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Comment by jmnicolas | Hacker News Reader

Interesting read, I appreciate that the author isn't dogmatic and is open to discussion.

However I think he misrepresent some anti-vaxxers: it's not a matter of trusting science, it's a matter of trusting scientists with heavy conflict of interest to tell the truth while most of us don't have the required scientific knowledge to evaluate if they're telling the truth.

Pfizer and Moderna combined are making more than $1000 every second (stop and calculate how much money that makes for a year, that's mind boggling). Do they have an incentive to lie?

The fact that the discussion is immediately shut down and doubt isn't allowed is a big red flag. Let me quote the author:

> Here this question is especially tough, because, uh, if you say anything in favor of ivermectin you will be cast out of civilization and thrown into the circle of social hell reserved for Klan members and 1/6 insurrectionists. All the health officials in the world will shout “horse dewormer!” at you and compare you to Josef Mengele. But good doctors aren’t supposed to care about such things. Your only goal is to save your patient. Nothing else matters.

He's funny, but the underlying reality is very sad.

Add to this the power grab by politicians toward totalitarianism, color me very skeptical about the situation.

View on HN

Mind boggling? $1k/s is around $31 billion. First of all, just Pfizer brought in more money than that last year -- around $10 billion more. But let's set that aside for now, because they're slated to bring in twice as much this year.

You think Pfizer and Moderna are somehow coordinating a global censorship campaign to defend that income? Sure, Pfizer's projects $82 billion in revenue is real money. But it's less than half of Amazon's income. Facebook brings that much in every year. Apple and AT&T crush these numbers, but nobody's going around deleting every tweet about how Mac OS has gone downhill or AT&T's cell service sucks.

In other words, it's just not enough money to have this kind of pull. Even if Pfizer and Moderna were lying their asses off to everyone who would listen, they just don't have the cash to buy off every medical expert and microbiologist of any standing -- and even if they did, the relevant government agencies can't accept hush money and aren't particularly interested in advancing some cartoonish corporate ruse.

Biological and medical research is a competitive field; most of these people slogged through six or eight years of underpaid postdoctoral work just to build the qualifications to participate in meaningful research as PI. Are there crooks who will take a check to parrot a party line? Sure. Is that common enough to enable the kind of overwhelming consensus we see today? Absolutely not ... but let's say I'm wrong: there just isn't enough money to pull it off.

This is why the current crop of conspiracy nuts insists the scheme isn't just about profits but also about some kind of vague assault on unspecified civil liberties -- it's necessary to ascribe actual evil to the movitation before it's even remotely believeable.

Supposedly they are not buying everyone off. Look, 2008 happened, why couldn't similar thing that happened in financial industry happen in medicine industry?

The motivations, rushing of everything could be just aligned enough to cause all of this. Safety studies excluding some participants, some important data. All you'd have to pay off is to exclude certain data, for which there are ALREADY reports coming out for. For example Maddie de Garay's injuries excluded, there's report of someone else's vaccine injury being excluded from the original study.

BMJ coming up with the article of falsified data etc.

The way Pfizer reportedly conducted side effect studies. E.g. asking participants to report their side effects on 7th day in the app without any freeform text or custom symptoms - only predetermined symptoms. For any custom symptom you had to contact the doctors, who may have just ignored you or determined your symptoms to be irrelevant since they didn't have motivation or time to deal with you.

Pfizer just pressuring subcontractors just enough for them to provide data that favours vaccine safety, and there's just not enough time to double check everything so all of it just flies by.

Mainstream media has reported absolutely none of it. None of the excluded participants, nothing about the BMJ article. Nothing about how Pfizer conducted the studies. Everyone is clueless about that. There's already so much PR built towards hating "anti-vaxxers" and considering them uneducated and unintellectual, so the word "vaccine" is already associated in everyone's mind as something good, safe and effective. The PR is already there, you just have to work out something that you could call "vaccine", and help out people in the current very desperate situation.

Very few are actually closely looking into the data and there are actually plenty of scientists and doctors talking about it, but they are getting debunked using very superficial arguments and just finding anything slightly wrong or misleading about what they are saying and they are immediately considered "debunked".

