“YouTube is shutting down dissenting Biology PhDs and MDs”

Most doctors don't bother treating a patient with anything other than standard care procedures.

Why--I honesty believe most don't care enough to look beyond the usual treatment.

8 minutes per patient, collect the most money from the out of the patient, and insurance company. Do not say or do anything than might bring a lawsuit. Write a script, or recommend a Nettie Pot. (I still think about a guy here whom paid $450 out of packet for a sinus infection, and was told to buy a nettie pot. Nothing wrong with not doing anything though. It was the price of the office visit.) Determine if you can get the patent in for another pricey office visit. Repeat.

Go back to writing that vanity novel, or checking the stock market. (This has been my experience. They have about 50 drugs they commonly use, and when things get complicated, they refer, or claim it might be psychosomatic?)

There's always a risk of a lawsuit too.

Then there are doctors whom sometimes prescribe off label for a condition, or honestly try to keep current. I appreciate those doctors.

waiting for a properly run study will cost lived especially when there are corporate and political interests controlling these tests.

it would have been easy to run dozens of prophylactic studies while this virus was running rampant. same for testing the dozens of clinical sourced protocols. instead the medical testing establishment shutdown and ignore all clinical protocols that were successful used, and put the message out so that medical journals, big tech, pharmacy boards, hospitals, suppressed more discussion and application of these protocols.

What good old days those were.

Well, yeah. One important point about health policy is that it's designed with the knowledge — the assumption — of some level of non-compliance.

Health policy design is game-theoretic, like overbidding in a negotiation: rather than choosing rules that are logically correct, you pick optimal rules to get your own population — a portfolio of people with different feelings toward authority — to on average do the thing you want them to do, or a set of different useful things you want them to do.

When regulating doctors, that means that you take into account that the doctor "on the ground" always has more knowledge than the regulator, and so you can phrase the regulations as absolutes to not do X, Y, or Z, knowing that the doctor will still do X/Y/Z anyway if they have information you don't that leads them to know better in a specific situation.

This is very different from actually making a recommendation to do X/Y/Z in those situations, because such a recommendation can be interpreted out-of-context to imply that doing X/Y/Z might be helpful, and may mislead some doctors into doing X/Y/Z in situations where it wouldn't be helpful — especially in situations where they don't have enough information, but are just falling ever downward on a flowchart of things-to-try.

Basically, when the regulations say "don't do X/Y/Z", what they mean is "if you do do X/Y/Z, we consider you to be taking a heterodox-to-the-medical-establishment position and will discourage others from giving you a platform to promote doing X/Y/Z, lest others not-as-informed as you hear from you and try X/Y/Z themselves without the same justified niche situation. But you can go ahead and keep doing X/Y/Z yourself; we'll turn a blind eye to that. Just do it quietly."

They are called protocols and not algorithms for a reason.

> You can rest assured right now many MDs are prescribing off-label meds, diagnostics tests, making non-protocol judgement calls etc all around the world.

Sure, sometimes for good reasons, others for less so. Every patient is different and the doctor has incomplete knowledge, and the protocols are in the end just that: Guidelines.

I would be happy, if I get a doctor, which is critical of guidelines in the sense of being aware of their limitations and won't follow them like they are written in stone (on a case by case basis).

However, as I understand it, we are talking here about deviating from the guidelines without good evidence or without a procedure to gain knowledge from it in a structured manner, not a case-by-case basis, but on principle. Quite frankly, I would stay the hell away from such doctor, which thinks that is a good idea.

>It is special in that everything about it has been very high profile, and in this day and age of hyper-connectedness, when expert institutions mess things up it is harder to cover up and their authority is at a greater risk.

>Let's be honest that is why they are being very iron fisted about out-of-band covid treatments, not because of a proportional threat to life.

I had limited contact with the expert institutions, but do have direct contact to people who did work in an ICU with Covid-19, (and a below average mortality rate).

Whenever the topic of, as you call them "out-of-band" treatments arose, the look on their faces would silence the topic. So, if you feel adventurous, I would suggest to cross-check your opinion with someone in the field.

Bingo. If there was a treatment for covid they couldn't administer the vaccines anymore. There are a lot of entrenched positions and people in power who stand to lose lots of dollars.

This is mostly true, but mRNA vaccines have gone through human trials before covid.

Except that the doses involved are way lower than what's being speculated about (on flimsy evidence) as a possible COVID-19 treatment. And this drug has severe side effects at such higher doses. There's no way in hell that this stuff is ever going to be safer than mRNA vaccines, let alone more effective.

At risk of being flippant, have you been on Facebook lately at all in the past 5-6 years?

