I never had Covid. Or if I did, it was so mild I never noticed. So, I really have no dog in this fight. But the way the media handled this coverage was really, really off-putting.
First, if it doesn't work, just say that. "It doesn't work". "Ivermectin is not an effective treatment for Covid". That's all that was really necessary, right?
But no, there was this whole ridiculous crusade of "It's a horsey drug for horses! If you take it, that means you're a horse!". Which, after two seconds of consideration, was patently absurd. It's an extremely commonly prescribed drug for people. And there's plenty of drugs that are used for both people and animals. Ketamine. Antibiotics. We give antibiotics to horses too. So does that mean if you take antibiotics you're some whackjob taking horse drugs?
So now you have the media constantly repeating something which anyone with two brain cells can discern is a blatant lie, and they somehow wonder why people don't trust them?
I haven't read any story that said: "It's a horsey drug for horses! If you take it, that means you're a horse!"
That’s been said multiple times. By government agencies and media conglomerates. Amazing what you can find when you look for it.
Literal talking point from the FDA https://twitter.com/US_FDA/status/1429050070243192839?s=20
Debacle with CNN and Joe Rogan https://news.yahoo.com/lie-joe-rogan-accuses-cnn-151300650.h...
Oh, come on. The tweet links to a page that gives information that doesn't fit in 280 characters; making a sly reference to what people are talking about is hardly outrageous, and likely intended to increase distribution of the useful info in the link. https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-shoul...
The next tweet has a FAQ, too (https://twitter.com/US_FDA/status/1429050498515144708) that's quite clear that ivermectin has some uses in humans, but isn't approved or shown to be useful for COVID.
If you base your reality off single jokey tweets, that's on you.
Obviously they didn’t use those exact words, but any time it was mentioned they were sure to include something like “…which is used to treat livestock…”, when that is not really relevant since it’s also widely used for people.
> FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine officials said in a letter to veterinarians and animal product retailers that people have become seriously ill from consuming highly concentrated ivermectin formulations, such as pour-on products, injectable products, pastes, and drenches meant for horses, cattle, and sheep.
> Poison control officials said in August they were receiving substantial numbers of calls from people experiencing side effects—mostly mild illnesses—from consuming veterinary-use ivermectin. Some poison control centers across the U.S. were receiving five times as many calls about human exposures to ivermectin in July 2021 as compared with a pre-pandemic baseline. The reports of ivermectin misuse coincided with rising numbers of SARS-CoV-2 infections.
https://www.avma.org/javma-news/2021-10-01/people-ingesting-...
> Ivermectin is a deworming agent most commonly used on horses, livestock and occasionally dogs and cats. It is used in smaller doses in humans as an anti-parasitic, to treat conditions including skin problems and headlice.
FYI there is no horse version of drugs. It would be a logistics and production nightmare to produce two kind of medicine like that.
If a medicine has a chemical compound (like for example Amoxicillin) then it is good for both your fish and for you generally speaking.
> Animal drugs, on the other hand, are often highly concentrated—especially those used in large animals such as horses and cows—and high doses of those drugs could be highly toxic in humans.
> In addition, animal drugs often have inactive ingredients not evaluated for use in human medicine, and FDA officials don’t know how those ingredients affect drug absorption in a human body, FDA information states.
https://www.avma.org/javma-news/2021-10-01/people-ingesting-...
By "horse version" I don't mean a different chemical active ingredient. I mean packaging, dosage, etc. E.g. for animals Ivermectin is often in powder form so it can mixed with food, while for humans it's usually a pill. That means the human version is not approved for lifestock and the lifestock version is not approved for humans. They are two different drugs in that sense.
It really doesn't make sense to collectively blame "the media" because some of them say silly or incorrect things sometimes. The word itself -- a plural -- tells you there isn't a cohesive "the media" to blame anyway. Who are you actually talking about when you refer to "the media"?
Now, if you’re a medical doctor like he is and you spend hours poring over the studies, you can eventually conclude that they’re all flawed in various ways, and there’s not really an effect.
If you’re a layperson and you see that there’s studies published in peer-reviewed journals, but the media is telling you you’re a stupid redneck who’s just a sucker for “conspiracy theories” you’re going to figure they’re just insulting and dismissing you, as they have been consistently doing for years. When those same outlets say the claims about Ivermectin are “baseless” you’re going to wonder why those 26/30 studies don’t constitute a “base” and maybe suspect that there is something else going on.
So, at the end of the day, it is really irresponsible of any media outlet to marginalize and dismiss people, who are trying their best to make sense of a confusing and stressful situation.
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...
Sure, and that's why governments around the world employ such people, in significant quantities, to do exactly that, and then tell the media what they've concluded, who help distribute that information to us laypeople.
Which is exactly what happened.
You don't want to call that a conspiracy theory, but then what should it be called?
And which media outlets have been calling people stupid rednecks? You have a grievance against "the media", but who exactly is that?
I'm really a lot more concerned with the irresponsibility of pushing ineffective medical treatments to a serious health hazard than I am with how gently "the media" tells people that their conspiracy theories are wrong.
