"Most scientists/doctors believe it to not work against Covid-19" wasn't a serious argument for you?
It is a strange phenomenon that people are so ready to disagree with people who spent decades achieving exactly that kind of knowledge.
It is a strange phenomenon that people are so ready to disagree with people who spent decades achieving exactly that kind of knowledge.
And if anyone who said "many scientists/doctors believe it to work against Covid-19" is getting banned, then that statement has 0 signal.
As Scott points out in this article, without knowing about the parasitic worm situation https://ivmmeta.com/ is both reasonable and moderately convincing.
What you should do instead is to listen to your medical authorities who even if they do make mistakes have your best interests at heart, contrary to those that are pushing the quackery in an attempt to further destabilize our societies. You made yourself a willing collaborator in that, something to think about.
They, like every other person, have their own best interest at heart, which, if you're lucky, aligns with yours. "Just listen to the authorities" is probably the worst advice ever given.
The problem with this pandemic is that a lot of people in places of power have made mistakes, sometimes really bad ones (for instance, such as pursuing herd immunity) rather than to follow the WHO expert advice. This could easily be construed as authorities acting against your best interests and in fact in quite a few places people have died that need not have died at all.
But there is a difference between 'political authorities' and 'medical authorities', the WHO has been fairly consistent and sensible in their advice to date, what political authorities locally do with that advice is another matter entirely, that runs the gamut of Bolsonaro to Boris Johnson to Jacinda Ardern and everything in between.
Pursuing herd immunity is a viable strategy only if you can actually achieve it.
Sweden has done far worse than their neighbors in this respect. But given the fact that it drags on all you can say is that as long as we don't treat this as a global problem your local measures matter less than you think.
Countries that did fantastically well early on showed it could be done, but because they were the exception eventually they too became overwhelmed through imported cases. If that had not happened, which would have required a more synchronized approach, then the total damage would be a fraction of what it is today.
And this isn't over yet, not by far and it is a much harder problem now than it was in March last year.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-deat...
Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland all did considerably better, and have demographics and local conditions that are closer together than comparing Sweden with the rest of Europe. It's a thinly populated Nordic country, so the comparison material should be countries that match those criteria, not the average of the EU, which runs the gamut of high density extremely interconnected countries with major airline hubs all the way to vast emptiness with the occasional city.
It's an easy mistake to make though.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/netherland...
"Use social distancing and isolation to avoid COVID and get vaccinated as quickly as possible" is good advice from well-meaning people who do know better. Sorry it's unpleasant, but if the USA behaved rationally, there wouldn't be 750K+ dead today.
Sweden readily admits that its approach was a terrible mistake. It's just not as embarrassingly bad as other countries, particularly ones that, with sensible leaders, should have done much better (UK, USA).
Mixed messaging by people in the media undercut a lot of support for the countermeasures, which was then further amplified using social media to pretend that scientists are divided in their opinions when in fact they weren't, except for a few lone holdouts, who - yay controversy - were given a disproportionate amount of airtime.
It does?!? Funny, how can I have totally missed something as big as that?
I'm a Swedish "expat"; I have now lived abroad for just a little longer than I lived in Sweden (26 vs 26.5 years), but I've always followed Swedish media and I still travel there regularly. All I've seen is some hemming and hawing about "Perhaps not totally optimal"; far from any flat-out admission of "terrible mistake". And when I spent a long weekend there three weeks ago, the populace at large certainly didn't seem aware of any such thing.
Got any handy links to this admission by Sweden?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientist-behind-swedens-no-loc...
> The epidemiologist behind Sweden’s controversial decision to forgo a mandatory lockdown conceded for the first time that more restrictions might have helped prevent a surge in coronavirus-related deaths.
Throughout the pandemic the experts, including the WHO, have been very frequently wrong. That doesn't necessarily mean you'll be better off following advice from secret messages encoded for you in game show hosts, or, worse, Donald Trump's actual opinions. But blind faith in experts hardly seems to be justified.
Over 40 doctors, most of them MD/PhDs, from 4 of the 10 top ranked hospitals in the world for the relevant issue, told me I’m an idiot, because that disease is a 1:10,000,000 thing, it can’t be the cause. It’s probably a virus and I should just go home and wait a few weeks.
