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Comment by atty | Hacker News Reader

What I find almost more interesting than the article itself is the comments that show a non-zero portion of the HN community (which I think is generally more intellectually curious and educated than average) are actually strongly arguing that ivermectin has strong effect, and even crazier, that it may be safer or more effective than the mRNA vaccines.

Is this from being incapable of following science and drawing rational conclusions? Or is it more of a tribal thing, where they are exposed to a biased subset of information/misinformation, and are now emotionally invested in the success of ivermectin because their tribe is?

Either way, like someone else in the comments said, these past 2 years have shown us that laypeople are incapable of following active science in real time and drawing reasoned conclusions. Frankly, this is probably true of everyone who is not an expert in the field in question. We need organizations like the CDC and FDA to be much better about their messaging (remember the no-mask debacle? Great way to lose credibility, guys and gals), and we need much better tools to shut down the spread and weaponization of misinformation from the anti-vax crowd et al. I honestly don’t have any idea of how either of those get fixed, however.

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I really think covid has broken hacker news. Maybe it’s instructive. It’s the most interesting tech story of the decade. I want to know everything about how the virus works, how we can fight back, what new ideas are out there, etc. for a community that loves articles that require thinking, it should be great.

Instead, covid threads are awful. Comments which are pure drivel and talking points are the norm. Politics has infested and rotted our brains.

So with ivermectin, it’s as I was with HCQ or Vitamin D: I’m open minded and intrigued. I want to read the studies, especially the theoretical ones. Let me watch things develop and let medicine take it to patients if the science gets there. But you can’t do that when every other comment is weaponized to the point where people are scarred to read articles because they might contradict their dogma.

I am sleep-deprived and just caught myself reading this comment thread.

I've been avoiding HN threads about the COVID like I avoid any scaremongering ones on Reddit: it's just a massive pile of people that think they know better than most spreading constant misinformation.

The worst thing about the pandemic is it has made the vast majority of the populace an expert in epidemiology, biological containment, sociology, politics, economy, virology. Everyone has an opinion to share about it. Everyone has something to say about it.

In a forum where most people are technically-minded, this creates the negative and odious version of nerd sniping. Nerds talking out of their arse about stuff way over their head.

I don't like calling for censorship, but I wish dang would demote and let any COVID-related post slide off the front page 10x as fast as any normal thread. They did it for Bitcoin, and frankly it was not such a shitshow.

I could change every assumption in this comment to the opposite and it would make just as much or little sense.

You can’t pretend to be searching for truth if your solution to the problem of people making mistakes is to shut down any possible way to discuss the disagreement. I just find the cognitive dissonance on display here staggering. How do you you know you’re right? Have you ever been wrong? I suppose you knew at the time that you were wrong? Or maybe you just know that this time you’re right?

I am not arguing that I know anything to be right or wrong - I am not an epidemiologist or an infectious disease expert, or a doctor. I explicitly said that us non-experts are not able to verify these things on our own. I am saying that those communities of experts have decided that the question of ivermectin’s effectiveness is effectively settled. There are of course experts that disagree - there always are (I work in physics and we can’t even get 100% agreement on the standard model, for instance). But the group consensus of experts, supported by the scientific evidence, is that it either does not work, or the effect is small enough that it is not worth the risk - this is coming from acquaintances who work in infectious disease and medical research who have been working on Covid, who are part of that community.

I also never said shut down disagreement. That’s a straw man you created. Anti-vax is not a good-intentioned disagreement with sound scientific merit, it is a pseudo-science movement that actively and knowingly disregards the truth. Scientific freedom and discussion is important. Allowing pseudoscience to flourish under some strange argument that their positions are as scientifically valid as actual science, is, frankly, nonsense.

You've confused science with politics. There is no scientific consensus on whether ivermectin is an effective treatment for covid. The people claiming this are engaging in politics. There is a consensus that people should not use ivermectin (or any medicine) except as directed by a doctor and not until there is extremely good clinical evidence for its efficacy. But that doesn't imply that ivermectin isn't effective, just that we don't know.

Comparing ivermectin's supposed anti-viral properties to the the standard model or vaccines is absurd.

> I am saying that those communities of experts have decided that the question of ivermectin’s effectiveness is effectively settled.

Trials[1] don't tend to be run on settled science, so it really does seem that you've taken a position based on political arguments.

> I also never said shut down disagreement. That’s a straw man you created. Anti-vax is not a good-intentioned disagreement

You've said to shut down disagreement based on a standard that requires mind reading. How is that effectively any different from shutting down disagreement? That old Chomsky quote about Stalin being for free speech he agreed with come to mind.

