical issue and this pharmacist is probably acting politically.
This time I'm sure the consensus/"the science" has got it right though.
Because there are examples of the medical community getting it wrong (btw they did not get it wrong when it came to opiates - everyone knew opiates were addictive) doesn't mean they are always wrong.
Also there is no way for you to figure out who the quacks are (of course they exist, there are MDs suggesting insane things all the time) and who the correct but contrarians are.
So, by default you assume if the opinion is not mainstream it must have validity.
Now, I'm not saying the opposite is true. I'm saying it is just as bad (or maybe even worse statistically) to form an opinion because it isn't mainstream as it is to form an opinion just because it IS mainstream.
You're not a critical thinker because you dismiss the mainstream because it is mainstream. Just the opposite.
Point is we also have a long history of genuine quacks and loonies, and they outnumber the genuine Cassandras to such an extent as to invalidate your heuristic. Statistically, if someone disagrees with the mainstream scientific consensus, they aren't a brave voice fighting the tide of darkness - just wrong.
Why would you mention only one list and not the other?
Why would you want to enlist as a soldier in one side of a cause where neither side is reliable, neither side has your best interests in mind?
You're playing yourself for a fool.
Yes, there is inertia in the scientific community, and sometimes the dissenting voices have a hard time being heard. That much is true.
But that is true because most of the time, the dissenting voices are wrong, if not outright lunatics.
You’re just as likely to see current or former GOP talking heads like Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, or Pat Buchanan as some DNC talking head. In fact, scrolling down their page just now, McConnell is the only actual politician I saw interviewed, though they did have a Biden speech clip.
Keep in mind that inviting Political opponents into your show can advance your political message if you lampoon them — but PBS News Hour has about the same ratio of push to pull interviewing politicians, never ever interrupts, and doesn’t ask cheap shot gotcha questions.
They are more likely to choose topics from a loosely mainstream democrat perspective — you’d be more likely to see a story about the ACLU releasing a statement about immigration than a law enforcement agency doing the same, but that sheriff or whatever is going to get equal respect and air time in that segment… and it’s not that extreme of a shift compared to mainstream outlets.
So I firmly believe that they fit the criteria for your specific question. Truthfully I think most people just don’t want that.
But that isn't the answer to the question asked in the parent comment. The parent was wondering which media would choose guests that have a differing view from theirs. The mainstream media happened to align with the people representing the general opinion of the medical and epidemiological community, and were rarely inviting Robert Malone, Peter McCullough, or Jay Bhattacharia, who had different views.
Whether they ultimately turn out to be right or wrong about any particular topic, the problem occurs much earlier: they choose their position before conclusive evidence is available, often, as in this case, based mostly on politics, then skew their coverage to fit.
I'd prefer to hear the arguments and evidence from an impartial source, not a political position.
My issue is that the use of IVM got politicized and as a result the will of many doctors and patients was undermined. A large number of the people who took it illicitly did it so because pharmacies stopped filling valid prescriptions.
If you want to talk about safety: The same crowd bitching about IVM happened to be the people pushing a vaccine with much less data supporting its safety and questionable efficacy on people under 50.
Their logic: - Mandate a new drug, using a new technology on the entire world, even though there were no real Phase III trials.
- Don’t look into prophylactic treatment options which are cheaper and known to be safe.
- Call anyone who studies anything else a conspiracy theorist and a quack
- Actively suppress peer reviewed articles that don’t follow the narrative. (Including refusing to publish or unpublishing work in major journals)
To be clear, IVM was just another politicization. It was a rush decision to reject the obvious mainstream option and an attempt to find alternative treatments so that people could take a medicine with known side effects and unknown efficacy over one with known efficacy and unknown side effects, all seemingly because it felt better to be counterculture and was an act of defiance against "big {your adjective of hate here}".
After billions or doses and ever more research it's pretty obvious which side made the right call.
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/ed-dowd-millennial-age-gr...
The risk is also far below aspirin. As to what you consider an acceptable placebo, why should anyone care? As long as we are all consenting adults, i would say mind your own business, would you?
Knowing that the more you try bossing people around, the more likely they are going to push back. Leaving us all in a non to friendly environment. So ask yourself, are you really willing to start societal conflict over denying people a non-harmful, not scares placebo?
further there were supply problems with ivermectin when only a small portion of the population was trying to take it. a clinical trial on ivermectin was halted due to supply issues. imagine if it were recommended broadly.
