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Comment by chrisan | Hacker News Reader

> Covid debunks all your claims.

No it doesn't.

Maybe something on social media but not a single one of my wife's colleagues at the hospital nor any other scientist would have turned down ivermectin (as an example, there were many other theories besides that one drug) if it had shown any sign of doing good for their patients.

There were routine talking about alternate therapies among the scientists/doctors/researchers about these topics. You can search for the UCSF Covid Grand Rounds on youtube and watch the history of their open discussions as research was routinely presented from all over the globe on the various items.

I code for a living and have no idea about this stuff, but my wife's goal is to make patients better and she would watch the grand rounds (or similar) every time and I'd listen from another room. Not a single alternate treatment wasn't discussed and evaluated.

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I’ll give you an example.

Until 2020, healthcare authorities in the Western world were were certain that viruses could never remain airborne for extended periods of time.

People who thought otherwise (i.e. Asia) were routinely dismissed as unscientific dunces following some weird cultural habit.

Eventually it turned out that the Western scientists didn’t really have any hard evidence for that belief. It was just an old idea that happened to match with their priors, so they kept parroting it to one another and to the public until the dead started piling in.

> Until 2020, healthcare authorities in the Western world were were certain that viruses could never remain airborne for extended periods of time.

Did measles not exist before 2020? Where do you people find this crazy shit?

Source of western healthcare authorities telling the public this?

edit: also the airborness of it was also a repeated topic in the cited grand rounds

The WHO only declared COVID-19 to be airborne in December 2021.

There were many articles at the time describing this failure. It’s interesting how quickly it has faded from memory.

I’m on my phone, so this is just an example from a quick search. Again, there are many like this:

“Public health organizations including the World Health Organization (WHO) initially declared the virus to be transmitted in large droplets that fell to the ground close to the infected person, as well as by touching contaminated surfaces. The WHO emphatically declared on March 28, 2020, that SARS-CoV-2 was not airborne (except in the case of very specific “aerosol-generating medical procedures”) and that it was “misinformation” to say otherwise. […]

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States followed a parallel path […]

“The very slow and haphazard acceptance of the evidence of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 by major public health organizations contributed to a suboptimal control of the pandemic, whereas the benefits of protection measures against aerosol transmission are becoming well established.”

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ina.13070

You said

> Until 2020, healthcare authorities in the Western world were were certain that viruses could never remain airborne for extended periods of time.

There was certainly mainstream belief that covid was limited to droplet transmission (though I remember much discussion of that as well) but the idea that Western medicine didn't think any viruses were airborne is nonsense.

Another comment brought up measles, which is a great example, and known for many decades.

>Until 2020, healthcare authorities in the Western world were were certain that viruses could never remain airborne for extended periods of time.

"Healthcare authorities" are not necessarily scientists, they are professionals. Nor am I aware of them ever making this claim in the first place, at least never in any kind of coordinated way. Please provide a source.

If you're talking about masks for Covid, that was because the Trump administration bungled the mask situation so badly that we were critically short on masks[1]. It was decided that to minimize causalities, focus would be on making sure health care professionals got masks first.

1. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/n95-...

>It was just an old idea

but it is from the experience of another Corona virus outbreak last time.

Asia just know wearing mask is helpful anyway.

But the health authorities in the West did not update their knowledge in view of that evidence. I am familiar with the case of Spain: when the COVID-19 pandemic started, the public healthcare guidelines in Spain still classified coronaviruses as mild viruses, not more severe than the flu.

> Eventually it turned out that the Western scientists didn’t really have any hard evidence for that belief.

Regardless of whether this particular "belief" was actually held by anyone (it probably wasn't as others point out), science is fully based on evidence. If what you say is actually true, what those people claiming that were doing was not science by definition. You cannot claim something which you can't back up with data and plenty of evidence and call what you're doing science.

You were living in an echo chamber if you think that is true. I dare you to question any covid crap in front of your parent or (former) friends and relatives. Wait until they call you every awful thing in the book.

Criticism or intellectual curiosity was absolutely not tolerated.

the scientists are not the problem here, PUBLIC science and public institutional structures were, are, and will be. The media takes a scientist, who has a strong tendency to say "this may work, we can't be sure" and "under some conditions, we believe that it might" and turns it into "we know!"... for institutional media reasons. Some scientists like the attention and are willing to play along, to an extent. Public institutions need "certainty rhetoric" for legal and PR reasons. The reason Ivermectin was so clubbed to death wasn't because it ddn't work, it was because the legal process of emergency certification of the vaccine required that there are no working cures, so that could institutionally not be pursued. No evil intention is needed here; "we want to help and this is a legal hurdle", on the one side, meets "we want to sell this thing and need the certification" on the other.

Scientists will always say "wait a minute, were not sure". Institutions and their structures leave little room for this, so scientists get translated to certainty rhetoric, and the gullible public who often has a quasi-religious view of science swallows it, as that's how the media makes it for them.

> my wife's colleagues

Your wife’s colleagues are not the scientific community at large. Organisations such as WHO and numerous government regulators flat out lied to the public throughout the pandemic.

Take the UK. Our health watchdog swore that masks were not needed and people shouldn’t wear masks at the start of the pandemic. This was specifically to stop hoarding of masks needed in hospitals. 3 months later mask mandates were a legal obligation with fixed penalty notices given for not wearing them.

Take the lab leak theory that WHO and many many governments said was a Hoax. Pretty much widely known to be correct now.

And yes. Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine etc.

Finally. Vaccine safety. There is a lot of evidence that there was not informed consent on the full impact of taking the combine vaccine. Like I said, I took all the doses. I’m not an antivaxxer. But the scientific community destroyed careers of anyone that tried to say otherwise.

> Take the lab leak theory that WHO and many many governments said was a Hoax. Pretty much widely known to be correct now.

A possible lab leak was never ruled out, just most of the evidence does not point to it. It was never 10% ruled out during the pandemic and now.

I'm a biologist, have friends who also biologists and work in connected fields. Unless you think a possible lab leak is the same as someone posting "100% proof covid is a CCP bioweapon!!!!)

> Pretty much widely known to be correct now.

What? I thought it was widely acknowledged to not be ruled out. But how could it be shown to be correct?

vermectin and hydroxychloroquine still are not correct treatment of covid-19 now.

>Maybe something on social media but not a single one of my wife's colleagues at the hospital nor any other scientist would have turned down ivermectin (as an example, there were many other theories besides that one drug) if it had shown any sign of doing good for their patients.

Japan used it and it worked there.

A quick google search disagrees:

https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-439365261885

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