I've heard that sometimes in public health you have to lie to avoid the strange incentives that people acting as a massive group have. But your lies have to at least make sense. When you go around frantically pushing a narrative that is a blatant lie, you lose the public's trust. It doesn't help when half of news programs are brought to you by Pfizer - a company with a vested interest in Ivermectin not working for this purpose.
The randos on YouTube will always be there, but it's the failing of the mainstream media that anyone takes them seriously.
The absurd response seemed to be in response to absurd behaviour, as far as I can tell.
Hard to blame people for taking the horse version if that's all they could get. Also hard to blame pharmacies for not wanting to give out medicine that doesn't work, although pharmacies seem more than happy to sell other kinds of snake oil.
Secondly the whole "horse drug" came about because people actually started taking a literal horse drug when they could not get their hands on a prescription for the human version. So people made fun of them.
And yes, taking a drug dosed/mixed for horses based on Facebook posts makes you a wackjob.
Not gonna defend the media and political spindoctors. But we all know what they are about. All people had to do was listen to the medical authorities.
But no, everyone applies the "politicians/media lies" selectevly so that they can keep listening to the ones that make them feel good.
The MSM was mostly fair and accurate in their reporting. "Horse paste" was mostly a meme or a joke. The NY Times and CNN didn't make jokes about horse paste. The CDC and similar orgs all gave accurate explainers of the use and misuse of Ivermectin (and Hydroxychloroquine).
While a lot of right-wing media like FOX and OAN was absolutely endorsing it. Here's a good one where Tucker Carlson has an Ivermectin booster on his show but apparently conflates it with Hydroxychloroquine.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/biologist-tucker-ivermectin-ef...
Not to mention the former president spreading absolute nonsense about HCQ, disinfectant, UV light and whatever else popped up in his twitter feed. This inspired a lot of clapbacks from satirists and unserious opinionators, but you wouldn't see any real news being that sarcastic.
If you had stuck with left-leaning and moderate MSM, traditional news sources during these past few years you would have been very well informed.
It seems like there are often specific turns of phrase that just get widely adopted. What I cited above is one example. Another is "the deadly January 6th insurrection".
(Probably there's some right-wing phraseology around "stolen election" or "southern border invasion" or something like that. But I can't think of any specifically, so at least from my perspective they're less widespread or less sticky.)
One time we had 4 humans and several cats in the house and we could see the worms in the litter box and could see them in the human feces too so we gave everybody (humans and cats) pyrantel which is what gets used for that here.
People get ivermectin in Africa where the problem is worse, but it is going to be in an appropriate dosage and form.
Apparently not. Because that is what was said at first. And doctors refused to prescribe it because it didn't work, there was no reason for it to work, etc.
So people went down to Sneed's Feed and Seed, bought the apple-flavored paste with a picture of a horse on it and started shitting themselves in the middle of WalMart. They deserved to be mocked.
That didn’t seem to get people vaccinated.
> We give antibiotics to horses too.
Which are not the same for people and horses either.
---------
Maybe the ridiculous thing was to make Ivermectin into political calling card into first place. And in the second place, attacking doctors who say it is not tested or does not work. What about that, really.
Ivermectin is a wildly effective anti-parasitic, so unsurprisingly it reduces mortality rates in countries where the endemic parasite infection rate is something like 50 percent.
This study appears to have been done in Canada, where parasite infection rates in the general population are probably 1% or less. Hence... no demonstrable benefit to using Ivermectin!
Nonetheless, Ivermectin is safe drug to take in normal doses, and will help people that are hospitalised with COVID and are given steroids.
It's not a prophylactic and high doses are not a treatment for COVID itself.
The misunderstandings around this drug stem from misunderstandings of basic statistics and the scientific method. This is why you shouldn't get your medical advice from Joe Rogan.
The reason people are testing it is because it has potential anti-viral properties as well. Researchers discovered that ivermectin is a protease inhibitor - which means it can prevent viral replication when it comes to Covid. The problem, from what I understand, is that no one knows the dose required for that effect to occur, or whether the drug needs to be modified in some way to do so.
The new Pfizer anti-viral drug is based on the same protease inhibition mechanism and seems to work very well, but costs hundreds of dollars for a single round of treatment. So, finding a way to make ivermectin work would create an extremely cheap treatment.
You talk about misunderstandings but it's funny how badly you misunderstand the situation.
Sources:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsptsci.0c00108#
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/cp/d1cp0...
> Yes, ivermectin is an anti-parasitic, and yes that's probably why there's anecdotal evidence of it working. The reason people are testing it is because it has potential anti-viral properties as well.
And then you said:
> Yes, some people are interested in Ivermectin as a protease inhibitor. But the reason the de-wormer came to prominence in the first place was because some lower quality studies found it has a positive effect on COVID-19 outcomes.
The famous study done in Brazil was a fraudulent one, without authorization from the public health agency, where the patients that took Ivermectin had a 2 to 3 times higher mortality rate (very likely due to unrelated issues), but the numbers were cooked to make the drug look useful. That's the one with thousands of people that registered an effect.
There is also another one, with dozens of people that got an week effect. This one is most likely spurious.
Can you link the follow up study confirming this?
