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"Most scientists/doctors believe it to not work against Covid-19" wasn't a serious argument for you? It is a strange phenomenon that people are so ready to dis

"Most scientists/doctors believe it to not work against Covid-19" wasn't a serious argument for you? It is a strange phenomenon that people are so ready to disagree with people who spent decades achieving exactly that kind of knowledge.

roenxi 5y ago
That literally isn't an argument. It is a statement. And if anyone who said "many scientists/doctors believe it to work against Covid-19" is getting banned, then that statement has 0 signal. As Scott points out in this article, without knowing about the parasitic worm situation https://ivmmeta.com/ https://ivmmeta.com/ is both reasonable and moderately convincing.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  This article doesn't move the needle at all for those that have a basic understanding of the mechanisms at work and who don't fall for the first conspiracy theory that gets lobbed their way. What you should do instead is to listen to your medical authorities who even if they do make mistakes have your best interests at heart, contrary to those that are pushing the quackery in an attempt to further destabilize our societies. You made yourself a willing collaborator in that, something to think about.
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    > who even if they do make mistakes have your best interests at heart They, like every other person, have their own best interest at heart, which, if you're lucky, aligns with yours. "Just listen to the authorities" is probably the worst advice ever given.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      In the case of a pandemic it is probably pretty good advice, unless you are of the opinion that your authorities are acting against your interest. The problem with this pandemic is that a lot of people in places of power have made mistakes, sometimes really bad ones (for instance, such as pursuing herd immunity) rather than to follow the WHO expert advice. This could easily be construed as authorities acting against your best interests and in fact in quite a few places people have died that need not have died at all. But there is a difference between 'political authorities' and 'medical authorities', the WHO has been fairly consistent and sensible in their advice to date, what political authorities locally do with that advice is another matter entirely, that runs the gamut of Bolsonaro to Boris Johnson to Jacinda Ardern and everything in between.
      - fallingknife 5y ago
        Yeah, I agree, that in the case of a pandemic, the health authorities interests are pretty well aligned with a member of the general public. However, there are always issues in this kind of situation when the authorities got it wrong. In a political environment, changing course is seen as an admission of being wrong, and a loss of face. So we continue on with the initial policy. We are currently facing this problem as all experts seem to agree that covid will be endemic, but we are still flailing around with (increasingly half-assed) prevention measures as if we are still going to stop the virus. I disagree that pursuing herd immunity was a bad decision. With every day the pandemic drags on, Sweden's decision is looking better and better.
        jacquesm 5y ago
        Agreed that there is a lot of ego involved, and that certainly doesn't help. In NL we have a couple of nice examples of that. Pursuing herd immunity is a viable strategy only if you can actually achieve it. Sweden has done far worse than their neighbors in this respect. But given the fact that it drags on all you can say is that as long as we don't treat this as a global problem your local measures matter less than you think. Countries that did fantastically well early on showed it could be done, but because they were the exception eventually they too became overwhelmed through imported cases. If that had not happened, which would have required a more synchronized approach, then the total damage would be a fraction of what it is today. And this isn't over yet, not by far and it is a much harder problem now than it was in March last year.
        fallingknife 5y ago
        That's not correct that Sweden has done much worse than its neighbors. It's actually below the median for Europe. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-death-rate-europe-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-deat...
        jacquesm 5y ago
        I said neighbors, not all of Europe. Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland all did considerably better, and have demographics and local conditions that are closer together than comparing Sweden with the rest of Europe. It's a thinly populated Nordic country, so the comparison material should be countries that match those criteria, not the average of the EU, which runs the gamut of high density extremely interconnected countries with major airline hubs all the way to vast emptiness with the occasional city. It's an easy mistake to make though.