And after 3 months (10 days of which were in-patient) and 40 or so specialists, and 5 hospitals), a doctor looked at all the data and said “of course you are right, we start treatment tomorrow” and we did.
All it cost was some irreversible brain and CNS damage, a few years at home - not much, right?
And through the years and some Facebook groups, I’ve met other parents in similar situations. Some had a 5 year delay in diagnosis because it’s a rare disease, stories about the medical system incredibly similar. That’s 5 years of irreversible brain damage and general suffering. Also, it’s more likely severely under diagnosed and actually more like 1:1,000,000
It was just the beginning of a journey. An eye opening one about incompetence and incentives.
The assumption that health authorities in particular (and authorities in general) have your best interest at heart, and are competent, are severely lacking in evidence. You might not have been bitten by that, and I’m happy for you that you weren’t.
Health authorities and professionals optimize for a lot of things, that only sometimes coincide with your interests as an individual. E.g. they might prefer you stay sick than get better, if there’s a 1:10,000 chance you’ll sue them (regardless of merit). I am intimately familiar with such a case.
Of note, the pharmaceutical industry, which is intimately intertwined with regulatory agencies and health authorities, is incentivized to make you a paying regular customer (Office 365) rather than selling you a one time product. Unfortunately, that means managed chronic illness rather than cure.
Which is not to say HCQ or IVM or whatever are the cure. But the idea of “trusting the authorities” is something you only do until it bites you hard.
I lost a sister (at the ripe old age of 23) to such a case so I'm quite familiar with the territory. In spite of that the default for me is to follow what my doctors tell me, and only if it doesn't work would I start to read up more and to try to come up with suggestions, but not with diagnosis.
Health authorities preferring you to stay sick rather than to get better should re-read the oath of the medical profession, that's despicable.
And agreed that there is a lot wrong in mixing business and health care, but those are the kind of setups that we apparently favor. I recall a doctor here in NL remarking to me that money and health are mutually exclusive, because if doctors have to make decisions based on finance they are immediately transgressing their oath. I can see his point, but I also understand basic resource allocation issues and the medical profession does not operate in a vacuum.
These are hard problems.
I reside in Israel these days, which has a system similar to NL ttbomk. The doctors that treat you (in the public system) are not incentivized other than to cure you, except perhaps through the occasional marketing cruise.
But high up ministry of health people have been indicted (including through corona) for pushing and in some cases mandating useless treatments after receiving a bribe.
The doctor at the hospital just got the memo “the recommended treatment in case of x is y”.
These indictments are for what can actually be proved. I’m sure there are more cases that have not been found, and also in other countries.
The only one who really has your best interests in my mind is yourself; if you are capable of doing research, you are likely more qualified for your own situation than specialists.
WHO recommends against remdesivir. FDA and IMOH promote it as a wonderdrug. Who would you trust?
My GP.
I could read the research papers and the guidelines, but for that I would first need a medical degree in the relevant (sub)fields, figure out who is and who isn't telling the truth/stacking the deck/fudging the data/angling for funding and so on and then finally I'd have to weigh those papers and all of their contradictions and arrive at some conclusion. The chances of me getting that wrong are just as high as the chances of my GP debugging a piece of software by reading papers about debugging.
For rare diseases the job of a GP is not to diagnose but to pass you on to someone who can. You also have the right to a second opinion here in case you don't trust the advice that you are getting and finally, you can ask for arbitrage if you are then still not happy.
That said, plenty of errors are made, but I don't think the software industry has any right to speak about mistakes made in other fields, our own house has been on fire for the last three decades in that respect and the only thing we've done to deal with it is to avow any responsibility.
But very likely (especially in the US, but also in other places), his considerations have to do with not increasing his malpractice insurance premium.
Your and his interests are not aligned. And that chasm is larger than anyone likes to admit.
If you want to outsource your health decisions to someone else, who may be more knowledgeable in general, but may be less knowledgeable on any specific matter you dive into, and whose incentives are only generally aligned with yours - by all means do.
I don't, and this has paid great dividends for me so far. People who are capable of reading and understanding research (not all are), and have the ability to reach far out to well informed people and consult with them (not all can), are also likely to be in this situation -- and those people potentially lose dearly for not doing so.