But I guess it was not replicated.
doses much higher than the maximum approved or safely achievable for use in humans would be required for an antiviral effect while treating COVID-19
There are always leads, always more possibilities to try, so it's a critical scientific skill to understand how promising they actually are. Nobody will ever publish a peer-reviewed scientific paper saying "this shit is completely fucking hopeless" -- even if it is -- so you have to make that inference from a growing pile of negative evidence "we haven't been able to replicate / determine dosing / find support for" and from the shift of attention to different theories.
"Dr. Mills and his colleagues looked at 1,358 adults who visited one of 12 clinics in the Minas Gerais region of Brazil with Covid-19 symptoms."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4964320/ > Eleven sites were selected for sampling. Cysts of Entamoeba coli were the most frequently found in this study (50%), followed by Hymenolepis diminuta eggs (27.6%), Iodamoeba butschllii cysts (5.6%), Ascaris lumbricoides eggs (5.6%), Taenia species eggs (5.6%) and hookworm eggs (5.6%). The highest positivity rates were found in the samples drawn from the cafeteria's eating table.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30050346/ > Results: A total of 216 slides were analyzed [sampled from public bus seats], of which 86 (39.8%) were positive for at least one intestinal parasite.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29972467/ > The aim of this study was to establish the prevalence of Schistosoma mansoni in indigenous Maxakali villages, evaluating the TF-Test® performance for diagnosis compared to the Kato-Katz technique. Stool samples from 545 individuals were processed by the TF-Test® (1 sample) and Kato-Katz (1 slide). The positivity rate for S. mansoni by Kato-Katz was 45.7%. The rate by the TF-Test® was 33.2%, and 51.9% by the combined parasitological techniques. The amplitude of parasite load was 24 to 4,056 eggs per gram of feces (epg), with a geometric mean of 139 epg.
Alternately if they gave the antiparasitic far enough before the infection, the rather complex causal sequence of "severe Covid -> steroids -> parasites multiply -> Ivermectin to the rescue" might not happen in the first place. Though that should show up by severe cases not having the parasitic reaction to begin with, if the Ivermectin cleared them out.
- So in summary, actually, now that I think about it, in a country with high parasite load, an antiparasitic having no detectable effect on survival rate of a high-stress infection seems pretty suspicious on the face of it! Really could go for a study link.
In what way will it help in people having no parasite?
It's a bit like an episode of Dr House. Trying to determine an illness solely with tests is often futile or prohibitively expensive. It can also take long enough that meanwhile the patient will die. Directly treating them "just on the off chance" can actually be a better approach, but obviously this would have to be weighed up against the side-effects and risks of the treatment and drugs involved.
Ivermectin luckily is so safe that some doctors have called for giving it to every COVID patient that goes to hospital. Saving 1% of patients is... thousands of people at the scale of the pandemic.
On that front I think it is not totally plausible that parasites explain these discrepancies. Here is a large study in the United States https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122... that found ivermectin to be effective against death.
> Moreover, both Efimenko and Nackeeran also told Reuters that other evidence available so far clearly refutes the benefits of ivermectin to treat COVID-19.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/...
You're 100% correct, of course. But the prevalent MSM response, of calling it horse medicine, was equally damaging. Since it is a well known, effective, and respected medicine used in humans, this characterization as "horse paste" made it easy to believe that it was additionally being unfairly maligned in regard to its effectiveness for Covid.
In my part of flyover country, you had to provide evidence, from a veterinarian or a sale bill from an auction house, that you owned livestock to be able to buy livestock ivermectin. Because people were buying it to use on themselves.
That's where the 'horse medicine' thing comes from. It's real.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/08/23/covid-...
Some people decided to go to farm supply stores and take the sterile bovine injectable form of IVM orally.
This whole situation would not have happened if social media, YouTube, and major news outlets didn’t make such a stink about using a drug. It has virtually no negative side-effects, over 40 years of safety track record, and is safely taken prophylactically for other uses around the world. Its efficacy has yet to be proven and there are conflicting studies on this, but its safety is not disputable.
I.e. it's not that ivermectin is horse medicine in all forms, but the forms of it which the people were taking in response to Trump's early promotion were horse medicine
Would a more diplomatic wording have actually helped? I don't think it would have. And trying too hard to have diplomatic neutrality will often encourage the toxic idea that every debate has two valid and reasonable sides.
In what way? Ivermectin was pitched as an alternative to vaccination, leading people to avoid the highly effective vaccines.
Is likely because of the legions of people who have been dosing themselves with horse paste.
At the time that Rogan did have the episode with Dr Kory and Bret Weinstein, Ivermectin was already very popular and he hasn't been promoting it since (yes, he may have had a guest or two that brought it up during the conversation, but it was peripheral).
The media had a collective freakout because when he got Covid he mentioned on Instagram a laundry list of medicines he's taking and Ivermectin (the human form) was among them.
Blaming him or Spotify for all of society's ills is just an attempt to prevent dissent on mainstream discourse.
That's a leap only you took so far.
In fact there’s even a paper floating around showing an anti-correlation between helminth infection and Covid-19 severity.
My point being: the “obvious” mechanism of action may not be as obvious as you think.
That is simply not true. Parasites do have an impact on the immune system and can amplify or reduce response to other pathogens. This is a very well known effect and an important area of study due to the prevalence of parasitic infections in tropical regions.
> Recent studies have shown that helminth endemic countries showed fewer cases and deaths so far and helminth co-infection might reduce the severity of COVID-19.
from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/iid3.573.
