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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

I imagine I will very much regret commenting here.

When the pandemic began, I left a few comments with home healthcare tips, like how to do lung clearance. People attacked me and accused me of practicing medicine without a license.

At some point, I went looking for an officially recommended list of OTC drugs for covid. I couldn't find any such thing online.

Healthcare shouldn't really be used to mean medical care. I think it's a mistake to treat those as synonyms.

Diet, exercise and lifestyle choices are all part of caring for your health. We could include grocery stores, restaurants and gyms as part of the "Healthcare Industry" though they certainly aren't part of the medical industry.

I think it was a huge missed opportunity that no official health organizations, like the CDC, put together tips of a sort I naively tried to share as someone with a serious condition who therefore has no choice but to do a lot of medical-like healthcare things at home. I was shocked at how hostile people were to that.

Because of that, I've mostly opted to say little about this topic. People are scared, etc and I didn't want to become a target.

But the mistake we made here was relying too heavily on the medical industry and not leveraging the internet as the perfect first line of defense for sharing good info without sharing germs.

View on HN

People want pills to fix their poor life choices.

The best thing for yourself and the country as a whole is sleep, regular cardio, regular lifting, regular sunshine and fresh air, cooking all your meals from scratch with whole (ideally local and in season) ingredients and mostly elimination of all refined products like sugar. But we normalized obesity.

We normalized and encouraged obesity to the point where even the acknowledgement of one's state of obesity can be labeled as inappropriate speech. There's a growing sentiment that the term 'obese' is a slur [1] and should be removed from our lexicon.

Imagine if the same thing happened in the 60s as we started to understand the risks of smoking - all the smokers got together and decided that the science was hateful and they were being discriminated against. To rephrase a line from the article, using that silly hypothetical:

"In the end, says Flegal, defining smoking by number of cigarettes/day promotes anti-nicotine attitudes and tobacco stigma."

One can't navigate conversations about obesity without topics like "attitudes" and "stigma" being part of the conversation, but I don't think the hard biology of the results of excess fat tissue really cares.

I'm aware this is a bit of a goofy tangent, but hopefully it highlights the silliness of the current obesity discourse.

[1] https://conscienhealth.org/2022/04/obesity-how-does-a-diagno...

Nobody needs to smoke. Everybody needs to eat.

Abstinence is easier than moderation.

Well, nicotine is actually a pretty good ADHD treatment option.

That's part of the reason why we see more (adult) ADHD these days: people used to smoke a lot. (Chain smoking plus guzzling black coffee used to be the stereotype for eg journalists or editors.)

So nobody strictly _needs_ to smoke, but it helps some.

(Before you go and light one up: smoking is one of the worst ways to get nicotine. Use a patch or lozenge or vape instead.)

Oh, I had no idea about the ADHD/nicotine connection.

As a recently diagnosed & medicated ADHD person, who used to chain smoke and drink gallons of coffee daily, so much makes sense all of a sudden.

Thank you for making me aware of this!

FYI: Consumption of caffeine increases tolerance for nicotine. Drinking coffee and smoking will tend to lead to more smoking.

Not to dismiss the ADHD connection at all, but I would be hesitant to hang too much of the blame on that given the coffee drinking.

See https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine for more.

Wikipedia says

> The nicotine causes the receptors to release nitric oxide, which slows sensory inhibition causing a suppression of a subsequent stimuli

It seems unlikely that nicotine is the only discovered substance that causes this effect, meaning there should be a healthier method?

Yes, it's called amphetamine. There is an alternative to being fat too, it's called broccoli. The point isn't that there are no alternatives, just that choosing to smoke is just as morally justifiable as choosing to be fat. Whether that means you should judge both categories of people, or neither, is up to you, but there can be good reasons why people are in either category. Things are rarely so black and white in the real world.

> There is an alternative to being fat too, it's called broccoli

There's a lot of discussion on obesity and weight issues on hackernews that show zero shreds of empathy that it's just wild to me and this is not much different. I don't think anyone refutes that diet and exercise are great options to avoid/combat obesity, but statements like yours are as useful as walking up to a smoker and saying "just quit". You may be alienating the audience you are trying to help, given that is the intention

Congratulations on understanding my point!

> Yes, it's called amphetamine.

Just about any stimulant will work.

Eg adrenaline/epinephrine works fairly well. Your body produces that itself, especially when exercising or fidgeting. (And now you know one reason why ADHD people often fidget.)

Methylphenidate works, too. It's also known as Ritalin.

> meaning there should be a healthier method

Nicotine is a generally safe substance, as long as it's not delivered alongside acrylamide, VOC-carrying particulates, and tar, as it is in cigarettes.

Amazon sells the stuff in lozenge form for only 7 cents per mg.

The choice of food is in fact a choice, and moderation isn't really required if your main ingredient in a dish is egg plant. It might not be an exact match, but the similarities between nicotine addiction and food addiction are more numerous than the differences.

Just to be precise: nicotine by itself isn't really addictive. It's the whole cocktail of chemicals in cigarette smoke.

That's a very fair point. It's definitely not a 1:1 comparison between smoking and obesity.

We need more mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods, we need to resolve the housing crisis, we need to make it feasible for most people to live comfortably without a car if they so wish.

Car-centric lifestyles and other trends that were not the norm fifty or a hundred years ago have made it nigh impossible for probably most Americans to live the way you describe.

Those lifestyle bits strongly shaped by the public infrastructure, how work gets structured etc are even harder to talk about productively than diet or home healthcare. People feel helpless to change any of it, so saying something like "If America had cycling infrastructure like the Netherlands..." just more or less falls on deaf ears.

The way America used to eat healthy was "wife and mom" (aka homemaker) was the primary role for a lot of women. With two-income couples and other trends, that just isn't a pattern we can rely upon anymore.

There is a proliferation of products, like meal delivery services, to address this widespread crisis but we need to more explicitly recognize and grapple with some of the root causes and we don't seem to doing a great job of that.

I used to do that until I moved to US. Now the stress of working long hours, constant anxiety of layoffs, working on next cutting edge tech, raising a kid without any family or community help, constant fear of losing healthcare insurance leaves me exhausted. I don’t have time to cook, exercise or sleep well. I guess that is the American dream.

I see what you’re trying to do, but everything you list is the result of personal lifestyle choices.

It is unfortunate that you’re having a difficult time but where you live and work is completely up to you.

This individualism logic is borderline propaganda. It is not a “personal lifestyle choice” to have children. Children are a biological necessity if we want to continue as a species. The fact that society doesn’t support healthy parenting is not an individual failure, but a failure of society. Similarly, it is not a “personal lifestyle choice” to live in economic insecurity due to layoffs. It’s the fault of corporate greed coming back to bite corporations and instead of the executives responsible paying for it, it’s the employees that had no decision making power. We are not individuals with some godly ability to warp reality to fit our health. We are all subject to a society that isn’t incentivized to prioritize the wholistic health of the people living in it.

The parent comment is complaining about the difficulty raising children. If you have children without accounting for how that is going to change your life, I guess I don’t have much sympathy for you.

And layoffs are a reality of the economic cycle, not merely because some “greedy corporation” decided to fire ppl on a whim.

