This is a byproduct of the arcane US medical system. The rich see a doctor and get drugs and are warned off ivermectin. The poor see doctors with meters attached, insert $$, get advice, follow advice to pharmacy = another meter, insert $$.
Even an ambulance can cost $1000.
In Rest of world the state pays health, so the first doctor visit kill the ivermectin myth and they get the proper medication at a fraction of the US price.
You can't say vaccine hesitancy hasn't been well earned. It's not like the US doesn't have a history of lying about medical procedures performed on misinformed citizens...
Fool me once, shame on you [Tuskegee]. Fool me twice, shame on me [MKULTRA]. Fool me three times...
I am so tired of seeing Tuskegee trotted out as an argument by anti vaxxers.
The Tuskegee experiment specifically targeted a selected group of African Americans and was an overtly racist program. COVID vaccines on the other hand are not targeting a specific sample group, they are being given to virtually everyone. There's no sample group. The two are not remotely comparable.
What kind of reasoning is this? Even if the government had not lied about medicine, or any other topic before, there is equally "no reason" that they couldn't lie going forward about anything and everything. Everyone and anyone could lie to you at any given moment. What's your point? How do you go on living your life?
"the government lied about vaccines a couple times a few decades ago so they are forever untrustable. Far right wing talking heads like Alex Jones lie on a daily basis, but they're inexplicably trustworthy for medical advice because reasons!"
So let’s run with that thought: the governments of almost every nation are outright lying about the vaccines. Also, a supermajority of folk have been vaccinated in most of the advanced nations.
Now what? The government lied and… the plan is to have 80% of the population die? How does that benefit those in power? The economy would crash. Production of everything—food, cars, houses—would cease. Healthcare, education, policing, infrastructure maintenance—all would collapse. First-world society would disintegrate.
It makes no sense to believe the powers that be are lying about the vaccine.
Oh, and also: the unvaccinated make the vast majority of hospitalizations. Now the lie is even more crazy: the vaccine is obviously great at keeping people out of the hospital, but also the governments are all lying about the vaccine. It’s just sheer crazypants conspiracy thinking, through and through.
> The Tuskegee experiment specifically targeted a selected group of African Americans.
Ah, and if they did that (and a thousand other things, many of which were not limited to African Americans, including the aforementioned MKULTRA) and suffered no repercussions for it whatsoever, well, I'm sure they still learned their lesson and would never dream of doing something like it again.
> You can't say vaccine hesitancy hasn't been well earned.
Sure you can. People spend their entire lives studying this shit, dedicating their entire careers to saving people who sit on facebook all day and post nonsense they hear on podcasts and other credit-less sources.
It's not "vaccine hesitancy". It's stupidity.
Domain experts know more than your conspiracy-theorist crazy Facebook aunt. There is no conspiracy here. It doesn't benefit big pharma by giving it out for free, essentially. There are a handful of other pharmas that did want to rush the vaccine and as a result did not make it to manufacturing because they didn't pass the regulatory process.
So no, vaccine "hesitancy" has not been "well earned".
Do the experts have any long term studies on efficacy (5+ years out)? It seems like they figured out the 6 month (or is it 5? or 8?) window only recently. It also seems learning the vaccine is non sterilizing is new as well.
I don't fault them for any of this. Science takes time and iteration. Nobody can account for unknown unknowns - the only solution is time.
For a start, we could stop making claims that we don't know to be true. Replace "the vaccine is safe and effective, and if we all get the vaccine the pandemic will be over" with "the vaccine is the best tool we have to prevent serious disease and death".
Exactly, I have no reason to doubt that the vast majority of ivermectin users are taking it as an alternative to and not in tandem with a free vaccine, and vaccine inaccessibility is way down in the list of justifications unvaccinated people give in polls.
Another fact along those lines, government spending per capita in the US is on par with European nations. We just receive vastly less services for the same and often more money.
Are you sure extremely poorly educated population isn't also a major factor in this matter? I bet good money that these are the very same people that believe in creationism over evolution, that bush did 9/11, on bigfoot and the illuminati, et al.
I agree that our medical system is fucked, but what exactly are you referring to here? The process seems the same from when I was poor and now that I'm rich. Make appointment -> pay money -> see doctor -> get prescription -> go to pharmacy -> pay money -> get drugs. And the advice I get from doctors doesn't seem to be any better now. It's not like doctors that poor people see are intentionally giving bad medical advice.
Perhaps they don't even see a doctor, at least not in the official manner. I know of people who consult medical practitioners in a "black market" fashion because it's so much cheaper (and in some ways more convenient) than the proper medical-industrial-complex way.
They're saying the upfront costs of healthcare put poor people off going to the doctor at all and leads to distrust of doctors as just being in it for the money. At least that's the way I read it.
I think the point was that those who can afford it can see better doctors, particularly those who are less likely to be swayed by pharmaceutical company incentives. Case in point would be, when you were poor did you go to the same doctor in the same neighborhood now that you are rich?
Kind of like those who can afford them can receive better lawyers than overworked public defenders.
As a doctor, someone tell me where I can sign up for some of these pharmaceutical incentives. I guess I am out of the loop as after a decade of practice, no one has come knocking
Here in Canada, the payment is by the Ontario Health plan. I pay nothing except for a small list of meds, like colchicine.
This is an excellent system, conditions that need immediate attention are seen immediately, and treatment is fast. Elective procedures, like knees worn out take more time. Bad knee from car crash immediate system.
There is a steady loss of doctors to the USA, but the documentary process with a huge number of providers has led to fee based invoice creators, and there are fee based invoice deniers that make doctors wait long periods to be paid, and if they are denied = round again.
We now get as many doctors leaving as entering as the process can eat up half the doctor's time. Ask any US doctor about this process...
there’s actually a different procedure if you are on government issue it’s the governments bill, so if you get injured they won’t suggest the same care right away that they would to someone who had better insurance. you do not think this is happening but my mother and sister years and years ago did medical transcription (before speech to text was a big thing) and the notes from the doctors were insanely prejudice towards people who did that dress well, or who used government insurance. today’s standards talking how they talked would get anyone fired, but that attitude is still there with certain doctors. so yeah i still believe care is withheld due to insurance. it might not be done out of mistreatment of the patient but purely procedural, like an mri cost more than an x-ray, so they will suggest the x-ray first and never bring up an mri until the patient insists on it, that’s the type of low key care difference.
there has not been any studies on this to my knowledge but i’ve experienced it before with friends who do not work jobs that provide healthcare options.
i am not sure if it is done consciously or not, a lot of judgements are subconscious and that will affect outcome.
We have universal national healthcare here, and people still take ivermectin because (someone on) Facebook told them to. Before that it was Hydroxychloroquine including one major newspaper running articles on how it helps with COVID (which not only it doesn't but it is illegal to run advertisements on pharmaceuticals around here).
So I dunno if US medical system has much to do with it. It seems more like someone weaponized Facebook and other social media to get gullible people to commit mass murder-suicide by refusing vaccinations, masks and taking poison.
Or it's an emergent phenomenon with no master behind it, who knows.
Why do you mention hydroxychloroquine as if it were snake oil? At least some hospitals here administered it as part of their covid routine, ostensibly because they believed it helped according to the science.
As far as I understand, they were using it before we had the vaccine as "it might work, it might not, better than nothing". But I don't know the details. I think the practice was discontinued later?
But the space it occupied in the public debate (at least around here) was the same Ivermectin does now - not "better than nothing" but "use this instead of the vaccine because evil media and pharma and gubmint is lying to you".
The other side of it is that it was unnecessarily lambasted and made to seem unscientific when it was being administered by our hospitals.
People would go in Twitter and shout "people promoting HCQ are idiots!" while their grandpa was in the hospital on that very drug as administered by doctors.
Unfortunately, hydroxychloroquine, like Ivermectin, has become politicized. Although a Gilead shareholder with a bias towards Remdesivir, I know that the cost and infusion method (IV) makes Remdesivir much less likely to be used and contraindicated for home use.
I hope this rampant politicization of drugs stops before it hits the important drug classes like ACE2 inhibitors, bronchodilators or anti-inflammatories.
It'd be a real shame if someone were to take the Pzifer COVID vaccine, slap a ivermectin label on it, and then sell it to people searching for ivermectin. Real, real shame.
Disclaimer: I am not implying I buy into the theories about ivermectin being an effective treatment for COVID.
This feels like another situation where the attempts to quell disinformation are having the opposite of their intended effect.
Depending on where these people first learned of this drug, there is some pretty confusing information floating around. When someone like Bret Weinstein points out that ivermectin is used widely and safely to treat river blindness, but most media sources are focused on “it’s a horse dewormer”, people stop listening.
Censoring most information about the human use of the drug is driving conspiracy types to decreasingly reputable sources and I’d argue that this is more responsible for the overdoses than anything.
It's like when the CDC first said that masks are ineffective to try to keep people from hoarding them. People are wise to the game now, and expect that the CDC is saying things to influence behavior, rather than because they are true. Nobody trusts a salesman.
“They are effective, but doctors need them more, so please don’t hoard” is different from “they are not effective”, hence is a lie.
This should be a lesson to all those corporate-like structures in public sector where they use common enterprise tactics of middle management to say things in the non-specific way so that later down the road they can cover their asses.
They had to be very specific, don’t lie, simply say about things they are not sure about “we don’t know” (hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin etc.) and do tests, never say “vaccines are safe”, but say they are 100000 times less dangerous than disease etc.
And then we could trust every word they just say as we know that they are very aware of what they are saying and they haven’t lied to us in a lot of situations before.
They should govern, but instead they play politics… wtf really.
> “They are effective, but doctors need them more, so please don’t hoard” is different from “they are not effective”, hence is a lie.
No, that doesn't follow. Do you have any evidence the CDC knew this was false, and was consistently messaging to the contrary (aka not a pointer to things like 280-char tweets where everyone understands bandwidth would be limited)?