Similarly during 2008, very few people were predicting this crash and everyone just wanted to pretend together that everything was going well. All the experts, economists etc. And human anatomy is somehow simpler than financial system?

Directly from the article:

> "Sometimes these people even have a specific theory for why elites are covering up ivermectin, like that pharma companies want you to use more expensive patented drugs instead. This theory is extremely plausible. Pharma companies are always trying to convince people to use expensive patented drugs instead of equally good generic alternatives. Ivermectin believers probably heard about this from the many, many good articles by responsible news outlets, discussing the many, many times pharma companies have tried to trick people into using more expensive patented medications. Like this ACSH article about Nexium. Or my article on esketamine. Given that dozens of studies said a drug worked, and elites continued to deny it worked, and there are well-known times where elites lie about drugs in order to make money, it was an incredibly reasonable inference that this was one of those times.

> If you have a lot of experience with pharma, you know who lies and who doesn’t, and you know what lies they’re willing to tell and which ones they shrink back from. As far as I know, no reputable scientist has ever come out and said ‘esketamine definitely works better than regular ketamine’. The regulatory system just heavily implied it.

> I claim that with ivermectin, even the people who don’t usually lie were saying it was ineffective, and they were saying it more directly and decisively than liars usually do. But most people can’t translate Pharma → English fluently enough to know where the space of “things people routinely lie about and nobody worries about it too much” ends. So they incredibly reasonably assume anything could be a lie. And if you don’t know which statements about pharmaceuticals are lies, “the one that has dozens of studies contradicting it” is a pretty good heuristic!"

What are these paragraphs in response to?

We currently have a unique situation. Never in the world have scientists, experts or doctors been as pressured to direct people to current vaccines. There's a clear risk to losing your credibility and your job if you were to contradict. Even if you were to think that something may be wrong, it would be a herculean task for you to prove it and is it really worth it to sacrifice your career and everything else? Maybe you are just 50/50 or 80% sure, and incase of that 20% uncertainty you definitely don't want to risk your life work.

Also chicken and an egg problem. Anyone who claims current vaccines are unsafe or ineffective are discredited, so after they have made their claim you can just call them misinformation spreaders and tell again "no credible scientist has said X" and if that credible scientist says X, you will just stop considering them as credible.

But my point is more oriented towards vaccines than Ivermectin honestly. I'm not a proponent of Ivermectin, but I'm just trying to discuss what results might current motivations in the world yield, and I believe it's definitely possible that Ivermectin COULD be improperly discredited in current ecosystem of everything.

With all the social pressures, dire situation, debates being blocked, people labelled immediately misinformation spreaders if their conclusions don't fit the mainstream narrative, I would say very many untruths are possible.

I myself can't trust MSM at all any longer, and I am 95% sure that vaccines are not as safe and effective as MSM is trying to portray them as. I don't know exactly how unsafe or how ineffective they are, but that's mostly because proper debate is not allowed. Until this clears up, I'm going to skip on vaccines.

> Anyone who claims current vaccines are unsafe or ineffective

Needs to come up with some compelling evidence. That's what your evaluation is missing.

What about this testimonial on how one of the trials was performed?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5_gpJW7Euo

Or testimonial from Maddie de Garay's mother, also about how the trial for children was performed?

This article: https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635

And how many others have not come forward or been censored?

What would be compelling evidence?

Would excess deaths in summer in 0 - 45 age group, in Europe be compelling or is there some other explanation to those?

For preventing spread ineffectiveness, would Gibraltar being #2 in the World by infection rate while having 99% vaccination be compelling?

For waning hospital and death protection would Israel data be compelling?

What about countless anecdotal stories of similar persistent adverse effects and VAERS reports?

If none of that is evidence, then even if this vaccine was unsafe, it would be virtually impossible to prove that, no?

> Would excess deaths in summer in 0 - 45 age group, in Europe be compelling or is there some other explanation to those?

I don't know, what figures are you referring to and what do you think those are evidence of?

> For preventing spread ineffectiveness, would Gibraltar being #2 in the World by infection rate while having 99% vaccination be compelling?

Taken in isolation, not particularly, no. What you appear to have there is some vaguely formed speculation.