  - cbakt 5y ago
    [flagged]
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      Sweden, the country where the authorities apologized for messing up, that Sweden? People on average gained 10 kg? Really, I have no idea where you get this nonsense but clearly you are not interested in a factual debate but in one that gives you what you want: the ability to ignore this pandemic as though it doesn't exit. There are no ICU beds for the gerontocracy, there are simply ICU beds, and there is a limited number of them, they will have a COVID patient in them or someone else, and in case of surplus they might be free. The medical authorities and the politicians should not be confused.
      - falrh 5y ago
        It is easy to find: https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2021/03/one-year-pandemic-stress https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2021/03/one-year-pan... "APA’s survey of U.S. adults, conducted in late February 2021 by The Harris Poll, shows that a majority of adults (61%) experienced undesired weight changes (weight gain or loss) since the pandemic started, with 42% reporting they gained more weight than they intended. Of those, they gained an average of 29 pounds (the median amount gained was 15 pounds) and 10% said they gained more than 50 pounds, the poll found."
        jacquesm 5y ago
        You really have a reading comprehension issue. 61 percent could have gone either up or down, and 42% said they gained more weight than they intended, of those that gained some gained more than 10 kg, and a smaller fraction gained more than 50 pounds. So, what does this say: (1) that people should adapt their eating habits to their needs (2) that it is possible to lose weight and to gain weight unintended (which is something that isn't really news, see also: weight watchers and the whole weight loss industry) (3) that the study did not correct for what would have been the result of the poll had COVID not happen (4) that the word 'lockdown' that you ascribe to the cause does not appear in the article text, but the word 'stress' does and finally (5) that you link to this article because you think it supports your statement above when in fact that really isn't the case.
  - beagle3 5y ago
    You may disregard my pseudonymous self’s statement, but one of my children had a weird disease, which I managed to figure out watching YouTube videos of similar symptoms and reading Wikipedia (at first, then pubmed etc) Over 40 doctors, most of them MD/PhDs, from 4 of the 10 top ranked hospitals in the world for the relevant issue, told me I’m an idiot, because that disease is a 1:10,000,000 thing, it can’t be the cause. It’s probably a virus and I should just go home and wait a few weeks. And after 3 months (10 days of which were in-patient) and 40 or so specialists, and 5 hospitals), a doctor looked at all the data and said “of course you are right, we start treatment tomorrow” and we did. All it cost was some irreversible brain and CNS damage, a few years at home - not much, right? And through the years and some Facebook groups, I’ve met other parents in similar situations. Some had a 5 year delay in diagnosis because it’s a rare disease, stories about the medical system incredibly similar. That’s 5 years of irreversible brain damage and general suffering. Also, it’s more likely severely under diagnosed and actually more like 1:1,000,000 It was just the beginning of a journey. An eye opening one about incompetence and incentives. The assumption that health authorities in particular (and authorities in general) have your best interest at heart, and are competent, are severely lacking in evidence. You might not have been bitten by that, and I’m happy for you that you weren’t. Health authorities and professionals optimize for a lot of things, that only sometimes coincide with your interests as an individual. E.g. they might prefer you stay sick than get better, if there’s a 1:10,000 chance you’ll sue them (regardless of merit). I am intimately familiar with such a case. Of note, the pharmaceutical industry, which is intimately intertwined with regulatory agencies and health authorities, is incentivized to make you a paying regular customer (Office 365) rather than selling you a one time product. Unfortunately, that means managed chronic illness rather than cure. Which is not to say HCQ or IVM or whatever are the cure. But the idea of “trusting the authorities” is something you only do until it bites you hard.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      And for every story like yours - and I know of a few of those - there are examples of people who were absolutely convinced that their child had 'x' or 'y' when it in fact wasn't the case. It is great that you had the perseverance to see this through, and unfortunately it isn't rare at all that local medical care is not up to speed with rare diseases or misdiagnosing a rare disease as a more common one. I lost a sister (at the ripe old age of 23) to such a case so I'm quite familiar with the territory. In spite of that the default for me is to follow what my doctors tell me, and only if it doesn't work would I start to read up more and to try to come up with suggestions, but not with diagnosis. Health authorities preferring you to stay sick rather than to get better should re-read the oath of the medical profession, that's despicable. And agreed that there is a lot wrong in mixing business and health care, but those are the kind of setups that we apparently favor. I recall a doctor here in NL remarking to me that money and health are mutually exclusive, because if doctors have to make decisions based on finance they are immediately transgressing their oath. I can see his point, but I also understand basic resource allocation issues and the medical profession does not operate in a vacuum. These are hard problems.