A lie requires intent to deceive, i.e. dishonesty. Not something where they're forced to summarize and strip out details, but provide the details elsewhere when they have the chance. And certainly not a genuine, honest mistake. I have yet to see evidence the CDC knew that masks are effective and yet lied about it. And nobody here has been willing to provide any evidence of that either. Just because they might have been inaccurate in their assessment of the situation, doesn't mean they were lying. Just like how, just because you say "we ran out of ketchup, can you buy some from the store?" and then discover you had some in the back of your fridge, that doesn't mean you're lying.
And btw, I don't even know what example you're talking about. If you're talking about my example like I said, at 1:32, the reporter clearly communicates "surgical masks are not that effective". And it wasn't the CDC talking either. You should really link whatever you're talking about because it doesn't seem to be this example.
> "Seriously people - STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!"
There was absolutely quite a bit of false messaging on the point from authority figures.
(a) Do you call any case where someone turns out to be wrong "false messaging"? Their prior knowledge led them to believe (wrongly, but it seems to me, quite honestly) that non-N95 masks would not be effective, and they didn't have evidence to the contrary, and they very openly explained that their fear is healthcare providers not having masks, which was 100% a sincere worry any official worth their salt would have.
(b) A tweet only has so much room to explain things. There's a reason websites in general, official CDC recommendations in particular, and the news media exist. If the only source of information you get your news from for several weeks amidst a pandemic is Twitter, and the tweet turns out to be lacking some info, the problem isn't the source you're reading.
(c) Even if you establish there was "false messaging from the surgeon general on Twitter" (which you haven't due to the reasons above), it's quite a goalpost move from "the CDC was being deceptive/manipulative". Especially when the the surgeon general was picked by the president and specifically not the NIH authority figure that the nation was looking up to 24/7.
They stated something as fact to influence our behavior, when they did not actually have the requisite knowledge to make such a statement at that point in time.
They should have instead said "We don't know whether they're effective yet, so don't hoard them, because doing so could cause X."
There's nothing wrong with admitting you don't know something yet.
Instead, they make commands without supporting evidence. That implies total disregard for the peoples' intelligence. Upon realizing this, trust is lost and dissenting actions increase.
A leader's most important role is to build and maintain trust.
> "Seriously people - STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!"
This could very easily have been reworded to an honest "we do not know if they are effective" instead of a definitive "they are not". You cannot in good conscience call yourself a good leader and/or scientist if you do not acknowledge the limits of your understanding.
People may not understand the science, but they understand trust. And given that no individual has the time and/or intelligence to understand the science, breaches of trust should be the end of a leader's career. They're failing in their most important duty.
"Stop buying masks. There is a shortage and if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk! Since we live in a very capitalistic society we cannot reserve masks for healthcare use and instead we have to rely on all of you to do the right thing. Keep in mind that masks may not offer the kind of protection you think they do, i.e. they do not make you invincible, you're still advised to stay at home and keep social distancing. When supply of masks will be restored we will likely encourage people to wear them as to reduce community (probabilistic) spread, which works even if the masks are not 100% effective."
Unfortunately nobody would read things that don't fit in a tweet.
“Masks are in short supply; we are asking major vendors to sell them only to local hospitals. We are working to improve supply. Here’s how to make a cloth one for now, as well as advice on staying safe.”
There’s an idea with masks where preventing any infection or virus that you could contract while stricken with COVID will shorten the period of time you have COVID and thus shorten the window in which you are contagious.
That was always true and will always be true. Even if COVID flows right through masks, there will still always be a plausible reason to wear them.
You cherry picked a video from April after he changed his mind. Here's what he said in March.
"There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face."
First, no, I didn't cherry-pick anything, it was literally the first video I saw when I searched on YouTube. I certainly didn't even recall your video.
Second, if you're going to accuse cherry-picking, look at the very crucial quotes you omitted from your own clip:
- Right before your quote he had added very critical qualifiers that you skipped: He specifically said, "Right now, in the United States, there's no reason to be walking around with a mask." Mind you, this was on March 8, pre-lockdown. He explicitly made it clear this guidance could change as the situation evolves (or, as you wrote, "change his mind" should he get more data or see circumstances change... how horrifying!), and he specifically said in the United States, likely because the epidemic was much less severe than it became in the following weeks (it wasn't even declared a pandemic yet!), so they thought it could be better handled without telling everyone to wear masks. He clearly genuinely believed at the time that the protection they would be likely to provide would be small compared to the benefits of saving them for hospitals.
- Also note that he continued to provide context: "When you think masks, you should think of healthcare providers needing them, and people who are ill." Again, he's explaining his concerns. You can't ignore that.
- Also note that he even specifically explained: "When you look at the films of foreign countries and you see 85% of people wearing masks, that's fine, that's fine. I'm not against it. But that's when it can lead to a shortage of masks for people who need it." i.e.: If he wasn't worried about a shortage, he wouldn't be telling people not to wear masks.
You can't honestly hear all that and accuse him (or me...) of dishonesty with that clip.
> "Right now, in the United States, there's no reason to be walking around with a mask."
And when he did decide we should be walking around with masks he didn't cite any evidence. He said it was because surgical and N95s masks were in short supply.
When I was trying to find this video, I came across another video where he speaks in absolute terms that all we need to do is wears masks, social distance and practice good hygiene we would turn around the pandemic. I understand that things change over time, but whenever he speaks, he speaks as if what he is saying is fact. Now we even have vaccines and we clearly haven't turned it around. This is why people don't trust this guy.
I honestly don't see how you can watch all these videos and still trust this guy. I get that things change, but that's why you don't speak in absolute terms. Words matter.
I'm not saying I "trust" him (or don't). I'm saying I've seen no evidence he's been lying, trying to mislead the public, or whatever other maligned accusations people have been hurling at him all over the internet. When something looks like an honest mistake, why cut into others' characters instead of just calling it out as an honest mistake? Especially with half-quoted clips like that? Say he was wrong all you want (though I highly doubt you would've been a better NIH director). But don't cut into his character without evidence (or mine, for that matter). Not only does it take a lot of audacity to suggest you would've foreseen things better than someone who's spent his life dealing with epidemics (and not all unsuccessfully so), but hurling unfounded accusations like that at everyone whose judgment you don't like is just infuriating, insulting, and unproductive.
> When it looks like an honest mistake, why call it a lie instead of an honest mistake?
I linked you to evidence that shows he lied. In the first video he said masks don't work. It clearly wasn't an "honest mistake".
> I highly doubt you would've been a better NIH director
Nice strawman. I never said I would be, but I know one thing for sure: I wouldn't deliberately lie to the American public about something so important.
> But don't cut into his character without evidence
There is plenty of evidence that he's a liar. I don't know what else you need.
> Not only does it take a lot of audacity to suggest you would've foreseen things better
Yet another strawman. I never said that. Are you replying to the right comment?
> hurling unfounded accusations like that at everyone whose judgment you don't like is just infuriating, insulting, and unproductive
The accusation that Fauci deliberately lied? It's pretty founded if you ask me. It's infuriating, insulting, and unproductive to protect someone so obsessively and thinking he can do no wrong.
No, you most definitely did not. You ignored most of the video and started quoting him mid-sentence. As I already explained to you. You've shown zero evidence that his genuine belief was anything different than he communicated in that interview. At best, all you've showed is that he gave poor advice, and even that itself is highly questionable given how you still can't be bothered to even quote him properly and depict the interview accurately. It's not exactly hard to make someone look like a monster when you cut their quotes in half and ignore all the surrounding context.
This conversation clearly isn't going anywhere so I'm not going to continue responding.
The last study I saw seemed to imply that cloth masks have a very tiny effect, if any, but surgical masks are pretty good.
The problem is that the media doesn't do nuance, they write big bold headlines that are outrage bait to drive engagement. And more than a few people never read anything but the headline.
At this point, I feel like headlines themselves are harmful.
Yes that's unfortunate. For what it's worth, Anthony Fauci was on a podcast in June, 2021 where he discussed the mid-2020 mask advice among other things. He basically said that, yes, they didn't want people to hoard them, but also that, based on experience with the original SARS, only visibly (symptomatically) sick people were spreading the virus. Of course we know now that SARS-CoV-2 spreads asymptomatically for days/weeks, but hindsight is 20/20...
Unpack the word “effective” used here. It is still the case that ordinary cloth masks are less effective than higher grade masks.
As a health official you are weighing the question: do we advocate a sub-optimal approach on the grounds that it is better than nothing, when we know a large segment of the population will be militantly non-compliant anyway? There were anti-mask protests back in the Spanish Flu days too.
Point being, it’s not a binary thing, and there’s some consensus that has to be built in the early stages.
So this is what confuses me. I understand why some people might have started to lose trust in the CDC because they thought they were intentionally lying because they didn't trust people to do the right thing. Or as you say, they start to see the CDC as "salesmen."
But why do they therefore inherently trust the other people saying to take hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and these other solutions? Aren't these people also salesmen?
This also confuses me. I hear people say this and yet I don't know how it's possible to look at third-party information without inherently trusting someone in the chain of distributing that evidence.
The announcement is for people with basic reasoning skills, not for those that take drugs based on Facebook posts. Ivermectin, like many drugs, is used for various things. COVID is not one of them, and those pushing it have no expertise to understand the medical studies, nor are they interested in doing a comprehensive evaluation. Yet again, actual experts aren't on the playing field, it's talking heads and hired degrees.
Ivermectin is being prescribed off-label for Covid-19 by tens of thousands of doctors nationwide. Are those "people with no expertise to understand the medical studies"?
Yes, there are plenty of shitty incompetent doctors like there are with any other profession. Did these same doctors not contribute to the opioid crisis? Can every programmer understand every whitepaper and implement what they read?