> For waning hospital and death protection would Israel data be compelling?

Be specific, what claims are you making and what evidence do you think backs them up?

> What about countless anecdotal stories of similar persistent adverse effects and VAERS reports?

Perhaps you could count them, and investigate to understand if the anecdotes and VAERS reports are true or not, and at what rate they occur. VAERS is by design a catch-all and self-reported, so the data there is interesting but not necessarily trustworthy. Anecdotes are not data, after all.

I can't reply to your last comment because it's too deep, so I'll comment here:

> According to your graph, excess mortality for ages 0-14 for this year is lower than it was in 2019, before the vaccine or the pandemic hit. And the excess mortality in the 15-44 age group is maybe 5000 people across 28 countries

See week 18-42, for 0-14 age group. Yes it has barely got to 2019 levels, but consider that beginning of year they died much less due to lockdowns, so summer high rate was enough to make up for 2019 where both winters the starting and ending saw very high climb. Again, it's about having that type of velocity during summer, not winters. It's 500-800 children compared to other summers. Since 3 millions of vaccinations given out it could mean around 1 out of 6,000 deaths per vaccination.

So all in all, it wouldn't be possible for me to prove it even if vaccine was causing a lot of harm? Because what else can I use besides excess deaths (as much data that as it's possible to gather), adverse event reporting tools etc, anecdotal stories. There's just no way.

To myself, there are too many signs pointing towards it, but I guess there's no point to really crusade at all even if it is causing harm.

> Since 3 millions of vaccinations given out it could mean around 1 out of 6,000 deaths per vaccination.

It could, or it could mean something else entirely, and it could be within normal trends. Which is what it looks like to me if all cause mortality is lower than 2019 levels.

> So all in all, it wouldn't be possible for me to prove it even if vaccine was causing a lot of harm?

Not from this data, no.

> Because what else can I use besides excess deaths (as much data that as it's possible to gather), adverse event reporting tools etc, anecdotal stories. There's just no way.

Real research and analysis, not "I looked at some very high level graphs with fairly shallow data and decided that it fit my preconceptions".

If you're thinking "I don't have easy access to that information, and I don't have the time or the funding to investigate", you're quite right. Medical researchers will have to carry the can here.

> If you're thinking "I don't have easy access to that information, and I don't have the time or the funding to investigate", you're quite right. Medical researchers will have to carry the can here.

Yeah, unfortunately, I've lost all my trust in anything that comes in from mainstream. I was to vaccinate myself, but then I found contradicting information, and from there I couldn't stop going to the rabbit hole, because this doesn't make sense. Mathematically and statistically if mainstream was only telling truth, what I'm seeing should be impossible.

It's a terrible situation for me to be in as it stresses me daily, ruins my focus and depresses me. Either I'm crazy and worried about nothing or things generally in the world are not going well and people are in mass hypnosis. Neither is a good side to be in.

> Mathematically and statistically...

...what you've identified is not enough to draw any conclusions from, at all.

> Either I'm crazy and worried about nothing

This one. The vaccine is not killing people in significant numbers, but the virus is. Stop worrying, get vaccinated, get on with life.

> I was to vaccinate myself, but then I found contradicting information, and from there I couldn't stop going to the rabbit hole, because this doesn't make sense.

Dodged a bullet there! How fortunate that you went to look for contradicting information, what are the chances?

Not sure what you mean here? I didn't have bias towards being anti-vaxx. In fact I was arguing with anti-vaxxers before and doing calculations how many lives would 1 vaccinated person save during summer given different R values, vaccine efficiencies etc.

I have scanned through so many forums reading anecdotal stories, also downloaded VAERS data, and I definitely see a pattern, but this is not enough of compelling evidence for anyone.

But let's just focus on what could be causing excess deaths during summer.

Source:

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

Scroll to Excess Mortality

See 0-14 age group excess mortality growth during summer (EU approved vaccines for 12+ in May). There has been similar rate variance in winters, but this can be explained by bad flu seasons, there's no such variance ever during summer. If vaccines really were the cause, it means only 12-14 group should be affecting the rate, this means that with 0-11 the growth could be 4x that assuming linear relation.