If there is less work than workers or business outlook changes, what would you do? Keep on employees to dig ditches and fill them in out of the goodness of your heart?

You are blaming individual families on one hand for not budgeting for children and giving CEOs the benefit of the doubt for not budgeting for economic headwinds. This is the precise propaganda I was talking about.

At least I have a consistent logic: if the issue is that we have an unhealthy population we should prioritize the health of the population. Give people the time to exercise and cook. Give people the healthcare they need. Give people who fall down a way to get back up without crushing humiliation, debasement, and poverty trauma.

It's also a poor excuse. I have a full-time job, am raising multiple children, and I fit gym and meal prep into my schedule just fine.

When people say they don't "have time", examine their television, video game, or social media habits. You'll find that 99% of the time they are liars.

We all have plenty of time, it's just a matter of priority. For many, imposing an unnecessary burden on the healthcare system is a small price to pay for having watched plenty of TikTok and knowing the minutiae of Game of Thrones. On their (premature) deathbeds, they'll all wish they'd finished Season 6 of The Expanse and clicked on more heart icons.

"Where you live and work is completely up to you"

That's a patently false statement for a huge number of people now and the vast majority of people throughout history.

There's a kaleidoscope of possibility around people's behavior, station, and life between "Fully Self Actualizing Superman" and "Lazy schmuck who gets what they deserve."

Sure, it is false for many. But many of us on HN moved away from family to chase the excitement of Bay Area, NYC, etc. to work on cutting edge tech. And we could potentially have no problem getting hired at a boring, less stressful, 9-5 job tech job back where our families live. Many of us here have options.

So -- if you want to say "Where a person lives and works is discretionary for a very small number of people for a small period of their lives" that's a more correct statement.

The blanket statement "Where you live and work is completely up to you" is a deeply naive and insulting opinion of the same flavor as "let them eat cake"

It may not be a conscious choice but an unconscious belief about themselves, such as that they are not productive enough, or that their feelings are not valid.

I don't want pill to fix poor life choices, I want daily monitoring of the top 20 most likely things to kill me or destroy my health, like PSA, blood pressure, skin mapping, blood sugar / insulin sensitivity, etc. I will optimize my life around those.

There's just no data ... one day you'll feel a little off, a month later a routine checkup will detect advanced stage cancer, and you've got no time left.

There is someone who does this already: https://med.stanford.edu/snyderlab/news/May-24-20211.html I heard him give a talk - at that time the main thing he learned was that although being extremely fit, he was at risk for type II diabetes, so he modified his diet. My takeaway was that, even with all this monitoring, the best strategy is diet and exercise (or doing what your doctor has been saying for the past 50+ years).

I'm at elevated risk for skin cancer, which is almost trivial to handle with monitoring. It's a perfect case for a phone app / camera app. Not just "is this cancerous" but "how has this changed over time"

Even healthy people get cancer, get into accidents, die from crashes. A lot of health is lifestyle but there are always exceptions.

I mean, yeah, I agree with you, but think of it this way:

I don't have a citation on hand, but I remember reading a while ago that when it comes to general health outcomes, it was about 70% genetics and 30% personal choices (don't quote me on that, can make that number even 60/40 or 75/25, the point will still stand).

Which makes sense, a lot of people here probably know someone who did everything "right" in terms of their health choices and still got hit with something nasty (e.g., active lifestyle, eating healthy, etc., and still got cancer or covid or something else), as well as someone who did a lot of things wrong and still had a decent outcome (e.g., my grandfather who has been smoking a pack a day since middle school, been doing hard manual labor, and is still kicking in his 80s).

And sure, it seems daunting that your health choices can affect only that 30% (rather than 70%). In blackjack, however, the house edge against an average player is about 2%, and about 0.5% for perfect strategy pro players. People spend countless numbers of hours practicing memorizing (and executing) perfect strategies just to give themselves that extra 1.5%. While with just basics of taking care of your health, you can take charge of the 30%.

That's quite a massive effect that taking care of your health can have on your outcomes (and your life), even though your genetic health predisposition still has the edge.

Sure, but why not at least try to put the odds in your favor?

We know much about how exercise and diet plays into long term health in the same way that wearing a seatbelt keeps you safer.

It’s because we’re conditioned to believe we are already doing the right things an taking the right decisions so anything “substractive” is seen as a step backwards we expect a solution that will fix our problems with minimum effort.

Cutting subsidies to factory farming and encouraging plant-based diets would save billions in healthcare reduce pollution and water usage, yet people kick and scream for “mah bacon!”. We will get what we deserve no more nor less.

As it turns out, obesity is one of the main risk factors for people dying of Covid. This is inconvenient, so no one ever talks about it.

That being said, the vaccines worked. The Covid culture war was dumb as fuck

I don't know where you are in the world but in the UK we were constantly reminded that obesity, immunodeficiency, and old age were the biggest risk factors for worse Covid outcomes.

In fact when the prime minister (quite a fat man) at the time caught covid and became quite ill he started talking about how people should lose weight to increase their odds of a quick recovery

> their poor life choices [...] But we normalized obesity.

Feeling hungry all the time is not a life choice.

Responding to it is. I'm hungry all the time, and I eat all the time, and I weigh the same as I did in high school. I also run 70 miles a week. This is not a recommendation to anyone (although I sincerely enjoy it). There are a million ways to respond to a million variables. Some of those responses are hard.

I largely agree. Healthcare in the general sense isn't something that you can Outsource efficiently. While this is true in the obvious sense of diet exercise and behavior, it is also true in terms of medical care. Doctors and medical databases are not a complete alternative to taking ownership and responsibility or understanding your medical needs and history.

You wouldn't expect a home contractor to know everything after visiting a 50-year-old house for 30 minutes. As a homeowner, it is your job too collect information over time and synthesize the advice of experts

> At some point, I went looking for an officially recommended list of OTC drugs for covid.

I think COVID is perhaps different than other health and medical topics. The key factor about COVID-19 is that 3 years ago we knew pretty much nothing other than: "People are going to the hospital, not thinking they are starved for oxygen, but are posting horrible O2 numbers. Vents keep them alive a while, but lots of them die."

Seems pretty obvious that "the longer medicine has had to explore something, the more medicine can separate the wheat from the chaff." And even then when incidence is low: Are you sure that exposing the patient to the 24 hour healing property of pink light saved them, or were they one of these folks who would pull through anyway.

Maybe worth a listen: https://radiolab.org/episodes/312245-rodney-versus-death

As to the first "citizen medic" hypothesis, I think this already is in place for lots of established conditions. Perhaps not to the degree it should be, but I can certainly know when to use an ice pack or a heating pad, when to take aspirin, and can go get CPR certified.

As to the "holistic view of heath" perhaps there was a mixed messaging opportunity, but at least here in the US it was hardly the worst missed messaging opportunity. They totally whiffed on masking messaging.

The internet is a fine place to exchange information on understood things. The internet is a horrible place to exchange information on poorly understood things that science is focusing on because the internet mob is not science minded and the mediums we use to have these discussions are monetized for attention. "We don't know yet" is not an interesting answer from the "company gets paid for attention" point of view.

> and can go get CPR certified.

In many places this is free (or dirt cheap) along with "stop the bleed" (in the US), certified first aid courses, etc.