Agree, and I have no reason to believe that international and national health organisations don't have their own fair share of shitty incompetent doctors too.
I don't listen to the first contractor or plumber on a big job, either. There is nothing special about the position or opinions of medical professionals that I shouldn't seek additional information or help.
How frequently do you think people consult more than one doctor when they are sick? I know people do it for expensive, chronic conditions like cancer, but I’m guessing that for urgent infections diseases the frequency is vanishingly small.
The only reason you think it's inherently shitty and incompetent for a doctor to prescribe ivermectin off-label for Covid is because you've bought into the dumb culture war politicization of it. I'm not a Bill Maher fan but he made a good point when he said "ivermectin isn't a registered Republican, it's a drug." Maybe it doesn't actually work (unlike so many on the other side of this issue I am at least willing to grant that the evidence is mixed), but in the doses it's being prescribed it has a very safe side-effect profile. Why is it that the only correct standard of care for an early-onset Covid case is "sit at home and hope it doesn't get worse"?
Maybe I'm a fan of science, of which there is NO evidence that Ivermectin works against COVID. It seems like maybe you're the one that bought into something.
These doctors are doing nothing more than profiting off the fear of their patients, while offering no value other than what might be argued is a placebo. That doesn't stop these people from infecting others around them.
You sound more like a fan of the mainstream narrative than science. The studies on ivermectin are ongoing. By just ignorantly saying "there is no evidence" as meaning that it's been proven to be ineffective, you show how scientifically illiterate you are. No evidence doesn't guarantee something isn't true.
In fact, if you had read the article you would have learned that they haven't ruled out ivermectin and are still researching it along with other treatments. If you want to take ivermectin they want you to be part of the study. This is how science works.
"The NIH is studying the drug in a large trial comparing a half-dozen established drugs to see if they have some effect against COVID-19.
Experts say those interested in ivermectin should ask about enrolling in such studies."
> By just ignorantly saying "there is no evidence" as meaning that it's been proven to be ineffective, you show how scientifically illiterate you are.
There is less than no evidence, and yet there are several studies already. It’s chloroquine all over again. The quacks are those who jump at any random drug, justifying the lack of evidence as a reason for their support, while decrying vaccines for a supposed lack of evidence.
A study being done is not a reason to support prescribing a drug.
Agreed. I have a friend who is a dr who already says a “hard no” on ivermectin even after I’ve stated that I’m ok being wrong about the issue and I want further investigation. I just don’t want this drug to be politicized but here we are. Full stop, you can’t talk about the drug, etc. I’m just trying to keep an open mind here
>The only reason you think it's inherently shitty and incompetent for a doctor to prescribe ivermectin off-label for Covid is because you've bought into the dumb culture war politicization of it
Right wing politicians and right wing media politicized it to minimize impact of covid on the 2020 election.
> for those that are prescribing it, this is not an FDA approved treatment for Covid.
Most (all?) off-label prescriptions aren't FDA approved for that use, that's what makes them off-label. Prescribing drugs off-label is an acceptable practice, although it's generally higher risk to do so than with an FDA approved treatment as there's less information available.
I haven't looked into this particular off-label use, and it certainly has a lot of signs of poor advisability, but one way the medical community figures out what drugs work for conditions with limited treatment options is trying random things and reporting on what seems to work; then those things can be tested in more controlled situations.
General clinical doctors are barely qualified to prescribe acetaminophen. They haven't been to medical school in 30 years, don't read medical studies, and have lost their ability to learn anything new. It's just a job to them.
Also, there aren't thousands of doctors doing that. If so I'd love an actual source.
The main responsibility for the overdoses falls with the FDA and AMA, which are actively discouraging physicians from prescribing ivermectin off-label and pharmacies from filling those prescriptions.
It seems that humans have an in-built affinity for groups and group affiliation, so if your in-group says something you tend to go with it instead of believing your lying eyes.
> other research suggesting the drug would need to be given at levels 100 times the standard dose to have antiviral effects in humans.
I find it rather absurd to refuse a vaccine the FDA has approved and then take something at 100X the dose and off-label considering that a good idea since the FDA approved it for humans.
Before the delta wave there were arguments for probability that covid wouldn't become endemic so one was comparing a 5-10% of covid to getting vaccinated, now one is comparing 100% chance of covid with vaccination. If one thinks one will use Ivermectin when infected then one should vaccinate instead.
Conflating veterinary horse paste ivermectin with the human version of ivermectin is one of the most brazen lies I've ever seen from the American media, who is actively pushing pharmaceutical industry propaganda.
Just one of many examples this week:
"Joe Rogan has told his Instagram followers he has been taking ivermectin, a deworming veterinary drug formulated for use in cows and horses, to help fight the coronavirus."
That's framed as though he took a drug for cows and horses! He certainly did not.
Meanwhile, this is the human version of ivermectin, the one Joe Rogan took:
"In 2015, William Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for its discovery and applications. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines... Between 1995 and 2010 the program using donated ivermectin to prevent river blindness is estimated to have prevented seven million years of disability whilst costing US$257 million."
Re-read that. It's on the WHO's list of essential medicines. It prevented seven million years of disability for less than $300M. Is that anything remotely like the way it's being portrayed by the media?
It's a cheap, Nobel Prize winning medication that is proven safe, having been used billions of times in humans.
Oh, but you can overdose on it? Just like most drugs?
As for its use with regard to Covid, I'm vaccinated and wouldn't personally seek it out, but here's a meta analysis of 63 studies https://ivmmeta.com/ which would suggest it's worth looking at. If doctors are prescribing it, such as in Joe Rogan's case, I don't see why that should be a problem.
I've seen so much on this subject here lately, I cannot resist asking the following question: If there's really such an altruistic, humanitarian concern, why not disclose the actual differences between the veterinary and human variety rather than vaguely implying possible absorption issues. The difference of a 1200lb beast vs 160lb human is a bit too easy. The ingredients, however, might offer a clue.
Also, as I understand, ivermectin is more commonly used as a cat (and sometimes dog) medicine, ie Revolution, that is, if cats outnumber domestic horses. I wonder if the cute-factor of people using catpaste would reduce the outrage.
Honest question regarding the data on ivmmeta.com: I had heard that there was some pre-existing fraud in some Ivermectin studies. I don't know how true that is. Is it true? And if so, does this website account for that by withholding those ones?
It is probably more accurate to describe IVM as a safe antiparasitic with well-known antiviral qualities.
However, we don't always know when something has antiviral properties whether it has efficacy or not against a specific virus. That is why a number of studies is a great contributor to determining when it can be of use, or not.
Just to point out, I wasn't talking about Ivermectin, I have no qualifications to say anything about the medicine. Just commenting on the bogus "scientific" site the parent linked to, ivmmeta.
It is inappropriate to critique a drug's studies, and to apply them to the overall drug itself.
"because the studies are flawed, the drug is useless"
A more measured response would be to look through the actual studies themselves, ferret out good from bad, and then to draw conclusions.
Additionally, to ask questions about variables for which we know there are a ton of potential reasons why we'd see differences. Foremost being food/drug synergism, prescription requirements, genetic differences in drug MOA, and variation of actual covid type.
Protocols like Zelenko/McCullough do not list any one drug as a "wonder drug" but instead have a large number of drugs and vitamins to treat all the specific indications in more classes of drugs
And from what a doctor told me most of those studies refuse to recall themselves after purposefully and heavily weighting a study that has been recalled for blatantly falsifying data and lying about the math.
Additionally horse ivermectin is a big part of the problem. People are literally going to vets and getting horse ivermectin and taking it. So it isn’t the media that is conflating them. At least not the so called “leftist media”. It is idiots who insist on lying about its effectiveness.
That person is claiming issue is not about horse version, but about human version. He implies media spread false information when they talk about the issue.
They are. If they weren't, they'd say "People are overdosing on ivermectin by taking doses intended for Horses." Instead they call the drug itself a "horse dewormer," and make it sound like that's its exclusive use, and that it should not be taken by humans in any dose. That's false.
People know when they're being played for fools and if you don't treat them as if they're capable of nuance you will only lose their trust and push them further away.
Well, they should not be taken by humans in any dose to try and treat respiratory problems. If your doctor gives you a prescription of ivermectin to treat some worm problems, knock yourself out, but there's nothing wrong a simple general message "do not take ivermectin just because you thing you want it" - it's a prescription drug, so use only if explicitly, personally advised by a doctor who has looked into your particular problem and decided that this is the right thing for it.
I agree. People are doing the wrong thing by taking horse-sized doses, and should be careful with drugs that are not prescribed to them. The way you're phrasing things would be a much more understandable message that would not push people further away.
The question of whether or not to take things not prescribed to you is another question I suppose. LSD is an illegal drug but helps a lot of people. Ivermectin is widely, widely used and safely at that. Not being prescribed is not the same as being dangerous, so when it comes to self-medication my personal belief is that it is acceptable to work outside those boundaries, so long as you're being knowledgable and safe about it. (Which a lot of people are not doing in this case.)
It's a privileged view to see this as a new phenomenon. People without financial means to access the human medical system have been using things like fish antibiotics for years: https://fishmoxfishflex.com/collections/fish-antibiotics
“No scientific basis for a potential therapeutic effect against COVID-19 from pre-clinical studies;
No meaningful evidence for clinical activity or clinical efficacy in patients with COVID-19 disease, and;
A concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies.” - merek
The problem is people using it off label, in dangerous quantities, INSTEAD of taking the vaccine.
Why would it matter if the medical community thinks ivermectin is safe or not, if the people making this choice don’t trust medical science enough to take the vaccine.
they are not conflating it. they literally describe the difference in the article you posted.
> Dr. David Boulware of the University of Minnesota says the drug’s side effects are mild at two or even three times the usual human dose. But formulations for farm animals might contain 1,000 times what’s safe for humans.