Perhaps you were just helping my case out by demonstrating how easily people sometimes confuse even relatively accessible topics like the difference between stupidity and ignorance?

You do realise that it often takes heterodoxy - i.e. going against the orthodoxy in a field - to achieve a breakthrough? You also realise that the people Brett Weinstein is talking to are anything but quacks?

Why, then, this cheap shot of implying that what they are discussing is quackery? What is to be gained by such behaviour? It is not as if the orthodox approach to the treatment of SARS2 has been set in stone, nor is it a spectacular success. If the treatment they discuss - mainly Ivermectin as prophylaxis, Ivermectin in combination with Fluvoxamine and some other preparations as treatment - work they should be used given the long experience with and low cost of these preparations. They indicate these preparations help against 'long-term covid', they claim to have proof of their efficacy. What is to be gained by ignoring what they have to say? I understand that Pfizer, Moderna, Curevac, Astra-Zeneca, J&J, Merck and a few others potentially stand to loose a great deal should the emergency use authorisation for their vaccines be withdrawn prematurely because of the proven efficacy of other preparations - this is what would happen if the rules were followed which state that EUA is only given where there are no alternatives. That is not a valid reason for not allowing them to present their claimed evidence.

What is to be gained by defending the continued suppression of this information? It is clear that the information will come out in any case, most likely soon - it will be published no matter the hurdles which are being thrown up. Should their proof hold it will be yet another blow against the trust people have in the institutions of government.

I say publish this information, without censorship, without interference. The mantra of "trust the science" can only hold when the scientific method is allowed to function. Censoring anything which goes against the orthodoxy is not science, it is authoritarianism. It is what allowed Trofim Lysenko to push his Lamarckian nonsense which eventually led to disastrous famines in the Soviet Union and Communist China [1]. Just like Lysenkoism was not science, authoritarian dogmatic orthodoxy is not science.

Publish and discuss, in the open, without fear of repercussions, without censorship.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko#Consequences_of...

masks have been similar in general outside of a few fringe idiots speaking out of turn. they know and knew that well fitted n95 masks were effective in slowing the spread and should be used in the hospital settings. the advice was not to buy masks. they didn't know the efficacy of general cloth masks at the time and weather or not having them on would be a net detriment because it might cause people to touch their face more often while adjusting the masks and cause contaminated hands to come in contact with the face more often. the data showed that those fears were not fruitful and thus the recommendation changed.

there is also the disastrous TB paper that took the conclusion from a miner's lung paper as gospel and misinterpreted the results of that and then every subsequent paper used that erroneous data in their papers. (mining paper said that the nose was very good at blocking out everything down to 5 microns and aerosolized particles could be 100 microns or smaller but since the nose was effective at blocking particles larger than 5 microns you needed to worry about masks that block the small stuff. well the TB paper used the 5 micron aerosol particles as TB only infects you if you get the particles deep in your lungs. The problem is that aerosol particles greater than 5 microns can infect you with other diseases if the receptors for those are not deep in the lungs. in the end 5 micron was chosen as a magical aerosol particle threshold when the actual threshold is 100 microns and one scientist finally got the WHO et al to understand this after doing much research and advocacy)

in the end science is messy even when done with rigor.

No need to draw unfounded "implicit" proposals. I explicitly invoked a body of everyone with domain expertise to evaluate claims, not a singular institution.

Those people often do connect via institutionS created to support and benefit from their work and its utility, like professional associations, journals and trade publications, domain-specific forums, research arms, university departments.

The emphasized plural in institutionS should underscore the point that as neat a rhetorical flourish the invocation of an oppressive capital-I Institution is, it's actually substantially wrong as a way of engaging this topic. The actual truth is not going to be somehow hamstrung or stamped out if the stewards of a large public platform like YouTube follow the conversations in these communities of expertise on some topics rather than letting Lone Gunmen lead them into controversy-view battle against it.

Like Paul Graham recently said "Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed. But not when they're proposed by reasonable domain experts." The first best way to tell if someone is a domain expert is to become one; the second best is to see if the maverick can convince other domain experts.

If collective expertise itself sounds oppressive to you, wait until you try the oppression from giving authority to collective ignorance.

> the efficacy of wearing masks?

If this is talking about the surgeon general's take circa Feb/Mar 2020, I welcome its admission to this discussion, because it's actually an illustration about the problems of mass communication and how someone can say something where every last word is defensible and most of it holds up over a year later ... and yet harmful mass misunderstanding (and a handle for disinformation) can follow. And that should encourage people towards more cautious use/responsibility when it comes to media reach.

And still, even with all the problems with that... the official narrative that you seem eager to characterize as potentially misleading or oppressive had actually fixed itself, accompanied with accessible arguments and demonstrations within months.