Realistically there is no reason to not take some basic first aid course. You hope you never will need it... But its better than flapping when/if something does happen.

A lot of people I've met are incapable of even cleaning and covering a small wound, so they go clog up the ER.

>The internet is a fine place to exchange information on understood things.

Is it even? Social media algorithms distort things to such a degree that even "understood things" are not safe.

People dislike being reminded of there mortality. And if they need to be reminded (because for example they are sick), they want to seperate this extraordinary state out into something seperate, far away were it can be put out of mind once the "normal" state, aka assumed-immortality returns. Your attempt for continous integration of health care breaks down that barrier.

For you its not a problem, as you are reminded of mortal frailty every day, but for a lot of people that is a scary prospect, they try to yell out there lifes.

2020 was different, we didn't have all the information that we've now at our finger tips.

I agree with you that diet, exercise and lifestyle choices are all part of caring for your health

Here in Germany there is a general focus on avoiding medical intervention as much as possible unless required. So much so that "Camille tea and hot pack" is a meme for healthcare here.

Gargling sage tea for everything respiratory (I did that the one time I caught covid as well, only went to the doctor for the sickness slip), drinking ginger tea when coughing, a lot of sleep. Pretty much my treatment for almost every sickness I had in the last 5 years.

My wife is from USA-like South Africa and thinks you need some kind of pharmaceutical for everything and us Germans are crazy ;)

It's fairly similar in Japan.

Japanese doctors are super adverse to prescribing anything, even painkillers after some type of accident, it's rare they will give you anything, even if your leg is broken.

When I was there I didn't mind it personally, but it's hard to get good drugs if you do require them.

> it's rare they will give you anything, even if your leg is broken.

Wow. And people think German doctors are extreme :D

A German doctor will probably prescribe an Ibuflam in this case, with warnings :-)

We had the information at the very beginning. March 2020 on Theodore Roosevelt, out of 4,800 sailors one died with covid.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_USS_The...

OTOH, Diamond Princess, 3711 on board, 712 infected, between 7 and 14 died ("from vs with" dispute as I understand it).

There's a lot of differences between a navy crew and a luxury cruise ship, but IFR estimates for COVID still vary a lot by nation: 0.2-1.3% around the beginning of the pandemic, and even now the CFR (which is always higher as IFR accounts for unsymptomatic cases) is 1.9% in Brazil, 18%(!) in Yemen, 0.2% in Cyprus, and a bit less than 0.1% in Singapore: https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid

Diamond Princess avarage age of passenger was 84. We had all the information.

And the average age of people in Yemen is 20.2.

Look, I get that old people are more vulnerable than young, and that's still true if I were to add the words "to COVID" to that statement.

But you know what? That's not helpful on either a personal, community, national, nor global level; and saying we had "all the information" on the basis of stuff like that is about as accurate as saying "answers in Genesis" as a response to anything about evolution.

FYI: Kamille = chamomile

Genau

If anyone is interested in the thread in question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22640905

I bookmarked it at the time, as I was worried about the hospital system collapsing where I lived like it had in northern Italy.

There is no officilly recommended (or even useful) OTC drug for covid. Maybe you can treat mild symptoms with NSAIDs and similar.

Nothing of what you are saying is helpful beyond the official advice given by doctors and public health sources and even the media.

You vastly overestimate your knowledge of the topic.

There is now Paxlovid, but that's a relatively new drug. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/regulatory-approv...

Lung clearance is something that's been taught to asthmatics and people with chronic pneumonia for a long time. I don't know about its effects on your absolute chances of survival but it could make you significantly less uncomfortable.

That's not true, there have been several medical center drug lists since mid 2020, with the most(?) popular probably being the one shared by the Eastern Virginia Medical School which they began in Jul 2020 and kept updating. Here's a snapshot of it:

(formatting compactly to save space)

Suggested approach to prophylaxis and treatment of COVID-19

Prophylaxis

While there is very limited data (and none specific for COVID-19), the following “cocktail” may have a role in the prevention/mitigation of COVID-19 disease, especially amongst the most vulnerable citizens in our community; i.e. those over the age of 60 years and those with medical comorbidities. While there is no high level evidence that this cocktail is effective; it is cheap, safe and should be readily available. So what is there to lose?

• Vitamin C 500 mg BID and Quercetin 250-500 mg BID • Zinc 75-100 mg/day (acetate, gluconate or picolinate). Zinc lozenges are preferred. After 1-2 months, reduce the dose to 30-50 mg/day. • Melatonin (slow release): Begin with 0.3mg and increase as tolerated to 1-2 mg at night • Vitamin D3 1000-4000 u/day (optimal dose unknown). Likely that those with baseline low 25- OH vitamin D levels and those > living at 40o latitude will benefit the most.

Mildly Symptomatic patients (on floor):

• Vitamin C 500mg BID and Quercetin 250-500 mg BID (if available) • Zinc 75-100 mg/day • Melatonin 6-12 mg at night (the optimal dose is unknown) • Vitamin D3 1000-4000 u/day • Enoxaparin 40-60mg day (if not contraindicated; dose adjust with CrCl < 30ml/min) • Optional (and if available): Chloroquine 500 mg PO BID for 5 days or hydroxychloroquine 400mg BID day 1 followed by 200mg BID for 4 days • Observe closely. • N/C 2L /min if required (max 4 L/min; consider early t/f to ICU for escalation of care). • Avoid Nebulization and Respiratory treatments. Use “Spinhaler” or MDI and spacer if required. • Avoid non-invasive ventilation • T/f EARLY to the ICU for increasing respiratory signs/symptoms.

https://srpc.ca/resources/Documents/COVID-19%20Resources/Cli...

> There is no officilly recommended (or even useful) OTC drug for covid. Maybe you can treat mild symptoms with NSAIDs and similar.

I gathered that was the point of GP.

> You vastly overestimate your knowledge of the topic.

This statement can only be made by someone who believes they have more knowledge. I fail to see how you do though, who provided no concrete argument against any of the points in GP.

I feel the covid fearmongering by governments, medical companies, medical authorities, and the media has made public discourse in general (let alone specifically medical) even more prohibitive.

Today, we aren't supposed to question or otherwise so much as discuss something if it goes against or strays from any established narratives. At one point, so much as uttering the word "corona" could get you silenced by the powers-that-be regardless of the context.

This is all ridiculous because the foundation of science (protip: medicine is a science) is to always remain skeptical and engage in rich discourse. Blind trust in science is no different from worshipping a religion or cult.

We are the Galileo against the Church's Geocentric Model, but far more precarious and farther gone.

> Blind trust in science is no different from worshipping a religion or cult.

Let me translate this: "Blind trust in the best recommended knowledge science has at the current moment in time is no different from worshipping a religion or cult."

No. This is wrong.

Science's recommendation at any given time is based on assembly and analysis of evidence. It evolves over time in the presence of additional evidence.

Religion or cults do not.

OTOH, paying attention to what the "my uncle got COVID, spent a week in only pink lighting, and subsequently recovered!" most recent FB post in your feed is wrong. The internet mob is not following the scientific method. They are posting anecdotes. Those anecdotes are filtered by the mediums for ability to create attention in others; and then those are presented.

