3 ms·
The problem with "fact checkers" is you can design them any way you want to get the answer you want. Here's how this is done with this one: Yes, the claim that
by ccn0p 5y ago
The problem with "fact checkers" is you can design them any way you want to get the answer you want. Here's how this is done with this one:
Yes, the claim that Pfizer's new pill is "just repackaged Ivermectin" is certainly verifiably false, so the second line of the article can claim false followed by a supporting expert quote to drive it home. Statistically something like 95% of readers will stop there. Case closed. They're convinced.
But it's not hard to find lots of front-line doctors who are seeing success with Ivermectin. Even the 4th-to-last paragraph in the factcheck article (that I cited) admits that Ivermectin "acts like a protease inhibitor" which is how the new patented "covid pills" will also act.
If you follow many of these voices like I do, you see patterns that they aren't really even claiming that the new drug is exactly like Ivermectin. So even framing the question like this is a failure and doesn't capture the actually-useful voices out there. Probably just the Twitter mobs which always seem like the majority these days, but are far from it.
This doesn't prove anything, nor am I claiming that Ivermectin works, but advancing the conversation is so much more nuanced than framing something and then calling it false. We, dear Hacker News readers, should know this better than most.
- nuerow 5y ago> But it's not hard to find lots of front-line doctors who are seeing success with Ivermectin. If that was true then how do you explain the fact that so far no study was able observe or reproduce that effect under a controlled environment?
- naasking 5y agoTechnically not correct. Most blinded, randomized controlled trials showed improvements in symptoms and timeline [1,2,3, among others], but they are generally underpowered and so many consider the results to be not compelling. All the headlines you may have read that ivermectin studies found no results are way overblow; science journalism has never been great to begin with, and now politics has thoroughly infected this so signal to noise on this question is terrible. Some better trials are underway now, so we'll see. Not surprising, the patentable drug got a decent trial since pharma actually has a much bigger financial incentive there. [1] https://ejmo.org/pdf/A%20Comparative%20Study%20on%20IvermectinDoxycycline%20and%20HydroxychloroquineAzithromycin%20Therapy%20on%20COVID19%20Patients-16263.pdf https://ejmo.org/pdf/A%20Comparative%20Study%20on%20Ivermect... [2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/03000605211013550 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/030006052110135... [3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589537020304648 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258953702...
- AshamedCaptain 5y agoIt is not hard to find lots of front-line doctors who have success with sugar pills (see: homeopathy). This means absolutely nothing. People always seem to have trouble with statistics when stuff is not digital-like clear cut. In many areas (e.g. anything involving social studies), your noise levels are huge. The fact that you hear "some success stories" usually means that there is absolutely nothing, rather than indicative of something. When there is interest (and thus publication bias), the noise level actually increases. For something in medicine to be actually plausibly effective, what you need to hear is more like "few failure stories". "Some success stories" doesn't even start to cut it. Our current research/publish system just cannot be used to identify treatments that have low effectiveness (which may actually be a good thing). We went over this topic not long ago in HN.