Hacker News Reader

Comment by SkeuomorphicBee | Hacker News Reader

Most of the writing is fantastic, but I'm very disappointed by the take that "everyone was wrong", by the implication that doctors didn't know they should treat for worms before giving immunosuppressants. Guess what, doctors in the developing world already knew that, it was always the standard practice on Brazilian hospitals. In fact, ivermectin was in very high demand in hospitals before it was suspected to be a Covid19 treatment. That whole paragraph reads like some really bad exceptionalism (it it doesn't exist here it doesn't exist).

View on HN

The everyone-was-wrong part was about scientists missing the worm connection when looking at the aggregate data, not about practicing doctors and worm treatments.

Is it standard practice to test for worms with every COVID patient that comes in?

Just an fyi, worms/parasites generally suppress the immune system.

So why hasn’t that come up before in these studies?

Because it was not related to Covid. If someone with heart problems is admitted with Covid they will receive their heart medications in the hospital, that doesn't mean that now heart medication is a Covid medication, so doesn't get mentioned in studies. The same goes for dewormer, it was in normal use against worms. Only after people started believing that it could be a treatment for Covid, that it started being studied for that (with different protocols). And then we found out that it is just a dewormer like we thought in the beginning.

Except in this case the dewormer is the central focus of the study. The relationship between worms in the population and its influence on covid outcomes makes that highly relevant to the publications. If it's known to be present in the general public, then not controlling for that in your study is just shoddy science.

More likely: a case of wishful thinking. Need miracle cure, found miracle cure, look no further.

Ivermectin being cheap and widely available is really important here. Something like that- instead of a novel vaccine made with novel tech in very specific first world factories- is very attractive to cash strapped governments and public health systems.

Of course. But that doesn't mean it exists.

Wishful thinking IS shoddy science

but it is essential to good engineering

Reply on news.ycombinator.com