5 ms·

Paul Marik is also the co-founder of the Front Line COVID Critical Care Alliance, the foremost group of doctors promoting ivermectin https://www.medpagetoday.co

Paul Marik is also the co-founder of the Front Line COVID Critical Care Alliance, the foremost group of doctors promoting ivermectin https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/96522 https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/9652...

moistly 5y ago
It’s people like that who make me think tar and feathering wasn’t a bad idea.
WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
mikeyouse 5y ago
I hope (but doubt) that the repeated fraudulent studies, the lack of replicable results followed by very strong negative results from more ethical scientists, and the self-serving grift that the HCQ/IVM/Zinc promoters have engaged in is enough to get people to really step back and consider why they believed these charlatans in the first place. Plenty of ~intelligent people on HN and elsewhere, who would never sign up for a Gwyneth Paltrow detox regime, talked themselves into believing that there was some forbidden knowledge being exposed by these quacks. It was always so transparently silly.
- Maursault 5y ago
  - Khelavaster 5y ago
    Dichloroacetate apparently cures cancer as hard as smoking 'cures' meat--kills too many normal cells to be safe to do in living people. https://xkcd.com/1217/ https://xkcd.com/1217/
    - Khelavaster 5y ago
      Seems like DCA is significantly more toxic than other chemo agents, and wasn't justified at the doses used. It might be good adjunct therapy with neuroprotectants or something...but that's an area for serious chemistry research!
      - Maursault 5y ago
        > but that's an area for serious chemistry research! Biology was never my thing, but it stands to reason, even if it is cynical, that if a cancer cure could be developed, except that there was no possible way to profit from the cure, then a cure would not be developed. Studies and research and development of treatments is very expensive, so the results need to be profitable or they will not be pursued.
        Dylan16807 5y ago
        There's a good amount of research done without the goal being massive profits, and nobel prizes are pretty nice too.
        Maursault 5y ago
        That wasn't my claim, and if there is a good amout of research done by BigPharma without the goal being massive profits, they should really tell us about it.
        Dylan16807 5y ago
        Big pharma doesn't have to research every drug, especially if it's already easy to make and highly effective.
        Maursault 5y ago
        My claim is not that BigPhatma spends too much money researching every drug. My claim is that BigPharma doesn't research new drugs or treatments unless they're going to be profitable, which means that BigPharma does not invest in development or research of unpatentable drugs that already exist.
  - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
    I had to look up a reference for DCA to see what you’re talking about. I don’t have time to read and summarize it all now but if anyone wants to take a look: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6885244/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6885244/ Edit: It seems potentially promising but also potentially toxic. Needs more study.
    - Maursault 5y ago
      > Needs more study. Yes, but it wasn't really the drug I was drawing attention to but instead that if a cure can't be profitable, it will not be developed. It wasn't always this way. The polio vaccine was developed and never patented. Edward Murrow asked Jonas Salk who owned the patent. Salk’s famous reply was “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"
      - SequoiaHope 5y ago