The WHO recommends against using remdesivir in hospitalized patients -- which is very different from your claim! The FDA and others make their cutoff point slightly but not substantially later, e.g. remdisivir isn't indicated when a hospitalized patient is on high-flow oxygen. Their disagreement isn't one of substance, just one of scope, and all doctors treating Covid know the rationale behind each cutoff point.
But instead any of that nuance, people say things like the "WHO disagrees with FDA" and decide that both are useless so they should take medical advice from morons with podcasts?
I actually read the papers on remdesivir, and as a result decided that I will not take it if offered, whether hospitalized or not, because of my risk/reward preferences, which may or may not align with the doctor's or the system's.
In Israel (where I now reside), AFAIK, they are happily administering it to hospitalized covid patients; at least, they were giving it out a lot until they started treating with regeneron. Now, Israel has its own definition for requiring hospitalization than the WHO or the FDA (e.g. SpO2<94% is considered severe and requiring hospitalization -- if you have a positive PCR test).
Do you think the doctors treating covid are actually aware of the minute differences between WHO, FDA, IMOH definitions? I checked with a couple I know. They have no idea.
In your anecdote, you suffered a failure to diagnose, and specifically, a failure to diagnose a rare disease.
This is unfortunate, and bad, and a problem to try to figure out, but it is a completely different sort of failure than what other people are proposing for HCQ or IVM, that there is a highly effective and inexpensive treatment that the medical establishment is failing to recognize despite apparently having such clear evidence in its favor that people on Facebook can understand it.
The diagnostic failure was just the beginning.
(And, unlike the HCQ/IVM case, which I don't support and is in general speculative - the guy responsible for the official recommendation was actually convicted for taking bribes from the company making the treatment. I won't divulge any details, because that will de-anonymize me - the disease is rare enough that people in the field know each other and all the cases).
p.s: That treatment (in combination) is also used for other, similar diseases, each is rare, but overall it was a lucrative market for the drug company.
Also, even the "moderately convincing" evidence is in my opinion not nearly enough. It might be if Covid-19 were a modestly important disease with only a few labs and clinics running working on it. But it's not. Throw enough shit against the wall, eventually something will stick by chance. This is a globally distributed experiment, and it is impossible to control for publication bias and all quality issues...
The only reason to think why Ivermectin should work against Sars-Cov-2 is because it has shown some action in cell cultures at ridiculously high doses, and maybe there have been other anti-viral interactions in the literature. For widespread use, there needs to be more and better evidence, especially given the currently available vaccines and treatments.
It is a fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority . To make an argument, there needs to be an argument.
This seems to be a common and recurring theme: my opinion is worth as much as the opinion of an expert in the field because their argument can be discarded as an argument from authority. But they are an authority and I'll be happy to believe them compared to believing you, who are not active in their field at all.
See:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28067406
and
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29235584
"I'm no medical anything but I do have extensive academic and statistical training."
But you forgot that that only applies to those fields that you actually know something about, otherwise this is about as transparent an appeal to authority as one can make. Who cares about your extensive academic and statistical training if you start off with nonsense? Garbage in, garbage out, no matter how good the program is.
This is wrong to the point where you really might want to take a deep breath. The point of experts is they have thought about a field more and are better at making sound arguments in that field. "Most scientists/doctors believe..." is literally, exactly and unambiguously a fallacious argument. The only thing that matters is why they would believe that.
And if that why is "statistical significance", I'm friends with enough doctors to know I'm better at interpreting stats than they are. If the answer they go to is parasitic worms then yeah, that is why they are experts and I'm not. It is a compelling argument.
I stand by my comments and disagree that they make the point you want them to. The 1st isn't even about medical opinion if you read it closely, it is scepticism of politics.
Probability dictates that any doctor - let alone most doctors' - opinion trumps yours and everybody else that parrots you, because they will be right far more often than you about medical things.
You may be better at interpreting the statistics than your doctor friends but you are not better at medicine, are not wired into their world as much as they are and in fact are most likely blabbing nonsense.
You can stand by your comments but that just proves my original point: that you consider your own opinion to be a higher one than someone trained in the field that you have an opinion on. See your other comment in this thread regarding how medicine prescription works, it doesn't but that isn't going to stop you from being convinced and it would not surprise me if you felt that that doctor is making an argument from authority.