Also see 15-44 excess which has never been climbing that fast and is much higher than previously in total. You can also include other years from 2016 to compare.

These may not be vaccines, but what is causing this then and why specifically in younger demographics?

I'm honestly looking to understand what could be the explanation here.

> EU approved vaccines for 12+ in May

which doesn't mean kids were vaccinated at any relevant rate at that point. In plenty places they only started that August or thereabouts. There has been some talk of delayed infections with various things due to school closures etc before, I do not know if that had any relevant impact on death rates though, but would explain why they shifted to later in the year.

> and why specifically in younger demographics?

Looking at the 44+ ranges, those are way more above or close to "substantial increase" - as you would expect with them at being higher risk from covid. Higher vaccination rates help, but aren't entirely stopping it. Potentially also some other medical factors, not aware of any good data on them (i.e. delayed treatments, risky delayed treatments now happening, ...)

> Also see 15-44 excess

Delta is affecting them more, for at least part summer you can't assume them to be vaccinated yet (and even today, in the badly hit places the vaccination rates are far from perfect - here in Germany "people in hospital" and "percentage unvaccinated" correlates quite well between regions). Delayed treatments again might hit here too, again unsure if relevant.

Could there be something hidden in there: sure. But it doesn't seem all that obvious that anything is weird about these numbers.

Can't answer to detaro either, so answering in my own comments. Delta and covid waves on average went really low during summer, so it should have less effect.

But maybe delayed treatments, risky delayed treatments now happening could have something to do with it potentially. Also there were talks about child suicides.

VAERS data is not verified, as I said, it's self reported. It's useful but not necessarily great for basing hunches on.

According to your graph, excess mortality for ages 0-14 for this year is lower than it was in 2019, before the vaccine or the pandemic hit. And the excess mortality in the 15-44 age group is maybe 5000 people across 28 countries. Without knowing the variance in previous years, which is not given in those graphs, that's meaningless and could easily be down to the disease itself. I personally know a lot of people in this age group who have come down with the disease now, as they are starting to go out and socialise a lot more than they were a year ago. It's hard to see how the 'normal range' is calculated on the pooled deaths graphs as there only appears to be about 4 years data there, which is not a lot to go on.

So as I said before, what you have here is vague speculation. You can't tell from there that anything unusual is necessarily going on at all, let alone what might be causing it.

But it did give him what he was looking for: a reason not to get vaccinated. All of the above is just that: justification for that decision, and once looked at through that lens it makes a lot more sense.

What you are saying is that I made the decision first and then looked for the material?

I was strongly pro-vax before that, and I was debating anti-vax people.

Why would I want to make such a decision that would make me be hated by so many, stress me out of my mind, make people think I'm some sort of anti-science or anti-intellectual, etc?

If covid vaccines are truly safe and effective, I would have 0 motivation to believe in some sort of conspiracy, or not take it.

Either the VAERS data is broadly accurate, and the COVID vaccines are the most dangerous vaccines ever released (which is not to say they aren't helpful in some populations); or the VAERS data is all just useless unverified anecdotes like you're saying, and so there is no useful system in the US to monitor patient- or doctor-reported adverse events at all, in which case nobody can effectively claim that they are safe for any event that happens more than 1/(number of people in the trials). Which is it? If the VAERS data is all garbage, and someone claims on Telegram that the vaccine gave them lupus or cirrhosis or something, I guess I can't go on VAERS and see that there aren't reported events beyond population baseline, then, and I'll have to take them at their word?

I have seen enough video stories to believe those anecdotal stories and VAERS, where people got a vaccine complication and nobody believed them, everyone gaslighted them and considered them anti-vaxxers - even though they did take the vaccine. Text based stories, you can never tell, but with video stories you can at least understand their sincerity. And after that it's possible to notice patterns within anecdotal reports as well.

And mainstream media has not talked about these side effects at all so I fully believe side effects are not being reported and what are reported is probably with less frequency, it's just difficult for me to tell what the exact frequencies of different side effects are.

I have got pretty obsessed now with trying to understand what the frequencies are, there's so much conflicting information.