You also skipped over the the part of your opinion being not reason enough to start societal conflict. I do sympathies with your views, however any such behavior comes with a cost. And looking around we cant really afford more conflict over trivial things. Your feelings might not be important enough to add to the problem with no clear harm at stake.
Edit to add: not sure if I am alone in this, but I also disagree with the author's characterization that the purpose of thinking about fallacies is to understand how people come to wrong conclusions. I think it has much more to do with the structure of an argument. It's not "you have come to this wrong conclusion by treating this fallacy as a good argument". It's more like "you believe this for whatever personal reasons you might have. You are trying to convince me to believe it as well, but you are failing to do so because your argument is not valid". I.e. it is more about the rhetoric than it is about coming to wrong beliefs in the first place.
That's not really the point but, for some, yes, he does have more influence. That "some" apparently includes you.
>You don't think he gets negative press or death threats?
Again, not the point. You asked why Fauci and others weren't challenged. My response was that, not only is he challenged, but he's also been the target of personal attacks, conspiracy theories, and death threats.
>Rogan has a diverse assortment on his show, and admits he is not an expert
Yet, he continuously pushes a counter-mainstream narrative that you seem to be repeating here.
>However, when bodies of so-called authority or expert credentials make policy you and your family will have to live by
To each his/her own, but I think those credentials are meaningful. We've had expert public health guidance for decades brought to us by the "so-called experts" and it's generally served us well, as evidenced by the fact that you've probably never had polio, measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, etc. And, you're also not likely to die from a case of diarrhea.
>You are free to go after Rogan.
Yes. I know. But, I wasn't going after him, as much as pointing out the reality that people (seemingly yourself included) respect his opinions over those of public health officials.
The WHO screwed up for systemic reasons that commentators, at the time and without the benefit of hindsight, were able to call out. Specifically, they repeatedly claimed there was "no evidence" for cloth masks and "no evidence" for aerosol transmission. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and the organisation meant to coordinate a global medical response should know that. Many respiratory viruses spread by aerosol transmission, and it would have been responsible to say "we do not have enough evidence to say how COVID spreads yet." Additionally, there was evidence for the efficacy of cloth masks, but the papers were studying whether cloth masks were adequate replacements for surgical masks and N95 respirators in hospital settings, and they (rightly) concluded that cloth masks weren't as effective as actual PPE, from which the WHO (wrongly) concluded that cloth masks weren't effective at all.
The 'misinformation' label has made it really easy to just ignore a range of views through not wanting to be in 'that group.'
> But that is true because most of the time, the dissenting voices are wrong, if not outright lunatics
That's an incredibly broad generalisation, you're going to have to back that up with evidence. Does that also include those over-enthusiastically pushing the 'right' science that is in fact later proved wrong? Or are they not lunatics, just 'the science changed' on them?
Neither would some that disagreed were quasks so all who disagree with the mainstream are quacks, which is how they are treated.
Regardless, we do know that the vaccine saves lives, and what we definitely know at this point is there is going to be very little debate about how ineffective Ivermectin is.
This recent trend of treating science as an unquestionable reminds me much more of religion than of science. At this point in the covid game where quite a bit of the accepted science has changed, it seems that only people's egos are keeping them from seeing this.
What is happening especially now is precisely that, this whole 'misinformation' drive is to encourage the dismissal of critical opinion (on more and more topics it seems). This is a bad road to go down.
And you make a good example of the overall point: there should not be this 'mainstream' vs 'not-mainstream' and we just pick a side. We should all be mature enough not to fall for that silly manipulation and instead try to fully inform ourselves from a range of sources and challenge ourselves.
I think the reality is that because there are holes in the response to covid, people dismiss the whole.
Also, there's no real way for us to know what would have happened if we did nothing. Maybe another 1-2m dead - or maybe we'd be just where we are today.
> I think the reality is that because there are holes in the response to covid, people dismiss the whole
I think a more salient point is perhaps that because so much effort was put into covering the 'holes' (not to mention the coining and dissemination of the label 'misinformation') rather than be honest about them, distrust was created. It is sensible to question when any groups make concerted efforts to dismiss and censor alternative views, regardless of the merits. Evidence and transparency on the side of the reason/truth should not need such measures.
The authorities and press infantalised the population on the assumption people are too stupid to process information and make their own informed choices. This is bad precedent.
People gotta stop with this whole "you're either with the science or against it" rubbish. Be adults, inform yourself and make decisions. Don't just let media, politicians or fringe dwellers define your 'label' for you.
Complex issues need complex thought, but it's easy to just fall for paternalism and externalise your responsibility.