Others:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34861106/
So I agree with your post both in letter of what is written and in spirit, but...
The misunderstandings around this drug also stem from the fact that its detractors were unhinged and anti-scientific. They were dismissing a large, obvious statistical effect without any argument. The publicised pushback around Joe Rogan was spearheaded by people who thought the problem was that Ivermectin is effective in horses.
I'm perfectly happy to pick this hill to argue on - the people who had hope that Ivermectin helped were the sort of people who are persuaded by evidence. It was never strong evidence, but the balance was in favour of Ivermectin for a while there for people who only looked at studies and hadn't had their attention drawn to the endemic parasite thing.
No. The extreme pushback started after higher quality studies came out that showed there was no effect and those swayed by the initial Brazilian data wouldn’t let it go. For some segment of the population it became a magical COVID cure and any high quality studies were just big pharma ignoring cheap solutions so they could make more money.
That doesn't sound very scientific to me. It sounds desperate. You can argue Ivermectin might have a good enough safety profile to have warranted experimenting on yourself. And I tend to err on the side of trusting people to understand a little about taking their healthcare into their own hands. That said, it's not exactly how medical professionals see things. And people did get poisoned here and there after all. The average person doesn't know how to self administer medicine. I think this is why the 'worth a shot' opinion on ivermectin wasn't a great idea and it wasn't because the people excited about it were better persuaded by facts and logic.
The amplification effect of steroids on parasites is backed up by research on mice [2] and an informal survey of the ivermectin/covid research shows good evidence for the same effect in humans [3]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220220090522/https://www.econo...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3110371/
[3] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...
My story (yes, I know, just N=1, but it's good to put it out there):
I found a doc to give me two prescriptions for a treatment protocol as recommended by the FLCCC. Since it was in short supply, I didn't want to waste it prophylactically. I've had IVM available to me since early sprint 2021.
If I ever got that nagging feeling in my throat like I was coming down with a cold, I just took a single dose of IVM. The next day I was always better. This happened about a half dozen times over the last almost year. Would I have gotten better that quickly without it? I don't know. I just didn't want to risk thing getting worse, and the risk calculation was obvious since IVM is so safe.
Was it just a cold attacking me and not COVID? I don't know, but it was still better than coming down with a cold. Colds always take me down for a week anyway, so I saved a week of my life even if it was just a cold.
From my understanding IVM is a broad spectrum antiviral that seems to work well on coronaviruses. I'm going to keep taking it on first symptoms of a cold, just because so far I haven't had even a sniffle since I started taking it on the first sign of a infection. It may not be the thing that's working, but as you say, it's so safe, it doesn't hurt to use.
Before the downvotes: I'm not saying that this is the solution to the pandemic, and I'm not touting that it's better than other treatments or vaccines. I'm just saying that the downside to taking it is negligible, and my experience is that it did help (or at least didn't hurt). And it's cheap, so why not experiment.
If you cherry-pick your experts enough, you’ll be able to find one that agrees with you, no matter how absurd your position.
I’ll also note that much of the time the licensed doctors he invites on aren’t actually in relevant specialties at all. And in many cases they are grifters in some way or another.
There's enough people with MDs that are willing to do more or less anything for money that checking for a license isn't really much in the way of diligence.
People make unwise choices all the time, and when we try to prevent them from doing so coercively, we fall into a pit of unintended consequences. When people see powerful people suppressing a point of view, it makes it more sympathetic to many of them, even if they would otherwise have rejected it as unreasoned.
Depends on the coercion.
Taking action against false advertising of medical benefits is and should be under the purview of qualified government agencies, and should be a private cause of action.
E.g., the FDA and FTC have jurisdiction over false claims in drug and food advertising [0-2]. This is an unqualified good thing. It would be a large net benefit to society if these are also extended beyond specific paid-for standard-format advertising claims but also persistent promotion of false and unsubstantiated claims by jucksters like Joe Rogan, whether or not it is the result of direct paid promotion or just as part of his self-promoting schtick to increase it popularity with contrary opinions, and without regard to the number of people he will literally kill with his bad advice.
If you want the libertarian version, then when Jack's relative takes bad advice from adverts or some on-air huckster, then he has a cause of action to sue (and of course must establish that the relative relied on that advice and died from following the advised course of action, and that Jack has suffered losses).
Yes, countering disinformation is a thorny problem, but resorting to First Amendment absolutism is intellectually lazy at best. It feels like having a nice solid black&white answer, but it is not, since the result of the answer is the destruction of society. Bigger challenges and higher complexity society require more complex answers (and NO, simple censorship isn't the answer either).
[0] https://www.fda.gov/drugs/office-prescription-drug-promotion... [1] https://www.fda.gov/drugs/prescription-drug-advertising/back... [2] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/truth-advertising
That's quite an assertion, but I notice you back it up with nothing at all.
What you describe as the libertarian version is the non-cartoon version of "First Amendment absolutism": you can say what you want, but you're not immune from demonstrable consequences of what you say. There's nothing in that position that requires or suggests that people should be coercively prevented from speech that is unpopular, incomplete, or incorrect. In that light, the objections you present mostly fail to address my point.