I am reminded of the somewhat grim "Facebook COVID researcher" joke: https://i.redd.it/ovumfo3f48ca1.jpg

I think in a benevolent reading, you have to read it as: "Scientific facade hides many charlatans."

Engineering and applied science are entire universes removed from the ideal of science that gets painted here in defense of them.

Yes, scientists who pursue science in the way highlighted exist (and they are often not well paid for it) and it is a very respectable and admirable pursuit.

But there is a way larger mass of people and companies who strike a balance between profit and being scientifically backed enough, with incentives to tilt the balance into the direction of profit.

> Science's recommendation at any given time is based on assembly and analysis of evidence. It evolves over time in the presence of additional evidence.

I think you’re confusing science with “The Science”.

The 6 foot rule and mask mandates weren’t science, they were “The Science”.

People aren’t Luddites or anti-science, but they do often know when people (bureaucrats, politicians) are full of shit.

The whole point of science is that you’re supposed to question things intelligently, which inherently means you’re allowed to question things. Censoring “disinformation” in the name of science is how you get Galileo and the rest to roll over in their graves, and it didn’t even work. 30% of America is still unvaccinated, and a huge portion of them were probably radicalized by people being censored for spreading disinformation, because deliberately making yourself out to be Big Brother doesn’t convince anyone that you’re right (even though they mostly were).

That being said, you should look at things intelligently, but you can’t force people to do that, or you get situations where you can’t question that the Sun revolves around the Earth because that’s not seen as intelligent. The “mRNA vaccines will kill you” crowd are idiots, but censoring them only makes their point seem stronger and goes against the principles of scientific inquiry. Proving them wrong, which is easy, is better

No, that's not the whole point of science though. That's where science starts, and where most "disinformation" ends. The next point of science is to evaluate each claim on its own merits, but most people prefer not to do that, because it takes effort. Blindly believing the claims that are most convenient to you is also a good way to get Galileo and the rest to roll over in their graves.

I initially phrased it badly, and modified it to better explain my point. Forcing everyone to accept the current viewpoint of most scientists, especially in a rapidly evolving field such as studies on a virus discovered less than 5 years ago, is stupid, but you also shouldn’t blindly believe nonsense and most Covid disinformation is. You need actual evidence, and luckily platforms like The Lancet make it relatively easy to find studies (although they should be more open tbh)

The Lancet is the most ironic example you could've named, given the enormity of the error they made in February 2020 publishing the Daszak letter. This act was the single biggest instigator of the exact issue you're talking about: "Forcing everyone to accept the current viewpoint of most scientists, especially in a rapidly evolving field such as studies on a virus discovered less than 5 years ago".

Luckily, nobody is forced to blindly believe in anything. However, there is a huge mass of people, who would benefit from blindly believing in scientific consensus, because they know too little about how to question things properly. Their methods are often very-very bad.

Millions have died. Are still dying, especially in China. More could have died if there hadn't been a robust world-wide response.

How do you illicit a robust world-wide response? By making the potential consequences of not acting abundantly clear, aka "fear-mongering".

But you should address citizen concerns, rather than oppress them.

For example: yes, the vaccine has side-effects. But here is the data on which we decided to still approve it: a much better aggregate health outcome and lower risk of death.

That has been done. Ad nauseam. If you didn't notice that you had to actively ignore it or live under a rock or something.

No. For instance, on YouTube, even mentioning COVID would get you demonetized. Thunderf00t's video debunking lack of oxygen through masks was even taken down repeatedly. [1]

And in the beginning, there were recommendations NOT to wear masks, because masks were not proven effective for THIS PARTICULAR virus. Which would have been impossible, since it was a month old. But my supposition is that the medical community wanted to buy them first, so I wore a scarf.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drN1VyLkEIY

YouTube has an incredibly aggressive demonetization policy. Its moderation is not a reflection of the FDA or CDC or whatever

Google and Facebook are so big and so closely tied to the government, they might as well be another branch of government.

They might not even be financially viable without government deals like PRISM.

> Google and Facebook are so big and so closely tied to the government, they might as well be another branch of government.

By this logic almost every corporate out there is a branch of government. Which is trivially provable as being false.

> They might not even be financially viable without government deals like PRISM.

This is just absurd :-)))) Do you think Nike's ad money are funneled through PRISM?

This reads like goalpost moving. It started with asking why science wasn’t being explained, and then used a private company’s aggressive censorship policies as an example while ignoring the government’s official statements and published studies, which are the actual authorities in the matter.

>YouTube demonetisation

Isn't this the very point of the GGP comment? Social media algorithms do a very poor job of selecting relevant information to present to users.

I don't think 'citizen concerns' has anything to do with Youtube demonetization; you've already moved the goalposts.

The reason for the recommendations for not wearing masks was so that health care workers wouldn't run out of PPE.

They could have said nothing. They could have told the truth. They could have said that people should wear whatever masks or textiles they can.

Except that's not what they said, right? People like Fauci said there was no reason for the general public to use masks, which is a lie.

> That has been done. Ad nauseam.

Has it? Because Pfizer said they needed 75 years to release the vaccine trial data, and that was just a few months ago. Things were not as transparent as you imply.

It is hard to tell whether you seriously believe this, or simply want to make an argument. Pfizer said they needed 75 years to redact a particular set of vaccine trial data given the resources they had allocated. They had already released an enormous amount of data, but were subjected to a nuisance suit asking for more. The statement that they wanted 75 years to release vaccine trial data is misleading.

Transparency is not a "nuisance", it's a requirement. Dismissing people's concerns as immaterial or nuisances is a big reason why people have lost trust in institutions.

As for whether my claim was misleading, are you suggesting that the proposed schedule for releasing the vaccine safety data would not have taken 75 years?

The fact that Pfizer released aggregated data based on their own analyses is immaterial if third parties can't analyze the raw data replicate the results.

Perhaps we can disagree on what constitutes transparency. Is the data release transparent if it does not include the full name and social security number of each participant? Surely that information would allow additional analysis. Transparency is not binary - there are trade offs. The nuisance part of the suit was in data that required painstaking redaction, without a strong argument for benefit.

> Is the data release transparent if it does not include the full name and social security number of each participant? Surely that information would allow additional analysis

No, that has no medical, public health or accountability benefit, and you know very well that this isn't the data the scientists are requesting be released.

> The nuisance part of the suit was in data that required painstaking redaction, without a strong argument for benefit.

The strong argument for benefit is that the public deserves to have a independent, public accounting of the processes that led to vaccine approvals. This has significant implications for how public health should be managed going forward, how government mandates surrounding vaccines should be handled, and even how public messaging affects institutional trust and vaccine adoption.

Secretive processes managed by an unaccountable elite/select group whose judgment of the data we must simply trust is not how science works, or even how government should work.

Edit: and to be clear, the documents they were forced to release to date on adverse events during the trial are already raising some eyebrows, and no doubt much more debate is to come.

Are you implying that this wasn't done? This was precisely the communication I've seen, personally.

The AZ vaccine was withdrawn in the EU only a few months after it was launched. Citizen concerns were addressed incredibly quickly by bureaucratic standards.

Yes, the process was not nice looking, but it never is.

