Hacker News Reader

Comment by halfjoking | Hacker News Reader

Say whatever you want about effectiveness of Ivermectin, it's still an extremely safe drug used by billions worldwide. No one is going to win the Darwin award for taking it.

On the other hand, I vividly remember being told I would win the Darwin award for not taking an mRNA vaccine. If the vaccines are so great, why do non-covid excess deaths continue to rise while the media ignores it? [1] Until there is a reasonable explanation for these deaths, any novel therapy/treatment/vaccine should be taken off the market.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqKZlDsesL4

View on HN

> No one is going to win the Darwin award for taking it.

Surely that depends what they’re taking it for, no?

Got worms? Take a de-wormer. Don’t have worms, but do have a viral infection, and this is all you’re taking? Probably best avoid the thing with lots of well know unpleasant side-effects, even if they’re not generally lethal, as it has no benefit.

Los of well known unpleasant side effects? The known unpleasant side-effects is a stomach ache and feeling bad if you take a horse sized dose (assuming you aren't allergic to it of course).

On normal doses, fever, itching, and skin rash when taken by mouth; and red eyes, dry skin, and burning skin when used topically for head lice.

On large overdoses — which I don't normally count but which would be necessary for actually inhibiting the covid virus because even in vitro that only happened at 35x the maximum FDA-approved dosage — central nervous system depression, ataxia, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, hypotension, decreased level of consciousness, confusion, blurred vision, visual hallucinations, loss of coordination and balance, seizures, coma, and death.

(But apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?)

Safe dose: mildly unpleasant, and also ineffective.

Effective dose (in a petri dish): very unpleasant and possibly lethal.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We are discovering new long-term side effects of COVID-19 exposure everyday, most of which could have been prevented by inoculation.

That's a pretty big claim that inoculation prevents long-term side effects. The viral load is the same between unvaccinated and vaccinated who get infected. [1] So if the amount of virus is similar, I'd assume the potential for damage would be similar unless there is some other evidence.

As for evidence the vaccine caused medical problems, it already exists. The CDC tried to block the v-safe data from being released.[2] It shows overwhelming safety signals which the public should know about to have informed consent.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

[2] https://aaronsiri.substack.com/p/v-safe-part-1-after-464-day...

I don't think [1] means what I think you think it means:

"""Although peak viral load did not differ by vaccination status or variant type, …. Fully vaccinated individuals with delta variant infection had a faster (posterior probability >0·84) mean rate of viral load decline (0·95 log10 copies per mL per day) than did unvaccinated individuals with pre-alpha (0·69), alpha (0·82), or delta (0·79) variant infections."""

My point was if vaccinated could spread covid, and that paper shows the viral load is just as high so they can.

Yes vaccinated with pre-alpha, alpha, and delta have faster viral clearance... but what about Omicron which is 99% of cases now? Maybe the study was done too early, but the results are very bad for vaccinated with Omicron.

"In other words: out of 100 boosted persons who catch Covid, 31 — or one-third — will be still carrying LIVE VIRUS on Day 10. Out of 100 unvaccinated persons, only 6 would test positive on Day 10 — over five TIMES fewer people." [1]

So even if you justified treating unvaccinated differently due to viral clearance (completely disregarding that prior infection, age or weight has much more influence), eventually you'd be wrong using that metric anyway.

[1] https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/study-boosted-people-slowe...

Infectiousness is slightly different to peak viral load or the decay rate of viral load, and also includes symptoms, and has been tested independently of those.

There was a paper going around not too long ago whose headline result showed there was only a mild decrease in infectiousness, something like 24% immediately after vaccination, which some thought was a gotcha all by itself but (a) that is certainly better than nothing, and (b) it was based on prisoners who shared a cell, so a fairly extreme case of proximity and duration anyway.

Some already have.

Google hit #1: https://www.kiro7.com/news/trending/coronavirus-2-deaths-lin...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com