- bayesian_horse 5y ago
  In my opinion it should be an argument, especially for people who don't have that expertise. Also, even the "moderately convincing" evidence is in my opinion not nearly enough. It might be if Covid-19 were a modestly important disease with only a few labs and clinics running working on it. But it's not. Throw enough shit against the wall, eventually something will stick by chance. This is a globally distributed experiment, and it is impossible to control for publication bias and all quality issues... The only reason to think why Ivermectin should work against Sars-Cov-2 is because it has shown some action in cell cultures at ridiculously high doses, and maybe there have been other anti-viral interactions in the literature. For widespread use, there needs to be more and better evidence, especially given the currently available vaccines and treatments.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    > In my opinion it should be an argument, It is a fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority . To make an argument, there needs to be an argument.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      It is only a fallacy when you are an expert as well, but when you are a layperson in a field and you are discarding real expert opinions because you don't like them you don't get to claim that their opinions are arguments from authority and therefore by definition fallacies. Maybe actually read that wikipedia page instead of just linking to it? This seems to be a common and recurring theme: my opinion is worth as much as the opinion of an expert in the field because their argument can be discarded as an argument from authority. But they are an authority and I'll be happy to believe them compared to believing you, who are not active in their field at all. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28067406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28067406 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29235584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29235584 "I'm no medical anything but I do have extensive academic and statistical training." But you forgot that that only applies to those fields that you actually know something about, otherwise this is about as transparent an appeal to authority as one can make. Who cares about your extensive academic and statistical training if you start off with nonsense? Garbage in, garbage out, no matter how good the program is.
- pjc50 5y ago
  > is both reasonable and moderately convincing No it isn't, it's full of obvious fraud! That's what the entire rest of the article points out. And they put an unwarranted warning against one of the few non-fraudulent studies because it doesn't go their way: [re: Lopez-Medina et al] > "I’m making a big deal of this because ivmmeta.com - the really impressive meta-analysis site I’ve been going off of - puts a special warning letter underneath their discussion of this study, urging us not to trust it. They don’t do this for any of the other ones we’ve addressed so far - not the one by the guy whose other studies were all frauds, not the one where 50% of 21 people had headaches, not the unrandomized one where the groups were completely different before the experiment started, not even the one by the guy accused of crimes against humanity. Only this one. This makes me a lot less charitable to ivmmeta than I would otherwise be; I think it’s hard to choose this particular warning letter strategy out of well-intentioned commitment to truth. They just really don’t like this big study that shows ivermectin doesn’t work." That's the nearest Scott gets to directly accusing ivmmeta of fraud.
  - gunapologist99 5y ago
    > "full of obvious fraud" That's a pretty sensational claim. Who benefits from this fraud? The ivermectin manufacturers, researchers receiving funding from pharmaceutical company or the government, or the ivmmeta.com website itself (I see no third party ads or assets at all -- not even GA)? Meanwhile, back at the Pfizer ranch, they just bought a few small countries for cash.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      People seeking discontent and chaos?
