Banning academics from talking on a platform is a high-risk strategy. It was always possible YouTube would do more harm than good implementing their stupid policy.
Note that their ban might be taking out anyone who wants to talk about Ivermectin neutrally or negatively because of the risk of being censored. It is possible (probable, even) that YouTube is now presenting a biased sample of videos sampled only from people who believe strongly enough in the drug to try and circumvent the ban.
My guess is that if Ivermectin turns out to be useless despite the evidence, a lot of the buzz I've heard will have been generated by YouTube squelching debate meaning that only the pro- side even attempts to get the message out on social media. Because I've only heard of wall-to-wall positive coverage on YouTube and I don't trust the consistency.
Where else can it be discussed? No major media would allow it on their networks for fear of the cancel mobs coming with torches and pitchforks.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=ivermectin&cond=...
[1] This should mean an RCT, but I haven't time to read through each and check they are
The results show that there might be something there, but it’s not a miracle cure.
The conspiracy angles are coming from those who have been misled into thinking it has been more successful than it really has been, which leads to confusion about why it’s not being used everywhere.
No, the "conspiracy angles" are coming from people who have seen youtube videos and HN posts disappearing just for discussing it.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/why-has-ivermectin-become-a-di...
> One of the challenges of the pandemic period is the degree to which science has become intertwined with politics. Arguments about the efficacy of mask use or ventilators, or the viability of repurposed drugs like hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, or even the pandemic’s origins, were quashed from the jump in the American commercial press, which committed itself to a regime of simplified insta-takes made opposite to Donald Trump’s comments. With a few exceptions, Internet censors generally tracked with this conventional wisdom, which had the effect of moving conspiracy theories and real scientific debates alike far underground.
Refer also to the Solomon Asch conformity experiment which occurred during a previous episode of cancel culture called "McCarthyism".
There are other theories. Some people have supposed that the motivations have to do with the money that big pharma would lose if they couldn't sell their vaccines because a safe and effective alternative was already available and proven, and therefore the conditions of the emergency use authorizations for the vaccines would become void. But nobody has any smoking gun evidence here that I'm aware of, it's just a plausible motivation.
Some people might believe so strongly that vaccines are the only possible savior of humanity that anything which detracts from the success of the vaccine campaign will be devastating, and so they do what they can to shut it down. Bret argues this is illogical if Ivermectin works because all forms of immunity work together to build herd immunity. But logic is unfortunately lost on far too many people.
More far fetched ideas include influence campaigns from foreign powers who aim to see America defeated. If they can influence the right people in the right way at the right time, they might be able to prolong the pandemic in America.
I'm sure there are even more hypotheses as to why such censorship is being attempted.
During COVID times, scientists have become political. Many scientific arguments were not written about in the American media, because journalists assumed that the truth was the opposite of whatever Donald Trump was saying. Tech firms mostly did the same thing. This means discussion of conspiracy theories and real scientific debates have both been suppressed, and now take place "underground" i.e. in non-mainstream forums.
Ivermectin works by interrupting nerve function of helminths(parasites). covid is a virus, not a multicellular organism with nerves.
I'm not saying ivermectin is useless, but why it would work for covid doesn't make sense (yet at least). Maybe it has some other mechanism to slow down covid that isn't fully understood.
This is the way many treatments work. For example, hydroxychloroquine was a treatment for malaria, but doctors found that some patients with autoimmune disease had their symptoms lessened or eliminated as they were treated for malaria.
So, it has become a milder treatment for autoimmune disease in some cases. The scientific community doesn't 100% understand why it's effective for autoimmune disease, but there you go. It seems to work in many cases.
I say this not as an expert, but as someone who has taken it and it has worked for me. I don't care that the mechanism is unexplained.
The mechanism by which Ivermectin works does make sense, and has been well-established. Look up any of the many binding studies on pubmed for example.
Regardless of this, the results of the great many RCT's speak for themselves.
I don't have a reference for this but I recently read it was basically used on every tested-positive case with symptoms in Mexico City, with significantly improved results.
https://www.fda.gov/media/97321/download#page12
Go to page 12 in the PDF (document page 8) then read section D.
Pharma companies could not distribute experimental treatments unless they lied to us about existing useful drugs. Reminder:
Pfizer: Phase 3 trial estimated end date 2023 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04368728
Moderna: estimated end date 2022 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04470427
Johnson & Johnson (it’s actually a Janssen Product which is a subsidiary of J&J): estimated end date 2023 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04505722
AstraZeneca: estimated end date 2023 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04516746
* The quoted 95% etc. numbers are in terms of Relative Risk (ie, the ratio of attack rates with and without a vaccine—which is expressed as 1–RR) * These numbers are essentially a reported efficacy and useless to compare between studies held under different conditions.
With this in mind, from the lancet article linked above:
> However, RRR should be seen against the background risk of being infected and becoming ill with COVID-19, which varies between populations and over time. Although the RRR considers only participants who could benefit from the vaccine, the absolute risk reduction (ARR), which is the difference between attack rates with and without a vaccine, considers the whole population.
>__ARRs tend to be ignored because they give a much less impressive effect size than RRRs: 1.3% for the AstraZeneca–Oxford, 1.2% for the Moderna–NIH, 1.2% for the J&J, 0.93% for the Gamaleya, and 0.84% for the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccines.__
This is an odd statement. Why would that be the reason to ignore it? ARR is extremely specific to a time frame and location.
Without wide deployment of vaccines, almost everyone would eventually naturally catch the coronavirus at some point in the next several years. As vaccines are deployed, the risk reduces since vaccines reduce the R0 of the virus in that population. Any calculation of ARR would be highly speculative and have to include models about how widely the vaccine would be deployed, the transmissibility and mutation of the virus, and the RRR of the vaccine itself, as well as being stated only for a specific timeframe and location.
Given all this it’s obvious why RRR is the typically reported number and the one that makes sense to use in discussions.
There is nothing fake about what I said. It’s simply the common sense way to think about the effectiveness of a vaccine.
According to your reasoning the polio and smallpox vaccines are 0% effective because those viruses have been eradicated in the USA currently.
You can't know how efficient a vaccine is without a trial. You need an authorization first to do that. But you wouldn't get an authorization if something exists, even "only" 70% better, because that 70% would make Covid less lethal than the yearly flu.
Hence 70% is enough to block emergency vaccines trial authorization.
This is what is extremely disturbing. This result of the control of information occurring in our society.
What's more, it is not just the literal control, but the social conditioning. Within the group of those who have known for a long time, there is a reluctance to share that with anyone else as society will apply any number of taboo labels to such individuals to make them outcasts.
And FWIW, I have seen many ivermectin articles on HN (check my past comments), and all seem to say roughly the same thing, so they get rather annoying in my feed at this point.
It is not about the validity, it is that you can not even evaluate that which you have not heard.
The level of censorship varies greatly by media and platform.
To the other poster, my argument was supposed to be obvious: it was intended to be a simplified example to elucidate concerns by comparison.
> ....there hadn't been a randomized trial the drug
You don't see the contradiction here?
Edit: because it must be made 100% obvious, clinical trial results are the definition of evidence in medical science.
Doctors don't need permission for off-label use. It's just not a thing. We're in strange territory where doctors (professionals) have been demoted to nurses and they can't profess.
So I don't see how your argument contradicts the one you are replying which says there is no an overwhelming amount of evidence for ivermectin as a good treatment for COVID.