People need a prescription for Ivermectin (human dosage) but since they can't do that. They're taking the horse paste version without understanding the difference or knowing that its a much higher concentration..
And what are you talking about with "pharmaceutical industry propaganda?" Ivermectin is literally owned by Merck, who has said not to take it. The pharmaceutical industry would be the ones actively profiting of Ivermectin.
Ask yourself: why does the big photo only show the veterinary version? Why do so many headlines classify it as horse paste medicine? They are fully aware most people only read the headlines or above the fold. They bury mention of human dosage to have plausible deniability, knowing most people won't ever see it.
As for Merck, they are creating a new, patented version for Covid use. They want ivermectin discredited because anyone can make it. This is how that industry operates.
> Why do so many headlines classify it as horse paste medicine?
Because, convinced in the absence of evidence, some people are acquiring it by the path of least resistance, which is farm-related retailers.
Some ask their doctors. Some of those doctors say sure because it's relatively safe. Others say no because they point out there's scant evidence it's effective.
The worst part is people are taking this in lieu of a vaccine because they're so convinced that it's ineffective or gene therapy or experimental and dangerous, etc. We're not dealing with data based reasoning. It's an emotional response rooted to some degree in American partisanship.
If that was the concern the headlines would say: "Don't confuse horse ivermectin with prescribed ivermectin!"
That would be the PSA and approach. But it's not about warning people or any kind of concern about those who foolishly take a horse sized dose. It's about shaming them and pushing the interests of the pharma industry.
The "debate" is hilarious, overblown and infantile, like always, but yeah the facts are pretty simple: Great for worm problems (river blindness being a worm problem). No reason thus far, other than wishful thinking, to believe it's good for anything else.
Ivermectin is an antiparasitic, but it also has well-known antiviral properties too [1] [2]. Chose a study that did not relate to C19 since I think we all hate HIV/AIDS, Dengue Fever, and what was once a scourge in Yellow Fever.
As with any other drug, it is important to consider Ivermectin toxicity [3]. That would be my primary concern for the general population taking veterinary sized doses intended for large animals. I would never do that - I would talk to a doctor, preferably an infectious disease doc that has experience treating this malady, and get a prescription for it, and follow dosing instructions.
we're on "Hacker News". This is anonymous website. WHOIS is hidden. It runs on Google Cloud. Nobody is signed, they use mysterious "we". And what is "real-time meta analysis" - that's not a real scientific term.
You know, all and all pretty suspicious website, for what it claims to be.
Note for readers like me inside the liberal media bubble: the Ivermectin craze isn't 100% nonsense where hillbillies take their horse medicine. As the article notes, it's been seriously studied in various countries and so far afaik hasn't been proved to not be effective.
yes but thats grammatically obtuse so as to avoid conveying clear information. its very easy for someone reading that to come away with the wrong info due to the redundant negation.
> it's been seriously studied in various countries and so far afaik hasn't been proved to not be effective.
It also hasn't been proven to be effective.
Edit: to further show why this is a ridiculous approach towards using something that is unproven to treat a disease: cat urine has also not been proven to not be an effective Covid treatment.
I'm on board with the argument that it hasn't yet been proven to be effective, and should be judged as such.
The argument about cat urine no longer seems in good faith, though. There are multiple studies evaluating ivermectin as a COVID treatment, but there are no such studies about cat urine.
I understand what you're trying to say; however, there's at least enough interest in ivermectin to warrant real trials.
I'm not optimistic that it'll be some miracle cure, but let's not pretend it's cat urine.
We shouldn’t feel obliged to correct the misinformation of mainstream propaganda.
If you are dumb and arrogant enough to believe that people are dumb enough to stick an ivermectin dispenser designed for horses in human mouths, you deserve to live in the private psychological hell you’ve created for yourself.
No one is saying that, yes it’s hilarious to watch people take the horse version. And we absolutely should
Make fun of them. But just like I’m not using a leg splint to treat cancer, ivermectin doesn’t treat a virus. It’s not the “liberal” media it’s science dumbass.
You have to positively demonstrate that a treatment is effective and safe enough to prescribe. It's not enough for something to have not yet been proven not to work. Otherwise, you could sell gumdrops as a cure for cancer, because nobody has proved gumdrops don't cure cancer. Technically true, but not responsible medicine!
I think it's possible that ivermectin could have positive effect (less hospitalizations) on people with parasites who contracted Covid-19.
After-all a lot of people die not from Covid-19 but from complications from it.
I think the main issue with it's use is, similar to antibiotic resistance, (note that it's not antibiotic or antiviral) overuse will lessen it's effectiveness when needed the most.
Parent's claim doesn't really require that. I believe they are just theorizing that some people carry unknown parasitic infections and taking anti-parasitics clears that which happens to put them in a batter place to clear covid as well.
Neither has been cyanide. And since i've always wanted to be a cult leader, I say that it's possible that cyanide cures wuhan virus disease if you ingest minute quantities of it. Don't forget to smash that like button, hit subscribe, and click on the bell icon.
Fun fact, the clinical trials for hydroxychloroquine were basically shanked by data which made it appear dangerous that turned out to be completely fabricated.
Well there was that study published in the Lancet dunking on HCQ using manufactured data that even made it past peer review. This despite the data failing the most basic of smell tests:
Let's suppose ivermectin has a weak positive effect. I am fine with the possibility. My doctor believed in that, he prescribed it, me and my family took it (my kid would take it anyway for other reasons).
The big problem (in Brazil at least) is, the bozo president and his entourage elected this medicine as a silver bullet, saying that we didn't need vaccines, didn't need any social isolation (let alone lockdowns), etc.
These bozos created a false dichotomy: one thing is to take a chance and swallow some medicine as last-ditch attempt when you have no other known option. They use this reasoning to say nothing else was needed.
If, like European me, you're wondering how in the nine hells of Baator the US ended up in a situation whereby what a doctor prescribes has somehow become political, I found this primer (on Twitter) by the US Journalist Ben Collins to be highly informative:
A interesting observation I had recently was that some people who tend to have views around recreational drugs that can be described "live and let live" are up in arms about ivermectin. I know a guy who uses horse tranquilizers recreationally who posts on Facebook everyday about the "morons who are taking horse medicine". Personally I don't care if you use either, it isn't my body.
We are in a age where you no longer must be remotely logically consistent in your arguments and it's fascinating to watch.
People are frustrated with the resistance to vaccines from people willing to take a lot less sound medicine and like it or not, vaccines are a social issue. It's actually very logical.
To my read, the arguments you are making are not different from the ones made about marijuana legalization, and medical marijuana.
> that doesn't have the effect they're using it for
Similarly, the FDA claims that marijuana has no legitimate medical use.
> when there's a better alternative
Many people consider alcohol or tobacco to be alternatives to marijuana. Further, all of the conditions treated by marijuana have alternatives for treatment of some kind.
> which is freely available
Alcohol and tobacco are freely available. All of the alternatives to marijuana are available via a prescription.
> AND the knock-on effects are harming other people
Watch Reefer Madness. Take a look around the moral panic where marijuana has been legalized in regards to driving. "Since we can't tell accurately how high someone is, they could get stoned and be a risk to everyone on the highway!". Or what about "You are funding terrorism/organized crime!". I can't also neglect to mention the "think of the children" card that is often played, "If the drug was more available, children might get their hands on it!". If I had chosen a less benign drug at the start of this, I could talk about people overdosing, or the harms of addiction, or people accidently killing themselves while having drug induced hallucinations, and so on and so on.
> By mid-August U.S. pharmacies were filling 88,000 weekly prescriptions for the medication, a 24-fold increase from pre-COVID levels, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Meanwhile, U.S. poison control centers have seen a five-fold increase in emergency calls related to the drug, with some incidents requiring hospitalization.
So despite prescriptions going up x24, and some unknown number of people taking veterinary versions of the drug, emergency calls have only gone up x5? Wouldn't we expect it to be around x24 or greater?
Also, the lack of stats on hospitalization is interesting, in that there aren't any. From another article on the same subject, Mississippi at least has apparently had zero (https://msdh.ms.gov/msdhsite/_static/resources/15400.pdf).
This whole thing just seems like a manufactured story that gets clicks because it plays into prejudices about rural Americans.
> So despite prescriptions going up x24, and some unknown number of people taking veterinary versions of the drug, emergency calls have only gone up x5? Wouldn't we expect it to be around x24 or greater?
Presumably most of the hospitalizations are from the non-prescription use and less people are likely to take medicine "off-book" and some of those are at least clever enough to work out a safe dosage.
> So despite prescriptions going up x24, and some unknown number of people taking veterinary versions of the drug, emergency calls have only gone up x5? Wouldn't we expect it to be around x24 or greater?
Why would we expect excess emergency calls due to doctor prescribed levels of ivermectin? Ivermectin is used to treat humans for other things, and unless it's a particularly dangerous treatment I doubt we'd see many hospitalisations due to it.
There's little evidence it helps treat COVID, but I doubt doctors are prescribing dangerous levels of ivermectin like those found in animal treatments. 5x emergency calls for people taking animal treatments sounds reasonable.
Presumably the rate of overdoses or bad reactions would stay the same for doctor prescribed ivermectin, so 24x more prescriptions would result in 24x more overdoses or bad reactions. Then throw in the people taking veterinary versions of the drug that have to be properly converted to a human dosage, and I'd expect the rate to go up, not down, as they would be more likely to experience ill effects.
I suspect this has something to do with the human drug vs. the veterinary products.
Ivermectin is a widely prescribed and generally safe drug when used for its intended purpose. Some would argue that taking it in human-sized doses for COVID is probably not dangerous (this does not imply it's effective).
The problem is that people who can't get human prescriptions are turning to veterinary products which tend to be massively larger doses, and this is where things probably go off the rails.