But the vaccines are not better for all segments of the population. For, say, a healthy 20yo male, the data clearly shows that a second shot of Moderna has net negative expectations. This demographic would be much better served by fewer lower dosage shots spread further apart. For a frail 80 year old every jab helps.

For vaccines the choice was never about vaccinating everybody or vaccinating nobody and when you only look at aggregate health outcomes you can justify any number of horrific medical practices. E.g. is serving everybody peanut butter good in aggregate because there are more malnourished people in the world than people with peanut allergies?

"The data" does not "clearly show" any of that. Particularly there was not even a hint of such evidence until months or years after the vaccines have been approved.

It's not so easy to find the exact age at which the vaccine becomes "net-positive" even assuming a negative effect can be shown at all. Which would also be very minor, on average. Turns out, "healthy 20yo males" don't generally react purely to vaccines.

Clearly it's very hard to push for a vaccination mandate when acknowledging uncertainties like "more research is needed to determine which age/gender cohorts net benefit from vaccination". Much easier to push forward based on aggregate results from preliminary data. Some people think the end justifies the means but I'm very much opposed to misrepresenting scientific results to justify public policy.

You're misunderstanding the decision at the time. It wasn't a case of "more research needed for decision" but rather "decision needed before more research".

There isn't really any data showing a clear net negative outcome for any age group. And even if there had been some doubt, the overall picture, was and is that vaccinating everyone is saving lives and it had to be done as quickly as possible. Waiting for more data would have cost more lives. And the results show that decision was correct.

I'm understanding just fine, it's clearly our ethics that differ.

Running about 6.7 million dead so far, so there's little tolerance for fantasists. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Fewer than 1 in 1000, mostly elderly, on a planet of almost 8 billion.

Obviously not good, but it's not apocalyptic either. (Not bad enough to justify writing off 'freedom' as an awful selfish far-right concept that should be purged from society entirely?)

9/11 killed fewer than 1 in one million of the world population and look at the response to that. Including impacts to freedom.

Maybe that was the event that completely broke everybody's sense of proportion. 100ml liquid bottle? Can't take it on a plane. Airborne pathogen? Sure, why not, bring it aboard.

Politicians felt they had to (or seized the opportunity to?) enact a disproportionate response to 9/11 because it’s (politically ) better to fail by going too far than not going far enough.

I suspect the same is true of covid, but how do we break the cycle? Is it innate in politics?

Same way we break any cycle. We vilify those who peddle it and shun those who support them.

Obviously not good, but it's not apocalyptic either.

That's the death count with the measures put in place. If C-19 hadn't been taken as seriously as it was then you might be adding a zero to that death count. Maybe two.

>Not bad enough to justify writing off 'freedom' as an awful selfish far-right concept that should be purged from society entirely

Why the ridiculous straw man?

Which freedoms are you missing currently? This obviously depends on location, but apart from few closed venues (which was good decision during height of pandemic) and few months of limited cross border travel (choice of every state) no freedoms were curtailed here in Switzerland, and absolutely 0 are curtailed now. Same applies for whole EU AFAIK.

Unless you mean obvious a-holes that back then refused to put on masks in shops and public transport and made it a political issue, which it was not, simply a security one.

It was wonderful to see all those slightly weird quiet types suddenly go full blown nuts and dive head first into various redneck conspiracy theories, if they weren't drowning in them before. Reasonable mankind lost those for good probably, but they were never truly part of it so at least now we see situation more clearly and can manage expectations more realistically.

Switzerland closed schools, hardly "a few" venues, it was pretty much every venue. They banned gatherings of more htan 5 people, unless it was financially beneficial (say people building something for money)

And we do them a disservice if we fail to examine what went wrong

You should express that as a percentage of the population and also show precisely which groups died.

Specifically, it was very old and otherwise very sick people.

A large percentage of the deaths were simply pulled forward a couple years. Tragic and awful, yes. But worth 2 years of major disruptions to life and the huge lingering economic impacts?

At this point, I think most would say no. It was absolutely not worth it.

I estimate 8 billion people [0] are going to die of something; if we shut the economy down every time 7 million people die there will be nothing left.

Up until COVID there was a pretty good social contract going on where we'd all promised never to do the things that the authorities then went and did. 7 million deaths doesn't justify that, WWII alone was 70-80 million people lost trying to promote the opposite of the COVID response. Liberty is important. And might turn out to be a better policy depending on how bad the shock of the COVID response turns out to be (see, for example, the article).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

During WWII, in the place least impacted (USA) there were substantial, government imposed interruptions to daily life and business: government mandates on production, rationing, a military draft, curfews, the literal internment of Japanese Americans.

Of course, these interruption were tiny compared to those of life in England or France or other battlefields of the the war. There’s an entire genre of literature and film devoted to lives ripped apart by the interruption of World War II.

The lesson of WWII isn’t that we never need to impose individual sacrifice, but rather that the preservation of our liberty requires deep collective sacrifice on occasion, and to work to protect it not just for ourselves but for our friends who by virtue of luck are in a worse situation than we are.

Internment of innocent Japanese Americans during WW2 has always been repugnant. It wasn't justified then and it's still considered shameful today. It's not "individual sacrifice [needed to] preserve liberty", it was just racist and abusive.

Governments will overreach and violate civil liberties when the people don't resist (Snowden revelations, anybody?). That's the lesson.

Let me clear that I’m not saying all of the govt actions that took liberties away in wwii were justified or helpful or good. Japanese internment is one of the clearest examples of paranoia that was destructive and did not help the war effort.

But many other actions, from curfews, to govt planning of the economy, a draft, collective bomb shelters in London, etc, clearly did help preserve life and Liberty in the long term.

> But many other actions, from curfews, to govt planning of the economy, a draft, collective bomb shelters in London, etc, clearly did help preserve life and Liberty in the long term.

A literal interpretation of this (comprehensive) text yields a rather bold claim.

> Japanese internment is one of the clearest examples of paranoia that was destructive and did not help the war effort.

Sure, but it makes the point that just because people claim some measure is for the collective good, doesn't mean we should just take that at face value. Power is easily abused and we should be demanding more transparency and accountability from people who want to impose onerous top-down restrictions for speculative reasons. Instead, we get legions of people shouting down and vilifying those who are expecting more.

But my larger point to the original comment was that wwii may have had an order of magnitude more causalities, but it also came with at least one order of magnitude more disruption. My own grandfather lost over a year of his life to POw camp and walked with a limp for the remain 77 years of his life. His family that were still in Europe on the other hand were systematically rounded up and murdered, their property confiscated, first by the Germans then by the soviets. But he was proud to have made the sacrifices he did to stop fascism in its tracks.

Yeah, WWII was a much bigger deal than COVID. And we come out of COVID to discover what? Suddenly we've got war in Europe involving the country with the world's biggest nuclear arsenal. We've got some terrifying tensions in the Pacific with the worlds largest manufacturing superpower that is going to rip the region a new one of they go haywire. We should have been focusing on war and peace, not trying to innovate new ways of torpedoing basic liberties. Signs suggest we might be about to lose a lot more human lives than just 7 million in the next 10-20 years. I hope not.

