4 ms·

A sure sign someone's brain has been addled by partisanship is if they embrace the idea that certain drugs being researched have a red or blue hue to them. One

by gfodor 6y ago

A sure sign someone's brain has been addled by partisanship is if they embrace the idea that certain drugs being researched have a red or blue hue to them. One output of all this is that those who, for example, reveal their expectation of HCQ to have been one of 'snake oil' simply due to a Trump tweet have taken themselves off the field when it comes to rational discourse. edit: For those down-voting me, my guess is you were not reading papers back in early February from China and South Korea as I was about early drugs worth trialing. If your expectations of a given drug's efficacy was informed by political tweets you weren't paying attention to the trial pipeline.

nostrademons 6y ago
The author is British - U.S. partisanship doesn't really affect him, because he can't vote and isn't subject to U.S. laws anyway. This is how the rest of the world sees us.
- dfee 6y ago
  Wasn’t my experience as an American living in London. Labour and Tory mapped well enough to US politics.
  - nostrademons 6y ago
    Most of the U.S. Democratic party (all but the Bernie Sanders wing, really) is to the right of the Tories. Britain has nationalized health care (which isn't really up for debate in Britain the way the much more conservative Obamacare is starkly divisive in American politics), Tories supported LGBTQ marriage before it was legalized in the U.S, and Boris Johnson endorsed Barack Obama.
    - oarsinsync 6y ago
      > Britain has nationalized health care (which isn't really up for debate in Britain Correct, there's no debate. New Labour under Blair started privatising the NHS, and the Tories simply accelerated the process, taking advantage of opportunities presented to them to do so (e.g. Covid). Alas, this doesn't make the news, so there continues to be no national conversation about how important the NHS is, beyond paying lip service and occasionally clapping for them. So yeah, there's no debate, because both parties were doing it.
      - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
        New Labour were more or less analogous to the centre-right Democratic Party in the US. Old Labour/Corbyn were more or less analogous to the European centre-left mainstream and Bernie Sanders. These centre-left positions are allowed to play a role to continue the appearance of genuine democracy, but they're not allowed to win power. Some European countries have more extreme left parties. Some have actual Communist parties. These parties never win power either - but they tend to keep the centre-left on the left side of the centre and stop the rightwards drift that happened in the UK. The British public haven't realised that the NHS - fully socialised medicine - is already over. They're worked out that care levels and service provision have been dropping steadily, but they haven't worked out that this has been happening since the 90s, because all the centre-right parties are ideologically opposed to effective public health care. Meanwhile Brexit is about oligarch-ing what's left of the UK, very much in the style of post-Soviet Russia. It's a period of planned chaos which will see a small number of rich and well-connected individuals land-grabbing public money and what's left of the public's assets. Unlike Russia, which had significant physical resources, the UK has very little of value which won't be destroyed by Brexit. The remains of the NHS is on that list, and it will be forced to become a customer of US pharma and insurance with a much-weakened negotiating position.
saalweachter 6y ago
> For those down-voting me, my guess is you were not reading papers back in early February from China and South Korea as I was about early drugs worth trialing. If your expectations of a given drug's efficacy was informed by political tweets you weren't paying attention to the trial pipeline. This is, kind of exactly how snake oil works? It's not even the typical South Park / "2. ????" plan. It's "1. Take a treatment that people are already credulous towards." "2. Sell it for lots of money while pretending it's a sure thing." "3. Run away with lots of money before anyone catches on that it's not actually worthwhile." The thing with snake oil and real science based medicine is that they both start with that first step, of grabbing a bunch of things that seem plausible. The difference is that science based medicine first tests to see if it works before selling it for lots of money to lots of people as a cure, instead of after (or never). The initial ideas and plausibility are only occasionally different; science is a tool for finding a lot of things that don't work, and a very few that do.
- gfodor 6y ago
  I have no idea what you're talking about. There were medical papers published out of SK in February indicating preliminary signs that some drugs were worth investigating. The investigations happened. The results were published. If you were sitting through that process feeling like you knew which way it was going to go one way or the other based upon political tweets then you'd describe it as "snake oil" as the author did, when in fact it was just the normal, albeit accelerated, clinical research process with a lot of noise from the bleachers. My own assessment is any scenarios where preliminary data was less than ideal (eg due to non-randomization) was published in the interest of sharing information due to the urgency of the crisis to help guide further controlled trial development. And look, it worked, most of the drugs who had early papers published with clinical patient data pointing in a positive direction did in fact get into trials. Unfortunately so far there have been no home runs but some solid base hits. The reality is that most of these kinds of things like using the term "snake oil" to describe HCQ are an obvious "tell" on the part of people who consider themselves immune to cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias to be anything but.