        You said: > It cures cancer, but it is never prescribed because it is unpatentable. The article I found says: > The occurrence of side effects such as neurotoxicity as well as the suspicion of DCA carcinogenicity still restricts the clinical use of DCA. I am thoroughly anti-establishment and particularly anti patent as well. I am a libertarian communist aka an anarchist. But you're not going to win any arguments misrepresenting things like that, saying "the cure for cancer exists but they won't use it because they can't profit". It sounds like what they are trying to do is figure out what mechanism DCA uses to work, so they can find away to do the same thing without the toxicity issues. Of course everything in our world is touched and marred by the profit motive. So perhaps they have not studied DCA enough because of this profit issue in general. But perhaps it does a good profit opportunity since DCA is toxic - they have to invent something new that does the same thing as DCA without the toxicity. Anyway I sympathize with your feelings about the world, but your obvious black and white views and grand claims aren't going to make you very popular in online discussions. The profit motive does suck, but the world is still a very complex place.
  - yold__ 5y ago
    You seem to have very strong anti-establishment opinions. There are a lot of off-patent drugs (i.e. generics) that are dirt cheap and widely prescribed. Metformin is one example. Unfortunately, your world-view prevents you from seeing through the logical holes of your own statements. If dichloroacetate cured cancer, it would require a global conspiracy to conceal that fact. Doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies have quite the opposite incentives from big pharma. Like you, they dislike the excessive profiteering from pharmaceutical companies. Why would they be party to this conspiracy?
    - Maursault 5y ago
- ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
  There's a balance to be found: we want enough "quacky" people to try crazy things to find what might work, especially when dealing with newly emergent diseases. On the other hand, we do not want those people to falsify data, and we want to minimize the incentive to do so. But the fame that comes with finding an off-label treatment that works is its own incentive to fraud/being sloppy.
  - mikeyouse 5y ago
    Yep - especially during a novel pandemic of the scale of Covid19 - I'm really glad they looked at all of the available treatment options. Unfortunately it was extremely damaging for them to hold onto them as long as they did while crying "censorship". There were tons of people who refused to get vaccinated since they had access to IVM - the /r/hermancainaward subreddit was filled with people saying as much before they ended up in the ICU. "Strong convictions loosely held" is an admirable way forward on testing everything we have to save lives. Unfortunately when it became so politicized and the unethical doctors and scientists realized they could print money by claiming they had a secret cure being suppressed, the "loosely held" bit was left behind.
- timeon 5y ago
  > Plenty of ~intelligent people on HN and elsewhere, who would never sign up for a Gwyneth Paltrow detox regime, talked themselves into believing that there was some forbidden knowledge being exposed by these quacks. It was always so transparently silly. I'm afraid that this is thanks to political tribalism. Especially in the system where you have only two sides.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Yes, but no way they are going to come out and acknowledge they were duped. And some are still on that bandwagon. And imnsho a bigger problem: that they were in turn trying to dupe others. This amplification effect is at least as harmful as the initial fraud.
- makomk 5y ago
  Part of the problem is that the more reputable hydroxychloroquine studies were abandoned based on an even more blatently fradulent paper in the Lancet claiming it actually increased the risk of patients dying - like, it wasn't even some subtle statistical issue, there was no way the authors could've had access to the data they claimed to use and the number of patients supposedly in the study from some countries was implausibly high. So there wasn't really any good-quality evidence for a long time. Also, there's reason to suspect that the reason the Lancet was so willing to publish that paper is partisan; their editor-in-chief's Twitter had a blatant political axe to grind the whole time.
- pjc50 5y ago
  There's a ridiculous number of youtubers who are basically Gwyneth Paltrow For Men, and selling bogus supplements is a lucrative business that enables a self-sustaining disinformation ecosystem. Also people really want to "own the libs" at any cost.