The only exception is your extension of the FDA and FTC rules regarding food and drug advertising to non-advertising speech, which would present a lot of practical problems, creating a vast opening for frivolous and harassing lawsuits against public figures and discouraging the expression of much valid and worthwhile opinion. I'd oppose it, and I can't imagine that it would find support outside the sort of election-year rhetoric that evaporates on contact with reality.
What I think is baffling is why there was such resistance to even trying Ivermectin and other alternatives in the first place? I'm not talking about after Joe Rogan used it here, I'm talking about well before he said he used it and there were some initial reports from some Indian and other doctors that this might have been very effective in their initial usage. Sick and dying people wanted to try this out and were shut down. If we had an inexpensive and marginally effective treatment, Covid would have been over very quickly. Yet, every initial inexpensive treatment (Hydroxychloroquine) that showed some initial effectiveness was given the stiffest resistance possible.
It's the easiest risk management decision in the world to try out inexpensive (and safe in human dosage) drugs when the alternative is death, and for some reason there was supreme resistance to this. Why? It still feels like potential solutions were totally shut down precisely because nobody could really make any money off of it.
If they were severely sick or dying, it would already be far too late for an anti-viral to do anything.
I mean, you should never really take advice from any expert that isn't sitting in front of you, imo. Podcasts exist to gather views and often incorporate bias and misinformation in various forms to achieve those ends. They're no different from listening to Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow in terms of information quality; they may interview SMEs but at the end of the day the way they interview them and the subjects they focus on matter much more if you're not a discerning person on a given subject.
When I listen to podcasts, even ones that try to give good information like Freakonomics, I always listen to them for entertainment first. It's like maintaining boundaries with your information sources.
This part of your post is confusing. Your conclusion and the conclusion promoted on the JRE are the same.
Joe Rogan is a terrible person to get advice from.
But where are the good sources? Are science studies (funded by government, military or corporations) trustworthy? Is the government?
The issue is that all information has become obviously politicised. Which means it there are agendas in play foremost, rather than enabling the population to make informed decisions.
You can source your advice from any of them or a sufficient consensus. Most even publish their recommendations and findings in English too. Interestingly, none of them asked their healthcare systems to prescribe cheap-as-chips ivermectin, all of them provide free vaccination and all of them recommend face masks for the last year and a half.
Let's not act like the parasite idea is more than an untested hypothesis though.
On what evidence are you basing this? There appears to be no good reason to think so.
That being said, the WSJ article is limited to looking at hospitalizations. Full stop.
Nothing about deaths, length of hospital stay, so called long Covid, etc.
Could you elaborate on this one? Did he give any medical advise ever?
What is it about COVID that causes people to just forget to think critically about what they read?
I listened to the Mr Beast and Joe Rogen podcast the other day. The best part about it was all the times Jimmy would simply say "I don't want to speculate about that, I don't know anything about it." It was glorious, a person not providing opinion on something because they don't know anything about the topic.
I have a suspicion that, like myself, they came to this conclusion after reading this extensive post from Slate Star Codex https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...
Nor strangers on the internet. Nor cable news networks.
Everyone agrees medical advice and treatment should be between a patient and their physician…unless you are Joe Rogan and one of the hosts of treatments your physician prescribes is Ivermectin. Then it seems it’s newsworthy and fair game to cherry-pick a single prescription therapy and disingenuously frame it as “Joe Rogan takes horse dewormer”, rather than Joe Rohan’s physician prescribes anti-parasitic therapy which studies show has potential anti-viral applications and early studies showed potential benefits for treating covid, and has otherwise is generally harmless to humans based on nearly a billion doses over decades.
It's a good theory but youre technically spouting misinformation by claiming it's hard fact.
This theory was developed by Scott Alexander from SSC in his ivermectin blog post.
Joe Rogan never claimed anyone should take medical advice from him.
He had Sanjay Gupta and Robert Malone both medical doctors with differing opinions.
This is how the media is supposed to work. It's not supposed to be just the people you agree with(that's propaganda).
During a deadly pandemic that's killing millions, it's perfectly fine to only present the information that will save lives.
Doubling down on blatant lies during a mass casualty event is exactly what spooked so many people and fueled the anti-vax movement.
"why would they lie? what else are they lying about? what are they hiding? whats their motive?"
misinformation thrives in a low trust environment. sure misinformation agents can sow distrust, but that should be seen as an opportunity by the institutions to set the record straight and gain trust, because if their ideas are really misinformation there should be no issue with having a conversation that demonstrates it one way or the other.
The exact wrong thing to do is double-down on lies, penalize, cancel, and censor free speech, and socially shame, berate, and hummiliate people that are just as scared, confused, and vulnerable as anyone else.
That's how you lose trust and how misinformation wins.
Your last statement relies on the assumption that the authorities actually know what information will save lives. I do not believe that is true.
I do believe in the reasoning and self preservation instincts of most people. The way these experts have acted shows very little respect for the sanctity of the individual.
It's perfectly fine to invite whoever you want on your show, unless you're Joe Rogan apparently?
Please stop with the fear based, hand wavy: 'millions have died!' to justify censorship and medical tyranny.
It's not that simple. This is:
* a novel vaccine developed with novel technology for a novel virus, where the effectiveness data has changed numerous times and breakthrough cases happen constantly and the FDA is fighting against requests to release the data that they used to approve it?