> Allowing pseudoscience to flourish under some strange argument that their positions are as scientifically valid as actual science, is, frankly, nonsense.

This is an actual straw man, by the way, the comment you're replying to made no such faulty conflation.

Since mind reading is back in fashion I will do some clairvoyancy and predict that I will be labelled anti-vaxx for defending the mere possibility of disagreement and dissent. Now there's a problem with a non-zero number of the HN community you should be concerned about.

[1] https://www.principletrial.org/

Ivermectin was suspicious from the beginning, not just because it was promoted by the same people with the same the-FDA-doesn’t-want-you-to-know-drivel. By this point, it’s ridiculous. And, yes, you can switch it around in the comment and it’d make just as much sense. If, that is, you also switch reality.

> ivermectin has strong effect

Strong effect? I read it was a mild antiviral

> and even crazier, that it may be safer or more effective than the mRNA vaccines

It is definitely safer according to the literature

VAERS, even with its data quality issues, is tracking ~7600 deaths from COVID vaccines in the US. VAERS is widely alleged to have large factors of undercounting [1] around vaccine deaths & injuries

> Adverse events from drugs and vaccines are common, but underreported. Although 25% of ambulatory patients experience an adverse drug event, less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Likewise, fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. [2]

If VAERS only has 1%, 5%, or 10% of actuals, things are going to get much worse.

However, despite the skyrocketing counts of pericarditis and myocarditis among young men in particular, they are still pushing vaxxes for the youngest that have the lowest death rates from covid.

Really, this is becoming a medical ethics issue of coercion and a violation of Due No Harm.

[1] https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/30/adverse-reacti...

[2] https://digital.ahrq.gov/sites/default/files/docs/publicatio... -- search for under in the document.

Your post is assuming a lot of this science is "settled". I don't think science is settled - especially in this field. Acknowledging that your own statements may be incorrect might help you down the path to figuring out a fix.

Hint: as soon as you know you're right, and you make statements based on that, when you're inevitably wrong (not saying this in a disparaging way - making sense and being right through all this is nearly impossible), you will lose all trust.

Settled is a strong claim, but as far as I’m aware (I have many connections amongst the medical and epidemiological communities), the general consensus is that ivermectin does not work. For instance, the FDA, WHO, the AMA, the American Pharmacists Association, and the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists all say it should not be used outside of clinical trials because there is no good evidence for it, and even Merck, the manufacturer, specifically states it should not be used for COVID at all.

I’m not saying no discourse or testing should happen. I’m a scientist, I believe scientific freedom, and of course, that includes a lot of disagreements. But those disagreements happen in the scientific community, not in the general public. What’s happening in the general public is not at all connected to what’s happening in the research.

Instead, I’m interested in how these “treatments” with no strong evidence are getting weaponized by motivated agents (like the anti-vax crowd) to sow distrust both in scientific organizations (the CDC, and the FDA, Pfizer, Moderna, et al), and in the use of tools with proven effectiveness, like the vaccines themselves.

>Instead, I’m interested in how these “treatments” with no strong evidence are getting weaponized by motivated agents (like the anti-vax crowd) to sow distrust both in scientific organizations (the CDC, and the FDA, Pfizer, Moderna, et al), and in the use of tools with proven effectiveness, like the vaccines themselves.

In this polarized environment CDC/FDA/WHO/AMA are political organizations first and authoritative ones second. The conflict of interest here is legitimate and the loss of their authority with the public is in great part their own doing.

Sorry what is the conflict of interest in offering the most accurate information they can?

Even discarding whether we drill into the issues with the relatively small body of ivermectin studies, for or against. There isn’t anything approaching a consensus there.

On the other hand what does have a consensus is that the vaccines work.

Recommending the best possible action is pretty clear and obvious. Using ivermectin as a prophylactic isn’t close to settled and even if it did have a positive result that doesn’t necessarily make it as effective as the vaccines. Nor is it as reasonable a treatment regimen.

As far as actually treating active/severe COVID cases we do have verifiable and working treatment mechanisms. Let’s just actually use what we know works. Makes more sense for everyone.

I’m all for having more, and better studies don on ivermectin. But this is absurd.

The loss of authority with the public is certainly about politics. But it is very obviously a political action being taken upon them, rather than one they’ve put out themselves. They have been politicized, as have many things in recent history for outside political gain.

I have some pretty serious issues with the FDA around many aspects of policy but unless you actually believe (and maybe you do I don’t know) that the vaccines are harmful ( in which case nobody can dissuade you no matter what), then the current advice is pretty obvious and clear cut.