moistly 5y ago

It’s people like that who make me think tar and feathering wasn’t a bad idea.

WaxedChewbacca 5y ago

mikeyouse 5y ago

I hope (but doubt) that the repeated fraudulent studies, the lack of replicable results followed by very strong negative results from more ethical scientists, and the self-serving grift that the HCQ/IVM/Zinc promoters have engaged in is enough to get people to really step back and consider why they believed these charlatans in the first place. Plenty of ~intelligent people on HN and elsewhere, who would never sign up for a Gwyneth Paltrow detox regime, talked themselves into believing that there was some forbidden knowledge being exposed by these quacks. It was always so transparently silly.

Maursault 5y ago
- Khelavaster 5y ago
  Dichloroacetate apparently cures cancer as hard as smoking 'cures' meat--kills too many normal cells to be safe to do in living people. https://xkcd.com/1217/ https://xkcd.com/1217/
  - Khelavaster 5y ago
    Seems like DCA is significantly more toxic than other chemo agents, and wasn't justified at the doses used. It might be good adjunct therapy with neuroprotectants or something...but that's an area for serious chemistry research!
    - Maursault 5y ago
      > but that's an area for serious chemistry research! Biology was never my thing, but it stands to reason, even if it is cynical, that if a cancer cure could be developed, except that there was no possible way to profit from the cure, then a cure would not be developed. Studies and research and development of treatments is very expensive, so the results need to be profitable or they will not be pursued.
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        There's a good amount of research done without the goal being massive profits, and nobel prizes are pretty nice too.
        Maursault 5y ago
        That wasn't my claim, and if there is a good amout of research done by BigPharma without the goal being massive profits, they should really tell us about it.
        Dylan16807 5y ago
        Big pharma doesn't have to research every drug, especially if it's already easy to make and highly effective.
        Maursault 5y ago
        My claim is not that BigPhatma spends too much money researching every drug. My claim is that BigPharma doesn't research new drugs or treatments unless they're going to be profitable, which means that BigPharma does not invest in development or research of unpatentable drugs that already exist.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  I had to look up a reference for DCA to see what you’re talking about. I don’t have time to read and summarize it all now but if anyone wants to take a look: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6885244/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6885244/ Edit: It seems potentially promising but also potentially toxic. Needs more study.
  - Maursault 5y ago
    > Needs more study. Yes, but it wasn't really the drug I was drawing attention to but instead that if a cure can't be profitable, it will not be developed. It wasn't always this way. The polio vaccine was developed and never patented. Edward Murrow asked Jonas Salk who owned the patent. Salk’s famous reply was “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"
    - SequoiaHope 5y ago
      You said: > It cures cancer, but it is never prescribed because it is unpatentable. The article I found says: > The occurrence of side effects such as neurotoxicity as well as the suspicion of DCA carcinogenicity still restricts the clinical use of DCA. I am thoroughly anti-establishment and particularly anti patent as well. I am a libertarian communist aka an anarchist. But you're not going to win any arguments misrepresenting things like that, saying "the cure for cancer exists but they won't use it because they can't profit". It sounds like what they are trying to do is figure out what mechanism DCA uses to work, so they can find away to do the same thing without the toxicity issues. Of course everything in our world is touched and marred by the profit motive. So perhaps they have not studied DCA enough because of this profit issue in general. But perhaps it does a good profit opportunity since DCA is toxic - they have to invent something new that does the same thing as DCA without the toxicity. Anyway I sympathize with your feelings about the world, but your obvious black and white views and grand claims aren't going to make you very popular in online discussions. The profit motive does suck, but the world is still a very complex place.
- yold__ 5y ago
  You seem to have very strong anti-establishment opinions. There are a lot of off-patent drugs (i.e. generics) that are dirt cheap and widely prescribed. Metformin is one example. Unfortunately, your world-view prevents you from seeing through the logical holes of your own statements. If dichloroacetate cured cancer, it would require a global conspiracy to conceal that fact. Doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies have quite the opposite incentives from big pharma. Like you, they dislike the excessive profiteering from pharmaceutical companies. Why would they be party to this conspiracy?
  - Maursault 5y ago
ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
There's a balance to be found: we want enough "quacky" people to try crazy things to find what might work, especially when dealing with newly emergent diseases. On the other hand, we do not want those people to falsify data, and we want to minimize the incentive to do so. But the fame that comes with finding an off-label treatment that works is its own incentive to fraud/being sloppy.
- mikeyouse 5y ago
  Yep - especially during a novel pandemic of the scale of Covid19 - I'm really glad they looked at all of the available treatment options. Unfortunately it was extremely damaging for them to hold onto them as long as they did while crying "censorship". There were tons of people who refused to get vaccinated since they had access to IVM - the /r/hermancainaward subreddit was filled with people saying as much before they ended up in the ICU. "Strong convictions loosely held" is an admirable way forward on testing everything we have to save lives. Unfortunately when it became so politicized and the unethical doctors and scientists realized they could print money by claiming they had a secret cure being suppressed, the "loosely held" bit was left behind.
timeon 5y ago
> Plenty of ~intelligent people on HN and elsewhere, who would never sign up for a Gwyneth Paltrow detox regime, talked themselves into believing that there was some forbidden knowledge being exposed by these quacks. It was always so transparently silly. I'm afraid that this is thanks to political tribalism. Especially in the system where you have only two sides.
jacquesm 5y ago
Yes, but no way they are going to come out and acknowledge they were duped. And some are still on that bandwagon. And imnsho a bigger problem: that they were in turn trying to dupe others. This amplification effect is at least as harmful as the initial fraud.
makomk 5y ago
Part of the problem is that the more reputable hydroxychloroquine studies were abandoned based on an even more blatently fradulent paper in the Lancet claiming it actually increased the risk of patients dying - like, it wasn't even some subtle statistical issue, there was no way the authors could've had access to the data they claimed to use and the number of patients supposedly in the study from some countries was implausibly high. So there wasn't really any good-quality evidence for a long time. Also, there's reason to suspect that the reason the Lancet was so willing to publish that paper is partisan; their editor-in-chief's Twitter had a blatant political axe to grind the whole time.
pjc50 5y ago
There's a ridiculous number of youtubers who are basically Gwyneth Paltrow For Men, and selling bogus supplements is a lucrative business that enables a self-sustaining disinformation ecosystem. Also people really want to "own the libs" at any cost.