  - roenxi 5y ago
    The base rate in medicine is around 10% of studies being fraudulent [0]. That is roughly the rate that Scott came to in the article ("We’ve gone from 29 studies to 11, getting rid of 18 along the way. For the record, we eliminated 2/19 for fraud"). It might be that the list is riddled with fraud, but it isn't obviously so. I'm comfortable with many of the studies having methodological errors - that is why it is called "low quality evidence" instead of "high quality evidence" - and I assume the base rate for badly done studies is quite high. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine
m0zg 5y ago
Most scientists/doctors believed at one point that ulcers were caused by "stress". My father lost half his stomach to an ulcer surgery. Nowadays ulcers are cured with antibiotics in the span of a week. Don't put much stock in what crowds "believe" to be true, _especially_ when _not_ believing it means they can't work in their field.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  That's science working as intended: theories getting replaced by better theories. There is plenty that we are probably going to find out more about in the future that will invalidate some of what we believe today to be true. But that's fine, as long as we stick to the scientific method that will all come out, even if it takes a while. Science has brought us further in 400 years than anything that came before. Right now it has given us vaccines, which are the best way to deal with COVID-19, and the anti-vaxx crowd and the pro-hydrochloroquine and pro-ivermectin crowd show large overlap. Fortunately during the polio years we didn't have the internet, the carnage would have been incredible.
  - m0zg 5y ago
    Sure, but my point is "consensus" doesn't necessarily mean "truth", even though the vast majority of people use the terms interchangeably. "Everyone but one person is wrong" is a situation we've seen numerous times before in the history of science. And when the matters of social acceptability, prestige, politics, and just plain ability to make a living enter into the consideration, very, very few people would even be willing to challenge the status quo. I wouldn't. I have mouths to feed. I'm fully resigned to the fact that we won't know for sure if Ivermectin helps with any of this shit for at least another decade until tensions subside. Could be that millions of people died while they didn't have to. Could be that it's total horseshit. There's no way to know, and "consensus" means next to nothing in these circumstances.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      The consensus in the medical world is that if there is a link it is extremely weak, far weaker than you'd need to establish that 'millions died while they didn't have to' as you write, and that if it works it probably needs very high doses, higher than considered safe. At the same time, we have vaccines, which do work (though the slow roll-out and the many, many hold outs certainly don't help, as well as that it leaves the question of how to deal with children for the moment mostly unanswered). And propagating this Ivermectine (and Hydroxychloroquine as the predecessor) nonsense has caused a lot of people to forego their vaccinations. And that does have very clear effects. So even if consensus doesn't mean truth typically it is the experts that go against the grain with hard proof in their pocket that win out over the long term. It is very rarely going to happen that new scientific truth will come from conspiracy theorists rather than from the establishment, though I guess if you live long enough that too will one day happen.
nzmsv 5y ago
The conclusion of the article deals with this very question.
jacquesm 5y ago
Because people will happily discard evidence that contradicts that which they want to believe. There is apparently something attractive about 'miracle cure suppressed by vested interests' that pretty much guarantees its spread. All you need to do is plant the seed with some gullible people and they'll run with it and parrot it to everybody that will listen, doing a boatload of damage in the process. Between hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectine you are (worldwide) probably looking at a few hundred thousand extra people dead because they (or in some cases their leaders) chose to believe that bullshit rather than to get vaccinated.
nzmsv 5y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Are you suggesting that we didn't adopt his methods?
  - astrange 5y ago
    I don't think we adopted handwashing because of him. Actually, the reason people didn't believe him is interesting because they were using an earlier scientific method - he didn't have a good explanation for the mechanism, so they dismissed it with "correlation is not causation". We're better at using things whose mechanism we don't understand now, like Tylenol.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      There is a whole industry in off-label use of medicine, and there are also quite a few studies that try to move off-label use to on-label use once the link is clear. What is interesting (to me) is that which we now consider to be common sense was at one point controversial.
- nzmsv 5y ago
  Chain got too deep to reply. We did adopt his methods, but many years and hundreds of deaths too late, and not before declaring him insane for his beliefs and putting him in an asylum. What I'm saying is that authority has a dark side. Sometimes the establishment is actually wrong. Regardless of right or wrong, it always chooses to erase its critics. Some of us disagree with the erasure, even in cases where the critics are wrong.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Yes, so you trust in the scientific method in the long term and in the expert consensus in the short term. The thing where the case you linked went off the rails for me is that there was no downside to trying his methods earlier, but ego got in the way, and ego is by definition unscientific. But people will be people, that you won't be able to fix, I'm afraid.

