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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

>it if the worse case scenario turns out to be true: this treatment does in fact work, and was stalled or prevented due to politics.

There are two worst case scenarios here - Firstly, politicians pushing unproven drugs on the general population, causing unnecessary deaths. Secondly, treatments which may have some efficacy being abandoned because of a reaction against those politicians, potentially causing a failure to bring an effective treatment to bear.

Both of these can be true at the same time.

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But did we actually have “politicians pushing drugs”? “Push” sounds to me like “suggest people take.” I’m certain that the president didn’t tell anybody to take anything. He said almost verbatim what dr fauci was saying elsewhere at that same point in time. (See dr fauci on the jama podcast earlier that same week.) I won’t argue that the president has not oversold optimism at every juncture, but to say he “pushed” people to take plaquinil (illegally?) is either delusional or dishonest.

It's beyond optimism to latch on to an a specific treatment that has no real evidence attached, and say things like "what have you got to lose?" from your podium, speaking as president. It's deeply inappropriate.

Where you personally draw the line between "authority figure spouting off about something in official capacity" and "pushing" is up to you, but it's hardly delusional. It's also a hypothetical worst case scenario, if you read what I actually wrote.

Yup agree. In this case, with this particular drug, the risks from the first seemed incredibly overstated though. The number of times I heard of people claiming taking this drug could cause heart issues was countless, yet when one looked into it, this was only the case after extremely prolonged use. So the spin was everywhere.

We have to be careful with the "unproven" part, it was first approved for medical use in 1955 so it's side effects and safety are well known.

It's "unproven" as a treatment for COVID but pascal's wager would say that there is no harm in taking it.

> It's "unproven" as a treatment for COVID but pascal's wager would say that there is no harm in taking it.

That's nonsense, plenty of approved medicines have pretty crazy side effects, and can do more harm than good if taken when they aren't needed.

Pascal's wager, about the existence of god, is also incorrect FYI. It posits that you should believe in god because you have nothing to lose. Amongst other criticisms it fails to take account of the negatives of adhering to a belief system, and it fails to take account of the possibility of choosing the wrong god(s).

I think an underlying assumption of Pascal's wager is that choosing incorrectly not to believe has an infinite downside in the form of eternal torture (that is, hell). Charming, really.

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