If I had to guess I'd guess that there's some sort of age cut-off where harm may be greater than benefits. It would also highly depend on how social person you are and how much in risk situations, as if you are someone that works remotely, doesn't go out at all, and not in a risk group, then I don't think there's point in taking the vaccine.

VAERS will report all of the cases reported in, it is prior to analysis and once the analysis is done the final tally looks completely different. Any possible relation is reported (or actually, should be reported) to VAERS, so if you die the day after you took the vaccin, you will be listed there, whether or not that had anything to do with your vaccination will be determined later on.

For another viewpoint: if everybody was vaccinated there would be 7000 people dying the day after they got vaccinated for the USA alone. But that wouldn't mean anything at all, the big question is which of those deaths would not have happened if the vaccine had not been administered. So interpreting VAERS data in any other way than relative day-to-day is not very useful absent further background into those particular cases.

The "relative" interpretation of the VAERS data looks worse for the COVID vaccines than almost any other interpretation. There have been more adverse events reported in the past year for the COVID vaccines than for all other vaccines combined since the database's inception in 1990.

But of course there have been. Because there hasn't been a drive for a vaccine as strong as this one in decades.

A drive? Every child born in the US is recommended to take 15+ doses of various vaccines. Most of them are required to enter public school. Multiple new vaccines (like HPV and shingles) have been launched with millions of doses delivered in the same time period.

As you are probably aware: people tend to die somewhere between 50 and 100 with high regularity, leading to more entries in VAERS if large numbers of people in that age range are vaccinated.

It's children that have not been vaccinated in large numbers this time around.

> However I think he misrepresent some anti-vaxxers: it's not a matter of trusting science, it's a matter of trusting scientists with heavy conflict of interest to tell the truth while most of us don't have the required scientific knowledge to evaluate if they're telling the truth.

That's an excellent point - unfortunately people who are easily labeled as "anti-vaxxers" and perceived as uneducated anti-scince crowd quite often happen to be the people who just don't digest unsubstantiated narratives easily, which actually is a right way to listen to people and companies with potential conflict of interest.

A number of people (myself included) would perhaps pay less attention to ivermectin as in covid drug if crowd would really take it and do studies instead of just publicly mocking people who are trying to look into it. That attitude makes people think there is an agenda behind and big pharma revenues makes all of us think it's not entirely untrue.

Regrettably a lot of people related to science forget that science is not a blind belief in authority but actually quite the opposite - question authority in everything.

I still don't know whether Ivermectin works or not, but mainstream media calling it horse paste is absolutely disingenuous and what increases distrust from me. It's as if they are incapable of understanding that same substance could be used for multiple species for multiple different conditions and in fact it has been used for multiple species.

So anyone calling it horse paste, horse medicine or even focusing on that makes me question their intelligence.

People are literally buying veterinary pharmaceutical preparations though, and taking horse paste.

Sure, it's used in humans too. But there are people dosing with equine supplies.

How many people who believe Ivermectin works are actually doing that? Are there differences besides dosage and is it possible to split that dosage for appropriate human levels?

I don't know numbers, but there are credible reports of farming supply companies starting to restrict sales (so greater than zero, but I haven't a clue how many).

Differences can be that not all the preparations contain only the one active ingredient. Dosing appears to be whole other kettle of fish, because understandably people have no idea what a therapeutic or prophylactic dose actually might be - because as far as we know there isn't one for coronavirus.

Two of my relatives are running Covid wards in a rural part of the country, and they are filled with people who had their vets get them IVM or who had picked it up off the shelf. My next door neighbor told me he had his dog’s vet write him a prescription. You can guess his political persuasion and vaccine status.

That's so sad. And the proponents of that BS will happily continue to push it, what's in it for them I'll never understand. It's like a very indirect way of trying to kill people.

A number of people—probably not including myself, if I'm honest—would take this statement more seriously if it wasn't a complaint that a thing which has already happened, and continues to happen, isn't happening.

Seriously. There are trials for any number of medications underway, including Ivermectin. There is, at the point, no evidence whatsoever to suggest it is being unreasonably withheld in any way. The cult of "magic miracle cure" that has built up around this one particular drug is fucking terrifying

> There is, at the point, no evidence whatsoever to suggest it is being unreasonably withheld in any way.