by gfodor 6y ago

nostrademons 6y ago

The author is British - U.S. partisanship doesn't really affect him, because he can't vote and isn't subject to U.S. laws anyway. This is how the rest of the world sees us.

dfee 6y ago
Wasn’t my experience as an American living in London. Labour and Tory mapped well enough to US politics.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  Most of the U.S. Democratic party (all but the Bernie Sanders wing, really) is to the right of the Tories. Britain has nationalized health care (which isn't really up for debate in Britain the way the much more conservative Obamacare is starkly divisive in American politics), Tories supported LGBTQ marriage before it was legalized in the U.S, and Boris Johnson endorsed Barack Obama.
  - oarsinsync 6y ago
    > Britain has nationalized health care (which isn't really up for debate in Britain Correct, there's no debate. New Labour under Blair started privatising the NHS, and the Tories simply accelerated the process, taking advantage of opportunities presented to them to do so (e.g. Covid). Alas, this doesn't make the news, so there continues to be no national conversation about how important the NHS is, beyond paying lip service and occasionally clapping for them. So yeah, there's no debate, because both parties were doing it.
    - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      New Labour were more or less analogous to the centre-right Democratic Party in the US. Old Labour/Corbyn were more or less analogous to the European centre-left mainstream and Bernie Sanders. These centre-left positions are allowed to play a role to continue the appearance of genuine democracy, but they're not allowed to win power. Some European countries have more extreme left parties. Some have actual Communist parties. These parties never win power either - but they tend to keep the centre-left on the left side of the centre and stop the rightwards drift that happened in the UK. The British public haven't realised that the NHS - fully socialised medicine - is already over. They're worked out that care levels and service provision have been dropping steadily, but they haven't worked out that this has been happening since the 90s, because all the centre-right parties are ideologically opposed to effective public health care. Meanwhile Brexit is about oligarch-ing what's left of the UK, very much in the style of post-Soviet Russia. It's a period of planned chaos which will see a small number of rich and well-connected individuals land-grabbing public money and what's left of the public's assets. Unlike Russia, which had significant physical resources, the UK has very little of value which won't be destroyed by Brexit. The remains of the NHS is on that list, and it will be forced to become a customer of US pharma and insurance with a much-weakened negotiating position.

saalweachter 6y ago

> For those down-voting me, my guess is you were not reading papers back in early February from China and South Korea as I was about early drugs worth trialing. If your expectations of a given drug's efficacy was informed by political tweets you weren't paying attention to the trial pipeline. This is, kind of exactly how snake oil works? It's not even the typical South Park / "2. ????" plan. It's "1. Take a treatment that people are already credulous towards." "2. Sell it for lots of money while pretending it's a sure thing." "3. Run away with lots of money before anyone catches on that it's not actually worthwhile." The thing with snake oil and real science based medicine is that they both start with that first step, of grabbing a bunch of things that seem plausible. The difference is that science based medicine first tests to see if it works before selling it for lots of money to lots of people as a cure, instead of after (or never). The initial ideas and plausibility are only occasionally different; science is a tool for finding a lot of things that don't work, and a very few that do.

gfodor 6y ago
I have no idea what you're talking about. There were medical papers published out of SK in February indicating preliminary signs that some drugs were worth investigating. The investigations happened. The results were published. If you were sitting through that process feeling like you knew which way it was going to go one way or the other based upon political tweets then you'd describe it as "snake oil" as the author did, when in fact it was just the normal, albeit accelerated, clinical research process with a lot of noise from the bleachers. My own assessment is any scenarios where preliminary data was less than ideal (eg due to non-randomization) was published in the interest of sharing information due to the urgency of the crisis to help guide further controlled trial development. And look, it worked, most of the drugs who had early papers published with clinical patient data pointing in a positive direction did in fact get into trials. Unfortunately so far there have been no home runs but some solid base hits. The reality is that most of these kinds of things like using the term "snake oil" to describe HCQ are an obvious "tell" on the part of people who consider themselves immune to cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias to be anything but.