Triage children before anyone at hospitals and health service centers. Any adult should treat themselves with their best decision making. If that results in their death so be it. Time to stop babysitting adults.
What I don’t understand about ivermectin is… is the horse paste version different from the human version in any meaningful way other than concentration?
Perhaps what is most interesting is that people seem to have an opinion already and are not willing to change that opinion, and worse that the opinions seem to coincide with political leanings (at least in Canada and the US -- no idea about the rest of the world.)
The anti-ivermectin side seems to say: we have vaccines. We don't know if this is good enough until large-scale randomize controlled trials are done -- so don't go trying it. There aren't any peer-reviewed, published studies that show it has a positive effect, and, two high profile studies were pulled because they were done poorly.
The pro-ivermectin side says: the drug is cheap -- which means we can easily ramp up production and get it to everyone who needs it, and also means there's no one standing to make a profit to pay for large-scale randomized controlled trials. There are many studies showing a positive effect, some peer reviewed, and others "languishing on pre-print servers are no journals will print them." If you meta-analyze the studies, ignoring the ones that have been retracted, the results are clearly positive.
It is so frustrating. https://c19ivermectin.com says that are 113 studies of using 73 peer reviewed studies, and they all tend to show good results. That sounds convincing to me, but not anti-ivermectin people. Someone told me he read some of the studies and they were garbage. I really should try reading some of them, but it isn't my field, and even if I can understand what they did, I can't gauge the quality.
It seems to come down to "which experts do you trust?"
----
Last night, I was skimming through a book my wife got out of the library on diets called "The China Study" by T. Colin Campbell, PhD and Thomas M. Campbell II. I flipped at random to a chapter called "Science: The Dark Side", and will share a few excerpts here.
"Scams, tricks ... are as old as history itself... Very few experiences are as personal and powerful as those of people who have lost their health prematurely. Understandably, they are willing to believe and try just about anything that might help. They are a highly vulnerable group of consumers.
"In the mid-1970s, along came a prime example of a health scam, at least according to the medical establishments. It concerned an alternative cancer treatment called Laetrile. [A woman who was sick was told by all her friends about this treatment, which was not available in the states.] 'There are at least a dozen people in this area who were told they were going to be dead from cancel who used Laetrile and are now out playing tennis.'
[The lady went to Mexico for the treatment -- they treated 20 000 Americans each year -- and it didn't work.]
"[One of the authors joined a committee on health and nutrition.] [I]n the spring of 1980, I had discovered that, of the eighteen members on that committee, I was the only individual who did not have ties to the commercial world of food and drug companies and their coalitions.
"The committee was a stacked deck; its members were entrenched in the status quo"
"[In their second meeting, everyone was passed a copy of an intended press release, which] listed examples of the kind of nutrition frauds that our committee intended to expose.
"As I scanned the list of so-called frauds, I was stunned to see the 1977 McGovern dietary goals on the list. [A senator McGovern had convened experts on health and nutrition and they recommended decreased consumption of fatty animal foods and increased consumption of fruits and vegetables because of their effect on heart disease.]
[Because of his dissent, they didn't release this message at this time, but he could tell 'he was the chicken who had wandered into the foxes den'].
[The author talks about good science that was smeared by this group]
> . https://c19ivermectin.com says that are 113 studies of using 73 peer reviewed studies, and they all tend to show good results.
The problem is that studies that show bad results has a lower chance of been written and a lower chance of been published and a lower chance of been collected in the sites. So there is a lot of informal involuntary filtration, that hides the the bad result and collect only the good results.
If it had the opposite result, would it be listed in ivmmeta or only in hcqmeta? If it has a null result would any of them had shown it? (Assuming that the doctors took the time to write a boring article about a null result, and the journal published a boring article about a null result.)
>The problem is that studies that show bad results has a lower chance of been written and a lower chance of been published and a lower chance of been collected in the sites
Okay, but there are basically no studies showing no or negative effects. Except for ones with massive p-values. You'd think there would at least be a few showing no effect.
Take a look at hcqmeta, specially the RCT parte. You will see:
* A lot of small trials that are perhaps not even statically significant and show some positive effect.
* A few very large trials that show essentially no effect.
Very small trials are easy to organize, and if it fails people gets disappointed and forget to write it down, or the journal reject it because it shows (almost) no effect. So there is a lot of filtration.
Very large trials are difficult to organize, so they must publish the final result somewhere to ensure they can fill all paperwork. Also it's large enough to be interesting for the journal. So there is less filtration.
- doctors say: take a vaccine but people say “I don’t trust big pharma”
- random guy say take ivermectin and people say “great I trust pharma”. Merck is marking tons of money now.
So this is all about packaging of the message. I think the only way to convince people to take vaccine is that Binden (and democrats) starts telling people not to take one…
This is just beyond stupid and this is all result of our nanny state. Im 100% for Florida approach: let’s god sort them out.
To be fair, ivermectin is an old drug with a well established safety record ... when using proper human dosing.
The COVID vaccines are only just getting their first full approvals.
If someone is evaluating the drugs purely on their long term track record of safety, ivermectin wins by a long shot.
But none of that really matters, because the problem is about efficacy. It might be "safer" to take ivermectin in a vacuum than one of the vaccines, but that doesn't matter if ivermectin doesn't protect you and you die of COVID anyway.
That's odd. A quick look at sci-hub shows a bunch of ivermectin papers that don't look half bad.
I figure that if a physician wants to go off-label on a prescription they should go ahead. Plenty of warnings of course.
Buying it at the feed store along with fish antibiotics is sketchy, but remember that it's your body after all. People forget that. God knows how many people are harmed by Tylenol overdoses.
The issue is that there aren't any studies showing that safe doses are effective for treating this disease in humans. The studies on monkey cell cultures are what they are, but nobody seems to be noticing that the dose you'd have to use to get those effects in living humans is unsafe. As a rule, medicine should be more likely to treat the illness than to kill you. If my doctor prescribed Ivermectin, I guess I'd take it, but if my doctor prescribed it at this point, they should get their license revoked.
>The issue is that there aren't any studies showing that safe doses are effective for treating this disease in humans.
Actually I'm seeing a few, but they suffer from the typical lack of statistical rigor that I've come to expect in medical studies and fall into the 'further studies are needed' bin.
As a side note, I'm always blown away by the poor quality of many medical papers. Publish or perish? Dunno.
This article is ridiculous. It's claiming that Ivermectin is unsafe because people are taking the horse-intended version... . Really, they're screaming "We're losing money! We wanted to get paid for you taking the unproven vaccine instead of a safe drug that's been around for decades!" The wording in this article is highly dubious "The drug can cause... even death." Oh please! Then how come doctors are prescribing it???? Individual doctors, who have been to medical school, who understand pharmacy and anatomy, are prescribing this drug, and Pfizer is FURIOUS. Pfizer and Faucci likely paid for this article to be written, because one shred of critical thinking "debunks" this fraudulent article.
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[ 7.8 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] threadFool me once, shame on you [Tuskegee]. Fool me twice, shame on me [MKULTRA]. Fool me three times...
I am so tired of seeing Tuskegee trotted out as an argument by anti vaxxers.
The Tuskegee experiment specifically targeted a selected group of African Americans and was an overtly racist program. COVID vaccines on the other hand are not targeting a specific sample group, they are being given to virtually everyone. There's no sample group. The two are not remotely comparable.
Now what? The government lied and… the plan is to have 80% of the population die? How does that benefit those in power? The economy would crash. Production of everything—food, cars, houses—would cease. Healthcare, education, policing, infrastructure maintenance—all would collapse. First-world society would disintegrate.
It makes no sense to believe the powers that be are lying about the vaccine.
Oh, and also: the unvaccinated make the vast majority of hospitalizations. Now the lie is even more crazy: the vaccine is obviously great at keeping people out of the hospital, but also the governments are all lying about the vaccine. It’s just sheer crazypants conspiracy thinking, through and through.
Ah, and if they did that (and a thousand other things, many of which were not limited to African Americans, including the aforementioned MKULTRA) and suffered no repercussions for it whatsoever, well, I'm sure they still learned their lesson and would never dream of doing something like it again.
That's the thing though. COVID vaccinations are _nothing like_ the Tuskegee experiment.
Sure you can. People spend their entire lives studying this shit, dedicating their entire careers to saving people who sit on facebook all day and post nonsense they hear on podcasts and other credit-less sources.
It's not "vaccine hesitancy". It's stupidity.
Domain experts know more than your conspiracy-theorist crazy Facebook aunt. There is no conspiracy here. It doesn't benefit big pharma by giving it out for free, essentially. There are a handful of other pharmas that did want to rush the vaccine and as a result did not make it to manufacturing because they didn't pass the regulatory process.
So no, vaccine "hesitancy" has not been "well earned".
I don't fault them for any of this. Science takes time and iteration. Nobody can account for unknown unknowns - the only solution is time.
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2021/09/03/i-have-not-been-sil...
For a start, we could stop making claims that we don't know to be true. Replace "the vaccine is safe and effective, and if we all get the vaccine the pandemic will be over" with "the vaccine is the best tool we have to prevent serious disease and death".
How does this work?
Kind of like those who can afford them can receive better lawyers than overworked public defenders.
there has not been any studies on this to my knowledge but i’ve experienced it before with friends who do not work jobs that provide healthcare options.
i am not sure if it is done consciously or not, a lot of judgements are subconscious and that will affect outcome.
So I dunno if US medical system has much to do with it. It seems more like someone weaponized Facebook and other social media to get gullible people to commit mass murder-suicide by refusing vaccinations, masks and taking poison.
Or it's an emergent phenomenon with no master behind it, who knows.
But the space it occupied in the public debate (at least around here) was the same Ivermectin does now - not "better than nothing" but "use this instead of the vaccine because evil media and pharma and gubmint is lying to you".