roenxi 5y ago

That literally isn't an argument. It is a statement. And if anyone who said "many scientists/doctors believe it to work against Covid-19" is getting banned, then that statement has 0 signal. As Scott points out in this article, without knowing about the parasitic worm situation https://ivmmeta.com/ https://ivmmeta.com/ is both reasonable and moderately convincing.

jacquesm 5y ago
This article doesn't move the needle at all for those that have a basic understanding of the mechanisms at work and who don't fall for the first conspiracy theory that gets lobbed their way. What you should do instead is to listen to your medical authorities who even if they do make mistakes have your best interests at heart, contrary to those that are pushing the quackery in an attempt to further destabilize our societies. You made yourself a willing collaborator in that, something to think about.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  > who even if they do make mistakes have your best interests at heart They, like every other person, have their own best interest at heart, which, if you're lucky, aligns with yours. "Just listen to the authorities" is probably the worst advice ever given.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    In the case of a pandemic it is probably pretty good advice, unless you are of the opinion that your authorities are acting against your interest. The problem with this pandemic is that a lot of people in places of power have made mistakes, sometimes really bad ones (for instance, such as pursuing herd immunity) rather than to follow the WHO expert advice. This could easily be construed as authorities acting against your best interests and in fact in quite a few places people have died that need not have died at all. But there is a difference between 'political authorities' and 'medical authorities', the WHO has been fairly consistent and sensible in their advice to date, what political authorities locally do with that advice is another matter entirely, that runs the gamut of Bolsonaro to Boris Johnson to Jacinda Ardern and everything in between.
    - fallingknife 5y ago
      Yeah, I agree, that in the case of a pandemic, the health authorities interests are pretty well aligned with a member of the general public. However, there are always issues in this kind of situation when the authorities got it wrong. In a political environment, changing course is seen as an admission of being wrong, and a loss of face. So we continue on with the initial policy. We are currently facing this problem as all experts seem to agree that covid will be endemic, but we are still flailing around with (increasingly half-assed) prevention measures as if we are still going to stop the virus. I disagree that pursuing herd immunity was a bad decision. With every day the pandemic drags on, Sweden's decision is looking better and better.
      - jacquesm 5y ago
        Agreed that there is a lot of ego involved, and that certainly doesn't help. In NL we have a couple of nice examples of that. Pursuing herd immunity is a viable strategy only if you can actually achieve it. Sweden has done far worse than their neighbors in this respect. But given the fact that it drags on all you can say is that as long as we don't treat this as a global problem your local measures matter less than you think. Countries that did fantastically well early on showed it could be done, but because they were the exception eventually they too became overwhelmed through imported cases. If that had not happened, which would have required a more synchronized approach, then the total damage would be a fraction of what it is today. And this isn't over yet, not by far and it is a much harder problem now than it was in March last year.
        fallingknife 5y ago
        That's not correct that Sweden has done much worse than its neighbors. It's actually below the median for Europe. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-death-rate-europe-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-deat...
        jacquesm 5y ago
        I said neighbors, not all of Europe. Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland all did considerably better, and have demographics and local conditions that are closer together than comparing Sweden with the rest of Europe. It's a thinly populated Nordic country, so the comparison material should be countries that match those criteria, not the average of the EU, which runs the gamut of high density extremely interconnected countries with major airline hubs all the way to vast emptiness with the occasional city. It's an easy mistake to make though.
- cbakt 5y ago
  [flagged]
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Sweden, the country where the authorities apologized for messing up, that Sweden? People on average gained 10 kg? Really, I have no idea where you get this nonsense but clearly you are not interested in a factual debate but in one that gives you what you want: the ability to ignore this pandemic as though it doesn't exit. There are no ICU beds for the gerontocracy, there are simply ICU beds, and there is a limited number of them, they will have a COVID patient in them or someone else, and in case of surplus they might be free. The medical authorities and the politicians should not be confused.