But that wasn't the point I really wanted to make; what I'm trying to say is that we should be dealing with a substantially bigger emergency before the COVID response was justified. Seriously; how hard is it to just leave people alone to make their own decisions, and pass information to them to try and help them make the best decisions?

There are any number of cases in our society where we decide that you can’t just decide what you want to do because your behavior has consequences on others.

You can’t speed 65mph through red lights, for instance. In public spaces, or with actions that can’t be contained, many of your choices have consequences for me, so I get to have a say.

There was basically no risk of COVID in public spaces. It doesn't spread in fresh air.

The restrictions generally targeted private spaces. In Australia we even went as far as banning friends visiting each other at home.

> You can’t speed 65mph through red lights, for instance.

Driving is a privilege, not a right. You earn that privilege by agreeing to follow certain rules.

Being able to walk in public spaces or associate with whom you wish in private spaces is a right, not a privilege. You don't need to earn your rights. Do you see the difference here?

Fundamentally, you can't leave people to make the decision "spread the airborne pathogen" when that affects other people to this extent.

Obviously there is a limit - China has recently hit the end of political support for zero-covid restrictions, because they were extremely onerous even in an already totalitarian country.

> Fundamentally, you can't leave people to make the decision "spread the airborne pathogen" when that affects other people to this extent.

Because....?

When it comes down to it, you're arguing for a type of society that prioritizes certain values, and those who disagree with those policies are arguing for a society that prioritizes different values. You are not automatically right or morally superior simply because you value safety more than freedom.

Not even safety. The ruling class has shown itself to be greedy, untrustworthy, and incompetent in their response to everything from climate change to hurricanes to pandemics to wars to corporate regulation.

It astounds me that people look at the utterly bungled and hare brained government responses to covid (or 9/11 or Katrina or the war on drugs or Vietnam) and can turn around say, "See? We need to give these corrupt greedy nitwits even more power to control our lives."

Fundamentally, you can. And do all the time with flus and colds and any number of other airborne pathogens that we don't mandate vaccines, masks, social isolation, shutdowns of economy and education, etc.

And most measures and expert driven response were pretty ineffective anyway. People whip out the 6 million number as though it has any bearing on the number of people who might have died or been saved by different responses to COVID which is really pretty disingenuous and emotionally inflammatory. A lot of government particularly health policy involves tradeoffs with lives, you can't just try to put blame on people for deaths if you don't like their position and use that as an argument. Because some extremist can always come in on the other side of your position and make exactly the same argument against your position.

In other words, why would you be the arbiter of exactly what is reasonable and what is "extremely onerous" and when you can and can not allow people to make their own decisions? It's circular logic, you basically justify your position by asserting they are the right decisions.

> WWII alone was 70-80 million people lost trying to promote the opposite of the COVID response

I'm sorry but this is ludicrous. WW2 wasn't fought for liberty or freedom - the big 3 Allies were an extremely oppressive dictatorship, a colonial empire and US (which interned it's Japanese citizens in concentration camps and still had bloody segregation as something normal, so while somewhat better than the other two, far from a bastion of liberty). Furthermore, they were only fighting as an alliance of convenience because the war came to them (Axis invading/declaring war), the only exception being the UK deciding to finally stick to it's promises, and not sign a peace treaty (and that was very much thanks to Churchill's perseverance, there were enough people who wanted peace at all costs).

The war was to stop and defeat the Nazis and Imperial Japan, and to a lesser extent Fascist Italy. Liberty and freedom, or saving the Jews/Poles/Greeks/Czechos/Slovaks were never among the goals, or the war would have started much earlier and wouldn't have waited for Axis powers to declare it.

Also, the vast majority of the dead were on the Eastern Front, civilians and soldiers alike, and the people there were highly repressed before, during and after the war.

And in every participant in the war there was extreme censorship and liberty restrictions (like not being allowed to eat whatever one wants, and not being allowed to have lights on at night, curfews, etc.).

> Blind trust in science is no different from worshipping a religion or cult.

> We are the Galileo against the Church's Geocentric Model, but far more precarious and farther gone.

This sounds far more like the utterances of a cult than even the most dismissive "listen to doctors, they know better than you" media commentary...

The bad faiths attempts at "skepticism" are at least in large part to blame for that response.

It's as if I yell fire in a crowded theater, then when there is no fire and my speech rightly faces consequences I complain about "the-powers-that-be" limiting my future attempts at yelling "fire".

Scientific skepticism is good, but requires a certain level of being informed. Good, scientific skepticism does not occur on the internet in 99+% of instances. Usually what is actually occurring is politicking and spreading disinformation. Conflating that with the good kind of scientific skepticism is quite dishonest, intellectually speaking.

> I feel the covid fearmongering by governments, medical companies, medical authorities, and the media has made public discourse in general (let alone specifically medical) even more prohibitive.

A opposed to the fearmongering that vaccines are to be avoided at all costs, and that they only exist to control the masses and further enrich the rich?

I don't think it would be "as opposed to", both are manifestations of the same/similar underlying cognitive bugs in the brain/mind, the same sort of issues can be seen in many of the comments in this very thread, written by genuinely smart people who sincerely believe that what they say is true.

> always remain skeptical

Do you remain skeptical about whether the earth is a mostly roundish ball of rock or a flat disk on the back of some elephants?

How much effort do you put into that scepticism. How often do you re-evaluate your view?

> always remain skeptical

The appropriate amount of skepticism is exactly proportional to the probability that the theory is false.

Since a lot of people are very certain about vaccines, they are very un-skeptical about them. And therefore don't want to spend time on "skepticism".

(Of course if one's prior distributions are very whacky, it's no surprise that they end up with bad posterior distributions after reading/seeing new data/information.)

> and engage in rich discourse.

There's definitely room for improvement. Especially when some folks throw out sentences like "At one point, so much as uttering the word >corona< could get you silenced by the powers-that-be regardless of the context."

The MRNA vaccines that were introduced were novel and used a mechanism that hasn't been used at scale before and without long term human studies.

And increased amount of skepticism in such a case is completely warranted.

Skepticism of every and each human mRNA vaccine was completely warranted before we had data. That's why there were (and are) clinical trials, all of which do post-treatment data collection (some for 2 years). Exactly to get solid reliable data about effects of mRNA vaccines, exactly so that we can definitively say whether it was a good call or not, whether the continued skepticism is warranted or not. (Or more precisely, how much skepticism is warranted.)

Appropriate amount of skepticism about long-term (5+ years) consequences is still warranted, though as time goes on that amount is seriously decreasing.

What's your point?

If the current clinical trials find potential negative consequences, that hardly helps the people who already took the vaccines, many who were pressured against their will.

If skepticism is warranted, then it's wrong to be pressured to go through with a health procedure.

What? No. Risk-benefit analysis does not stop being valid just because there's a higher uncertainty.

If phase IV follow up finds problems people who are affected can be notified, funding can be allocated, etc, etc. Also known "potential negative" consequences are much better than unknown ones, because there are likely risk minimization and harm reduction strategies.

Public health is a cruel topic, because there are so many hazards, side-effects for preventative measures, so little resources, etc. It's "great" that COVID was "mild" compared to the extreme possibility of something like Ebola, but it was also much-much-much harder to contain, because it spread by air ... and it killed a lot more people in the end, because people did not take it seriously, did not manage it (inadequate testing), fall prey to the do-everything or do-nothing fallacy (eg. stay at home, meet no one ... or go to work and packed restaurants).

