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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

That's science working as intended: theories getting replaced by better theories. There is plenty that we are probably going to find out more about in the future that will invalidate some of what we believe today to be true. But that's fine, as long as we stick to the scientific method that will all come out, even if it takes a while. Science has brought us further in 400 years than anything that came before. Right now it has given us vaccines, which are the best way to deal with COVID-19, and the anti-vaxx crowd and the pro-hydrochloroquine and pro-ivermectin crowd show large overlap.

Fortunately during the polio years we didn't have the internet, the carnage would have been incredible.

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There would have been no carnage with polio. Vaccines have a demonstrable and long lasting effect and the disease is more severe for all age groups, so people would have taken the vaccine.

Polio, measles etc. are entirely different.

Yeah, I knew a guy who got his legs destroyed by it. Given how well the polio vaccine is tolerated, and how grim the prognosis is without it, I don't think there'd be any issues with vaccine adoption. Measles one could argue either way - the disease is far less severe in most people.

Sure, but my point is "consensus" doesn't necessarily mean "truth", even though the vast majority of people use the terms interchangeably. "Everyone but one person is wrong" is a situation we've seen numerous times before in the history of science. And when the matters of social acceptability, prestige, politics, and just plain ability to make a living enter into the consideration, very, very few people would even be willing to challenge the status quo. I wouldn't. I have mouths to feed.

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.

The consensus in the medical world is that if there is a link it is extremely weak, far weaker than you'd need to establish that 'millions died while they didn't have to' as you write, and that if it works it probably needs very high doses, higher than considered safe.

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.

I agree with both of you. We can't 100% argue that the prevailing wisdom is infallible because of real examples of the opposite occurring rarely, like the ulcer case. However, on the balance I prefer to go with prevailing wisdom. It's a judgement call that requires a human to detail with probabilities and humans are very bad at probabilities.

> has caused a lot of people to forego their vaccinations

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.

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