I am also not against being used by doctors who have the time for trying it and seeing if works. As we don't have a wide available treatment which we know for sure (with a high probability) that will cure COVID then maybe trying various scenarios could be a way to cure more people. But we have to take into consideration that giving one treatment means not giving other treatments so it is not an easy choice.
What the hell are you trying to say? That doctors treating patients observations can be dismissed because they don't talk the academic language or their results don't follow academic guidelines?
There is more to medicine than just clinical trials.
Many different things can count as evidence, even if they are not up to your academic standard. Doctors observations, population-level improvements, and studies of different cohorts.
There are levels of evidence, there is strong evidence based on reports of observable ivermectin benefit to profylaxis and some benefit in treatmeant of early infections.
I post this because I think it's the exception that proves the rule. Dr. Kyle-Sidell is a physician of great perception and insight. For every one of him, there are no doubt hundreds of "hydroxychloroquine doctors" who peddle bullshit without scientific basis to the harm of their patients. But the existence of doctors like him does boost the "maverick doctor bucking the institution" narrative.
[1]: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/928156
[2]: https://elemental.medium.com/how-one-covid-19-doctor-became-...
They banned an interview with the inventor of mRNA vaccine tech for saying it might be dangerous and needs more caution and study.
as of today, the mechanism that made HCQ work has been explained scientifically, right? What is your bias regarding this?
Now, that the mechanism is better understood, the doctor who recommended HCQ has now moved on to a better suggestion utilizating the same mechanism.
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2021/01/27/does-lockdown-work-...
Under the heading "The damage inflicted by medical ideas"
Or you know nothing about medical science.
Observational trials, natural experiments, etc. all constitute evidence.
As well, there have been over 25 RCTs performed globally on Ivermectin to date.
The scientific method is a process. Evidence is just one part of the bigger picture.
I doesn't help at all. I have a coworker who as using ivermectin as prophylactic and went to ICU (he is recovering now).
That you have a friend that took it and went to the ICU is similarly meaningless. What dosage did he take? What other predispositions did he have? How badly was he exposed? What other treatments were used? Did he keep taking it throughout, or not? You say he's recovering now, would he have died without it, then?
Eg, one of the most recent peer-reviewed meta-studies, whose authors include advisors to the WHO, just published in the Journal of American Therapeutics:
https://journals.lww.com/americantherapeutics/Abstract/9000/...
C19ivermectin.... c19study... all the same psyops.
there were no BANS on any of these medicines because of the pandemic. think about vaccines..
This is an anecdote, and it is dangerous to generalize from it. I have several family members who seemed to respond well to Ivermectin, and recovered better than their initial condition would have indicated.
MAYBE BEER IS THE MEDICIN. BIG PHARMA IS HIDING FROM US.
Banning it from the top is not going to help most people.
Shall we ban water? Sometimes people don't dose that correctly either, and drown.
What a dangerous substance!
Let’s take vaccines. Covid itself has a risk of harm of around 1:100 for older age groups of requiring hospitalisation. Risk of harm for vaccines is established at around 1:200,000.
Ivermectin? There is no good data on the therapeutic index however it is a toxic substance with a low therapeutic index and a narrow therapeutic window.
The sensible thing given the available data is to encourage vaccination. Barring that, masks and social distancing. And of course there are places where both there is no vaccine supply, and social distancing is economically in feasible. Is this a use case for ivermectin? Most data says no because establishing TI and TW and ensuring adequate safety of dosing is logistically about as difficult as maintaining social distancing.
Good chat
If you look at any vaccine adverse events reporting system, you do indeed find the 1:200,000 number - as that's indeed where it came from - for all ~70 previous vaccines on the schedule (and adjusted for under-reporting - the raw numbers in the systems are in the 1 in millions in most cases).
The COVID-19 vaccines however, unadjusted, are in the low 1 in 10,000's.
Check any reporting system independent of country/region, you'll find the same massive safety disparity between COVID-19 vaccines and all other vaccines being tracked.
So, basically everything you've said is wrong.
https://www.medsafe.govt.nz/COVID-19/vaccine-report-overview...
That point being addressed, I would expect the elderly to have a lot more background adverse events, such as death. If we live 28835 days on average, 15 people in this vaccinated group are expected to die every day from non-vaccine causes, and heavily weighted towards the elderly. But I'm not even seeing death as a side-effect, and the number of adverse events among the elderly (who got the vaccine first and have had the lions share of vaccine administration) is actually less than among younger groups. This perplexes me and if anyone thinks they know the answer to this riddle, please share.
[Oh wait... there aren't as many elderly people. hits head]
But here too the reporting is open to anyone, and is voluntary. So chances of large under reporting is present here as well. Which is a bit scary..
I fucking love HN - downvoting valid questions for criteria.
Here's a breakdown of what we've learned: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/07/iv...
Here's the latest bad news: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/04/science/coronavirus-iverm...
It was odd a week ago to see some of the media suddenly decide to report on one of these [2], like the "HCQ Bad!" blinders had finally been removed.
[2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9671029/Hydroxychlo...
Malone, Weinstein, Kory and al. were banned for two videos made one and two weeks ago talking among other this of this meta study.
That's hardly spreading disinformation, or am I wrong somehow ?
Several point of comparison :
Improvements with Ivermetcin were 76% for early treatment, 46% for late treatments, 85% for Prophylaxis for a 70% average over almost 19K patients. Ivermetcin was forbiden for Covid use in several western countries, and it's distribution forbidden to retail pharmacists (Switzerland is one).
Budesonide and Remdesivir were authorized with respectively averages of 17% and 31% improvement only over 3.5K patients, and it's use promoted everywhere as the miracle drug.
Dr. Raoult's initial HCQ announcement in early February was for 22 cases - very anecdotal and ridiculously insufficient. Later on, by the end of 2020 the hospital he's directing covering the southern third of France had treated 40K+ cases, with broadly similar results. We still hear the same "HCQ was debunked", somehow, and HCQ is still forbiden for Covid use in several countries.
I’ve included every double-blind randomized placebo-controlled trial I could find of ivermectin as a treatment for covid. Using only double-blind placebo-controlled trials means that only the highest quality studies are included in this meta-analysis, which minimizes the risk of biases messing up the results as far as possible. In order to be included, a study also had to provide mortality data, since the goal of the meta-analysis is to see if there is any difference in mortality .... What we see is a 62% reduction in the relative risk of dying among covid patients treated with ivermectin. That would mean that ivermectin prevents roughly three out of five covid deaths. The reduction is statistically significant (p-value 0,004). In other words, the weight of evidence supporting ivermectin continues to pile up. It is now far stronger than the evidence that led to widespred use of remdesivir earlier in the pandemic, and the effect is much larger and more important (remdesivir was only ever shown to marginally decrease length of hospital stay, it was never shown to have any effect on risk of dying).
I understand why pharmaceutical companies don’t like ivermectin. It’s a cheap generic drug. Even Merck, the company that invented ivermectin, is doing it’s best to destroy the drug’s reputation at the moment. This can only be explained by the fact that Merck is currently developing two expensive new covid drugs, and doesn’t want an off-patent drug, which it can no longer make any profit from, competing with them.
Still, the many pieces of non-randomized evidence can still clearly point towards this drugs efficacy. The sudden drop in Covid cases in India as the clearest indicator to me.
See: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2777389
Also similar non-randomized evidence was strongly suggesting that hydroxychloroquine was very effective (e.g. Raoult in France) - until proper randomized trials found it was not effective at all.