People would go in Twitter and shout "people promoting HCQ are idiots!" while their grandpa was in the hospital on that very drug as administered by doctors.
Neither side has been entirely rational.
I hope this rampant politicization of drugs stops before it hits the important drug classes like ACE2 inhibitors, bronchodilators or anti-inflammatories.
But it was more of a spaghetti as the wall thing, and it was removed from the protocol back in May.
It has been the cure-they-don't-want-you-to-know-about du juor, overtaking HQC since about March
This feels like another situation where the attempts to quell disinformation are having the opposite of their intended effect.
Depending on where these people first learned of this drug, there is some pretty confusing information floating around. When someone like Bret Weinstein points out that ivermectin is used widely and safely to treat river blindness, but most media sources are focused on “it’s a horse dewormer”, people stop listening.
Censoring most information about the human use of the drug is driving conspiracy types to decreasingly reputable sources and I’d argue that this is more responsible for the overdoses than anything.
The way I remember it was more like, the CDC said:
- They don't know yet if surgical (and in general, non-N95) masks are effective against COVID-19 spread. They never denied this for N95.
- Hospitals are running out of surgical (and N95...) masks, and given the above, people should stop hoarding them.
That seemed... pretty reasonable to me?
In fact here's a link [1] where Fauci literally said:
> When we get in a situation when we have enough masks, there will be serious consideration about more broadening this recommendation of using masks.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpjmKc2D0Mg&t=1m4s
Not that the CDC is incentivized much to care. The bigger the crisis the bigger the funding.
I don't see a lie in this example.
This should be a lesson to all those corporate-like structures in public sector where they use common enterprise tactics of middle management to say things in the non-specific way so that later down the road they can cover their asses.
They had to be very specific, don’t lie, simply say about things they are not sure about “we don’t know” (hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin etc.) and do tests, never say “vaccines are safe”, but say they are 100000 times less dangerous than disease etc.
And then we could trust every word they just say as we know that they are very aware of what they are saying and they haven’t lied to us in a lot of situations before.
They should govern, but instead they play politics… wtf really.
No, that doesn't follow. Do you have any evidence the CDC knew this was false, and was consistently messaging to the contrary (aka not a pointer to things like 280-char tweets where everyone understands bandwidth would be limited)?
A lie requires intent to deceive, i.e. dishonesty. Not something where they're forced to summarize and strip out details, but provide the details elsewhere when they have the chance. And certainly not a genuine, honest mistake. I have yet to see evidence the CDC knew that masks are effective and yet lied about it. And nobody here has been willing to provide any evidence of that either. Just because they might have been inaccurate in their assessment of the situation, doesn't mean they were lying. Just like how, just because you say "we ran out of ketchup, can you buy some from the store?" and then discover you had some in the back of your fridge, that doesn't mean you're lying.
And btw, I don't even know what example you're talking about. If you're talking about my example like I said, at 1:32, the reporter clearly communicates "surgical masks are not that effective". And it wasn't the CDC talking either. You should really link whatever you're talking about because it doesn't seem to be this example.
> "Seriously people - STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!"
There was absolutely quite a bit of false messaging on the point from authority figures.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200229123317/https://twitter.c...
(b) A tweet only has so much room to explain things. There's a reason websites in general, official CDC recommendations in particular, and the news media exist. If the only source of information you get your news from for several weeks amidst a pandemic is Twitter, and the tweet turns out to be lacking some info, the problem isn't the source you're reading.
(c) Even if you establish there was "false messaging from the surgeon general on Twitter" (which you haven't due to the reasons above), it's quite a goalpost move from "the CDC was being deceptive/manipulative". Especially when the the surgeon general was picked by the president and specifically not the NIH authority figure that the nation was looking up to 24/7.
They should have instead said "We don't know whether they're effective yet, so don't hoard them, because doing so could cause X."
There's nothing wrong with admitting you don't know something yet.
Instead, they make commands without supporting evidence. That implies total disregard for the peoples' intelligence. Upon realizing this, trust is lost and dissenting actions increase.
So far the only link I've seen is a tweet (not an official recommendation) from the surgeon general (not the CDC).
> "Seriously people - STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!"
This could very easily have been reworded to an honest "we do not know if they are effective" instead of a definitive "they are not". You cannot in good conscience call yourself a good leader and/or scientist if you do not acknowledge the limits of your understanding.
People may not understand the science, but they understand trust. And given that no individual has the time and/or intelligence to understand the science, breaches of trust should be the end of a leader's career. They're failing in their most important duty.
"Stop buying masks. There is a shortage and if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk! Since we live in a very capitalistic society we cannot reserve masks for healthcare use and instead we have to rely on all of you to do the right thing. Keep in mind that masks may not offer the kind of protection you think they do, i.e. they do not make you invincible, you're still advised to stay at home and keep social distancing. When supply of masks will be restored we will likely encourage people to wear them as to reduce community (probabilistic) spread, which works even if the masks are not 100% effective."
Unfortunately nobody would read things that don't fit in a tweet.
It’s really not that hard.
This may be true or not; all I'm saying is that the sentence is not an accurate summary of what I wrote.
That was always true and will always be true. Even if COVID flows right through masks, there will still always be a plausible reason to wear them.
"There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRa6t_e7dgI
Second, if you're going to accuse cherry-picking, look at the very crucial quotes you omitted from your own clip:
- Right before your quote he had added very critical qualifiers that you skipped: He specifically said, "Right now, in the United States, there's no reason to be walking around with a mask." Mind you, this was on March 8, pre-lockdown. He explicitly made it clear this guidance could change as the situation evolves (or, as you wrote, "change his mind" should he get more data or see circumstances change... how horrifying!), and he specifically said in the United States, likely because the epidemic was much less severe than it became in the following weeks (it wasn't even declared a pandemic yet!), so they thought it could be better handled without telling everyone to wear masks. He clearly genuinely believed at the time that the protection they would be likely to provide would be small compared to the benefits of saving them for hospitals.
- Also note that he continued to provide context: "When you think masks, you should think of healthcare providers needing them, and people who are ill." Again, he's explaining his concerns. You can't ignore that.
- Also note that he even specifically explained: "When you look at the films of foreign countries and you see 85% of people wearing masks, that's fine, that's fine. I'm not against it. But that's when it can lead to a shortage of masks for people who need it." i.e.: If he wasn't worried about a shortage, he wouldn't be telling people not to wear masks.
You can't honestly hear all that and accuse him (or me...) of dishonesty with that clip.
And when he did decide we should be walking around with masks he didn't cite any evidence. He said it was because surgical and N95s masks were in short supply.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XHC5Kxxv_w&t=94s
When I was trying to find this video, I came across another video where he speaks in absolute terms that all we need to do is wears masks, social distance and practice good hygiene we would turn around the pandemic. I understand that things change over time, but whenever he speaks, he speaks as if what he is saying is fact. Now we even have vaccines and we clearly haven't turned it around. This is why people don't trust this guy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P6QrVRJJzU&t=128s
I honestly don't see how you can watch all these videos and still trust this guy. I get that things change, but that's why you don't speak in absolute terms. Words matter.
I linked you to evidence that shows he lied. In the first video he said masks don't work. It clearly wasn't an "honest mistake".
> I highly doubt you would've been a better NIH director
Nice strawman. I never said I would be, but I know one thing for sure: I wouldn't deliberately lie to the American public about something so important.
> But don't cut into his character without evidence
There is plenty of evidence that he's a liar. I don't know what else you need.
> Not only does it take a lot of audacity to suggest you would've foreseen things better
Yet another strawman. I never said that. Are you replying to the right comment?
> hurling unfounded accusations like that at everyone whose judgment you don't like is just infuriating, insulting, and unproductive
The accusation that Fauci deliberately lied? It's pretty founded if you ask me. It's infuriating, insulting, and unproductive to protect someone so obsessively and thinking he can do no wrong.
No, you most definitely did not. You ignored most of the video and started quoting him mid-sentence. As I already explained to you. You've shown zero evidence that his genuine belief was anything different than he communicated in that interview. At best, all you've showed is that he gave poor advice, and even that itself is highly questionable given how you still can't be bothered to even quote him properly and depict the interview accurately. It's not exactly hard to make someone look like a monster when you cut their quotes in half and ignore all the surrounding context.
This conversation clearly isn't going anywhere so I'm not going to continue responding.
The problem is that the media doesn't do nuance, they write big bold headlines that are outrage bait to drive engagement. And more than a few people never read anything but the headline.
At this point, I feel like headlines themselves are harmful.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/21/opinion/sway-kara-swisher...
As a health official you are weighing the question: do we advocate a sub-optimal approach on the grounds that it is better than nothing, when we know a large segment of the population will be militantly non-compliant anyway? There were anti-mask protests back in the Spanish Flu days too.
Point being, it’s not a binary thing, and there’s some consensus that has to be built in the early stages.
But why do they therefore inherently trust the other people saying to take hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and these other solutions? Aren't these people also salesmen?
Isn't some trust required most of the time?
I don't listen to the first contractor or plumber on a big job, either. There is nothing special about the position or opinions of medical professionals that I shouldn't seek additional information or help.
How frequently do you think people consult more than one doctor when they are sick? I know people do it for expensive, chronic conditions like cancer, but I’m guessing that for urgent infections diseases the frequency is vanishingly small.
Maybe I'm a fan of science, of which there is NO evidence that Ivermectin works against COVID. It seems like maybe you're the one that bought into something.
These doctors are doing nothing more than profiting off the fear of their patients, while offering no value other than what might be argued is a placebo. That doesn't stop these people from infecting others around them.
If you are a fan of science, I’m sure you’ll acknowledge this.
The paper from Argentina around Ivermectin is already suspected of fraud. I won't hold my breath it'll end up with good results.
