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Comment by devwastaken | Hacker News Reader

Being studied, not accepted in use in humans for COVID. Blame the idiots injecting themselves with the actual horse versions, and the doctors/vets illigally prescribing it. IVM is as useful as eating dirt in relation to COVID, until proven otherwise with studies that aren't fabricated data or otherwise p-hacked to death - it's disinformation, and rightfully removed.

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> IVM is as useful as eating dirt in relation to COVID, until proven otherwise with studies

Um. No. IVM is useful or not useful regardless of whether studies have been done.

Studies are useful for finding out whether it is useful, but they do not affect the result.

If people take it now and then it turns out it's a miracle cure that halts ageing the people taking it now will have benefited. If instead it actually causes incurable cancer in five years the people taking it now are in the shitter. These things are true or false regardless of whether we know them and regardless of whether we got that knowledge from formal studies.

> IVM is useful or not useful regardless of whether studies have been done

Just like dirt.

Remember when posting the lab leak hypothesis on Facebook would get you banned and now it's, as best as we can figure, the most plausible theory?

There is no human run group fit to decide what is or is not "disinformation".

In fact, most of the "people are dying because they're injecting themselves with horse dewormer" story can be traced back to a rolling stone article that quoted a doctor who said so. The only problem was, they actually quoted the doctor's name as well as an actual hospital he supposedly worked at - and the hospital issued a statement that that doctor neither worked there nor had they treated any Ivermectin overdoses (https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/rolling-stone-s-ive...). In other words, "people overdosing on horse dewormer" is actual misinformation... which isn't being censored.

Relying on one source for information is wrong, the hearsay article which reported what the doc in Oklahoma said without verifying the claims about ivermectin overdoses was wrong.

What is not wrong is this:

According to the National Poison Data System (NPDS), which collects information from the nation's 55 poison control centers, there was a 245% jump in reported exposure cases from July to August — from 133 to 459.

Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...

On the one hand, it's nice to know this number is low, on the other hand the numbers are likely under-reporting. Low toxicity doses and symptoms are likely unrecorded. Self medication with prescription drugs is a bad idea.

No. The Rolling Stone debacle literally just happened.

The idea "most of the story" is traced backed to one bad article, from two days ago, when it's been a story for over a month is ridiculous nut-picking.

Ahem, I believe that's "nitpicking". b^)

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nutpicking

Thanks!

To be fair, the bans usually were about china fabricating the virus on purpose and releasing it with intention, accompanied by racism against Asians. This is pretty different from the accidental leak of a research-object, which is now the accepted theory.

The media did themselves and the public a disservice by gluing the two theories together and blending them. Several friends - college educated, intelligent professionals - were confused enough to approach and ask me about the lab leak/release theories.

The intentional lab release theory is the stuff of nonsense conspiracy theories. The accidental leak theory has always had some support but is now more widely accepted (but will likely never have hard proof).

For a time, both were bannable offenses on Facebook, Youtube and others. Likely because the media glued them together and assigned them both as "disinformation".

On YouTube and Facebook, "the media" is just "stuff people are saying in videos they post."

So this point reduces to "both were bannable offenses because people were posting videos that glued them together," which... Yes, that's why.

It wasn't really the media doing that. It was more a combination between nut heads, meme heads with their umbrella-connection and the first panic. The media just amplified it and rode the wave, as usual. And after the message was out, it was hard to turn it around. And I guess the platforms were just unable to distinguish between them, as also had more interest to wait till the nutty wave died down.

> It wasn't really the media doing that.

[1] - https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2021/06/covid-la...

[2] - https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/21/politics/coronavirus-lab-theo...

[3] - https://www.politifact.com/li-meng-yan-fact-check/

Not sure what you mean. These articles are all from 6+ months after the first panic. At that point, the theories were already long merged and spreading wild. They were already present from the first days in January 2020, when China's situation became epidemic. And this didn't really change till spring 2021 when everyone cooled down a bit and sanity returned a bit.

> To be fair, the bans usually were about china fabricating the virus on purpose and releasing it with intention, accompanied by racism against Asians. This is pretty different from the accidental leak of a research-object, which is now the accepted theory.

No, both versions were lumped into the same bucket.

"most plausible theory" according to whom? It's not a theory, it's a hypothesis with little tangible but evidence due to the nature of chinas control. It could have happened, it may not have. The problem with lab leak discussion on YouTube/Facebook is it was heavily associated with politics, and incredible unsubstantiated claims. "Experts" from nowhere, hired degrees talking about a lab they know nothing about, anonymous and convenient unheard of "researchers" supposedly "exposing the lab leak". The disinformation was incredible. Even if lab leak did happen - very few had the actual proof or good arguments to back it.

It became 'plausible' based on fashion -- the evidence didn't change at all. Which is even crazier.

Injecting? When I took ivermectin (for parasites, not covid, of course) I took it orally. Why on Earth would you inject it?

I've used the "pour-on" version of IVM which is used on livestock. I could hardly avoid it: we were deworming and branding a herd of cattle; the method of application was to pour IVM on each critter's back and spread it with your hands. Doing so probably put enough ivermectin in my system to kill any parasites I had 50 times over. Never suffered any consequences AFAICT. I have noticed that the guys who regularly do this are extremely healthy but they're all cowboys, so a selection bias is likely present.

I don't think it absorbs that well through the skin; there are topical ivermectin preparations that are supposed to be safer for kittens and the white-footed dog breeds that have a defect in the enzyme that detoxifies it.

In general, though, people panicking about ivermectin poisoning is ridiculous. Mass ivermectin administration is a common parasite-extermination measure.

When we use pour-on we just pour it on. I've never seen any instructions to rub it on with your hands. Liquid that gets stuck to your hands is liquid that isn't still on the animal's skin where it will have therapeutic effect.

But sure, it's completely safe for human beings to be exposed to ivermectin. WHO wouldn't recommend it otherwise.

The dose makes the poison; nothing is completely safe to be exposed to. The lethal dose of ivermectin is about 10 mg/kg orally, so it's about 250 times more poisonous than table salt, which from my point of view puts it in the "dangerous poisons" category. But that's about 30 times the standard therapeutic dose, so it's pretty unlikely to happen by accident.

However, that's the standard therapeutic dose for parasites. To work as an antiviral it needs to interfere with viral replication somehow, and since viruses replicate using normal somatic-cell metabolic processes, you'd probably have to take a high enough dose of ivermectin for it to interfere with normal somatic-cell metabolic processes. That, in turn, means you're going to see side effects you wouldn't see at the normal antiparasitic doses.

Nevertheless, there isn't in fact an epidemic of serious ivermectin poisoning, horse dewormers or no. Maybe one in ten million people in the US, less elsewhere.

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