So you really can't rely on such evidence. That someone gets better after they got some drug doesn't automatically mean they got better because of the drug. In the absence of controls for other factors (other drugs, spontaneous recovery on their own, etc.) it only means that the drug didn't make their affliction worse.
Not everything has to be immediately a conspiracy of big pharma (or worse).
The case for ivermectin is not a slam dunk. But it's definitely surpassed the low bar that HCQ set. There is at least quite a lot of suggestive correlation without trivially obvious other explanations, and the data set isn't just "a few people non-randomly selected".
To my non expert opinion the ivermectin case seems at least plausible, whereas HCQ was clearly and obviously nonsense. Still, I'm skeptical, partly precisely because there still hasn't been a slam dunk study and because quite a few proponents seem to have a worryingly conspiratorial view of the world. Stuff like assuming it's not being pushed because it's off patent screams conspiratorial thinking to me, and you hear that quite a lot. And that's a warning sign, because there are quite a lot of interested parties here that really don't care about some pharmaceutical companies profit, and in any case - just because they don't fund it doesn't mean they'll go all Machiavellian and intentionally prolong the pandemic just to sell a future drug, and actually get away with it to boot. At best, the lack of exclusivity might explain why there isn't a specific corporate backer for this research, but it doesn't explain why all of the governments and universities and hospitals etc aren't finding convincing data. So when people see a conspiracy here, I wonder how rationally they're looking at the evidence for Ivermectin, too - and at the end of the day, I'm just a random worried person without the capacity to deeply understand every single relevant bit of data, so I need to be able to find trustworthy sources and research. People that see conspiracies everywhere (without data and without real reason) don't inspire great trust in their analyses.
Still, it's hard to resist the lure of the cheap and affordable silver bullet...
It was also seriously flawed - a large percentage of the placebo group was self-medicating using Ivermectin, they mixed up the treatment and placebo group, and they switched the primary outcome in the middle of the trial. That trial still showed improvement, but it didn't reach statistical significance.
"[López-Medina] has many issues. The primary outcome was changed mid-trial from clinical deterioration to complete resolution of symptoms including "not hospitalized and no limitation of activities" as a negative outcome. Critically, temporary side effects of a successful treatment may be considered as a negative outcome, which could result in falsely concluding that the treatment is not effective. Such an outcome is also not very meaningful in terms of assessing how treatment affects the incidence of serious outcomes. With the low risk patient population in this study, there is also little room for improvement - 58% recovered within the first 2 days to "not hospitalized and no limitation of activities" or better. There was only one death (in the control arm). This study also gave ivermectin to the control arm for 38 patients and it is unknown if the full extent of the error was identified, or if there were additional undiscovered errors. The side effect data reported in this trial raises major concerns, with more side effects reported in the placebo arm, suggesting that more placebo patients may have received treatment. Ivermectin was widely used in the population and available OTC at the time of the study. The study protocol allows other treatments but does not report on usage. The name of the study drug was concealed by refering to it as "D11AX22". The presentation of this study also appears to be significantly biased. While all outcomes show a benefit for ivermectin, the abstract fails to mention that much larger benefits are seen for serious outcomes, including the original primary outcome, and that the reason for not reaching statistical signficance is the low number of events in a low risk population where most recover quickly without treatment."
This prompted an open letter from over 170 physicians concluding that the study is fatally flawed.
This also highlights the risk of only relying on a small number of large RCTs, instead of looking at the totality of evidence.
I does not help at all. (I wish it was a valid treatment).
The anti-science block is growing, and they are loud. If they continue to grow it could be an even greater threat to humanity than COVID-19. Science is attempting to fight against it by retreating to a science-only corner, for better or for worse.
This is kind of a corollary to the issues with rejecting conspiracies - when we reject a supposed conspiracy, due to lack of evidence, that can easily come across as claiming the conspiratorial claim is outright false - but in a sea of such claims, some then turn out to have at least a kernel of truth, which then turns into a big gotcha moment: "see, they're repressing us, we were right all along!"
So while I understand the idea of maintaining trust by not backing anything uncertain, I'm not sure it's the right call. Maybe communicating that uncertainty is better, and even communicating hints and possibilities - instead of trying to control the narrative but thereby ceding the ground to nutjobs until certainty arrives, often granting them considerable prestige if they guess sort of correctly ahead of time.
But that's already happened with vaccines. A bit late to worry about that now.
What's the alleged connection here? Are you claiming that some non-trivial number of patients in India were treated with this? How many, and at what point after being infected? And just how did the treatment affect the case numbers? Generally you'd expect the vast majority of secondary infections to happen before the diagnosis, not after, so a treatment seems totally irrelevant to the case numbers.
https://www.thedesertreview.com/news/national/ivermectin-obl...
Yes, example from two states.
https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/lucknow/uttar-prade...
https://www.news18.com/news/india/mortality-rate-much-lower-...
The testimony video in this page cites examples in many other countries https://covid19criticalcare.com/
To reduce R by a factor of 2 by the use of a prophylactic drug, you'd need to have half of the population on a regime of the drug. It seems pretty obvious that did not happen if this kind of reporting is the most impactful there is. Just think of the logistics of trying to do that! India has a population of 1.4 billion.
On the other hand, if they only gave the snakeoil to e.g. a single digit number of millions of people the reduction in the number of infections would be imperceptible.
I think it is safe to suppose they or the associated medical authorities have observed a big enough benefit before making that claim.
But no, no concrete numbers, as I think there was not much of tracking the number of patients who were given the drug. May be it is because such numbers are not much of a value in terms of research data due to lack of controls.
Nah that's just confirmation bias and rumors. It wasn't effective at all, otherwise India wouldn't have taken it off the recommended drugs list.
Normally authorities are afraid to go against W.H.O recommendations, because if it didn't work out, it would be hard to justify it on the basis of local observations alone, at least on paper.
But the important thing is that some states still did it, which might indicate there was very observable benefit.
Spikes abated all over the world, more than once in most countries, without ivermectin.
https://ascopost.com/issues/june-10-2014/randomized-trials-v...
The primary difference between a randomized controlled trial and meta-analysis is that the former “provide the highest level of evidence because they contain the least amount of bias. Randomized controlled trials reduce bias, while meta-analyses increase bias."
This Hacker News story is about a recent meta-analysis. But an actual randomized control trial of Ivermectin in March (on 476 patients) found the duration of symptoms on treated and untreated patients "was not significantly different."
I'm not anywhere near an expert, but two things stood out to me reading this study. First, time to recover in the ivermectin group was 10 days versus 12 in the placebo. The paper calls this "not significant" but it's not clear to me whether that's statistically not significant, and if so, why wouldn't it be, or if knocking two days off recovery isn't that meaningful. The other thing I noticed reading it was that only one person out of 400 died and that person was in the placebo group.
I think the Brett Weinstein response would be something like -
A. Ivermectin's best benefit is as a prophylactic not a treatment.
B. Ivermectin should be administered as early after onset as possible to treat, whereas here there was some delay to get people organized, enrolled in trial, etc.
C. It's hard to measure effect when the disease is mild.
Because you only gave the average time of recovery but not the standard deviation.
I did see the innerquartile range and it was the same for both the ivermectin group and the placebo. To me that suggests that variation in outcomes is probably similar between the two groups.