Edit: you dishonestly added the following to your comment after I replied:
“The paper from Argentina around Ivermectin is already suspected of fraud. I won't hold my breath it'll end up with good results.”
For what it’s worth, I’m not referring to that paper.
But again, if you understood science, you would know better than to make assumptions about the results of a paper you have never seen.
> there is no connection between hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin
You mean a connection like being pushed as a cure for the same disease while lacking any substantial, peer-reviewed data to back it up?
I think maybe we have different ideas of how science and the scientific method works.
> For what it’s worth, I’m not referring to that paper.
So you're not referring to any science at all, then? I'm unable to find any other published literature on the subject.
If you believed in science you’d know that’s a political connection not a scientific one.
> I think maybe we have different ideas of how science and the scientific method works.
Yes, you are mistaking politics for science.
More edits you dishonestly added after my reply:
“So you're not referring to any science at all, then? I'm unable to find any other published literature on the subject.”
> Yes, you are mistaking politics for science.
This isn't very convincing. What makes your position non-political or more scientific? Talk about dishonesty.
How is what any different?
> What makes your position non-political or more scientific? Talk about dishonesty.
What position have I claimed is non-political or more scientific?
So because Trump talked about the former that somehow makes it political? What a weak argument.
I think you should re-read the thread. The only person talking about Trump here is you.
What claim do you think I am making that you want me to explain?
In fact, if you had read the article you would have learned that they haven't ruled out ivermectin and are still researching it along with other treatments. If you want to take ivermectin they want you to be part of the study. This is how science works.
"The NIH is studying the drug in a large trial comparing a half-dozen established drugs to see if they have some effect against COVID-19.
Experts say those interested in ivermectin should ask about enrolling in such studies."
There is less than no evidence, and yet there are several studies already. It’s chloroquine all over again. The quacks are those who jump at any random drug, justifying the lack of evidence as a reason for their support, while decrying vaccines for a supposed lack of evidence.
A study being done is not a reason to support prescribing a drug.
Right wing politicians and right wing media politicized it to minimize impact of covid on the 2020 election.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh4uS4f78o
On the other hand democrats and CDC/FDA have been mostly following the real science.
[Citation needed]
Also, for those that are prescribing it, this is not an FDA approved treatment for Covid.
Most (all?) off-label prescriptions aren't FDA approved for that use, that's what makes them off-label. Prescribing drugs off-label is an acceptable practice, although it's generally higher risk to do so than with an FDA approved treatment as there's less information available.
I haven't looked into this particular off-label use, and it certainly has a lot of signs of poor advisability, but one way the medical community figures out what drugs work for conditions with limited treatment options is trying random things and reporting on what seems to work; then those things can be tested in more controlled situations.
Also, there aren't thousands of doctors doing that. If so I'd love an actual source.
I've just finished reading Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein and there's an entire chapter on this:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We%27re_Polarized
It seems that humans have an in-built affinity for groups and group affiliation, so if your in-group says something you tend to go with it instead of believing your lying eyes.
> other research suggesting the drug would need to be given at levels 100 times the standard dose to have antiviral effects in humans.
I find it rather absurd to refuse a vaccine the FDA has approved and then take something at 100X the dose and off-label considering that a good idea since the FDA approved it for humans.
Before the delta wave there were arguments for probability that covid wouldn't become endemic so one was comparing a 5-10% of covid to getting vaccinated, now one is comparing 100% chance of covid with vaccination. If one thinks one will use Ivermectin when infected then one should vaccinate instead.
Just one of many examples this week:
"Joe Rogan has told his Instagram followers he has been taking ivermectin, a deworming veterinary drug formulated for use in cows and horses, to help fight the coronavirus."
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/01/1033485152/joe-rogan-covid-iv...
That's framed as though he took a drug for cows and horses! He certainly did not.
Meanwhile, this is the human version of ivermectin, the one Joe Rogan took:
"In 2015, William Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for its discovery and applications. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines... Between 1995 and 2010 the program using donated ivermectin to prevent river blindness is estimated to have prevented seven million years of disability whilst costing US$257 million."
Re-read that. It's on the WHO's list of essential medicines. It prevented seven million years of disability for less than $300M. Is that anything remotely like the way it's being portrayed by the media?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivermectin
It's a cheap, Nobel Prize winning medication that is proven safe, having been used billions of times in humans.
Oh, but you can overdose on it? Just like most drugs?
As for its use with regard to Covid, I'm vaccinated and wouldn't personally seek it out, but here's a meta analysis of 63 studies https://ivmmeta.com/ which would suggest it's worth looking at. If doctors are prescribing it, such as in Joe Rogan's case, I don't see why that should be a problem.
Also see: https://www.cdc.gov/immigrantrefugeehealth/guidelines/overse...
EDIT: LOL. Uh oh the downvote brigade has started! Keep trying to silence the truth. Also feel free to google Bilderberg group for more enlightment ;)
Also, as I understand, ivermectin is more commonly used as a cat (and sometimes dog) medicine, ie Revolution, that is, if cats outnumber domestic horses. I wonder if the cute-factor of people using catpaste would reduce the outrage.
https://news.vin.com/default.aspx?pid=210&catId=-1&id=601847...
Not sure on the specific differences of horse vs human ivermectin.
However, we don't always know when something has antiviral properties whether it has efficacy or not against a specific virus. That is why a number of studies is a great contributor to determining when it can be of use, or not.
"because the studies are flawed, the drug is useless"
A more measured response would be to look through the actual studies themselves, ferret out good from bad, and then to draw conclusions.
Additionally, to ask questions about variables for which we know there are a ton of potential reasons why we'd see differences. Foremost being food/drug synergism, prescription requirements, genetic differences in drug MOA, and variation of actual covid type.
It doesn't refute good studies on ivermectin e.g. "the golden hamster" https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/emmm.202114122
Protocols like Zelenko/McCullough do not list any one drug as a "wonder drug" but instead have a large number of drugs and vitamins to treat all the specific indications in more classes of drugs
Additionally horse ivermectin is a big part of the problem. People are literally going to vets and getting horse ivermectin and taking it. So it isn’t the media that is conflating them. At least not the so called “leftist media”. It is idiots who insist on lying about its effectiveness.
The question of whether or not to take things not prescribed to you is another question I suppose. LSD is an illegal drug but helps a lot of people. Ivermectin is widely, widely used and safely at that. Not being prescribed is not the same as being dangerous, so when it comes to self-medication my personal belief is that it is acceptable to work outside those boundaries, so long as you're being knowledgable and safe about it. (Which a lot of people are not doing in this case.)
https://www.merck.com/news/merck-statement-on-ivermectin-use...
“No scientific basis for a potential therapeutic effect against COVID-19 from pre-clinical studies; No meaningful evidence for clinical activity or clinical efficacy in patients with COVID-19 disease, and; A concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies.” - merek
Why would it matter if the medical community thinks ivermectin is safe or not, if the people making this choice don’t trust medical science enough to take the vaccine.
> Dr. David Boulware of the University of Minnesota says the drug’s side effects are mild at two or even three times the usual human dose. But formulations for farm animals might contain 1,000 times what’s safe for humans.
People need a prescription for Ivermectin (human dosage) but since they can't do that. They're taking the horse paste version without understanding the difference or knowing that its a much higher concentration..
And what are you talking about with "pharmaceutical industry propaganda?" Ivermectin is literally owned by Merck, who has said not to take it. The pharmaceutical industry would be the ones actively profiting of Ivermectin.
As for Merck, they are creating a new, patented version for Covid use. They want ivermectin discredited because anyone can make it. This is how that industry operates.
Because, convinced in the absence of evidence, some people are acquiring it by the path of least resistance, which is farm-related retailers.
Some ask their doctors. Some of those doctors say sure because it's relatively safe. Others say no because they point out there's scant evidence it's effective.
The worst part is people are taking this in lieu of a vaccine because they're so convinced that it's ineffective or gene therapy or experimental and dangerous, etc. We're not dealing with data based reasoning. It's an emotional response rooted to some degree in American partisanship.
That would be the PSA and approach. But it's not about warning people or any kind of concern about those who foolishly take a horse sized dose. It's about shaming them and pushing the interests of the pharma industry.
I don't agree that this is shaming but perhaps some is in order.
https://globalnews.ca/news/8160269/people-seeking-horse-dewo...
As with any other drug, it is important to consider Ivermectin toxicity [3]. That would be my primary concern for the general population taking veterinary sized doses intended for large animals. I would never do that - I would talk to a doctor, preferably an infectious disease doc that has experience treating this malady, and get a prescription for it, and follow dosing instructions.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3327999/
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22535622/
[3] https://books.google.com/books?id=P4U0cEel-54C&pg=PA196&lpg=...
Moreover,
> https://ivmmeta.com/
we're on "Hacker News". This is anonymous website. WHOIS is hidden. It runs on Google Cloud. Nobody is signed, they use mysterious "we". And what is "real-time meta analysis" - that's not a real scientific term.
You know, all and all pretty suspicious website, for what it claims to be.
yes but thats grammatically obtuse so as to avoid conveying clear information. its very easy for someone reading that to come away with the wrong info due to the redundant negation.
It also hasn't been proven to be effective.
Edit: to further show why this is a ridiculous approach towards using something that is unproven to treat a disease: cat urine has also not been proven to not be an effective Covid treatment.
The argument about cat urine no longer seems in good faith, though. There are multiple studies evaluating ivermectin as a COVID treatment, but there are no such studies about cat urine.
I understand what you're trying to say; however, there's at least enough interest in ivermectin to warrant real trials.
I'm not optimistic that it'll be some miracle cure, but let's not pretend it's cat urine.
If you are dumb and arrogant enough to believe that people are dumb enough to stick an ivermectin dispenser designed for horses in human mouths, you deserve to live in the private psychological hell you’ve created for yourself.
I've been convinced that the world is beyond parody for years now. And yet it keeps on giving.