There is a plenty of evidence for that. We can start with censorship of ivermectin on social platforms.

> The cult of "magic miracle cure" that has built up around this one particular drug is fucking terrifying

That's a perfect definition for people believing in phizer and moderna.

> There is a plenty of evidence for that. We can start with censorship of ivermectin on social platforms.

That's not evidence that scientific information about ivermectin is being withheld.

> That's a perfect definition for people believing in phizer and moderna.

Not really. For a start nobody thinks it's a cure.

Since when removing misinformation that can cause harm is censorship? If I had any say I would absolutely remove all your posts that are spreading the same lies, you are literally killing people by furthering a specific agenda and trying to convince people that the vaccines are dangerous and ivermectin is the only cure. It’s honestly shameful that hacker news is letting this happen.

Something that you (or anyone else) insubstantiatedly label as misinformation may just not be so. That's pure censorship - "I think this is wrong, therefore it has to be removed". That's the rigidity and simplemindedness as opposed to intellectual curiosity, doesn't spark intellectual discussion and creates echo chambers of people regurgitating the same narratives over and over.

Fortunately people sharing your approach are not having any say here so we keep HackerNews a civilised place where all opinions expressed without arrogance are having light of day.

Somehow society managed to take an entirely new, experimental medical technology, run trials and launch it to the world population in < 12 months yet it's been nearly 24 months now and there are zero - zero - large scale useful studies of ivermectin produced by the western medical establishment.

As I was reading the article, this is really what leaped out at me. There are lots of people and doctors who think ivermectin works. It's clearly a question worth investigating. Why are all the studies based on 50 people in Bangladesh?

That, in turn, is very strongly connected to the cost of running drug trials that will get past the FDA and patent rights. So it's not surprising that people end up being very cynical about this.

There is currently a 15,000 patient study funded by the NIH which includes the evaluation of ivermectin.

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04885530

IT is slower than most would like, but it is one of many in a long list of publicly funded studies.

https://www.nih.gov/research-training/medical-research-initi...

Studies have been done. It has been found lacking. You're getting mocked because you're blind to this and sticking to something that bad actors are touting as a miracle cure, while science and medicine move on in the search for things that actually help.

Like dexamethasone, remdesivir etc etc

The way you have responded is a perfect illustration of the crowd we are talking about.

You are trying to make a personal offence and claims without any references. That sounds like a blind repeating of the narrative, even if it wasn't intended to be so.

I'm not "trying to make a personal offence", I am explaining why you may find people mock you. Your view of the situation on the ground is incorrect. The studies you are claiming have not been done are a mere google search away. In fact in this case the link at the top of the HN discussion contains a lot of relevant information.

Here's the major question I have for folks like yourself who are still on about ivermectin though - why?

Why are you invested in this one particular pharmaceutical? What is it that makes you think this specific chemical, which has been looked at and found not to be particularly beneficial for covid use, stands out from the other things which have been looked at and not found useful? Why are we allowed to dismiss and move on from them but not from this?

I wasn't soliciting for an explanation why people are trying to mock - too much studying of psychology provided enough information to answer this question. The answer, as it may come at a surprise for you, is not related to plausibility of statements. But that's totally different matter.

As for your question, let me give you a very simple answer. As a layman in certain area, I see few facts - several families who I know in person chose to take Ivermectin as part of their treatment when family member contracted covid. All of them successfully recovered from covid.

And at the same time, a person I know lost 2 legs shortly after "safe" jab due to blood cloths. Doctor said that if he wouldn't intervene and put him in ICU, he would be dead by now. Another person got cardiac arrest after jab (being 24yo) and was paid a lump sum (more than $200k) by government to suck it up and keep his mouth shut.

Certainly I am not going to draw any conclusions from those observations. Except one - why Ivermectin is so actively dismissed and the pharma jabs are so actively promoted? There is clearly some evidence ivermectin does help, but we have no means to know at what extend or at what price. This atmosphere of ignorance and narrative-pushing has nothing in common with intellectual curiosity, which is something we have to use when dealing with challenges like covid. Sadly not many of us are capable of that.

Which government is that? The one who paid.

I'm aware of frequent vaccine complications, but haven't heard of government doing any payouts.