"hazard ratio for resolution of symptoms, 1.07 [95% CI, 0.87 to 1.32]"
So statistically, those on ivermectin recovered 1.07 times as quickly as those on placebo, but the uncertainty bounds are from 0.87 times as fact to 1.32 times as fast.
Please see this
Generally speaking, in evidence-based medicine drugs and vaccines are not recommended based on incomplete statistics or hunches.
OTOH there was a lot of hype around remdesivir, despite it being barely effective. Pharma is really a weird world
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/coronavirus-drug-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexamethasone
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RECOVERY_Trial
[3] "A cheap and widely available drug can help save the lives[...]" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53061281
That's at least my understanding based on the proposed systemic problem in FDAs.
Conversely, in this proposed problem, it's said that ivermectin (and others) are only effective when used in the early stage or even prophylactic. Being already fully licensed medications, that could put the issuance of an EUA for vaccines or Remdesivir in jeopardy.
Remdesevir is fully approved in the US.
What's the explanation for why dexamethasone was allowed but ivermectin is being suppressed?
During that time gather data for this use was begun and it's taken this long to gather enough, over enough time, to prove its efficacy according to the standards required.
Dozens of (mostly Phase 2 and 2/3 combined) ivermectin trials as a Covid therapeutic are ongoing, no one has stamped them out.
Edit: sorry for the wrong position in the thread. Should have gone to the parent post.
The worrying split here is on HN I get to read 15-study meta-analysis posted by Steph C, int13 Labs CEO.
On YouTube, a PHD holder in a medical field discussing the same 15 study meta-anlysis might expect to have their video pulled.
It is quite worrying that the powers-that-be at YouTube are taking this radically anti-speech approach. It isn't like studies posted on HN are automatically good and on YouTube automatically bad. The YouTubers are probably more qualified to bring attention to studies.
Anyway, the original statement was that there are no trials - this in a comment on a meta-analysis.
That's quite an elitist statement. My belief is that a majority of the people that view videos of technical discussions have the capability to understand the context. The ones that do not grasp the subject are far more unlikely to watch the video.
Where you see "radical anti-sperch approach" I see a vestigial amount of false positives within a constant stream of crackpot and outright insane, anti-infellectual fearmongering-fueled conspiracy theories.
And let's face it: since when do appeals to authority pass off as a reliable indicator that the author is not a crackpot conspiracy theorist? I mean, during the past year the world had to endure a good share of people abusing their medical licenses to peddle bullshit conspiracy theories.
It may work, but that's why you get recommendations for "vaccine made me magnetic" and other garbage like that whenever you search for videos.
It's the same group that was pushing hydroxychloroquine as a miracle drug
What is their vested interest in a generic, cheap, decades old, off patent drug? Vested interests tend to be in new, patented treatments. That's where big pharma profit is. So let's try a rephrase: Many people pushing patented treatments have a vested interest in proving off patent alternatives are unnecessary.
For example, here's Merck warning against using Ivermectin for Covid-19:
https://www.merck.com/news/merck-statement-on-ivermectin-use...
Then a few months later, "Merck Announces Supply Agreement with U.S. Government for Molnupiravir, an Investigational Oral Antiviral Candidate for Treatment of Mild to Moderate COVID-19"
https://www.merck.com/news/merck-announces-supply-agreement-...
And so far we do not have any. So until then this story is pushed way further than it has any right to. Weinstein thrives on the censorship, but the fact of the matter is that there simply is no proven efficacy and until then this has no business being promoted to a mainstream audience who might get themselves into a lot of trouble, or who might forego getting vaccinated.
If ivermectin was authorized as a viable treatment the vaccines receiving emergency use authorisation wouldn't have been possible. There were and still are billions on the line.
Same as in coding, you eventually reach a point where you learn that when in doubt, you must read the source.
None of them are as effective as Ivermectin (allegedly). It is only logical that efficacy is also important.
Any other treatment is basically unnecessary at this point because COVID deaths in vaccinated people are less than 1 in a million.
That's why anti-vaxxers are so vested in other treatments. It's the only way they can rationalize not getting vaccinated
Vaccines and covid are going to come back every year for sure.
if I was so worried about such a thing i might start to think maybe I was being manipulated to fear something that didnt exist.
Nobody has implemented vaccine passports. And nobody will.
But the idea of a treatment even close to effective as a vaccine is attractive to those that believe that in such magical thinking
Ivermectin might be cheap but the vaccine is literally free if you're in the US. There's zero reason to not get it, and zero reason to hang onto hope that alternatives will work. We already have an extremely effective treatment, so effective it can wipe of the virus entirely, and its totally free.
Our government under Trump bought the vaccine en masse for a few dollars a dose. Those that refuse such a miracle treatment when the rest of the world dies of COVID are a stain on America's sheen
New York's Excelsior Pass is a vaccine passport, and has been called such by New York Times and other sources.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/nyregion/excelsior-pass-v...
https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/topstories/new-york-s-excels...
The line of reasoning hinges on the vaccines being "experimental" and only being distributed under an Emergency Use Authorization, as opposed to a full approval. The FDA policies for EUA indicate they're only to be used when there is no adequate, approved, and available alternative. This makes a lot of sense - if (let's say) someone comes up with a new flu vaccine (an mRNA one, to continue this example, as that would be kinda exciting), you really want it to go through the full approval process instead of EUA, even if it is better. That's because we have plenty of good, approved flu vaccines.
So, the theory goes, if we had an approved treatment for Covid, then the EUA for the vaccines would be illegal. And so that creates incentives for the pharmaceutical companies to suppress a miracle cure like (they claim) ivermectin.
To anybody with the capacity for rational thought, this is obviously bullshit. We have fully approved treatments already, including remdesivir. The idea that a treatment for Covid, even a pretty good one, would make vaccines unnecessary makes no sense.
I am fairly confident in making the following prediction. Full FDA approval for the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines is likely by the end of the year[1], at which point the above line of reasoning will no longer be applicable. Antivaxxers will smoothly transition to another line of argument.
I do think this "theory" is one reason you see a significant overlap between pro-ivermectin and antivax, for example in the comments of Bret Weinstein videos.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/covid-vaccines-what-full-fda...
If a better treatment was available that would lower the death rate that much, it would change the equation.
The vaccines are as effective as the one that eliminated smallpox. To be against it, you need some serious FUD
For young people, the cost-benefit analysis isn't clear at all--much less risk of anything bad at all from covid itself, plus far more years of life to lose or suffer from vaccine injury, which is a totally unknown risk.
To boot, the vaccines contain at least three entirely new technologies never before adopted in vaccine treatment.
Under the PREP act, pharma companies have total immunity from liability. Why would that be. Maybe because the vaccines are still only in stage 3 of clinical trials? Because the long term effects are unknown because it hasn't been long? With worrying reports about side-effects including at least 5000 deaths in the U.S. VAERS database, do you think those quotes are appropriate?
> The idea that a treatment for Covid, even a pretty good one, would make vaccines unnecessary makes no sense.
Actually, it makes perfect sense to many people.
You are shooting down the weak version of this argument. I think you are confounding necessity from the point of view of the state and institutions with necessity from the point of view of many people.
You are correct that the state and health institutions do want to get people vaccinated regardless of other cures, the evidence for that is overwhelming and existence and availability of some alternative strategy/cure isn't going to stop immediately that intent.