* A virus where the 'experts' completely ignored natural immunity and now years later are acknowledging that it may be as effective or more effective than the vaccine.
* A virus where every state and numerous countries have lifted all covid restrictions despite people dying in the THOUSANDS DAILY?
You should support the questioning of everything, even the earth being flat, and let the marketplace of ideas decide instead of ideological news media and medical dictators who think people are too stupid to think for themselves and/or are guided by whatever back alley deals they're making with big pharma.
And if none of this raises red flags for you then I worry that you're completely lost in the simplicity of ingroup/outgroup ideological propaganda.
Remember, Lobotomies won the Nobel prize.
edit: Apparently someone else? I've seen it on Twitter before Scott's blog, but I can't find the thread anymore.
edit: It was Avi Bitterman @AviBittMD. Also linked in the article.
It's been almost 5 months since I read the article.
Scott does attribute numerous references to the original postulators after looking again.
Via Scott's article plus numerous links:
" As several doctors and researchers have pointed out (h/t especially Avi Bitterman and David Boulware)"
* https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...
"Yes, the evidence suggests it but.." - "MISINFORMATION.
Theres been not a single study to show parasite Covid ivermectin connection.
Claiming it's fact instead of a theory is literal misinformation, even if it's a good theory.
The most bizarre part of this whole ordeal is how there was such a huge backlash to ivermectin usage as if it was some kind of a dangerous drug when that's clearly not the case. Even my layman's knowledge is enough to understand that much. If it's placebo at worst then why did the media try to demonize it so hard?
However, one of your comments shows the true problem. It's not FOR the media to decide. Murdoch may disagree but the media is just reflecting the establishment. You can argue about the effectiveness of said establishments because they're all dysfunctional, like any organization of any size, but to claim that we should just throw away scientific process in anathema to modern society.
There were multiple reports of people refusing treatment (and, of course, vaccines before that) because they wanted ivermectin.
Prior to that, people poisoning themselves with household products due to Trump's careless speculation on treatment.
It's ironic as those who don't trust vaccines seem to flock to the medical advice of those without any training.
The backlash has never been primarily about the dangers of ivermectin specifically, but the rejection of established protocol, scientific procedure and basically everything that humanity has moved forward with in the past century or so.
This is a trend I've observed in proponents of New Age alternative "medicine", way before COVID. They can simultaneously believe that Western medicine is "unproven" or a "hoax", and that doctors are "untrustworthy" and "big pharma" wants you to buy unproven stuff, and no amount of qualifications will convince them. Yet they have no trouble believing Bach flower remedies will cure anything, they follow homeopathy religiously, and it's enough evidence that some healer is the real deal because they heard someone at the grocery store say so and she seemed like such a nice person. Or some TV celebrity said so, and why would he lie?
Last I checked colloidal silver was being sold by a christian evangelist named Jim Bakker. Then there's chiropractors. Then there was the anti-vaxxers. Then the "vitamins will cure anything under the sun." Then there was things like "all-herbal fen phen" and other herbal products. Then there's that famous goop company led by a has been actress which has some questionable products, but sold to housewives. Oh and the entire premise of homeopathic medicine is a fraud.
And then FDA approved drugs like fen phen (Wyeth) which should not have made it to market some how did, and caused heart valve problems.
Hell, when you think about it, what the fuck exactly is holy water which is used by the Catholic church?
If you can dupe people into the premise that "Magical Things are Real", then it becomes easy to take their money away from them. And right now, it doesn't seem too hard to do these days.
For example, this article mentioning the research immediately should have a red flag for anyone that knows what the actual protocols that work/are being used for Ivermectin as 1) a preventative are, and 2) different protocol in hospital treatment - the moment you read that this trial only provided 3 days of Ivermectin once having symptoms (and where everyone involved has severe comorbidities - so improper protocol followed, inadequate dosing of Ivermectin will result in the worst outcome/non-effectiveness signal possible).
You think established protocol has been adequately applied or applied with integrity when it comes to the mRNA injections? Do you also think there's zero chance of influence or manipulation by for-profit medical industrial complex? Honest questions.
Edit to add: Ah yes, the lazy-dopamine rewarding downvote instead of engaging in discussion and critical thinking - the ideologues' wet dream and downfall of an intellectually evolving society.
This is not true.
https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-japan-ivermectinan...
Because anti-vaxxers pitched it as an alternative to vaccination, and many people listened.
Second, a viable alternative to vaccination wouldn't be a bad thing. But Ivermectin is not that. So suggesting that it is is a bad thing.
And no one is suggesting you accept vaccines as "the only way forward". Pfizer is developing a treatment for after you've caught COVID. Work is being done in that direction. Currently, vaccines are your best safety measure. That's been borne out by the data available. Any way you look at it.
You do not understand vaccines. It's incredible to me that we still have to be explaining this more than two years into the pandemic, but vaccines are not magical fixes. The COVID-19 vaccine exists to strongly reduce your symptoms in case of infection. The effect does not stay at full efficacy forever and as new strains develop over time they may become less protective still.
> Almost make me feel like they're scared of someone finding a better way out of this.