    - falrh 5y ago
      It is easy to find: https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2021/03/one-year-pandemic-stress https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2021/03/one-year-pan... "APA’s survey of U.S. adults, conducted in late February 2021 by The Harris Poll, shows that a majority of adults (61%) experienced undesired weight changes (weight gain or loss) since the pandemic started, with 42% reporting they gained more weight than they intended. Of those, they gained an average of 29 pounds (the median amount gained was 15 pounds) and 10% said they gained more than 50 pounds, the poll found."
      - jacquesm 5y ago
        You really have a reading comprehension issue. 61 percent could have gone either up or down, and 42% said they gained more weight than they intended, of those that gained some gained more than 10 kg, and a smaller fraction gained more than 50 pounds. So, what does this say: (1) that people should adapt their eating habits to their needs (2) that it is possible to lose weight and to gain weight unintended (which is something that isn't really news, see also: weight watchers and the whole weight loss industry) (3) that the study did not correct for what would have been the result of the poll had COVID not happen (4) that the word 'lockdown' that you ascribe to the cause does not appear in the article text, but the word 'stress' does and finally (5) that you link to this article because you think it supports your statement above when in fact that really isn't the case.
- beagle3 5y ago
  You may disregard my pseudonymous self’s statement, but one of my children had a weird disease, which I managed to figure out watching YouTube videos of similar symptoms and reading Wikipedia (at first, then pubmed etc) Over 40 doctors, most of them MD/PhDs, from 4 of the 10 top ranked hospitals in the world for the relevant issue, told me I’m an idiot, because that disease is a 1:10,000,000 thing, it can’t be the cause. It’s probably a virus and I should just go home and wait a few weeks. And after 3 months (10 days of which were in-patient) and 40 or so specialists, and 5 hospitals), a doctor looked at all the data and said “of course you are right, we start treatment tomorrow” and we did. All it cost was some irreversible brain and CNS damage, a few years at home - not much, right? And through the years and some Facebook groups, I’ve met other parents in similar situations. Some had a 5 year delay in diagnosis because it’s a rare disease, stories about the medical system incredibly similar. That’s 5 years of irreversible brain damage and general suffering. Also, it’s more likely severely under diagnosed and actually more like 1:1,000,000 It was just the beginning of a journey. An eye opening one about incompetence and incentives. The assumption that health authorities in particular (and authorities in general) have your best interest at heart, and are competent, are severely lacking in evidence. You might not have been bitten by that, and I’m happy for you that you weren’t. Health authorities and professionals optimize for a lot of things, that only sometimes coincide with your interests as an individual. E.g. they might prefer you stay sick than get better, if there’s a 1:10,000 chance you’ll sue them (regardless of merit). I am intimately familiar with such a case. Of note, the pharmaceutical industry, which is intimately intertwined with regulatory agencies and health authorities, is incentivized to make you a paying regular customer (Office 365) rather than selling you a one time product. Unfortunately, that means managed chronic illness rather than cure. Which is not to say HCQ or IVM or whatever are the cure. But the idea of “trusting the authorities” is something you only do until it bites you hard.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    And for every story like yours - and I know of a few of those - there are examples of people who were absolutely convinced that their child had 'x' or 'y' when it in fact wasn't the case. It is great that you had the perseverance to see this through, and unfortunately it isn't rare at all that local medical care is not up to speed with rare diseases or misdiagnosing a rare disease as a more common one. I lost a sister (at the ripe old age of 23) to such a case so I'm quite familiar with the territory. In spite of that the default for me is to follow what my doctors tell me, and only if it doesn't work would I start to read up more and to try to come up with suggestions, but not with diagnosis. Health authorities preferring you to stay sick rather than to get better should re-read the oath of the medical profession, that's despicable. And agreed that there is a lot wrong in mixing business and health care, but those are the kind of setups that we apparently favor. I recall a doctor here in NL remarking to me that money and health are mutually exclusive, because if doctors have to make decisions based on finance they are immediately transgressing their oath. I can see his point, but I also understand basic resource allocation issues and the medical profession does not operate in a vacuum. These are hard problems.