However, if there was, hypothetically, an accessible and efficient medication/treatment with profylactic or curing effects for COVID-19, this would make substantial portion of population skeptical about getting the vaccine, especially now that the number of serious cases is low and manageable.
It's one of the biggest infectious disease success stories since the invention of penicillin
If there was anything dangerous within even 3 orders of magnitude of those that have died because they didn't get the vaccine it would be front page news.
Get vaccinated
https://vaers.hhs.gov/docs/VAERS_Table_of_Reportable_Events_...
And the person you are responding basically said that the new vaccines are so safe that it didn't have to be on that list.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27513984
I don't mean this as a personal attack on that user, but It is really concerning how blind and apologetic some people are to the various things that can go wrong with a Vaccine.
Oh, that is great! Where can I find this tracker and the reports of side-effects? And this number we have, what is it? Can you write it here?
Should I rely for this information on my TV news?
What do these people (the promoters) get out of it? Attention? A more dedicated following?
The narrative for "the Ivermectin story" is particularly compelling, as it involves brave maverick doctors working selflessly to get the word out, suppression and censorship by shadowy organizations (big pharma fearing competition, the big Internet companies just lusting after the power of thought-control), and the empowerment of people to take medical decisions into their own hands.
Incidentally, this was the exact same narrative as HCQ, and is being pushed by a lot of the same people. The end of the story may turn out differently, as the evidence on HCQ is overwhelming that it doesn't work, so you only see dead-enders pushing it, but there is a good chance that Ivermectin will turn out to be at least moderately effective, though the jury is still out.
Ivermectin is a prescription drug in the United States. A doctor would most likely reject the request if a patient asked for it solely on a YouTube recommendation. So to answer your question, a prescribing doctor.
IMO YouTube isn't medically qualified to censor ongoing research or debate, just stick a disclaimer and be done with it.
Whoa whoa whoa. 1 year old mRNA vaccine's risks don't come with scare quotes. He often talks about the lack of long term data. mRNA covid vaccines might have been exceptionally safe so far, yet intellectual honesty demands we admit that indeed we don't have the long term data yet. Implying there would absolutely be no such risk is a fundamentalistic position itself.
Pretty much all risks are identified within a short period, it's very rare for there to be long term risks.So yes there may be some theoretical long term risk, but it's soo small that it is misleading to talk about it as a serious risk. Expecially compared to the real and known dangers of Ivermectin and covid.
Do those risks look proportional to you?
> Pretty much all risks are identified within a short period, it's very rare for there to be long term risks
I am not aware of any first principles in immunology that evidence this view. Maybe you do?
Youtube is qualified to say "This use of this drug is unresearched/unproven by the sources we build guidelines around", as are all private companies.
* If X died because of a "Take Ivermectin and you'll survive COVID" video on YouTube, who's to blame?
Assumption: Ivermectin has a net negative effect. Assumption: X relied on Ivermectin exclusively, rejecting the current standard of care procedures.
* If X died because Youtube censored "Take Ivermectin and you'll survive COVID" videos, who's to blame?
Assumption: Ivermectin is effective in certain cases, and X's life could have been saved if Ivermectin were used, possibly in conjunction with other standard procedures, up to and including vaccination.
The point of public conversation is to asses the cost/benefit tradeoffs of different courses of action, especially in presence of incomplete information. Additionally, reliable cost/benefit tradeoffs heavily inform the design of future information gathering campaigns. Given the public's heightened interest in Covid, it is unclear how to have necessary cost/benefit conversations other than in public. Censoring such conversations is potentially costing lives and is eroding the public's trust in the authorities.
The youtube algorithm and social platform is not some kind of careful dialog for mutual enlightenment. People aren't trying to rationally assess conflicting and limited evidence, and youtubes algorithm certainly doesn't reward any such painstaking work.
As such on youtube which is what this is about, any such discussion is not at all likely to inform; yet because convincing tales sell better, whatever claims are made, are likely to sound convincing to at least some people - truth and honesty are entirely orthogonal issues here, or worse actively selected against (because they're usually messy, unclear, and thus boring).
And thus on youtube the appropriate strategy is at a bare minimum draconian censorship. I mean, ideally they'd dump the sensationalism-boosting algorithm, but that ideal is obviously not a viable request to a platform that depends on user engagement (of any kind) for its survival.
Just because we don't want to live in an Orwellian nightmare doesn't mean all speech is necessarily a value-add, nor that there aren't any social dynamics that can reliably induce harmful speech. The world isn't that simple.
So while it's reasonable for people to seek certainty in uncertain times, that doesn't mean youtube is the place for everybody to debate ideal drug regimens.
Worse, youtube outcompetes traditional mass-media for ad dollars by exploiting precisely the sensationalism engine. The net result is an uninformed population fed sensationalism on all cylinders, with rampant censorship decided by a tiny clique. I have some doubts whether this is a recipe for a stable prosperous society.
Edit. Of course the bulk of the conversation should happen on technical grounds in the medical media in relative obscurity. But given the high profile of the covid pandemic, should a therapeutic drug with a stack of studies backing claims of positive impact, be discussed in mass-media?
When a "point of view" is having random unqualified people abuse medications, yes.
I've never before heard of people dying from vaccines so the usual safety bar for vaccines is obviously incredibly much higher than what we have here.
Please read this site terms of use. Post only substantive comments that contribute to discussion and avoid name-calling, and shallow dismissals.
If the brand new vaccines using a brand new technology are low risk, is really a matter of opinion. Basically it comes down to how much you trust the authorities and the how much you consider any given research or studies to be unbiased. (Particularly when the full data for the said studies remain unpublished)
You can plainly see that both of these are variable between different people, even within similar schools of thoughts.
So because someone does not share your opinion does not make them a liar.
If that is the case any one saying the new vaccines are "safe and effective", should also be an obvious lie, because the long term safety studies are not done, which objectively makes it a lie.
That's the nice thing about science though. It's based on (readily available, well recorded) evidence. Deciding that an individual is smarter and/or doesn't believe in science (aka the entire anti vax movement) may be a matter of opinion, but the actual data and risks are not.
> So because someone does not share your opinion does not make them a liar.
No, the lying part does.
How about the person who took it? We are presumably talking about adults, who we supposedly simultaneously trust with choosing a government that decides over life and death for millions in their own country and abroad.
Surely you're not complaining about this social media platform's established method for controlling the platforming of incorrect thought?!?
YouTube is chock-full of dubious health information. But only this one got banned.
Why?
For the record, since I've been muzzled from responding further, I don't believe that it was "money".
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
I still disagree strongly with your characterization of “substance” in this context though. E.g. when another user sent this (ad-hominem) challenge:
> Why is it that everyone who pushes Ivermectin as a miracle cure for COVID is also a conspiracy aficionado?
I responded with a simple and dispassionate explanation, rather than taking offense. Is there no “substance” in my entirely coherent, well-argued, and non-emotional reply?
> Simple. You have defined the latter as some variation on the former.
Perhaps you could call out my "what a pair of years" top-level comment as that was not responding to any of the nasty attacks in this thread, or even dogpiling on the excellent arguments that other people are making. But those kinds of comments function to put me on the record here with a timestamp, so I can link to them later. There is a tiny bit of substance even in those.
It sounds like you might prefer that I disengage and flag all of the nasty posts (e.g. another person in this thread implied that I am a murderer) so "the bureaucracy" can fix this conversation? Sorry, you are a great moderation team, but I am not going to do that, because I don't believe it is a real solution to anything. You cannot fix this kind of conversation from the top down - Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Trying will just disenfranchise the out-group further and make the echo-chamber effect worse. If that means this topic cannot be on HN, so be it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27562666
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27562679
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27562717
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27562722
Please stop posting like that. It's not hard, and doesn't need complex argumentation.