Suggestion: assume that you are a layperson in medicine, act accordingly. And go get vaccinated if you haven't been already, and ask your doctor if they thinks that's a good idea, rather than to believe me, yet another stranger on the internet.
And I suspect you would have had the same conviction about smoking had you lived in the 1960s and noticed that many doctors recommended smoking.
No, it does matter why a doctor believes what they believe. The vast majority of them just follow the official top down advice. And some actors, notably tobacco and pharmaceutical industries, have been using that to subvert science (to great effect and profit) for decades.
Which, again, I note, is not a statement about IVM or HCQ or Cominraty - it’s about the reasons for your own convictions, which seem to completely ignore decades of evidence.
It does not at all matter that doctors know better than me about 99% of medical things. When I have a specific issue, it is far more likely I can know more about it by spending 100 hours studying, than a trained doctor does without studying. It is likely he would know more than me if he spent 5 hours, but it is very unlikely that he has.
I haven’t disagreed with doctor about many things in my life. But in the 3 or so things which I found vitally important to research, and in which I came to a different conclusion than the specialists, I was proven right.
And real doctors promoting smoking goes back much further than that, all the way to the early 1900's.
It's that kind of activity that undermines the authority the profession, but it's the wrong conclusion to make that if doctors were wrong about smoking they are also wrong about everything else. Usually they are not.
https://www.rgare.com/knowledge-center/media/articles/smokin...
Indeed. And usually, there is no significant objection to the medical consensus, so it is irrelevant the "all medical advice" space.
The interesting (from my perspective, but also from an information theoretic one) things are those about which there is disagreement. And the "usually right" on those subjects goes down significantly - perhaps it's still "usually", but maybe it's just 60% rather than the 99% of the "right" things which inspire people to blindly believe doctors about everything. And perhaps it's just 20%; We'll likely know about today's status only in 30 years.
For example, there is still consensus about statin use to reduce cardiac problems through cholesterol lowering. I looked a little into that; the evidence is severely lacking, especially if you consider all cause mortality rather than just "lowering myocardial infraction risk" (which you can achieve 100% with Cyanide!). I have informally surveyed about 20 doctors, of which one was a cardiologist. Everyone other than the cardiologist was convinced statins are the best thing since sliced bread, have no risks, and excellent efficiency. Not one of them actually knew much about, e.g. statin effect on all cause mortality, or much of anything else related to statins except the official line and up-to-date (the service) summaries. The cardiologist still thought statins were a good thing, but was much more reserved about recommending them to anyone with high blood lipids, because he actually read the research and had actual experience (and discussions with informed colleagues).
"If you are not a logician your opinion on fallacies doesn't matter at all."
>Probability dictates that any doctor - let alone most doctors' - opinion trumps yours and everybody else that parrots you, because they will be right far more often than you about medical things.
You really have not spent much time around doctors, I think. Doctors (GPs) know about as much on a topic as someone who Googles the current country guidelines. For anything novel, I'd trust a statistician over a GP to interpret data every time.
Don't like it? Get a second opinion. Don't like that? Request a review. Don't like that? Self medicate to your hearts content, or go with crystals, aromatherapy or whatever you believe works. But don't go around the interwebs spouting your self derived conclusion from papers that you barely - if at all - understood as fact.
Because that's the rub: the people who were all over Vitamin-D, Bleach, HCQ and lately Ivermectin were just looking for excuses not to vaccinate and that is a problem, none of these miracle cures were miracle cures, they weren't even cures. At best they were no-ops, at worst they harmed the health of those that received them. By amplifying these messages thousands of people have needlessly died.
But Ivermectin seems to have run its course. I predict a new miracle cure with a new champion somewhere in the next couple of months, just like Vitamin-D and HCQ before it.
This is an excellent point. It is so good that I think it may serve as the definition of an expert: An expert is someone who is better at making sound arguments in that field. Sound arguments being what matters and not the person making the argument, just as the calculations matter more than the mathematician.
And to the extent that the article does say that even a legitimate authority needs to present an argument, in this context, they have!
Like the situation here is medical experts have said "hmm these studies that appear to show ivermectin's effectiveness are fraudulent and suspicious".