bayesian_horse 5y ago
In my opinion it should be an argument, especially for people who don't have that expertise. Also, even the "moderately convincing" evidence is in my opinion not nearly enough. It might be if Covid-19 were a modestly important disease with only a few labs and clinics running working on it. But it's not. Throw enough shit against the wall, eventually something will stick by chance. This is a globally distributed experiment, and it is impossible to control for publication bias and all quality issues... The only reason to think why Ivermectin should work against Sars-Cov-2 is because it has shown some action in cell cultures at ridiculously high doses, and maybe there have been other anti-viral interactions in the literature. For widespread use, there needs to be more and better evidence, especially given the currently available vaccines and treatments.
- roenxi 5y ago
  > In my opinion it should be an argument, It is a fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority . To make an argument, there needs to be an argument.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    It is only a fallacy when you are an expert as well, but when you are a layperson in a field and you are discarding real expert opinions because you don't like them you don't get to claim that their opinions are arguments from authority and therefore by definition fallacies. Maybe actually read that wikipedia page instead of just linking to it? This seems to be a common and recurring theme: my opinion is worth as much as the opinion of an expert in the field because their argument can be discarded as an argument from authority. But they are an authority and I'll be happy to believe them compared to believing you, who are not active in their field at all. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28067406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28067406 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29235584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29235584 "I'm no medical anything but I do have extensive academic and statistical training." But you forgot that that only applies to those fields that you actually know something about, otherwise this is about as transparent an appeal to authority as one can make. Who cares about your extensive academic and statistical training if you start off with nonsense? Garbage in, garbage out, no matter how good the program is.
pjc50 5y ago
> is both reasonable and moderately convincing No it isn't, it's full of obvious fraud! That's what the entire rest of the article points out. And they put an unwarranted warning against one of the few non-fraudulent studies because it doesn't go their way: [re: Lopez-Medina et al] > "I’m making a big deal of this because ivmmeta.com - the really impressive meta-analysis site I’ve been going off of - puts a special warning letter underneath their discussion of this study, urging us not to trust it. They don’t do this for any of the other ones we’ve addressed so far - not the one by the guy whose other studies were all frauds, not the one where 50% of 21 people had headaches, not the unrandomized one where the groups were completely different before the experiment started, not even the one by the guy accused of crimes against humanity. Only this one. This makes me a lot less charitable to ivmmeta than I would otherwise be; I think it’s hard to choose this particular warning letter strategy out of well-intentioned commitment to truth. They just really don’t like this big study that shows ivermectin doesn’t work." That's the nearest Scott gets to directly accusing ivmmeta of fraud.
- gunapologist99 5y ago
  > "full of obvious fraud" That's a pretty sensational claim. Who benefits from this fraud? The ivermectin manufacturers, researchers receiving funding from pharmaceutical company or the government, or the ivmmeta.com website itself (I see no third party ads or assets at all -- not even GA)? Meanwhile, back at the Pfizer ranch, they just bought a few small countries for cash.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    People seeking discontent and chaos?
- roenxi 5y ago
  The base rate in medicine is around 10% of studies being fraudulent [0]. That is roughly the rate that Scott came to in the article ("We’ve gone from 29 studies to 11, getting rid of 18 along the way. For the record, we eliminated 2/19 for fraud"). It might be that the list is riddled with fraud, but it isn't obviously so. I'm comfortable with many of the studies having methodological errors - that is why it is called "low quality evidence" instead of "high quality evidence" - and I assume the base rate for badly done studies is quite high. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine

m0zg 5y ago

Most scientists/doctors believed at one point that ulcers were caused by "stress". My father lost half his stomach to an ulcer surgery. Nowadays ulcers are cured with antibiotics in the span of a week. Don't put much stock in what crowds "believe" to be true, _especially_ when _not_ believing it means they can't work in their field.