Ideally ivermectin would show a clinical benefit because the best ways we have to treat an active/severe case are very expensive (Remdesivir/monoclonal antibodies) are unlikely to trickle out to most of the world.

>Sorry what is the conflict of interest in offering the most accurate information they can?

* When Fauci was telling people masks aren't needed was he speaking as a scientific authority giving "most accurate information" or was he speaking as a bureaucrat concerned about ppp availability for hospitals?

* When WHO goes against the booster shot narrative is it because of the science or is it because they want vaccines distributed to other parts of the world?

* When these organizations were casting doubt and even CENSORING the Wuhan lab origin theory is it because of the science or because of potential gain of function research and their association?

These "authorities" have chosen to act as political bureaucrats first and they have done it poorly. This is the result.

With respect,

Decisions have to be made and in the early days surrounding the pandemic PPE for hospitals is an important thing to have. If that is the motivation that is quite literally a medical and health authority decision and also valid. Information in hindsight change things. Triage isn’t politics. You can disagree but I think calling it playing politics is pretty absurd.

Re: Booster shots

So which health authority here then is acting as a political agent? Kind of muddies your perspective. Regardless all authorities don’t explicitly have to agree to be offering good advice. Do we expect everyone to have the right answer all the time? There are also competing interest here. Makes sense for WHO to prefer vaccination go wide. Also makes sense for the US to work to protect its citizens as much as possible, potentially at the expense of the rest of the globe. Does one do more good than the other? How do you quantify that result objectively?

Nothing about the wuhan lab origin is particularly relevant or important as far as the issues of treatment go. I agree this is an entirely political issue, but it is also divorced from what has become politicized as far as COVID treatment and vaccines.

I think it’s a bad faith argument to say the majority of the `political` aspects of the pandemic response are a result of health authorities losing trust because they are acting as political agents.

The counter narrative (if you want to call it that, I don’t know what would be the best thing to call it really) of anti-vax, anti-mask, and alternative (unproven) treatments is decades in the making of a general trend that I do agree is (From an American perspective) a general lack of faith in government. But I also think that a lot of that is political in its inception. And surrounding COVID especially, these are the ideas being amplified by mainstream political figures in an unprecedented way.

There have always been people skeptical of the government. There have always been antivax people. But the flames that are fanning these, especially now are explicitly being done so by political elements for their own personal political gain.

There is barely any defensible basis for the majority of the backlash here. It’s would be kind of funny if it wasn’t so depressing.

You’ve got military personnel making grandiose statements against their vaccine requirements. All of them got several when they enlisted, and there was no issue then for some reason. The anthrax vaccine really did have some major issues (identified pretty much immediately when it was rolled out) but we didn’t have this kind of narrative about it then.

Ultimately this really just reinforces the `politics` aspect to me.

Are there valid areas of debate to have on pandemic response? Absolutely.

Do some of them have political implications? (Boosters)? Sure

Does rejecting (especially) vaccines and masks in spite of the quantifiable data about their efficacy make sense? No.

Does advocating the use of debatably useful substances as an alternative because you’ve chosen to ignore what we do know (for political reasons, in this case your personal politics) make sense? No.

People are allowing their personal politics to override something that isn’t political. The politics are largely coming from outside, especially about pandemic response.

>Triage isn’t politics. You can disagree but I think calling it playing politics is pretty absurd.

You would call it "giving most accurate information" which is technically true but in a legalese sense. Not in a building trust with society sense.

>Nothing about the wuhan lab origin is particularly relevant or important as far as the issues of treatment go. I agree this is an entirely political issue, but it is also divorced from what has become politicized as far as COVID treatment and vaccines.

It's relevant to the issue of being a trustworthy authority figure. The response of the government/media was to censor this narrative while Fauci was internally exchanging emails about it. Not only did it set a new precedent but it was for questionable reasons because like you say they are orthogonal issues from perspective of finding scientific solutions. In other words they squandered the trust of the people for completely political reasons.

>There have always been people skeptical of the government. There have always been antivax people. But the flames that are fanning these, especially now are explicitly being done so by political elements for their own personal political gain.

We are passed that point. We are at a point where many bureaucrats feel justified operating in "post-truth" worldviews. They have gone from reacting to bad faith actors to themselves being part of the systemic problem.

>Does rejecting (especially) vaccines and masks in spite of the quantifiable data about their efficacy make sense? No.

In the context of both parties using the pandemic as a wedge issue for their own causes. In the context of all the doubt medical institutions have generated for themselves. It's not a surprising outcome on the social level.

> but as far as I’m aware (I have many connections amongst the medical and epidemiological communities), the general consensus is that ivermectin does not work.