Like, with the exception of the complete theory that ivermectin studies in some nations are naturally confounded by the presence of worms, the arguments he's made about the unreliability of the ivermectin data is the mainstream argument about the unreliability of ivermectin data. He even cites a number of experts whose analysis he sometimes relies on!
No it isn't, it's full of obvious fraud! That's what the entire rest of the article points out. And they put an unwarranted warning against one of the few non-fraudulent studies because it doesn't go their way:
[re: Lopez-Medina et al]
> "I’m making a big deal of this because ivmmeta.com - the really impressive meta-analysis site I’ve been going off of - puts a special warning letter underneath their discussion of this study, urging us not to trust it. They don’t do this for any of the other ones we’ve addressed so far - not the one by the guy whose other studies were all frauds, not the one where 50% of 21 people had headaches, not the unrandomized one where the groups were completely different before the experiment started, not even the one by the guy accused of crimes against humanity. Only this one. This makes me a lot less charitable to ivmmeta than I would otherwise be; I think it’s hard to choose this particular warning letter strategy out of well-intentioned commitment to truth. They just really don’t like this big study that shows ivermectin doesn’t work."
That's the nearest Scott gets to directly accusing ivmmeta of fraud.
That's a pretty sensational claim.
Who benefits from this fraud?
The ivermectin manufacturers, researchers receiving funding from pharmaceutical company or the government, or the ivmmeta.com website itself (I see no third party ads or assets at all -- not even GA)?
Meanwhile, back at the Pfizer ranch, they just bought a few small countries for cash.
It might be that the list is riddled with fraud, but it isn't obviously so. I'm comfortable with many of the studies having methodological errors - that is why it is called "low quality evidence" instead of "high quality evidence" - and I assume the base rate for badly done studies is quite high.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine
Actually, the reason people didn't believe him is interesting because they were using an earlier scientific method - he didn't have a good explanation for the mechanism, so they dismissed it with "correlation is not causation". We're better at using things whose mechanism we don't understand now, like Tylenol.
What is interesting (to me) is that which we now consider to be common sense was at one point controversial.
We did adopt his methods, but many years and hundreds of deaths too late, and not before declaring him insane for his beliefs and putting him in an asylum.
What I'm saying is that authority has a dark side. Sometimes the establishment is actually wrong. Regardless of right or wrong, it always chooses to erase its critics. Some of us disagree with the erasure, even in cases where the critics are wrong.
The thing where the case you linked went off the rails for me is that there was no downside to trying his methods earlier, but ego got in the way, and ego is by definition unscientific. But people will be people, that you won't be able to fix, I'm afraid.
Between hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectine you are (worldwide) probably looking at a few hundred thousand extra people dead because they (or in some cases their leaders) chose to believe that bullshit rather than to get vaccinated.
Fortunately during the polio years we didn't have the internet, the carnage would have been incredible.
I'm fully resigned to the fact that we won't know for sure if Ivermectin helps with any of this shit for at least another decade until tensions subside. Could be that millions of people died while they didn't have to. Could be that it's total horseshit. There's no way to know, and "consensus" means next to nothing in these circumstances.
At the same time, we have vaccines, which do work (though the slow roll-out and the many, many hold outs certainly don't help, as well as that it leaves the question of how to deal with children for the moment mostly unanswered).
And propagating this Ivermectine (and Hydroxychloroquine as the predecessor) nonsense has caused a lot of people to forego their vaccinations. And that does have very clear effects.
So even if consensus doesn't mean truth typically it is the experts that go against the grain with hard proof in their pocket that win out over the long term.
It is very rarely going to happen that new scientific truth will come from conspiracy theorists rather than from the establishment, though I guess if you live long enough that too will one day happen.
Citation needed. I think people forego vaccinations due primarily to how hard they are being pushed, and due to almost 2 years of pretty much nonstop incoherence (or even outright lies sometimes) from the health authorities and the press worldwide.
Case in point: we're still being told by talking heads that "vaccines can stop covid" whereas the reality is nothing can stop it - it's endemic. And that was clear to any sane person back in February of 2020.
Polio, measles etc. are entirely different.
Who is spreading the misinformation that all ulcers are caused by H. Pillory?