Singapore government. There is a special fund for people who got severe health complications due to vaccination and as far as I know, it’s being used quite often. Although, personally i can only speak about the case I have mentioned.

How's the current mentality towards vaccines in Singapore?

Short answer - it's complicated.

Long answer - quite a significant number of people are resistant to vaccines, particularly to mrna-based ones. Government offered voluntary vaccination and managed to vaccinate around 50%, after that different coercion and segregation measures (mandating without actually mandating) were used to raise the number to 94% (among eligible population).

Disappointment is starting to grow lately because despite total vaccination there is no removal of restrictions. While being reasonably open with data, government still plays with it - once vaccinated ppl become constituting majority of cases among fatalities they just stopped reporting how many vacc/unvaxx were among fatalities. This leaves people frustrated and disappointed in govt approach to tackle covid, particularly in this "vaccinate everyone" idea.

A lot of resistance spotted in people 60+, younger generation mostly just goes for shots.

Interesting that younger generation is willing to go for the shots, according to my impression danger curve for the shots compared to covid is vaccines better for elderly, and worse for young. Not to mention all the unknown health implications for the future if spike protein can increase chances of cancer or similar.

I wonder if older gen has seen enough to not take everything at face value.

You are spot on. Older generation knows if government pushes something too hard, that's most likely not going to bring any good. Older people more willing to accept traditional vaccines like Sinovac/Sinopharm instead of mrna.

Younger generation remained hesitant but government insinuated huge social pressure in schools and colleges. My spouse's 14yo son was initially very resistant to vaccines and we supported it, but immense peer and school pressure pushed him to get the jab.

Additionally government mandated vaccination in cafes and dining venues so younger generation just sees it as obstacle for fun and getting it easily. At younger age you don't think about long-term effects.

> several families who I know in person chose to take Ivermectin as part of their treatment when family member contracted covid. All of them successfully recovered from covid.

Are you aware that this doesn't constitute any sort of evidence about ivermectin's effectiveness?

> a person I know lost 2 legs shortly after "safe" jab due to blood cloths.

Are you aware that coronavirus causes clotting much more frequently than the vaccine? I'm sorry for your friend, but if this were commonplace then every other person in the street would be an amputee, given how many billions of doses have been administered.

> Another person got cardiac arrest after jab (being 24yo) and was paid a lump sum (more than $200k) by government to suck it up and keep his mouth shut.

So how do you know about it? Wasn't a very good gag order then was it if you know and are spreading it on the internet? I'm just going to say it - I don't believe this story.

> why Ivermectin is so actively dismissed and the pharma jabs are so actively promoted?

Well because Ivermectin hasn't been shown to do anything for covid, but quacks are promoting it online. The vaccines, on the other hand, have been tested and found to be a useful way to reduce the consequences of the pandemic. A pandemic that's killed millions so far. So those are pushed. I mean seriously - how weird is that? Who would ever think, something that's been shown to help in a worldwide health crisis, and it's being pushed!

By the way, ivermectin is a pharma product too.

> There is clearly some evidence ivermectin does help

Where do you draw this from? This is not clear at all, this is a bland assertion.

> This atmosphere of ignorance and narrative-pushing has nothing in common with intellectual curiosity

I agree - you have shown no intellectual curiosity there, asking for studies to be done that have already taken place and you could easily find, and throwing vague allusions about cover-ups around. This isn't intellectual curiosity, it's clinging to a conspiratorial narrative. Perhaps you could use your knowledge of psychology to figure out why you prefer this narrative.

My apologies for jumping into this discussion. Not going to tolerate arrogance and inability to listen. All the best in life and apologies once again. Dixi.

> Studies have been done. It has been found lacking.

TFA found that more reliable studies found it was helpful than not. You are the one who is anti-science.

Not sure you're reading it right there - "I think this basically agrees with my analyses above - the trends really are in ivermectin’s favor, but once you eliminate all the questionable studies there are too few studies left to have enough statistical power to reach significance."

So I'll revise - studies have been done, but no conclusions about positive efficacy can be supported.

"I think the conventional wisdom - that the most extreme ivermectin supporters were mostly gullible rubes who were bamboozled by pseudoscience - was basically accurate."