In this regard it's very likely okay that people were pushed, pressured, and persuaded to get the damn jab.

Higher uncertainty obviously influences a risk-benefit analysis.

If there is higher uncertainty about the validity of the purported benefits as well as the claimed safety, then it might very well be fine to decide to not participate in something, especially if you don't fall into a demographic that's particularly vulnerable.

Solid research really needs much longer timelines. Let's take some hypothetical and unlikely scenario that offspring of people who received an mRNA vaccine develop a medical condition. Mass vaccination would affect everyone so we cannot afford to be careless here. While the chances are remote, they are still above 0% and therefore 2-5 years of research seems just not enough.

0% isn't a real probability: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QGkYCwyC7wTDyt3yT/0-and-1-ar...

The rest of the argument is fine in so far as it goes, but because we already see acute and chronic damage from COVID, the hypothetical undiscovered long term damage from any given vaccine (and there are many fundamentally different ones, they're not all mRNA) would have to be both surprisingly frequent and severe just to get up to a swings-and-roundabouts with the actual illness.

I disagree. Always be skeptical, BUT we have a whole scientific method to use to address that skepticism. When the other side refuses to engage in that, it gets very frustrating. The vaccines had clinical trials and VERSA databases as skepticism warranted, and were shown to be effective and safe.

Yes, exactly, thanks for putting it in better terms.

p.s. it's VAERS https://vaers.hhs.gov/

> we aren't supposed to question or otherwise so much as discuss something if it goes against or strays from any established narratives

I guesss you are referring to vaccine scepticism.

Comparing anti-vaxxers to galileo is ridiculous.

Comparing anti vaxxers to vaccine sceptics is ridiculous.

> I feel the covid fearmongering by governments, medical companies, medical authorities, and the media has made public discourse in general (let alone specifically medical) even more prohibitive.

The fact that you still call it "fearmongering" with nearly 7 million people dead and how many others with negative long term health conditions from the virus tells you why there is a backlash against anti-intellectualism.

You are certainly not prohibited from challenging the status quo. You know that because there are thousands and thousands of anti-mainstream videos and blogs that tell us viruses aren't real, or covid is just the flu, or vaccinations cause more issues than covid itself, and, and, and....

Engaging in rich discourse happens while scientists are trying to form a consensus. But eventually a consensus is formed and then the outliers who mostly only generate noise tend to get ignored. 1 in 1000000 times then may be correct and successfully challenge the status quo, but mostly they're wrong but convinced beyond any reasonableness that they are not wrong. You cannot argue against all of these people, it is just too tedious, so in the end they just get ignored or stopped from spreading nonsense on certain forums.

My wife was in nursing school during/after the pandemic. One of her classmates/friends (37 year old mother of 3) was skeptical of the vaccines and wasn’t sure she was going to continue the nursing program because they were requiring vaccination. She contracted C-19 over the summer of ‘21, spent 2 months in the hospital before dying. Would she still be here for her kids if she’d taken the jab? It’s impossible to know, but more than likely she would have fared better than she did without it.

Lung clearing is a big deal. My dad (asthmatic) taught me at a young age and it's been very helpful, including when i got COVID while traveling and wanted to avoid a hospital trip.

Holistic and personalized health-care remains in its infancy, i can forgive skeptics.

The internet as a source of home remedies wrought gross misinformation like ivermectin, chloroquine, and a host of other bad advice that got people killed.

There's a reason lots of medical professionals dissuade people from relying on the internet for medical advice, and it's not some vast corporate conspiracy.

That's a literacy issue. Internet literacy can be taught.

If the CDC or NIH had posted established and well-developed protocols for things like lung clearance, then you educate people that "Ivermectin is not being recommended by reliable sources. Here are the home care recommendations from reliable sources."

Lung clearance at home is not some concept I invented. It gets routinely prescribed and taught for patients with serious, incurable lung issues.

> "Ivermectin is not being recommended by reliable sources.

Adding to that all communications regarding ivermectin and other crazy people miracle drugs, it should have been communicated that "Ivermectin is generally safe for human consumption. Ivermectin is highly dangerous if taken in single dosages above xxx mg/kg or longer than yyy days. There must be at least zzz hours between individual dosages of Ivermectin. Do not take more than vvv mg/kg a day. If you violate any of the advice given here, side effects might include: x, y, z, allergic shock, death, neurotoxicity."

Instead those hell bent on taking it were ridiculed and ostracized, taking it in secret and an uncontrolled fashion. They could have been both forced and allowed to get in in pharmacies, with the condition of them also taking an information pamphlet or something -instead they went for more difficult to dose formulation directed at large animals.

If you ask a pharmacy about off-label use of a drug, they are going to tell you "no", not to advise you how to take something you don't need. It might even be a breach of their license conditions to do otherwise.

20 percent of all prescriptions are written for uses not approved by the FDA.

https://www.drugwatch.com/health/off-label-drug-use/

Minor nitpick, prescriptions are written by doctors, with a medical degree, rather than pharmacists with a degree in pharmaceutical science dealing mostly with analytical chemistry and biochemistry.

My understanding is that policies vary from one country to the next.

I'm American. My understanding is that in the US you need a prescription from a licensed healthcare professional to get medication from a pharmacy. This usually means a doctor but in some states a physician's assistant may have the authority to write prescriptions.

In the US, if it doesn't require a prescription, it is sold over the counter, though they may check your ID to see if you are a legal adult for some things.

I have heard anecdotally that in other countries pharmacists can sometimes dispense medication without a prescription.

HN is a very international discussion space. This fairly often leads to people speaking past each other as their comments may well be rooted in a completely different set of assumptions and mental models about how such things work.

Then we need better, more humane laws for this topic. What's so hard about saying "Regulations force me to say and I personally believe that you should not take this medication, but if you insist on taking it please observe the following rules or you risk death and disability."

Meanwhile people regularly and irreparably blow up their livers with paracetamol and no one gives a damn.

Paracetamol is weird; it's clearly been grandfathered in as you'd never get it approved now. The UK sells it without a prescription, but you're not allowed by the shop (often enforced by the POS software!) to buy too much at once.

Then there's cocodamol, where in an effort to avoid "addiction" issues the relatively safe opiates are cut with relatively low-LD50 paracetamol.

I don't think an informational campaign would have helped with the ivermectin problem. Underlying that was the conspiracist belief that people were lying to them. Why would they believe a safety leaflet?

They got their hands on ivermectin anyway. Sure, making it easier to try would have lead to more abuses.

However, in theory thats why people have GPs or PCPs, to oversee their treatment. Yes, they were overloaded (as they always are), but if people want to try a treatment, in general we shouldn't say no. We should enroll them in a trial, etc. And we should say no when we have enough data to be sure that it's very unlikely to work, and still, in general fighting scammers/fraudsters and various snakeoil salesfolk should be done through prosecution of those who knowingly make false statements, thereby intentionally defrauding vulnerable people, not through right to sell shit. (And yes, this is a very hairy topic, because everything is fucking expensive when it comes to medicine. But that's one more reason to streamline it instead of having a cottage industry is these trial runners hemorrhage money into a thousand pockets.)

