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Comment by delecti | Hacker News Reader

I think skepticism of vaccines largely doesn't transfer to the broader medical field. The ineffective fad treatments (ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine) are still medicine, but are still "popular" with vaccine skeptics. It's not rational, but I think vaccine skepticism is largely not rational to begin with.

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Anecdotally, hearing from doctors working in COVID wards, they consist almost entirely of anti-vaxxers who are now seeking (and receiving) treatments only recently approved. So while not everyone will take this, I think probably many would once they have symptoms.

That said, this does work better it seems if taken early, before the anti-vax sentiment may have worn off. Hard to say.

What it does signal is really the "end of the pandemic". We have both a vaccine (now approved for kids) and a cure. That sounds like it to me.

This. Being antivax when one has 93% if not facing the virus ≠ refusing drugs when infected. At that point, it’s worth doing everything because the risk is realized.

The first three days of symptoms for an anti-vaxxer are obviously just a flu, because covid is fake. It's not covid until they're hooked up to a machine...

There are many who won't even get a test now, to check if it's COVID. They ride it out, and won't know if they just had a flu, cold, or COVID. And thus it seems we've currently plateaued in case counts in the US :(

Check out Reddit.com/r/hermancainaward for this exactly

How does knowing the name of your infection help you? If I'm sick I'm going to stay home and rest, not run to a test clinic out of pure curiosity.

A lab in the UK performing PCR tests messed up big time, and returned 40 000 false positives.

40 000 people forced to work by their employers, who then spread it to colleagues and customers, because they had a respiratory disease but ‘it isn’t COVID’.

COVID is particularly bad, but employees should also be allowed to stay home and rest, to not spread the cold and flu.

The fad treatments are "still medicine," but crucially are not generally approved of by the "mainstream medical establishment." This lack of approval is the key feature of these treatments.

> This lack of approval is the key feature of these treatments.

Lack of approval + length of use as medicine. There's a narrative that drug X has been used for 50 years (despite what it's used for) and therefore the pharma industry is uninterested in its success because they can't get rich off of it.

The latter is a common thread, along the lines of "what THEY don't want you to know."

But this makes absolutely no sense. Plenty of previously approved drugs, such as anticoagulants and dexamethasone, are part of the current standard of care; and their effectiveness has unambiguously been borne out by the data with multiple independent studies / analyses that all agree.

So why are THEY for these but against ivermectin?

Of course the whole idea of THEY is nutty. The idea that there is this level of coordination / cooperation among pharma companies is ridiculous enough to be the punchline of a joke.

You only make it ridiculous, it's actually really simple. Bureaucrats in agencies have their procedures and their agenda. Very little coordination is needed to ignore some controversial medication, associated with poor countries and antivaxers, when there are other things they can appear to be working on.

Many people sick with COVID are not getting this "standard of care" you suggest exists. Just tylenol and good luck. So those other drugs are not very far from ivermectin in terms of accessibility. All effective drugs are controlled and access is not given to the broad public, only to doctors and pharmacists, and many of these gatekeepers keep them from the sick people. You have to be lucky and have a good doctor who cares about you, not just about following what government agencies tell him to do. Then he may give both "unproblematic" stuff like heparines and also more "controversial" stuff like ivermectin.

All that stuff about access to quality health care is totally true, but I don’t see how it’s relevant. Ivermectin is being described as a preventative drug comparable to the actual COVID vaccines, not merely a treatment once you’re already sick.

Are these patients only being given Tylenol hospitalized? Because that would strain credulity.

The FDA regulates the marketing of drugs, not the practice of medicine. Physicians can prescribe whatever they want. Treatment guidelines are determined entirely by practicing physicians.

Uptodate is a good resource to check out if you want to see for yourself what clinical guidelines look like, and the type of evidence they are supported by.

https://www.uptodate.com/contents/covid-19-management-in-hos...

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