Add to that the built-in handicap because this community (like every other) values in-group opinions much more than out-group opinions, and it doesn’t make sense to even try better/longer arguments. I’m going to stop participating in controversy on this site, and move the infowar project over to audio chatrooms, where a conversation like this actually has a chance.
To everyone else: Arguing controversial topics with strangers, in Reddit-style text threads, is primitive and ineffective. The technology is insufficient for the task, and it will never get better.
This is very true. But I don't think it is a problem with technology.
It is just that you cannot really have a valuable insight by putting a 10000 idiots in a room and have them argue it out. In other words, you cannot replace one intelligent man with a 10000 idiots, hence the failure of HN and similar forums.
These things are only good for sharing interesting things, so the best way to use is to just use posted links, and never to engage in discussion.
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
My suggestion is to be more selective about sources, and perhaps to have an explicit policy. Individual papers tend not to be good sources, as people just use them as weapons to prop up their opinion. Mainstream media pieces aren't either, as they lack intellectual depth. I suggest blog posts by experts (David Gorski, Derek Lowe), pieces by top science journalists (Helen Branswell, Kai Kupferschmidt, Jon Cohen). Note I am not saying only mainstream views should be represented, quite the contrary. If and when Alina Chan posts something long form on lab leak (likely, as she's working on a book), that's a great candidate for spurring intellectually curious discussion.
I also remember today's Ivermectin post being flagged. Does that mean the moderators then chose to unflag it (despite the fact there'd already been at least two earlier "pro-Ivermectin" posts throughout the week)? According to the Hacker News FAQ, moderators "sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
The whole Ivermectin saga does not deserve the attention that it is getting, those that are relentlessly pushing it are causing people not to get vaccinated and that in turn will prolong the epidemic and lead to people getting ill and some fraction of those will die.
I've read up on this thing as much as I could and it's quite simple: there is at this point in time zero hard evidence that it works in humans short of using it in dosage that is well outside the range that we have data on. It's just the HCQ story warmed over.
Can you make an argument that people going for natural immunity and relying on currently used COVID treatment protocols in case they decide it is needed will prolong the epidemic more than if they took the vaccine?
Maybe it will do the opposite, as 1) natural immunity may be stronger, last longer 2) some number of non-vaccinated people getting sick, getting isolated and taking effective treatment may on the whole infect less people than if that same number of people gets vaccinated and then interacts with other people and potentially spread the infection more because they don't get strong symptoms.
I'm not saying that you are incorrect, just that the argument that getting vaccinated solves the epidemic quicker isn't clear.
You seem to be on a tear today. FYI, I added my flag here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27577500
As well as adding a flag to one of the comments in that discussion that attacked you. I don't leave a lot of flags on HN. For various reasons, I'm pretty conservative in my use of flags.
I'm surprised to see this particular piece where I am currently commenting got so many upvotes and so many comments. I asked about the mechanism of how this drug works and got some meaningful engagement and also some really worthless engagement, in my opinion.* And then I lost interest. I couldn't readily see a meaningful connection.
But you are basically talking about censorship. Censorship grows interest in the forbidden topic. I wholly disagree with your position here.
If this is the garbage you claim it is -- and it may well be, I just don't know the topic well enough to affirmatively agree with you -- then there are vastly better ways to kill it without harming freedom of speech.
But who is to blame for the deaths of thousands of people, who could have been saved by Ivermectin, which in all probability is happening right now, and has been going on for many months, if not for the censorship of W.H.O, Youtube and media?
Entirely irrelevant when discussing YouTube, which we're doing now. YouTube is not a legitimate source for medical/drug information.
It is not a source, and never was a legitimate source of anything, but a media of communication. I am not sure why people mix the two up. If doctors in one part of their world can share their observations with doctors all over the world, it has tremendous value.
Now it seems that doctors can only share their observations with W.H.O and any inference should come from the top, which they could delay citing sorry "no research" for an arbitrarly long time..
The nephrologist prescribed ivermectin for mom. She had mild fever for 3 days and recovered. Dad had no obvious symptoms and recovered(he was not prescribed ivermectin, hence did not take it). The govt doctors don't prescribe it just vitamin c, zinc and dolo. This is india btw.
If you don't have a proven, understood mechanism (which ivermectin doesn't for a virus like Covid) then you have to rely on trials, and those just don't stand up.
Quoting Derek Lowe on this:
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/07/iv...
> If you haven’t had to mess with drug discovery for a living, it’s understandable that you hear that Some Person Somewhere was very sick, took New Therapy X, and suddenly got better, and then assume that there it is, the cure has been found. But that’s not how it works. Real results stand up when you run larger, better-controlled trials, but most early results don’t turn out to be all that real.
Cue the Green Jellybean XKCD: https://xkcd.com/882/
Please, there are a ton of antiviral drugs without an understood mechanism. We don't even know how Acetaminophen (Tylenol) works!
> Please, there are a ton of antiviral drugs without an understood mechanism
Yes, but they have trials that stand up.
The trials for all those antiviral drugs show they work. As do with Acetaminophen.
> What happens to confidence in public health and USG if ivermectin turns out to be safe and effective for COVID, and the genetic vaccines turn out to have signficant safety issues? This looks like a very plausible scenario from where I sit.
his research becomes more important if these sort of vaccines become a silver bullet for medicine and basically end the modern flu and entire families of coronavirus; he could be looking at a Nobel prize
It's disturbing how much the suppression of Covid "wrong-think" over the last year has resulted in useful results and information only very slowly coming out (and generally, in the process, giving a feeling of vindication to the conspiracy theorists).
I have always been, and continue to be, against the idea that "this is such a novel emergency we just need to ignore all the processes that we know and trust". If anything, in those times, when we don't know what is going on, those principles are exactly the type of things we should stick to. I strongly believe it would have done us better over the past year.
There is a pretty well trodden path for new medicine to prove their effectiveness, which all Covid measures have gone through. If ivermectin, hydroxichloroquine or any other alternative drug goes through due course they would have no difficult being accepted.
The reason discussions have been censored is precisely because people have been rallying around a drug like a football club before they’ve had their effectiveness scientifically proven, and demanding to skip the traditional due diligence.
And for some context: this paper was submitted to a mainstream journal in March and rejected for lack of evidence. This publisher who picked it up is not exactly a reputable one (and will benefit immensely from citations of this study).
That’s what gets to me too, and this is the major issue I had with Trump saying anything about anything. He was floundering to look like he had a plan and the moment he mentioned HCQ he turned the whole thing political. It was massively irresponsible.
It should be left to medical science, which is doing pretty damn well with vaccinations and treatments like dexamethasone.
If Ivermectin can be helpful that’s great, and if it’s not then never mind, let’s evaluate other things. But it seems like people need to latch onto something, and then their ego and tribal allegiances won’t let it go.
Trump first mentioned it as a possibility and investigation and that he was taking it after consulting with his doctor. That's it. The media made you think otherwise.
Telling the public what drugs he's on is fine.. shouldn't we know what drugs POTUS is taking?
