> Many people pushing Ivermectin have a vested interest in proving the vaccines are unnecessary.

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-...

Being proven right. That’s the anti-vac crowd’s dearest interest.

Ok, but let's not get confused. This is different than being an anti-vaxxer. You can speak up for something like Ivermectin AND be a pro-vaxxer. The most prominent voice on this is Bret Weinstein (biology PhD), who is more vaccinated than average. He and his wife and kids are vaccinated for the typical things plus typhoid, rabies, yellow fever... They are pro-vaccine and so am I. Vaccines are one of the best inventions ever.

You can, but you'd have to have some proof.

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.

In my case that is far from the case. The implications of an effective treatment such as ivermectin are huge in that a) Covid passports go away b) Deaths and illnesses due to covid get reduced greatly c) It puts a spotlight on why these treatments have not had government sponsored clinical trials considering the ramifications. Incompetence in our governments in regards to these kinds of situations should not be tolerated. For example in Canada the province of BC allowed a trial to commence in may of this year and yet has not started. almost 2 years after the start of this thing? ivermectin has proven safe over the 40 years its been in use and if we try similar doses (which is the recommended for covid) there is all gain and no loss to test even as small trials. I would have certainly taken it since I had severe effects from covid. d) We don't have to have a phase 3 vaccine trial be a public trial where normally that is phase 4

That's the wrong side to look at this from. These are just people on the fringe with little influence and funding.

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.

I'm having difficulty understanding this line of reasoning. What does the authorization of ivermectin have to do with the vaccines? Xofluza, Relenza, and Tamiflu have been approved for treating influenza, and that has had no effect on the recommendation that people get their flu shots.

Someone else answered correctly saying an EUA can't be issued if an already licensed drug can help. I would further that point by saying to actually go dig up the true source of that policy on the FDA's website in your country (not someone's summary or interpretation). It's a great exercise that will leave you with some sort of ground truth in this mess.

Same as in coding, you eventually reach a point where you learn that when in doubt, you must read the source.

It's the way that emergency authorisation use works with FDA. They won't issue that if there are other safe viable treatments. These vaccines got that approval because these other options were suppressed.

>Xofluza, Relenza, and Tamiflu

None of them are as effective as Ivermectin (allegedly). It is only logical that efficacy is also important.

We already have a drug that's 99% effective at keeping you out out hospital. And it's only a single/double dose. It's the COVID vaccine.

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

Nope, that is not the only way. You have side effects. And you have the fact that the vaccine is still in test phase. What are the long term side effects, we don't know. And unless they are obvious we will never know, because vaccine are like a religion too many. You don't question a religion.

You're indirectly admitting that I'm right. The anti vaccine crowd is desperate for a non vaccine cure, because the vaccine is so incredibly effective their beliefs fall apart otherwise

The vaccine is empirically way more dangerous than every other vaccine commonly given. I did the vaccines but I don't understand why we can't be honest about it.

We can believe the vaccine works but that the risk is too great to take it because it's so new. And for the record, I think the alternatives are also too risky.

Well the covid vaccine comes with some caveats to me most crippling to freedoms being the vaccine passports that seemingly all nations are already implementing. Having various viable treatments would obviously put an end to that. Since ivermectin has a long history of safety and already largely available its reasonable that interest is strong.

But not for this particular application, and not in the doses where apparently it has some effect on COVID. And that is the problem with promoting this, as long as you weren't aware of that you probably should not be part of the army of 'useful idiots' of the anti-vax crowd.

I don't think this comment really addresses my point. From what I've seen the dosages (at least for prophylaxis) are similar to what you would normally take. No I don't think it should be rammed down peoples throats without solid evidence but neither should the vaccine. The fact is vaccines take around 7 years to exit trials and so yes I'm hopeful for a proven alternative that's not on trial but the likelihood as far as I'm convinced is nil.

Create the problem, bring an unecessary solution nobody would have accepted otherwise. Step 3, profit !

Vaccines and covid are going to come back every year for sure.

for all the talk of "vaccine passports", not a single state has done it. Biden said he wasnt going to do it months ago. Not a single country has done it in all of the earth.

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

> for all the talk of "vaccine passports", not a single state has done it

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...

These are extreme arguments with little legroom for nuance. If you are so sure then so be it. There's more than enough news on this countering most of your re-assurances.

Ok, I was confused by this line of reasoning, so did some digging. I believe it's one of the popular antivax disinfo conspiracy theories. Here's my reading.

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...

I think what has separated the policy around Covid, vs. say the flu, is the death rate. If the death rate were closer to the flu, or below some threshold that takes spread into account, the response would have been much different.

If a better treatment was available that would lower the death rate that much, it would change the equation.

Yes. Anybody trying to rationalize not getting one of the extremely effective vaccines will be grasping at straws for any other effective treatment. It's a natural outcome.

The vaccines are as effective as the one that eliminated smallpox. To be against it, you need some serious FUD

FUD like the fact that the vaccines have had no completed studies on their long-term effects? Or being part of a demographic that has a low risk from COVID?

Yes, that's FUD. You can't have a completed long term study when a vaccine has not been on the market for a long enough term. That's pretty obvious.

Right, so how is it FUD if you simply want to avoid being part of a clinical trial? Vaccines take at least 7 years (usually 10ish) to complete long-term trials.

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.

The several newly minted billionaire Pfizer execs are certainly happy Ivermectin is only just recently starting to get a decent look.

> vaccines being "experimental"

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.

IMO vaccine are pushed as miracle drug. There is probably fanatic peoples in both though. You might also want to check remdisivir, drug that is not efficient, but they pushed it far enough to get a contract of 1 billion, and effectively 0.2 billion have been spent on it.

The vaccines are a miracle drug. Less than one in a million people that have gotten both doses of mRNA vaccines have died of COVID.

It's one of the biggest infectious disease success stories since the invention of penicillin

Maybe, but do you know how many have died from the vaccine-induced side effects? How could we find this number?

Yes. Basically none. The vaccines have been given to almost a billion people. And side effects have been tracked. How can we find this number? We already have it.

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

What about long-term effects of the vaccines?

I asked why Covid vaccines are absent from VAERS list of reportable AEFIs

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.

I agree. I just hope that such blindness doesn't affect us. I worry that it will.

> And side effects have been tracked. How can we find this number? We already have it.

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?

It is and it is weird.

What do these people (the promoters) get out of it? Attention? A more dedicated following?

I think the most useful lens to understand the sociology of these kinds of questions is religious belief. And there is no shortage of people out there who want to convince others of their belief.

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.

Religious belief. Exactly. And what are your religious beliefs ? Are you sure you have none ? Is there something or someone you would never doubt ?

How about having a discussion? Not everything has to be so complicated lol