Yeah, obviously there's a giant conspiracy going on to prevent you from finding out about the magical solution to COVID-19. Can't possibly be that your understanding of how stuff works is lacking.
But pitching Ivermectin as an alternative to vaccination is bad because Ivermectin does not work and the vaccines work very well.
What's wrong with booster shots? I'm going through tick-borne encephalitis vaccination course right now, and it's 3 shots in the first 6 months, fourth shot after 3 years, and then a shot every 5 years. I also take an influenza booster annually. I'll a COVID one to the list too. Because it works!
Can you elaborate? Why does the number of booster shots tell you anything about the right way to treat this pandemic? I honestly don't follow.
It's a pretty good way to get rid of parasites, but the association with COVID caused a lot of problems.
The part "b)" about horse dewormer overdoses have been confirmed to be fake news long ago so I think don't need to dwell on that too much. I still don't know whether ivermectin is effective or not though. If it's not then I still don't understand what's the big deal. Why does it have to be smeared so hard.
And this whole "c)" thing. That's the most disturbing part to me. That's basically like religious fundamentalism to me. I just can't wrap my head around it. Why should vaccination be the only acceptable way to treat COVID and that we shouldn't even consider the alternatives as if they were some kind of heresies? I just don't understand. To me it seems like the vaccine fundamentalists are more interested in obedience than science. In science we need opposing views and this obviously means that some of those views will be proven to be false, but if you try to effectively SUPPRESS those opposing views then you can't call it science anymore. Also, there's always a good chance that the mainstream view can be false. I mean, just like with religions but that's one of those worm cans that only make people mad if we pop it open.
My whole life I was taught that trying to cure seasonal flu with vaccine is silly because the flu mutates too fast and it just leads to an endless loop of seasonal vaccines. Then covid happens and suddenly I should forget everything I knew about vaccines even though with the talk about all these booster shots it only makes it seems like the old knowledge makes more sense than this new knowledge. My brain refuses to accept this nonsense, I can't help it.
> Why should vaccination be the only acceptable way to treat COVID
It's not a treatment. Vaccines are prevention. We have treatments. Ivermectin isn't one of them.
> In science we need opposing views
That sounds so childish. We don't need "views" in science. We need results that people can trust.
You have my permission to try and prove ivermectin is effective. So far everyone trying has failed. That's not a view. It's fact.
> trying to cure seasonal flu with vaccine is silly
It's not. We can get rid of seasonal flu if we try hard enough.
> To me it seems like the vaccine fundamentalists are more interested in obedience than science.
"vaccine fundamentalists" suggests to me a complete disingenuous argument.
We know how to prevent covid. We know how to eradicate covid. We have watched countries do just that. Even if we don't do the things those places do, we can reduce the death count here.
But with small-minded attitudes like yours, that simply is never going to happen.
You've been taught wrong. First, the vaccines don't "cure" flu and nobody claims they do. Second, in many countries they are recommended yearly for people at risk, like elderly people.
It's true flu has newer strains each year and the vaccine must be changed, but the rest of what you were taught was not correct.
If you compensate for the body weight and ensure that the gel agent the animal medicine comes in doesn't have any adverse effects on the human body (it probably doesn't) then consuming animal medicine can be an excellent way to treat parasitic infections if you're awfully poor and don't qualify for any insurance. Consuming any chemical not made for human consumption is dangerous, but if you don't have another option, it's better than doing nothing.
People ridicule the whole horse dewormer story, but it's no secret that people around the world have turned to animal medicine out of necessity due to prices of medication.
[0] https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)32506-6/ful...
Also no effect, as show by an appropriate study, but that didn't stop a friend of a friend from trying to obtain it instead of going to a doctor. He failed and eventually succumbed to the illness.
While the case for Ivermectin has been weakened recently, there still seems a significant body of evidence to suggest that it does work.
Many (not discredited) trials show efficacy and there is a significant observational correlation between population mass consumption of Ivermectin and better results with Covid. There are also many doctors that swear by it's efficacy from their experience.
Trials aren't perfect. The drug companies have been manipulating trial data for decades to prove efficacy when there wasn't, it probably can be done the other way as well. And the incentive is there with such a politicized drug.
That doesn't sound like any drug company in America.
It totally makes sense from pharma to prevent discovery of a functioning drug because they found a better cash cow - vaccines.
If someone else has a doctor that prescribes it to them, and a pharmacy that fills the prescription, that should not be a problem, right?
It's not like they are telling people they have to take ivermectin against their will.
What am I missing?
Talking about ivermectin is almost always done in the context of political discourse, and political discourse is a shitshow
In this particular case, (some) advocates for ivermectin promoted it as a miracle drug alternative to getting vaccinated, which became tied at the hip to anti-vaccine ideology, which is tied to particular political ideologies
So ivermectin became a subset of a larger political debate, wielded as a weapon to show that your opponents are anti science (either because it’s effective and the other side won’t admit it because they’re tied to vax; or it’s ineffective and the other side won’t admit it because they’re tied to antivaxx)
If this weren’t true nobody would have ever cared for or against ivermectin
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.
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.
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?
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?"
24 hours!? How is that reasonable at all?
It's worth pointing out, the study - intentionally? - offers no insights on deaths rates or length of hospital stay, etc.