After-all a lot of people die not from Covid-19 but from complications from it.
I think the main issue with it's use is, similar to antibiotic resistance, (note that it's not antibiotic or antiviral) overuse will lessen it's effectiveness when needed the most.
https://www.the-scientist.com/features/the-surgisphere-scand...
As a standalone medication or one administered late in the disease hydroxychloroquine has not shown any real promise. When paired with TMPRSS2 inhibitors it may have some promise: https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
The big problem (in Brazil at least) is, the bozo president and his entourage elected this medicine as a silver bullet, saying that we didn't need vaccines, didn't need any social isolation (let alone lockdowns), etc.
These bozos created a false dichotomy: one thing is to take a chance and swallow some medicine as last-ditch attempt when you have no other known option. They use this reasoning to say nothing else was needed.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1431040456364810242.html
If, on the other hand, you live in the US and just want some comedic relief from an excellent medical professional comedian, try this: https://twitter.com/DGlaucomflecken/status/14327760801049518...
We are in a age where you no longer must be remotely logically consistent in your arguments and it's fascinating to watch.
Are we at war with East Asia today?
Some people abusing drugs:
- to successfully get high
- more or less safely at home
On the other:
Some people abusing a drug
- that doesn't have the effect they're using it for
- when there's a better alternative
- which is freely available
- AND the knock-on effects are harming other people
I don't see much comparison, nor any contradiction in being okay with the former and not okay with the latter.> that doesn't have the effect they're using it for
Similarly, the FDA claims that marijuana has no legitimate medical use.
> when there's a better alternative
Many people consider alcohol or tobacco to be alternatives to marijuana. Further, all of the conditions treated by marijuana have alternatives for treatment of some kind.
> which is freely available
Alcohol and tobacco are freely available. All of the alternatives to marijuana are available via a prescription.
> AND the knock-on effects are harming other people
Watch Reefer Madness. Take a look around the moral panic where marijuana has been legalized in regards to driving. "Since we can't tell accurately how high someone is, they could get stoned and be a risk to everyone on the highway!". Or what about "You are funding terrorism/organized crime!". I can't also neglect to mention the "think of the children" card that is often played, "If the drug was more available, children might get their hands on it!". If I had chosen a less benign drug at the start of this, I could talk about people overdosing, or the harms of addiction, or people accidently killing themselves while having drug induced hallucinations, and so on and so on.
> By mid-August U.S. pharmacies were filling 88,000 weekly prescriptions for the medication, a 24-fold increase from pre-COVID levels, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Meanwhile, U.S. poison control centers have seen a five-fold increase in emergency calls related to the drug, with some incidents requiring hospitalization.
So despite prescriptions going up x24, and some unknown number of people taking veterinary versions of the drug, emergency calls have only gone up x5? Wouldn't we expect it to be around x24 or greater?
Also, the lack of stats on hospitalization is interesting, in that there aren't any. From another article on the same subject, Mississippi at least has apparently had zero (https://msdh.ms.gov/msdhsite/_static/resources/15400.pdf).
This whole thing just seems like a manufactured story that gets clicks because it plays into prejudices about rural Americans.
Presumably most of the hospitalizations are from the non-prescription use and less people are likely to take medicine "off-book" and some of those are at least clever enough to work out a safe dosage.
Why would we expect excess emergency calls due to doctor prescribed levels of ivermectin? Ivermectin is used to treat humans for other things, and unless it's a particularly dangerous treatment I doubt we'd see many hospitalisations due to it.
There's little evidence it helps treat COVID, but I doubt doctors are prescribing dangerous levels of ivermectin like those found in animal treatments. 5x emergency calls for people taking animal treatments sounds reasonable.
Ivermectin is a widely prescribed and generally safe drug when used for its intended purpose. Some would argue that taking it in human-sized doses for COVID is probably not dangerous (this does not imply it's effective).
The problem is that people who can't get human prescriptions are turning to veterinary products which tend to be massively larger doses, and this is where things probably go off the rails.
Perhaps what is most interesting is that people seem to have an opinion already and are not willing to change that opinion, and worse that the opinions seem to coincide with political leanings (at least in Canada and the US -- no idea about the rest of the world.)
The anti-ivermectin side seems to say: we have vaccines. We don't know if this is good enough until large-scale randomize controlled trials are done -- so don't go trying it. There aren't any peer-reviewed, published studies that show it has a positive effect, and, two high profile studies were pulled because they were done poorly.
The pro-ivermectin side says: the drug is cheap -- which means we can easily ramp up production and get it to everyone who needs it, and also means there's no one standing to make a profit to pay for large-scale randomized controlled trials. There are many studies showing a positive effect, some peer reviewed, and others "languishing on pre-print servers are no journals will print them." If you meta-analyze the studies, ignoring the ones that have been retracted, the results are clearly positive.
It is so frustrating. https://c19ivermectin.com says that are 113 studies of using 73 peer reviewed studies, and they all tend to show good results. That sounds convincing to me, but not anti-ivermectin people. Someone told me he read some of the studies and they were garbage. I really should try reading some of them, but it isn't my field, and even if I can understand what they did, I can't gauge the quality.
It seems to come down to "which experts do you trust?"
----
Last night, I was skimming through a book my wife got out of the library on diets called "The China Study" by T. Colin Campbell, PhD and Thomas M. Campbell II. I flipped at random to a chapter called "Science: The Dark Side", and will share a few excerpts here.
"Scams, tricks ... are as old as history itself... Very few experiences are as personal and powerful as those of people who have lost their health prematurely. Understandably, they are willing to believe and try just about anything that might help. They are a highly vulnerable group of consumers.
"In the mid-1970s, along came a prime example of a health scam, at least according to the medical establishments. It concerned an alternative cancer treatment called Laetrile. [A woman who was sick was told by all her friends about this treatment, which was not available in the states.] 'There are at least a dozen people in this area who were told they were going to be dead from cancel who used Laetrile and are now out playing tennis.'
[The lady went to Mexico for the treatment -- they treated 20 000 Americans each year -- and it didn't work.]
"[One of the authors joined a committee on health and nutrition.] [I]n the spring of 1980, I had discovered that, of the eighteen members on that committee, I was the only individual who did not have ties to the commercial world of food and drug companies and their coalitions.
"The committee was a stacked deck; its members were entrenched in the status quo"
"[In their second meeting, everyone was passed a copy of an intended press release, which] listed examples of the kind of nutrition frauds that our committee intended to expose.
"As I scanned the list of so-called frauds, I was stunned to see the 1977 McGovern dietary goals on the list. [A senator McGovern had convened experts on health and nutrition and they recommended decreased consumption of fatty animal foods and increased consumption of fruits and vegetables because of their effect on heart disease.]
[Because of his dissent, they didn't release this message at this time, but he could tell 'he was the chicken who had wandered into the foxes den'].
[The author talks about good science that was smeared by this group]
"The majority of scientists are honou...
The problem is that studies that show bad results has a lower chance of been written and a lower chance of been published and a lower chance of been collected in the sites. So there is a lot of informal involuntary filtration, that hides the the bad result and collect only the good results.
Someone posted https://ivmmeta.com/#fig_fpr and https://hcqmeta.com/#fcite_rct . It's nice to be able to compare both.
Take a look at this paper: https://c19ivermectin.com/chowdhury.html
One interesting thing is that it compares Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine. It is listed as a success in the https://ivmmeta.com/#fig_fpr but it's not listed a failure in the https://hcqmeta.com/#fcite_rct site.
If it had the opposite result, would it be listed in ivmmeta or only in hcqmeta? If it has a null result would any of them had shown it? (Assuming that the doctors took the time to write a boring article about a null result, and the journal published a boring article about a null result.)
Okay, but there are basically no studies showing no or negative effects. Except for ones with massive p-values. You'd think there would at least be a few showing no effect.
* A lot of small trials that are perhaps not even statically significant and show some positive effect.
* A few very large trials that show essentially no effect.
Very small trials are easy to organize, and if it fails people gets disappointed and forget to write it down, or the journal reject it because it shows (almost) no effect. So there is a lot of filtration.
Very large trials are difficult to organize, so they must publish the final result somewhere to ensure they can fill all paperwork. Also it's large enough to be interesting for the journal. So there is less filtration.
- doctors say: take a vaccine but people say “I don’t trust big pharma”
- random guy say take ivermectin and people say “great I trust pharma”. Merck is marking tons of money now.
So this is all about packaging of the message. I think the only way to convince people to take vaccine is that Binden (and democrats) starts telling people not to take one…
This is just beyond stupid and this is all result of our nanny state. Im 100% for Florida approach: let’s god sort them out.
The COVID vaccines are only just getting their first full approvals.
If someone is evaluating the drugs purely on their long term track record of safety, ivermectin wins by a long shot.
But none of that really matters, because the problem is about efficacy. It might be "safer" to take ivermectin in a vacuum than one of the vaccines, but that doesn't matter if ivermectin doesn't protect you and you die of COVID anyway.
> established safety record
But then why these crazy doctors are saying not to take it? Conspiracy? I guess we not should trust these "doctors"...
I figure that if a physician wants to go off-label on a prescription they should go ahead. Plenty of warnings of course.
Buying it at the feed store along with fish antibiotics is sketchy, but remember that it's your body after all. People forget that. God knows how many people are harmed by Tylenol overdoses.
Actually I'm seeing a few, but they suffer from the typical lack of statistical rigor that I've come to expect in medical studies and fall into the 'further studies are needed' bin.
As a side note, I'm always blown away by the poor quality of many medical papers. Publish or perish? Dunno.
a. The placebo effect is real. A bout of induced vomiting and diarrhea makes whatever you are left with feel less worse than that...
b. They couldn't afford 1st world doctors and medicine anyway.
c. They were desperate.
d. Scoundrels preyed on their desperation.