> For instance, the FDA, WHO, the AMA, the American Pharmacists Association, and the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists all say it should not be used outside of clinical trials because there is no good evidence for it

These two statements don't mean the same thing. The stance for the FDA in particular is not "does not work" but is "we don't know (trials are ongoing), so we don't recommend it".

> scientific organizations (the CDC, and the FDA)

Are these the same organizations that told us we don't need a mask?

Are these the same organizations that said that controls on international and local travel were not needed?

Are these the same organizations now pushing N95 masks for health workers?

Are these the same organizations that were funding gain-of-function chimeric coronavirus research in Wuhan China?

Are these the same organizations that distanced themselves from a vaccine mandate, now in favor of them?

Are these the same organizations that failed to put out treatment guides for outpatient & inpatient care for COVID, but when they did, eventually, liberally plagiarized from the very doctors they attacked?

It’s because on this website there is a huge number of people that just drink whatever is the kool-aid du jour that goes around in the right side disinformation circles and social networks.

Imagine to oppose a perfectly safe vaccine that has been administered 6 BILLION times all around the world and that has a proven efficacy of at least one order of magnitude against delta variant and to push for a horse dewormer (that bear in mind it’s perfectly effective for what is used for.. killing parasites, not viruses)

I think it’s because a lot of the HN demographic has quite a big overlap with the people that use social networks where all this bullshit originates and it is amplified and it spreads.

>Imagine to oppose a perfectly safe vaccine that has been administered 6 BILLION times all around the world and that has a proven efficacy of at least one order of magnitude against delta variant and to push for a horse dewormer (that bear in mind it’s perfectly effective for what is used for.. killing parasites, not viruses)

Who here is opposing vaccines? You've created quite the strawman in your head.

>I think it’s because a lot of the HN demographic has quite a big overlap with the people that use social networks where all this bullshit originates and it is amplified and it spreads.

In other words Ivermectin is a proxy issue in the culture war. Hence why it's so polarizing and people are quick to regress from critical thinking to group think narratives.

I hate to weigh in here, but nothing is "perfectly safe"! This kind of absolute language seems to create distrust when people discover it's not quite true.

At this stage, the safety is fairly quantifiable, too: https://www.publichealthontario.ca/en/health-topics/immuniza... has a weekly adverse effects report which breaks down myocarditis/pericarditis by sex and age, per million population (the most common dangerous side effect for mRNA vaccines).

I see this a lot and it's very strange to see super smart people such as yourself conflate <number of people> with <time>. We cannot observe long-term effects through number of people.

Seems like you guys should take a look at Brazil as a cautionary tale for what happens when these miracle treatments are adopted by politically inclined doctors and sold to the masses as the magical solution.

Source?

Brazil is the large country in the NE of South America.

The most recent example would be the PreventSenior debacle:

https://www.metropoles.com/brasil/politica-brasil/exclusivo-...

https://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-paulo/noticia/2021/08/26/cpi-rec...

Early into the pandemic, a health insurance company ran a fraudulent study to show that HCQ was effective at treating COVID. The patients were enrolled without their consent, the data was manipulated to remove people who died from the statistics, and doctors were pressured to prescribe HCQ and other medications that did not have proof that they are effective.

This fraud was intended to promote a political agenda of mass contamination. The people running the fraudulent study were in contact with high-ranking officials in the Bolsonaro government, by means of a so-called "shadow cabinet" of pro-HCQ doctors and businessmen. This shadow-cabinet bypassed the experts inside the health ministry, in order to promote the idea that the best way to get through the pandemic was to allow it to spread as fast as possible, and try to use HCQ to treat people when they inevitably got infected.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-brazil...

Is there a name for a cognitive bias that predisposes one toward favoring iconoclastic positions solely for their novelty? Because that seems fairly endemic in the tech industry.

Being a contrarian fits that description somewhat.

Recognized immunologists have argued that their favorite unproven treatment is the best.

I know plenty of anti-vax, some of them remarkably smart, some of them are health professionals.

We are all biased, and overcoming bias is hard. It is a field of expertise by itself, and it is usually not required for tech jobs. Just being smart will only allow you to find more complex but just as fallacious arguments that will confirm your bias. For example, it took me a while to "believe" in climate change, I took a while to realize that solar panels are not just for pocket calculators, and things like that, for a variety of reasons, and found a lot of advanced material to fuel my bias, which still has not completely disappeared. I am not particularly attached to Ivermectin so there is no bias for me to overcome, but I understand that some people can be. Try to think about it yourself, you probably believe in stupid things too.

