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Comment by micromacrofoot | Hacker News Reader

This is the same kind of rhetoric Rogan uses to say nothing and make it sound like it's a worthwhile opinion.

Yeah, taking ivermectin to treat covid despite doctor's advice is objectively dangerous... people have actually died trying to take horse de-wormer. Rogan still spreads this nonsense.

You're appreciative of Joe having Jordan Peterson on to ramble about things like "climate doesn't exist"? In the same episode Rogan says it's "weird" to call black people black because they're not dark enough to be considered black technically. You feel like you've gained something from this exchange?

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> despite doctor's advice

Despite some doctor's advice....

Joe's doctor prescribed him human grade ivermectin, not "horse dewormer." HIS doctor. So HIS doctors advice was to take it, along with monoclonal antibodies, along with vitamins, and other things. He listened to HIS doctor, and recovered, and then told people what HE did. So it's Joe's fault some idiots took horse dewormer after he never mentioned those words? Please show where Joe, actually Joe and not a report of it, once recommended anyone take "horse dewormer" using those words. That was CNN's specific framing and where those words first showed up. They used those words, Joe didn't. Are you aware of that? The first time "horse dewormer" came out of Joe's mouth was in response to CNN's publicly false characterization of what he said.

Haven't heard Jordan's interview yet, but thanks for the heads up. I'm sure there will be something in the 4+ hour interview that I will gain, or will provoke thought, or cause me to go look something up, and some things I don't agree with or learn I was wrong about. Provoking thought is good.

Yes, Rogan was quite smart to get a real prescription and to get the actual human medical product. CNN (and other news agencies, and people on twitter) were outright foolish in attempting to make him look dumb (he won that round). I am quite irked at the people who thought the way to recommend not taking ivermectin is to shame people.

That said if he is smart enough to anticipate what people are going to say and adjust his actions to negate them, you'd think he'd also be smart enough to see that there really isn't any strong evidence for ivermectin being useful, and it's also possible you can take the drug, have no positive or negative effects, and get better from COVID, even if ivermectin made no difference. From that perspective, thing he did that was bad was "not even being wrong" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong) in the sense that we can't say really much of anything about his experience representing a generally useful medical advice.

Rogan is smarter than the average bear, but he's not in the club of the smartest bears.

“This doctor was saying ivermectin is 99 percent effective in treating Covid, but you don’t hear about it because you can’t fund vaccines when it’s an effective treatment,”

Actual quote. The guy spins it as "big pharma doesn't want you to know about this" so of course people are going off script. He's a dangerous moron.

It’s a moronic comment, but equally moronic comments are made about “big pharma” all the time by a bunch of people. He sounds like every Bernie supporter.

He's a moron that sounds like other morons, got it.

Hyperbole like this doesn't help. I'm not an advocate of ivermectin because I have no idea what the science is behind it, but calling it horse dewormer is just disingenuous. This is like the leftist version of the right wing media calling Seattle's CHOP/CHAZ a war zone.

I mean, it's not hyperbolic, it's literally used to de-worm horses.

There are horse medicines with aspirin, too. Is aspirin now a horse medicine because it contains a common ingredient? Ivermectin is also literally used by millions of humans in countries all over the globe that have parasite problems, because it's an antiparasitic. My whole photo tour group was given Ivermectin when we went to Africa before covid was even a thing.

> Ivermectin is an FDA approved drug for use in humans to treat a variety of parasitic infections including parasitic worms, hookworm and whipworm. It may also be used as an effective treatment for a wide range of other conditions and as a treatment of onchocerciasis, intestinal strongyloidiasis and onchocerciasis or river blindness.

https://www.drugs.com/ivermectin.html

people are literally buying and taking horse de-wormer, this is well documented... the FDA had to put out multiple statements in an attempt to get people to stop taking animal medications instead of vaccines...

I agree that hyperbolic isn't the right word, but do you really think people who call it horse de-wormer* are really being genuine.

*(Outside the context of literally treating horses)

"horse dewormer" is a type of medicine you can buy which is intended to be given to horses to deworm them. it's a different product from "people dewormer" (we call it an anti-parasitic in that context) with a different formulation and concentration. So it's not correct to say "literal" here, and just weakens your argument.

I think ivermectin doesn't work, but there's nothing wrong with a doctor prescribing it off label in a COVID context. It is not unsafe enough, generally speaking, to override the judgement of an individual doctor. The legal/regulatory system explicitly permits this, and there are other examples where doing this is likely ethically positive.

For example, there was a big controversey around lucentis and avastin where doctors found they could treat peoople with wet AMD with avastin far more cheaply, but the pharma (which marketed both) wanted people to use the far more expensive drug. Doctors actively precribed avastin instead of lucentis and treated patients (most case reports coming in positive) and then finally a large trial was run that showed it was basically as good as lucentis. Ethically, in retrospect, we say the doctors were acting in a good way (saving patients for less $$ and probably treating people who couldn't afford lucentis). I could imagine the owner of the two drugs running a PR campaign "Doctors: why are you prescribing a cancer drug to eye patients? Do you want to kill them"?

Veterinarians were literally turning people away because they were attempting to buy actual horse de-wormer. This isn't hyperbole. Some people poisoned themselves.

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