And the people who politicized it were medical journals who published fake studies with no data or vetting. Otherwise the comments would have passed on like every other trivial statement made by politicians. I mean Trump's statements may have been unwise or not backed by a double blind studies that doesn't make them untrue, not does it make them inherently political.
The immediate condemnation that HCQ was not only ineffective but harmful was based on data that does not exist. It was fake.
The only ones politicizing are the ones telling lies.
If you have genuine disagreements with trump, one ought to make them by issuing truths not made up fake studies.
Trump ongoingly and repeatedly pushed hydroxychloroquine, criticized published research showing it was ineffective, and most likely lied about taking hydroxychloroquine seeing as how no evidence or independent confirmation that he was on the drug ever surfaced.
It was not a one off thing, and it was not "mentioned as a possibility".
White house physician said he was on it.
Also studies are mixed on it's efficacy. The ones showing it was supposedly harmful were fake.
The only evidence we have that Trump took it is Trump saying he was taking it, and the press secretary while not giving a white house briefing directly saying it was prescribed[1], and the White House physician saying that he didn't see any harm in Trump taking it...[3] but I cannot find a single authoritative report [2] where someone claims to have actually prescribed the drug to Trump - from either the physician, or from Trump himself (remembering it is a prescription drug). The White House press office also never used those words that I can see, instead deflecting that whatever Trump said should be believed (while on the podium at a briefing, where there would be an accountability issue).
So, short version: it was implied by the people who would've had to prescribe it to him that they saw no problem giving it to him if he wanted it...but it seems like everyone carefully avoided saying they actually did prescribe it.
Now, on some level this is irrelevant whether he took it. Because he used the presidential podium to contradict medical professionals and push an ineffective treatment, created a shortage for a drug which a lot of people actually depended on (I knew a colleague who suddenly ran into trouble with this), which as it turned out provided no useful effect in preventing the president from actually catching COVID-19 and has since then continuously proven to be completely ineffective.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/498803-white-hou...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/19/trump-hydrox...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/19/sean-conley-...
> medical journals who published fake studies
There is someone else who thrives on calling things “fake” when they disagree with his opinions…
Is Donald Trump a scientific journal?
It was massively irresponsible for a political leader to bring up anything that wasn’t actually shown to work at that point, and the ensuing shitstorm was entirely predictable.
The responsible, statesmanlike thing to do would have been to tell the public all the stuff that he was doing behind the scenes to find solutions, not throw out something specific but unproven.
But his opposition outright lied and they knew it.
You’re just proving my point that it became more about sticking to your side and cheering for your team rather than relying on the medical evidence. This sort of stuff should not have been brought into the political sphere in the first place.
Many different measures have been implemented, you can't possibly pick one of them and say that particular one has had a definite impact on a certain thing.
At least where I live, the way that Covid deaths were recorded over the winter left plenty of leeway for those dying "with Covid" to have just died of the flu (to be specific, if a patient had symptoms or evidence of a viral respiratory disease being the cause of death, then all that was needed was a "clinical picture of Covid" to make it a Covid death).
That is quite naive, the "due course" here would mean very costly trials that usually big pharma pays for. I'm not holding my breath for them to pay for that.
Further, if there are viable alternative treatments we shouldn’t be using a vaccine still in phase 2/3 trials that haven’t even been tested on animals... the entire emergency use authorization is only allowed if there aren’t safe alternatives.
Ivermectin is generally safe to take, and a known drug with known risks. If it was shown to be effective the vaccine rollouts should be stopped. So, there’s a lot of political and financial reasons to not publicize it.
The vaccines are not shown to be (may be) safe outside of a brief few month window (for specific classes of people). These are a new class of vaccine and there appears to be significant risk based on the cdc data (VAERS).
https://austingwalters.com/covid19-vaccine-risks/
To be clear none of the vaccines really completed a standard phase 2 or 3 trial. It had an abridged or expedited version that skipped things like pregnant women, etc. the vaccine is also not 100% effective, which is important as it’s a “leaky” vaccine. Meaning, we’re going to see lots of variants that get around our protection from the vaccine. That’s why treatments are important.
It’s also possible we see genetic defects 2-3 years from now or an increase in cancer. We really have no idea.
In those millions we are missing the number of people that get seriously harmed, and killed due to getting the vaccine. So we do not know it is 100% safe, we only know that it is mostly safe, which is not good enough to be cheery and happy about it.
There's both actual conspiracies in this world, and well poisoning to damage the conversations. When you look at the amount of money these companies stand to make from producing billions of vaccinations, you should not be surprised.
Veklury (remdesivir) was approved by the FDA for the treatment of Covid-19 in hospitalized individuals on October 22, 2020. This was a full approval, not an emergency use application: https://www.fda.gov/media/137574/download
We've continued using the vaccines under the existing EUAs even after a treatment was approved.
The FDA has granted additional EUAs for other treatments, even after that date: four more, not counting a sedative agent, per https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-... .
In fact, the FDA has even granted an EUA for a vaccine after approving Veklury: the Janssen/J&J vaccine received its first EUA on February 27, 2021. https://www.fda.gov/media/146303/download
Even if ivermectin was a perfect treatment for Covid, and even if an approved treatment would pull all the vaccines off the market -- despite that not happening after the FDA approved Veklury -- by the time ivermectin made its way through the approval pipeline to be labelled for this indication, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines would very likely have received approval as well. So there's no "billions of vaccinations" at risk should another treatment be found to be effective and approved.
When people who are credible scientists (like many of his guests) get censored it can reasonably look suspicious.
I'm not saying he's correct, I'm just saying the right answer is debate.
A person who is willing to have a calm, 3 hour discussion on a topic is not the kind of person who needs to be censored.
And isn’t it valuable to have someone respond? Isn’t there value in educating the public so conspiracy theories don’t spread? (And preventing the theories from being discussed just makes them more firmly held, whereas debate doesn’t have that effect.)
Per the FDA: ""Under section 564 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act), when the Secretary of HHS declares that an emergency use authorization is appropriate, FDA may authorize unapproved medical products or unapproved uses of approved medical products to be used in an emergency to diagnose, treat, or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions caused by CBRN threat agents when certain criteria are met, including there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives.""
And that falls apart under some scrutiny... it says "adequate, approved, and available alternatives." "adequate" being efficacious which is debatable without testing. "approved" which that drug is absolutely not approved for covid use. "available" being enough supply which is debatable if it turns out to be effective and widely used. I see no reason why the EUA for the vaccines would be threatened by this drug also being used in an EUA fashion. if they are going for actual approval for that drug it would take as long as the vaccine to get.
> When you look at the amount of money these companies stand to make from producing billions of vaccinations, you should not be surprised.
I think that when you look at everything through the conspiratorial lens... all you see are conspiracies.
They both are used for the same disease but in different ways. They are only alternatives in a very broad sense.
Even if it fit all those criteria for being an alternative it's not like it's some kind of thing that couldn't be amended if they really needed/wanted to. saddens me how reactionary everyone is.
Edit: also I forgot to make the point in my replay above... it's not like having three vaccines under is preventing another vaccine from getting EUA so even under this logic framework it is nonsense. are they hinging it on the fact that it's an approved drug for some other disease?
Literally? Everyone? LOL this is why there are so many normal people in this thread saying "at least let's have a discussion!"
Your sentiment is the reason (imo) that these discussions are so hard to have, no offense.
nowhere did I say that this treatment couldn't be effective and no where did I say that they shouldn't look into it as an alternative because I think all tools should be on the table. I am simply saying the part about the EUA thing being pushed by antivaxxers and other conspiracy theorists.