And getting attached to a cheap treatment for a disease that has been messing with our lives since early 2020 is not what I would consider an unhealthy reaction. It is hope. Getting too attached to it can be a problem, but no matter what we want to think, we are just humans.

"intellectually curious and educated" is a nice way to describe "at the peak of Dunning-Kruger". It's ivermectin now, the same people were writing last year that whoever were suppressing Vitamin D, the obvious COVID prevention protocol. You don't hear much of the latter anymore (it hasn't solved cancer, either).

> Either way, like someone else in the comments said, these past 2 years have shown us that laypeople are incapable of following active science in real time and drawing reasoned conclusions. Frankly, this is probably true of everyone who is not an expert in the field in question. We need organizations like the CDC and FDA to be much better about their messaging (remember the no-mask debacle? Great way to lose credibility, guys and gals), and we need much better tools to shut down the spread and weaponization of misinformation from the anti-vax crowd et al. I honestly don’t have any idea of how either of those get fixed, however.

These two things are at odds with each other. When the authorities are wrong, contradicting them is classified as "misinformation". If they cannot be contradicted, they are the only people capable of correcting themselves. The results of that will be pretty predictable.

> We need organizations like the CDC and FDA to be much better about their messaging (remember the no-mask debacle)

When I heard of the COVID outbreak, I promptly put on my P100 mask and tried to go to sleep in it. Tried being the operative word.

Later on, switched to my N95. Ah yes, the joys of sleep!

Lol

For me I see the controversy here and I figure it could fall either way. Maybe it works, maybe it's just another hydroxychloroquine. I'm keeping an open mind. In no way should anyone be thinking it's safer or more effective than the mRNA vaccines given how many people have had them and the vast amount of data we have on that now. Any argument you can make on that is just very weak because there isn't that kind of rigorous supporting data on the Ivermectin side.

To the downvoters: put up or shut up. Your opinion doesn't change the facts.

What would happen if people just followed recognized experts, but those experts were wrong? Bad things like the "masks don't help" messaging early on.

What would happen if you got to be the contrarian that predicted the experts' wrongness? That would prove you're smart.

And a lot of us want to feel smart. So that makes us more vulnerable to certain cognitive weaknesses.

I'm just happy that HackerNews hasn't generated into a groupthink platform like what Ars Technica devolved into. Check the comment sections over there on articles regarding COVID and perhaps it's more to your liking and perhaps in your opinion the standard of discussion is higher over there.

I am one of those people that would trust Ivermectin more for treating (or prevention) of COVID compared to a mRNA-based vaccine and I have plenty of reasons for thinking so.

Some reasons I would avoid mRNA based vaccines:

- There's plenty of strokes into my family and I worry that I could easily get a stroke as well, perhaps due to genetically smaller arteries in my head (just a hunch). Seems many deaths of mRNA based vaccines were caused by blood clots.

- Looking at the numbers, I really don't believe COVID is very dangerous for most people. COVID is mostly dangerous for obese people, old people, people with co-morbidities and for those people it might make sense to use a vaccine (same we used to do with the flu every year).

- I feel the number of reported deaths are not correct, since in many countries, if people die with COVID, it's reported as a COVID death, while people might have died from e.g. cancer. As such, actual deaths are probably much lower.

- The media's unfair and sensationalist reporting of "horse dewormer" is one of the reasons I don't trust big media anymore (and there's many others in the past as well).

- Overall, Ivermectin is really very safe when using dosages based on body weight. It's cheap and easy to get. It's easy to mass produce. So even if Ivermectin would not work, there's very little risk when using the medicine responsibly.

- I've read many articles and looked at graphs of countries using Ivermectin and to me it seems there's a clear relation with the use of Ivermectin and the reduction in deaths and COVID cases.

- Even if the whole world would take the vaccine, it's very unlikely we'd stop COVID due to immune escape. Several sources already believe COVID is here to stay, like the flu. And I don't wanna bother to take every year a booster for some COVID mutation.

- In my view we can't be sure if the mRNA vaccines are totally safe in the long run. I will wait a couple of years (5 or more) and see if people receive any adverse long term effects. If not, I will be ok to accept mRNA-based vaccines in the future, but not going to take one right now.

- I was actually open to get the (traditional, e.g. weakened or killed off virus) Sinovac vaccine for COVID if it would make movement around easier in Thailand, but since Thailand now wants to combine the Sinovac vaccine with AstraZeneca, I won't bother.

I guess you haven't heard of brazilian healthcare provider Prevent Senior. That's just the tip of the iceberg, more healthcare providers will sure follow the same path.

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