You're playing yourself the fool by thinking this is just a game of being on the winning team.
In this topic, it's clearly relevant that this is far from universally the case. The establishment is often correct as well. That's why you don't want to cherry pick all your experts from one side. Especially if you yourself lack the ability to tell which experts are more expert, which is definitely true in Rogan's case.
As in my other responses, I agree and my view is not to just dismiss a view just because of which 'side' it is on.
We must keep reprosecuting the evidence, data and opinions over time to try to maintain objectivity while avoiding being swayed by manipulation, fraud and/or populist consensus.
this is just a nonsensical argument. should we not push back against flat earthers because "what harm are they causing"? we should strive for an evidence based intelligent society. when morons push drugs without sufficient evidence the press and society at large should push back. too bad if Trump's and Joe Rogan's feelings are hurt.
> Producing more would also not have been a problem
It took months to get production of masks to sufficient levels.
Its also far from a nonsensical argument. This isnt about vocalizing your opinion and communicating facts but forcing the behavior of other people without an actual harm at stake. Those are two very different things. You also shouldnt force flat earthers on ship trips around the world just because they annoy you. As they will interpret that as a hostile action on your part and react in kind.
Lets make the argument practical. Even with zero effect, I believe given enough motivation i could convince myself that Ivermectin has some sort of effect. Which would very likely induce a placebo effect. For something where there is zero home treatment options which makes it the best option available to me since i wont be able to convince myself of the benefits of homeopathics. All with neglect-able personal risk and societal impact. Differently put, a lot of what i do has higher risk and higher negative societal impact for zero upside as well.
A placebo you however want to prevent me from acquiring because it annoys you. I do believe we can get most problems solved through a reasonable discussion, impact analysis, cost benefit analysis and last but not least cooperation. But you seem to think your feelings allow you to force me to do stuff that leaves me at a disadvantage (lack of a placebo) for no reason what so ever.
This leaves me with the realization, that you are not interested in cooperation. Game theory tells me to stop cooperating immediately till you learned your lesson. Why shouldnt i? Because you get angry and start fantasying about more force?
Unrelated how right you feel on this, i do not believe that we can get anywhere as a species if everyone acted as you do. At the end of the day, forcing people has a cost and creates a reaction. Or differently put, you cant fix stupidity by force. Especially since you might overestimate your ability to identify stupid.
No force was applied to ivermectin proponents. I don't know what you think I'm proposing. We merely enforced the sensible existing rules that drugs should be prescribed only when there is evidence they work.
The ivermectin proponents are generally anti vaccine. People took ivermectin as a substitute for the vaccine. In that way ivermectin hurt public health.
Your placebo argument is also an argument against the entire drug testing/approval process. It's just the same tired libertarianism argument with a rationalist paint job
> This leaves me with the realization, that you are not interested in cooperation
I have no idea what you're going on about.
So again, neither of us needs to be convinced that i am not an utter moron,
that might not be possible, but do you really want us to go on opposite sites of political camps over this? Not only am i not a nazi but i am a friendly idiot that is actually looking for cooperation, if you cant get along with me, who do you get along with? Because it seems to me like you already burned a lot of bridges and my cooperation can be bought at the very cheap price of not interfering in me getting my horse dewormer despite your utter contempt for my idiocy. Yes i do understand its a placebo, it isnt a substitute for a vaccine and i am of legally sound mind. So where do i sign?
So do you have a thought process and evaluation of the cost benefit analysis of starting a conflict over this? Because it seems not. You believing you are right doesnt make the consequences of those actions (the reactions) go away. The world is full of idiots who react to your actions unrelated to whether you are right. Which you can think about. And should unless you want to end up over time having started a conflict with all the idiots (ie everyone given the exposure to enough topics) despite being right.
Everything else you talk about re: burned bridges is silly. The population causing a problem here is small. Most people got vaccinated and don't want ivermectin. I won't cave to them just like I won't cave to Q supporters or flat earthers.
You act like not giving these people ivermectin took a lot of effort or was costly. Just the opposite. It was the default no effort action of a system working properly.
The burning bridges thing is silly as long as you look at individual problems. They sum up quickly. And your political camp just denied me lifesaving horse dewormer, didnt you? Some people might not take that lightly. I dont have to join Q anon or flat earthers to vote tactically to stop you. Especially if you think you get to act the way you do because i have no alternative.
I am pretty sure this is a very real mechanism at play explaining a lot of what we see around us. We really cant afford more confrontation over trivial stuff.