> I don't think an informational campaign would have helped with the ivermectin problem. Underlying that was the conspiracist belief that people were lying to them. Why would they believe a safety leaflet?

And also afaik the biggest problem with Invermectin wasn't that people were overdosing on it, it's that they were treating it as a prophylactic or potential miracle cure which meant they didn't have to worry about catching or spreading COVID (or get vaccinated, when the vaccines were introduced). "Homeopathy doesn't cure HIV, but here are the dosages of homeopathic remedies which people looking to manage their HIV status with homeopathy rather than antiretroviral drugs and condoms should take", said no public health information campaign ever

Afaik Invermectin has all the safety information regarding its dosages on the packet anyway (at least the packets designed for human use...). Doesn't mean people getting health advice from people shouting about the evils of the medical profession on talk radio or Facebook necessarily acknowledged them.

I disagree that what you call internet literacy can be taught. In my opinion people fundamentally disagree what the 'reliable sources' are and some (many?) actively distrust the official recommendations.

With that analysis internet literacy becomes a question of showing people that official recommendations are not actively trying to trick you into doing something harmful to yourself. How will that be done when nobody trusts any official authority, be it government, universities, news media or anything else?

This trust will take generations to re-build and currently it doesn't seem like anybody thinks it's even a priority.

> Internet literacy can be taught.

Can it? We've been trying for 20+ years.

Not to mention that while it used to be purely a literacy problem, nowadays various commercial interests benefit from users being tech-illiterate and are incentivised to perpetuate this lack of literacy, all the way towards dumbing down UIs and removing advanced features so that people can no longer become literate even if they wanted to.

Hell, the spread of medical misinformation benefits the platforms on which it happens as it generates plenty of "engagement" so short of regulation with actual teeth (which won't happen due to government incompetence, regulatory capture or lobbying), I don't see why the situation would ever change.

> the spread of medical misinformation benefits the platforms on which it happens as it generates plenty of "engagement"

There was a great paper which I can't find now about the link between the "supplement" industry, whose products range from the ineffective to the actually dangerous, and aren't regulated by the FDA, and the rightwing channels that tend to advertise them.

Its not just a right wing problem, there's plenty of crazy hippies pushing turps and jilly juice.

Some of the more insane people I know (antivax etc) are moderate to hard left.

The polarization affected both ends of the spectrum it seems.

Did you notice all the famous people who were saying they wouldn't take the trump vax, and poo pooing it, and then once he was gone suddenly they were calling anyone who didn't want it a racist?

I don’t remember these people. Can you give some examples?

Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.

I'm not American, so no, I wasn't exposed to American brainrot so much.

Instead I got the European flavour, where on the left you have a lot of dippy hippies who believe in homeopathy and magic healing crystals.

Literacy? Just a sampling of educated people who were pushing this bullshit: Elon Musk (Stanford grad school dropout), Dr Drew (USC MD), Bret Weinstein (UMich PhD), Harvey Risch (Yale).

The figures above are reasonably educated and should know better but all share a political leaning that the social media recommender ML systems latch on.

If there is a literacy that can be taught, we need to start agreeing on what that literacy looks like

As far as I know, Elon Musk has no medical background. Wikipedia tells me he has degrees in economics and physics and was a cofounder of PayPal. I'm less familiar with the other three you list and in the interest of brevity won't bother to profile each of them.

Medical internet literacy absolutely includes educating people that wealth, fame and a willingness to generously and frequently share your personal opinions about everything under the sun, whether you have any expertise or not, does not make you someone people should take medical advice from, especially during a pandemic.

Except Ivermectin was prescribed by private health care professionals as part of a medication medley to many of the rich who found success with it.

Not only that but HCQ and Ivermectin saved many Indian states from far worse numbers of covid deaths, transmissions and cases (although HCQ eventually became detrimental).

You're thinking of the horse paste idiots who saw Ivermectin working but were denied safe access and the lady who murdered her husband with HCQ aquarium cleaner.

None of which supports the notion that Ivermectin has any effect against COVID (in isolation).

It's correlated with better outcomes in poorer countries for the simple reason that if you dose enough people with an antiparasitic drug in an environment where many people have parasites, overall health improves and a greater percentage of people are better equiped to fight off the worst effects of COVID.

Private health care professionals in the (US|UK) catering to rich internet readers will happily prescribe an antiparasitic to their patients on demand, they keep their customers happy and an antiparasitic won't kill anyone and might even help with any undiagnosed parasites.

Rich people across the world had better outcomes, they were able to isolate more, demand a higher level of hygiene from those that interact with them, afford better doctors, etc.

Properly conducted trials with sufficient ANOVA don't show any benefit for those with no parasites.

> None of which supports the notion that Ivermectin has any effect against COVID (in isolation).

Yes correct

> It's correlated with better outcomes in poorer countries for the simple reason that if you dose enough people with an antiparasitic drug in an environment where many people have parasites, overall health improves and a greater percentage of people are better equiped to fight off the worst effects of COVID.

Sounds like a win

> Private health care professionals in the (US|UK) catering to rich internet readers will happily prescribe an antiparasitic to their patients on demand, they keep their customers happy and an

There was a specific medley being prescribed for $3500 with many baulking at the inclusion of ivermectin and refusing to take it but being strongly recommended by the doctor to finish the entire course despite already feeling improved.

> antiparasitic won't kill anyone and might even help with any undiagnosed parasites.

Sounds like a win.

> Properly conducted trials with sufficient ANOVA don't show any benefit for those with no parasites

Big whoop.

> > Properly conducted trials with sufficient ANOVA don't show any benefit for those with no parasites

> Big whoop.

ie. Essentially pointless waste of time and resources in a first world country with no significant parasitic issues.

the thing you're missing is that in developed countries very few people have parasites. as such people were promoting it as a miracle cure based on bad data and it would do absolutely nothing (other than have potentially dangerous side effects)

Paracetamol is potentially dangerous. So are forks.

Along similar lines, taking cautious mental health steps like learning about bounderies and emotional coping/regulation would help people to look after themselves physically (e.g. not drinking or eating their feelings). Being your own psychologist has risks, so counselling is a good alternative.

> People attacked me and accused me of practicing medicine without a license.

> We could include grocery stores, restaurants and gyms as part of the "Healthcare Industry" though they certainly aren't part of the medical industry.

How is this even a controversial opinion?

> I was shocked at how hostile people were to that.

Was the hostility experienced here on HN? I've come to learn that HN is far more hostile and toxic than I'd first realised.

Eh.

My job is going to destroy my health anyway. Why pretend I have agency here?

Regretfully, the Internet has long since been weaponized as a place of discord and hatred and disinformation, especially by parties that want to profit off the war on women, the war on children, the war on science, the war on actual truth and real facts, and the war between radical conservatives and ... everyone else?

It's really hard for good basic information on how to take care of yourself and your loved ones to survive in that kind of environment.

Unfortunately in the world we live in today, "truthiness" wins over real truth. "Alternative facts" win over real facts.

And real honest and open discussion of these issues is also dead, thanks to partisanship, Puritanism, and extreme nationalism. Not to mention profiteering.

thank you for doing this

Totally agree with you.

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