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While the ivermectin story is largely explained by the confounding factor of parasite presence in developing countries, it indirectly helped covid patients by c
by snidane 5y ago
While the ivermectin story is largely explained by the confounding factor of parasite presence in developing countries, it indirectly helped covid patients by curing them of other problems and thus reducing the potence of covid. Not so much in the developed countries since the parasite problem was small.
Concerning though, was the society's attitude to the Ivermectin, an safe drug prescribed by WHO in Africa en masse, established for decades, versus an experimental vaccine-like treatment with unknown side effects and never tested at scale that was to be deployed population wide.
At the time of no studies, no information and heavy panic, one of these was condemned, likened to a horse paste for conspiracy theorists, the other revered like a God's potion.
This attitude is perfectly rational for pharma companies, for which a vaccine is a better business model, with healthy 95% of the population being customers, than a drug with sick 5% being the customers. Especially for an is off-patent drug Ivermectin which is just a pain in the ass for pharma producers, with no monopoly markup on it.
The behavior is not rational for the general populace though. Once country's biggest villains, pharma companies injecting patients unknowingly with opiods, turning them into lifetime subscribers, to world's biggest saviors like a flip of a switch.
It was interesting to observe how the pandemic was progressing with a rational attitude as somebody who went through it and developed an immunity right at the beginning. It helped me understand how the minds can be overriden at scale using tactics of fear. Helps explain other dangerous ideologies that were pushed to the populations using fear.
Vaccines and Ivermectin are old news though. Who would have though that Vladimir Putin would become the world's most successful doctor and cure the world of the pandemic overnight.
- NoraCodes 5y ago> Who would have though that Vladimir Putin would become the world's most successful doctor and cure the world of the pandemic overnight. Please, don't leave us hanging - i want to hear the rest! I wonder if your novel might be better suited for AO3 or FanFiction.net, though?
- snidane 5y agoSorry, I don't know how to write fan fiction. I don't know what you guys over there read.
- tinus_hn 5y agoIf you want to hear the rest just watch the news, it’s ongoing. Perhaps it didn’t happen the same everywhere but in a lot of countries it was out with the old COVID and in with the new Ukraine war.
- jcranmer 5y agoOn all of the news sites I follow, COVID is still covered as a major section with multiple news articles daily. It's just that, well, 2 years in, and "an Nth wave of COVID might be coming" is rather less newsworthy than "is the ongoing invasion of Ukraine going to lead to WW3?"
- tinus_hn 5y agoIts probably dependent on location, both in how much the Ukraine war affects that area and in how much it is feasible to ignore COVID. But I think it is pretty clear that even if their necessity were defensible at the moment, Corona measure like lockdowns would not be on the table because due to the Ukraine war most governments can no longer afford them.
- a_shovel 5y ago> Who would have though that Vladimir Putin would become the world's most successful doctor and cure the world of the pandemic overnight. I remember when people were saying this about the George Floyd protests, to make the point that it was all media fearmongering over nothing and we'd all forget about covid in a month. Now we're two years in and approaching 1 million deaths from covid in America alone. So that plan didn't work out. > an experimental vaccine-like treatment This is a very strange way to describe a vaccine. The issue with ivermectin is that those saying it should be used along with a vaccine were vastly outnumbered by those saying it should be used instead of a vaccine. And the covid vaccine was absolutely not the only one they objected to.