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Comment by cma | Hacker News Reader

For me it gave a big distrust of conspiracy theorists and reflexive contrarians, due to things like the ivermectin saga.

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Ivermectin Saga? You distrusted the 'conspiracy theorists' who took a perfectly safe drug that had been taken in the billions of doses a year prior? It was known as a possible protease inhibitor and was very safe to take. Where was the misinformation in what I just posted?

More convincing people they didn't need the vaccine because of one or two miracle studies that had huge red flags and overly slanted their metastudy. Brett Weinstein holding the "emergency podcast," which was always really about self-promotion.

The problem with ivermectin wasn't safety, but efficacy. If you have worms, ivermectin is great for you! Take it!

All the studies that showed ivermectin's effectiveness against Covid happened to be from countries with low levels of sanitation. The kinds of places where people are likely to suffer from worms without knowing it. If you have worms and Covid, and take deworming medicine, guess what? You're more likely to beat the 'rona. It doesn't mean the ivermectin cured you of Covid.

If I could upvote this 1000 times, then I would.

Or, put another way, people who self-medicated instead of getting the vaccine, putting those around them at risk, who used trickery to order the medication when it became restricted due to an unprecentedly and unplanned-for low supply, who resorted to using animal versions and mis-dosing themselves, risking needing a spot in the hospital that was already desperately needed for COVID patients. Yes, we distrusted those people, and for good reason, I should say.

> people who self-medicated instead of getting the vaccine, putting those around them at risk

How do you come to this conclusion when the vaccine's effectiveness against transmission was never demonstrated in controlled trials, and very highly vaxxed jurisdictions like the Bay Area saw huge and persistent waves of cases?

> How do you come to this conclusion

Because there have been many many studies of the effect of the vaccine, in many different countries, by many different groups.

The results are overwhelmingly that the vaccine saves lives.

> saw huge and persistent waves of cases

This is a bad argument.

A vaccine can be useful, and save millions of lives, even if we falsely assume for the sake of argument that it doesn't reduce the amount of people who get infected or transmissibility.

People were given billions of doses a year under supervision of doctors for actual cases where it made sense to take ivermectin. They weren't self-medicating with horse paste from agricultural feed stores like the idiots in the US.

It gave me a reflexive distrust of both sides. Govt officials utterly ignorant of the published research and happy to contradict it then reverse themselves next week; and unread citizens cheerfully making up their own fantasy worlds.

I was prepared with 20 N95 masks (ten years old but carefully sealed for a pandemic.) Which didn't matter because the provincial care workers spread the illness like wildfire through my building (they were seeing clients willy nilly all over the place, with no PPE, and with rules that forbid them from taking a day off with a note from a doctor who's face they'd breathed into. Also with no PPE.)

The vaccination story was a big win; and that was the decision that counted. So science won, and govts got the one key choice right, China aside. Antivaccers, zero.

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