jacquesm 5y ago
That's science working as intended: theories getting replaced by better theories. There is plenty that we are probably going to find out more about in the future that will invalidate some of what we believe today to be true. But that's fine, as long as we stick to the scientific method that will all come out, even if it takes a while. Science has brought us further in 400 years than anything that came before. Right now it has given us vaccines, which are the best way to deal with COVID-19, and the anti-vaxx crowd and the pro-hydrochloroquine and pro-ivermectin crowd show large overlap. Fortunately during the polio years we didn't have the internet, the carnage would have been incredible.
- m0zg 5y ago
  Sure, but my point is "consensus" doesn't necessarily mean "truth", even though the vast majority of people use the terms interchangeably. "Everyone but one person is wrong" is a situation we've seen numerous times before in the history of science. And when the matters of social acceptability, prestige, politics, and just plain ability to make a living enter into the consideration, very, very few people would even be willing to challenge the status quo. I wouldn't. I have mouths to feed. I'm fully resigned to the fact that we won't know for sure if Ivermectin helps with any of this shit for at least another decade until tensions subside. Could be that millions of people died while they didn't have to. Could be that it's total horseshit. There's no way to know, and "consensus" means next to nothing in these circumstances.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    The consensus in the medical world is that if there is a link it is extremely weak, far weaker than you'd need to establish that 'millions died while they didn't have to' as you write, and that if it works it probably needs very high doses, higher than considered safe. At the same time, we have vaccines, which do work (though the slow roll-out and the many, many hold outs certainly don't help, as well as that it leaves the question of how to deal with children for the moment mostly unanswered). And propagating this Ivermectine (and Hydroxychloroquine as the predecessor) nonsense has caused a lot of people to forego their vaccinations. And that does have very clear effects. So even if consensus doesn't mean truth typically it is the experts that go against the grain with hard proof in their pocket that win out over the long term. It is very rarely going to happen that new scientific truth will come from conspiracy theorists rather than from the establishment, though I guess if you live long enough that too will one day happen.

nzmsv 5y ago

The conclusion of the article deals with this very question.

jacquesm 5y ago

Because people will happily discard evidence that contradicts that which they want to believe. There is apparently something attractive about 'miracle cure suppressed by vested interests' that pretty much guarantees its spread. All you need to do is plant the seed with some gullible people and they'll run with it and parrot it to everybody that will listen, doing a boatload of damage in the process. Between hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectine you are (worldwide) probably looking at a few hundred thousand extra people dead because they (or in some cases their leaders) chose to believe that bullshit rather than to get vaccinated.

nzmsv 5y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

jacquesm 5y ago
Are you suggesting that we didn't adopt his methods?
- astrange 5y ago
  I don't think we adopted handwashing because of him. Actually, the reason people didn't believe him is interesting because they were using an earlier scientific method - he didn't have a good explanation for the mechanism, so they dismissed it with "correlation is not causation". We're better at using things whose mechanism we don't understand now, like Tylenol.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    There is a whole industry in off-label use of medicine, and there are also quite a few studies that try to move off-label use to on-label use once the link is clear. What is interesting (to me) is that which we now consider to be common sense was at one point controversial.
nzmsv 5y ago
Chain got too deep to reply. We did adopt his methods, but many years and hundreds of deaths too late, and not before declaring him insane for his beliefs and putting him in an asylum. What I'm saying is that authority has a dark side. Sometimes the establishment is actually wrong. Regardless of right or wrong, it always chooses to erase its critics. Some of us disagree with the erasure, even in cases where the critics are wrong.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Yes, so you trust in the scientific method in the long term and in the expert consensus in the short term. The thing where the case you linked went off the rails for me is that there was no downside to trying his methods earlier, but ego got in the way, and ego is by definition unscientific. But people will be people, that you won't be able to fix, I'm afraid.