I think every time I have seen Ivermectin come up on Hackernews, there's at least a few comments insisting on the make-believe, too. It's a very clear example of how no community's members - even our comment section literati - are automatically immune to bandwagoning conspiracy theories. They're not all green usernames, they're often people with a long comment history who I'm sure are considered informed, smart people at their jobs. Yet they show up to insist a big medicine conspiracy is the reason they've been told not to self-medicate COVID19 with anti-parasite drugs.
We have limited resources. We have to be smart about what to research. If the hypothesis is widely discredited, we should not be sciencing it, because that means something else is not being scienced.
Should we also be glad if an astronomy department starts seriously researching the geocentric model instead of exoplanets?
That the reasok why we are are with this debate is probably the very hamfisted approach that was taken early on with banning even medical doctors from mentioning it.
There has been a some times over the years were some seemingly miracle cure was announced for something but as new facts came in, everyone moved on.
This could easily have been the case here too. But by banning talk about a very safe over-the-counter medication social media reinforced the feeling that someone was hiding something and here we are f
today.
I don't know whether there was a hamfisted ban or not, but I don't think the rest of your reasoning makes sense.
Certain political groups cling on to seemingly random things, whether there's a research ban or not. For instance, I just recently learned that the 15 minute city concept is now officially part of the conspiracy theory canon.
From the study abstract [1]: "In this largely vaccinated (84%) population, the posterior probability that ivermectin reduced symptom duration by more than 1 day was less than 0.1%."
"Importance: It is unknown whether ivermectin, with a maximum targeted dose of 600 μg/kg, shortens symptom duration or prevents hospitalization among outpatients with mild to moderate COVID-19."
My guess is this study will likely not convince certain doctors to stop prescribing ivermectin for unvaccinated patients with mild symptoms.
The explanation I saw, and which sounded reasonable to me was that ivermectin did help reduce covid mortality -- in countries where water-bourne parasites are common. People could have a parasitic infection without realizing it and this would act to stress the immune system making it harder to fight the covid virus. When the took ivermectin, it cleared that parasitic infection giving them a better chance again covid. In areas that don't have many parasitic infections, like in northern countries, ivermectin had no effect on covid.
I had commented at the earlier link pointing out that their study might be a little off unless they're using a new water soluble very short half life formulation of ivermectin.
Also ivermectin is not used as an antimalarial in standard dosages, rather it controls the vectors that spread the disease. Either the reporter made the mistake or the science people who churned it out ... need help.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 46.8 ms ] threadEven with the politics of it, I'm still glad we're sciencing the hypothesis.
We have limited resources. We have to be smart about what to research. If the hypothesis is widely discredited, we should not be sciencing it, because that means something else is not being scienced.
Should we also be glad if an astronomy department starts seriously researching the geocentric model instead of exoplanets?
That the reasok why we are are with this debate is probably the very hamfisted approach that was taken early on with banning even medical doctors from mentioning it.
There has been a some times over the years were some seemingly miracle cure was announced for something but as new facts came in, everyone moved on.
This could easily have been the case here too. But by banning talk about a very safe over-the-counter medication social media reinforced the feeling that someone was hiding something and here we are f today.
Certain political groups cling on to seemingly random things, whether there's a research ban or not. For instance, I just recently learned that the 15 minute city concept is now officially part of the conspiracy theory canon.
"Importance: It is unknown whether ivermectin, with a maximum targeted dose of 600 μg/kg, shortens symptom duration or prevents hospitalization among outpatients with mild to moderate COVID-19."
My guess is this study will likely not convince certain doctors to stop prescribing ivermectin for unvaccinated patients with mild symptoms.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2801827
I had commented at the earlier link pointing out that their study might be a little off unless they're using a new water soluble very short half life formulation of ivermectin.
Also ivermectin is not used as an antimalarial in standard dosages, rather it controls the vectors that spread the disease. Either the reporter made the mistake or the science people who churned it out ... need help.