The scope as is is: Test positive. Receive a treatment. To hospital or not to hospital? But why stop there?
In fact, as is, you can flip it over and say placebos are just as effective as Ivermectin, as there's no mention of a no treatment at all control. Or did I miss that?
In any case, helpful. But apparently flawed.
which got very different results
When studying the effects of invermectin, at least checking for worms in the patients' feces would have been needed.
Ivermectin currently sits at an average efficacy of 65% after 81 studies.
So in reality, this study that WSJ cites should be added to the pool of efficacy, and not used to completely debunk Ivermectin.
https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/05/09/update-on-ivermect...
- Lack of preparation.
- Not enough resources allocated to research.
- Too much reliance on Pharma and particularly Vaccine producing companies.
The best research is still done mostly via foundations or private funding. Some of the most interesting work is still ongoing.
At the UK Recovery Study: https://www.recoverytrial.net/
They are investigating several treatments including Ivermectin. Results so far here:
https://www.recoverytrial.net/results
Also the PRINCIPLE Study is investigating Ivermectin with no published results yet. They were able to publish some results for other treatments already.
Principle Results:
https://www.principletrial.org/results
The EU also has EU-Response initiative with Study results here:
> - Not enough resources allocated to research.
How do you prepare for something that you don't know is going to happen? How would you have prepared for a major coronavirus outbreak before covid, for example?
Some might even argue that it's precisely because of the research done in preparation for a new pandemic, which included studying novel coronaviruses using something that Fauci says was definitely not gain-of-function research, that we got this particular one in the first place :-)
> - Too much reliance on Pharma and particularly Vaccine producing companies.
Yeah, I think this is the mainstream scientific orthodoxy now. But then, it probably makes the most sense in terms of how we understand the human body works. What would you have done differently — reallocated the resources to study drug repurposing?
The pandemic was predicted many years in advance, by many people: https://www.businessinsider.com/people-who-seemingly-predict...
The fact it was a coronavirus coming over from animals was also highly predictable, given SARS and MERS. There is a fantastic book called Spillover by David Quammen which lays all this out and explains why it was virtually guaranteed to happen.
Statistical extrapolation and lessons from previous disasters. We don't know when a flood will happen, but we know what a floodplain looks like.
> How would you have prepared for a major coronavirus outbreak before covid, for example?
Execute on the preparatory plans generated after H1N1, as one example.
You can't really target a specific pathogen directly ahead of time, but for example, monitoring can buy weeks of time to deal with infections that are doubling in days.
Ensuring that the public is reasonably skilled in thinking, journalists are skilled in both thinking and telling the truth, people are reasonable satisfied with their relative lot in life (minimize wealth inequality, etc) lest they have something to get revenge for any way they can, etc would all have gone a long way toward minimizing the problems we experienced during covid.
Unfortunately, we didn't do any of these things, and now people are even angrier.
Don’t we always prepare for something we don’t know is going to happen? In the case of Covid, it was actually being developed by humans in labs that were likely carelessly released into the world. Perhaps preparing to not develop and release dangerous pathogens is a start.
- Make sure Schools, Companies, Public Institutions have to go once a year, through an audited test trial. Demonstrate they can run their business with no personal physical contact and they can manage the appearance of a Biohazard level 4 virus.
- For companies delivering physical good rehearse you procedures for delivery product without physical contact.
- Make sure the each Country has stocks of drinkable water and food supplies for 1/2 years
- Each Country should make sure they have enough medical equipment for first response teams to handle up to Biohazard level 4 virus.
- Be ready to separate your medical care between institutions providing regular medical care and choose hospitals or field hospitals that will handle infected patients.
- Identify the Research groups and Specialists able to work with priority on medical research and don't outsource the research to commercial vaccine producers. A scientific research group at an University like Oxford is an acceptable team, Pfizer is not.
- Discuss the legal implications of medical mandates and open a public discussion of what measures will be acceptable, and what measures will be too much. Don't use a pandemic as an excuse to massage some groups authoritarian inclinations.
- Create a public dashboard of public acceptable metrics that measure each Country preparedness for a pandemic or by that measure, for other natural disasters.
- Make an effort to collect worldwide samples that can be use to research still unknown virus.
- Do not engage in ethically challenging, gain of function research ;-)
- Use 0.01% tax on corporate revenue ( not profit ;-) to budget a disaster fund.
- Could go but would say for now would say, update this one doc from 2007... https://www.humanitarianresponse.info/sites/www.humanitarian...
So my question is, POST Pandemic ( if we can already say that), which government, has currently in place any initiative that looks remotely like any of the points above?
It’s a good comment re reducing the parasite load to improve health, but as others pointed out that’s not common in the countries initially hit by covid. Once politics and hearsay took over, logical discussion ended. For any viral infection, the recourse is vaccination, antivirals and reducing the symptoms. The rise of mAB meant that the effect of vaccination could be immediately applied, which was a new improvement for treatment. Vaccines and antivirals take time to develop, mAB require survivors and they’re all “foreign substances and/or proteins”. The woo and political folks don’t want that.
The world is very lucky covid was much closer to the flu than Ebola. Unless the “oh, sh*t” response would have broken through and kept people rational. And keep in mind that “a really strong immune system” often leads to a cytokine storm that burns out the lungs.