> As for YouTube being “mass media”, come on—it’s filled with random crap uploaded by members of the public.

Walter Cronkite broadcast on narrow-producer mass-audience media.

Youtube is both mass-audience AND mass-producer. Some videos on the long tail see a few dozen views. Some videos have reached more of the world than Cronkite ever did and may still be doing so long after everyone who ever heard his voice live or even remembers his name is dead.

Seems to me that doesn't make YouTube any less "mass."

Sorry but put it more clearly we definetely should treat non expert as children, for their own good.

Are you taking the position that all gatekeeping is ideological?

Because otherwise, bringing it up when the topic seems to be gatekeeping of factual understanding seems off topic.

It's against their financial incentive to have ivermectin, an out-of-patent drug, be authorized for treatment of covid. See https://twitter.com/BretWeinstein/status/1402647948371005441...

[1] https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/vaccines/emerge...

https://www.pnas.org/content/86/16/6077.long

In the topsy turvy world of ivermectin proponents, this is seen as a argument in favor of ivermectin

If we relabel YouTube as "short segment internet video entertainment" than we have things like Twitch, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat that all compete for our attention. I would even say that Netflix, Amazon Video, Apple TV+, Disney+, etc. all compete with YouTube. Of course, they are all unique, but that shouldn't be the bar of measuring "competition". When I used to run a university bar, I would say "we aren't competing with the other bars in town, we are competing with Netflix. How do we convince people to leave their rooms and walk across campus?"

But I don't understand how large audience matters to anyone else than to the platform.

If you're just an user, there's nothing stopping you to use all of these services. In fact given the problem mentioned no one should stick to just one, because that leads to creating a monopoly.

If you're content creator, less of other creators means less competition, your videos are more likely to be featured etc.

That website is run by FLCCC / Pierre Kory

Here is a video about Ivermectin for covid, with Pierre Kory: https://youtu.be/4O7uy4tzI8A

https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152

I think some of the social media platforms are making mistakes sometimes at the moment, but honestly they’re faced with very difficult choices. Ultimately they do have to make those choices, there’s no such thing as broadcast communications platforms without editorial selection of some kind.

Its a loaded term.

This is a serious failure of the FDA. ivmmeta.com is a meta-analysis of all ivermectin studies (58 studies as of now). This meta-analysis shows ivermectin to be very effective, and the FDA isn’t even looking. This has been the situation for 9 months now.

As I understand it Eric has his theory, he wrote it up, and published it on his YouTube channel or a similar platform and a few interested people critiqued it. Great. It would be one thing if he was emailing the editors at Nature every week with a new crazy idea, that would be "crank" territory. That doesn't seem like what happened.

Regardless, this tweet is about Eric's brother who had a conversation with a doctor about possible use of ivermectin to treat Covid. Entirely separate from Eric Weinstein's physics credibility.

There's no way I'd let that Christian doctor try to save my dying child, their beliefs about a zombie savior that flew to heaven are "crank" like so they're disqualified.

Seriously - a crank about physics? The majority of those people are crazy in some regard, that's why they love physics!

There are many such types who reformulate various types of physics from a mathematical pov -- these attempts rarely have any deep upside... but it is a hobby of mathematical physicists.

Nothing "crank" about it.

  "he could also be one about Covid."

For example, the Nobel laureate Linus Pauling made outstanding contributions to chemistry in explaining the nature of the chemical bond. He also believed vitamin C could help cure or prevent cancer, for which there doesn't appear to be much evidence.

I might have agreed with that a few years ago, but crank conspiracy theories have gotten mainstream traction like I have never seen previously.

"Prove" and "disprove" are never fully black and white. It isn't easy to disprove the theory that the Chinese engineered Covid (i.e SARS-CoV-2) and its spike protein RNA so they could insert arbitrary genetic code into non-Chinese people via the inevitable mRNA vaccine they knew would be created (which itself contains genetic code directly copied from the virus itself). Maybe they want to control our minds, or make us susceptible to some future engineered virus that will take out everyone on the planet that was vaccinated.

I can't disprove that. Maybe someone can.... but whoever they are, they will hardly be able to communicate this to average internet users and YouTube consumers being as it is extremely technical.

But I can make a rational, reasonable analysis of this, and conclude it is unlikely enough that getting a vaccine is a good idea.

And by the way, it's not a matter of determining that you are the "smart guy in the room," it's really more a matter of determining what is the general consensus of many smart people in the room. Obviously that is getting harder to do.

Have you never spoken to conspiracy theorists? Go and watch one of the Flat Earth documentaries. If Flat Earth is a crank conspiracy theory then it should be easy to disprove and the conspiracy would die out, right?