> A number of people (myself included) would perhaps pay less attention to ivermectin as in covid drug if crowd would really take it and do studies instead of just publicly mocking people who are trying to look into it.

I don't think i've ever mocked any ivermectine taker (at least not for taking a medecine that may help some of his problems), and most "vaxxed" didn't either. And i'm aware than not all unvaccinated people are anti-vax (my brother is waiting for the Valneva himself). But as long as people tell me "look at the data", i will send them the data from the least vaccinated country in europe, Bulgaria (i even have a quick link on my phone), and ask them to explain to me their mortality rates, and grin a little. I'm not really mocking them, i just like seeing people trying to justify themselves, i find it fascinating. Note that i like seeing this in the "i fucking love science" crowd as well (people really have trouble explaining the moon's crescents, it is really funny), but as this is a novelty, it have more potential.

> people really have trouble explaining the moon's crescents, it is really funny

If you don't have that difficulty then you probably haven't thought about it long enough - yet.

But you don't have to trust only scientists directly or indirectly employed by those companies. There are plenty of subject-matter experts who work for competitors or are tenured in academia who would have very little to lose from criticising the rollout.

Ah yes, academia, that famous bastion of free thought where success is totally unconnected to whether your colleagues like you and nobody ever gets cancelled. One where, as the fine article points out, 95% of biology professors vote Democrat.

Academia is the last segment of society I trust on these topics.

What about those working for competitor companies then?

For better or worse, companies generally don't directly criticize their competitors products and especially won't make claims they're unsafe. That said, it's conceivable that with reforms to tort law, this could be incentivized in a reasonable way.

Call me a sheep, but if your distrust of other people runs so deep that you can't trust any source of scientific knowledge, from within or without academia, I feel a great sadness for you. Some scepticism is always needed but this seems like throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I'm a discerning sceptic. I trust science that has been proven through successful application. I feel sorry for people who have to read academic papers as part of their job in order to find science that they could apply, partly because that used to be a part of my job and after the novelty wore off it was a miserable task. Science is best paired with real world engineering - academia can do this but the least trustworthy fields e.g. those that rely entirely on modelling, never do.

The fraction of science that can ever be applied to engineering is vanishingly small though. How will you ever get to that kind of standard for things like astrophysics, particle physics, mathematics, most of biology? Do you really think the big bang, evolution, Fermat's theorem etc are bogus because they haven't been proven by "real world engineering"?

I completely agree that there is a lot of bogus stuff coming out, like the perennial "hyper efficient solar cell developed in a lab" press release that bubbles up on HN every now and then. But that is just a tiny piece of science if you ask me. Also blaming 'cancel culture' for this seems lazy , there are misaligned incentives but they are more subtle.

Particle physics has to a large extent become engineering: particle accelerators, nuclear reactors, radiotherapy for cancer. Evolution has been applied many times, most famously, to create SARS-CoV-2 right before it escaped from a lab ;)

As for the rest - well, who knows? Do I trust big bang theory? No, not really. I seem to recall it's inconsistent with various other measurements, hence the need for the enigmatic dark matter. But it doesn't matter or affect my life at all so I can easily choose not to trust it and who cares.

Where the problems start is when activists/politicians force me to "trust" self-proclaimed science that has never been through rigorous market-based mechanisms to weed out the crap. Epidemiology. Climatology. Virology. Standards in these fields are rock bottom low because nobody is at risk of losing their jobs if they're wrong, yet, I cannot simply evaluate this "science" and opt out.

> who would have very little to lose from criticising the rollout

I beg to differ, here is an example: Luc Montagnier, a Nobel prize recipient, has been completely marginalized after emitting doubts about vaccine safety and is now absolutely inaudible in anything mainstream.

It's just an example, there are several more. Anybody that saw how he was treated probably though really hard before emitting any dissenting opinion in public.

It feels like the Inquisition.

Hm the main content of a scientists life in my experience is really not measured by mainstream media appearances. And if anything, he is probably more known now than before [0], so even in the sense of crude 'celebrity status', he saw a net gain.

[0] https://trends.google.de/trends/explore?date=all&q=Luc%20Mon...

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