We need effective vaccines and therapeutics. I don’t understand this push to discredit any therapeutic before reasonable research has even been conducted.
No such thing exists. There are literally dozens of therapeutics in trials , and a few actually approved and in non-trial general use (dexamethasone, remdesevir, and favilavir, in various jurisdictions) — for both, see [0] — the ones that tend to get strongly negative treatment are hydroxychloroquine (not actually in trials) and ivermectin (in Phase 2/3 trials), both on the basis of unsupported scams around both earlier in the pandemic, not any general aversion to therapeutics.
[0] https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/...
It’s simple. Money. Companies like it and want more of it.
This paper by Pierre Kory has graphs that clearly show the evolution of Covid cases and deaths across different states in Peru.
https://covid19criticalcare.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/F...
It isn't like the vaccines are pure profit. The pharma companies have to develop them, they have to produce them, they have to distribute them, and if they charge too much they get into massive political trouble. It seems like it is basically a giant marketing effort for pharma companies where everybody in the world is benefiting.
1: For example, from Feb 1st, 20 to today, Pfizer is up 10% and the Vanguard total stock index VTI is up 35%
Did the patent issues get resolved? Last I heard, the drug companies didn't want to share because of reasons.
Two observational studies, both carried out in New York (Carlucci et al. and Derwan et al.), appear to show promising results in patients treated with a combination of hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and azithromycin. The first, involving 932 paitents, showed a 55% reduction in relative risk of death among those getting zinc in addition to hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, as compared with those just getting hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. The second, involving 518 patients, showed an 80% reduction in relative risk of death among those getting the full triple therapy, when compared with a reference sample that didn’t get any of the drugs.
That seems impressive. However, these are low quality observational studies that are seriously limited by the methodology used. The scope for confounding effects is huge. Therefore, these studies should be considered exploratory and hypothesis generating. They certainly should not be considered evidence of any cause and effect relationship.
>In an interview on Friday, Dr. Zelenko said that he was guilty of nothing more than sloppy wording.
>“I’m a clinician, not a researcher,” he said. “I don’t understand fully the language of clinical research.”
Yet he went on TV and on large podcasts and talked like he was an expert on clinical research.
"Under section 564 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act), when the Secretary of HHS declares that an emergency use authorization is appropriate, FDA may authorize unapproved medical products or unapproved uses of approved medical products to be used in an emergency to diagnose, treat, or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions caused by CBRN threat agents when certain criteria are met, including there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives."
You should probably drill into this if you are interested, but the phrasing most often referenced by people talking about effective therapeutics and the lack of approval by the FDA is, "there are adequate, approved, and available alternatives."
It'd be like claiming the existence of the iron lung is sufficient to yank the polio vaccine out of production.
For example, Remdesivir is approved, without any sign of that fact jeopardizing the EUA on the vaccines. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/therapeutic-op...
> FDA has approved one drug, remdesivir (Veklury), for the treatment of COVID-19 in hospitalized patients aged 12 years and older who weigh at least 40 kg.
https://www.fdanews.com/ext/resources/files/archives/e/Emerg...
(PDF warning)(section III, the first list, point #4)
>Source that HCQ and zinc are viable treatments?
Dozens? Hundreds? of doctors speaking out, including videos posted to youtube, that they saw great effectiveness in the trial. The people promoting it weren't a bunch of nobodys, despite what the nightly news told you. There were plenty of frontline workers with actual experience. But that likely won't satisfy your request for a source - which is fine. We all appeal to authority as we see fit. I saw many actual doctors saying "this is effective", and I saw many large corporations working together to shut that conversation down.
Do you have any evidence it's not effective?
Do you have any evidence snake oil isn't effective?
Burden of proof is on the people claiming a magic cure.
Anyway here are a couple of studies that show it's not effective.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jmv.27122
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2777389
Here's a good take by someone that does research on new medicines.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/07/iv...
Your document also doesn't say what you think it does. If it did, we wouldn't be able to have multiple vaccines approved. Is there any evidence that the FDA would interpret a non vaccine as an alternative to a vaccine, when there's no issue with granting EUA to multiple vaccines? I doubt it, but would love to see what you have.
"Among patients hospitalized with mild-to-moderate Covid-19, the use of hydroxychloroquine, alone or with azithromycin, did not improve clinical status at 15 days as compared with standard care. (Funded by the Coalition Covid-19 Brazil and EMS Pharma; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT04322123. opens in new tab.)"
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2019014
"After high-risk or moderate-risk exposure to Covid-19, hydroxychloroquine did not prevent illness compatible with Covid-19 or confirmed infection when used as postexposure prophylaxis within 4 days after exposure. (Funded by David Baszucki and Jan Ellison Baszucki and others; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT04308668. opens in new tab.)"
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2016638
"Neither HCQ nor HCQ/AZ shortened the clinical course of outpatients with COVID-19, and HCQ, but not HCQ/AZ, had only a modest effect on SARS-CoV-2 viral shedding. HCQ and HCQ/AZ are not effective therapies for outpatient treatment of SARV-CoV-2 infection."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258953702...
"Among patients hospitalized with Covid-19, those who received hydroxychloroquine did not have a lower incidence of death at 28 days than those who received usual care. (Funded by UK Research and Innovation and National Institute for Health Research and others; RECOVERY ISRCTN number, ISRCTN50189673. opens in new tab; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT04381936. opens in new tab.)"
https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2022926
Shall we discuss creationism?
To my understanding, the proponents tend to say that HCQ is effective when administered as soon as first symptoms (day 0 to 3 I believe). There are also dosage issues and combinations with other drugs, and they say that HCQ is ineffective administered late.
In the first paper you propose, patients treated are already hospitalized (day 14 or fewer still probably not day 0 to 3). The fourth paper states (when following the link the to protocol) that hospitalisation is a condition for eligibility. That's not first symptoms.
The third papers talks about "initiated medication a median of 5.9 days after symptom onset". So not 0 to 3 days?
The second paper you propose talks about administering HCQ as post-exposure prophylaxis. It seems outside of the scope to me.
There are other issues on this debate, dosage, drug combinations, I can't talk about that, this website does:
This person resumes the argument this way:
https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/how-to-rig-research-...
(Note that the fourth paper on your list is the RECOVERY trial he's no a fan of)
What do you think about this? Also what about intelligent design?
Of course, you're not supposed to use it on humans but they say that about fish mox too. But as time went on it was pretty clear to me that it was working to prevent covid from becoming severe in the countries that were using it for that because they had nothing much else to use. I saw many reports of it working.
I also read about vitamin D, melatonin, famotidine, and aspirin helping to reduce severity of infections. So, when my wife and I got our 1st and 2nd jab of the Pfizer vaccine we took all of those and had no reaction to it at all. Our daughter took it before her first jab and had no reaction but didn't for her 2nd and she did get sick. As soon as she told us she wasn't feeling good we dosed her with those and just an hour or so later she was feeling good again.
I haven't been infected and now I've reached full immunity so none of that proves anything at all but it's still been worth knowing.
In fact, CDC recommends taking fever reducing medicine only once you develop fever after a vaccine and not before vaccination for just this reason.
How do you know what I did doesn't improve immunity since all those things I mentioned do seem to lessen the severity of covid?
One thing I do know, is that no doctor anywhere has claimed what I did lessens the effectiveness of those vaccines.