Comment by petesergeant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by petesergeant | Hacker News Reader

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> "Long covid is not a thing" plays into the "Covid is not a thing" conspiracy theory; it's probably a harmful trope, rather than meaningfully helpful for the people suffering symptoms.

That something plays into a harmful trope doesn’t speak to its veracity though, and diminishing smaller inconvenient truths so as to not lead people astray in my opinion exacerbates rather than diminishes conspiracy theories.

Could probably have prevented a lot of wasted time, money, and endless internet arguments by saying something early on like “ivermectin, which humans are regularly prescribed, does look promising for treating Covid, but only at dosages that are very toxic to humans, or in populations that might have parasites, as a result of curing those parasites”, instead of the “lol it’s only for horses!” stuff, or by clearly stating “lab leak is possible, and not the same thing as an intentionally man-made bioweapon unleashed by Chinese people”.

If the potential effect of a message is rather harmful, it's reasonable to hold the veracity of that message to a higher standard of scrutiny than if a message is benign.

This wasn't a good study, scientifically. Scrutiny was not applied before reporting on it, and now we have a harm on our hands. The fact that we're discussing it attests to that, since its a sideshow leeching attention away from the main topic of long covid's effects.

Agree that public messaging could have and should be a lot better on the topics you mentioned, but disagree that harm should not be at least a part of the calculus.

Who decides on what is harmful vs what is benign?

This question can be be applied to almost anything and only serves to pointlessly redirect discussion ("sealioning") - "don't write code with bugs" "oh? Who decides what is a bug and what is intended behaviour?" - "don't take candy from babies" "who decides at which age you turn from a baby into a toddler?"

Your last paragraph makes no sense to me.

There were plenty of places which published long, complex, nuanced data and explanations about ivermectin.

But lots of people are unable to understand complex writing or statistics. And most people have little understanding of biology, medicine or disease. This led to widespread misinformation, which in turn led people to try to simplify out all the complexity, and trim it down to basic things like "ivermectin doesn't work" and "don't take horse medicine when your doctor refuses to prescribe ivermectin to you".

The messaging you think would have "prevented a lot of wasted time" was exactly the messaging in the medical reports that started the whole problem. Dumbing it down was a response to the "internet arguments".

I am saying there’s a middle-ground between “long, complex, nuanced” and “ivermectin doesn’t work”, which is useful because as you point out, most people can’t understand the former, but are able to understand abstracts of papers that suggest ivermectin does work, and wonder why they’re being told it doesn’t. Likewise telling people that entertaining the thought that a coronavirus escaped from a lab — in a city that has a lab that studies them — is ridiculous and racist simply opens a huge space for conspiracy peddlers who wonder out-loud and with reasonable justification why this is being dismissed without any nuance at all.

Dumbing a message down to contain no nuance — in my opinion — opens up the floor for quacks who will be exploit the lack of nuance on their podcasts.

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