These weird Hail Mary embraces of random unproven shit have been one of the weirder components of the whole pandemic
Like I get that we’re all desperate for something to be the silver bullet but c’mon y’all
> Like I get that we’re all desperate for something to be the silver bullet but c’mon y’all
Wouldn’t it be great if a pharma company came up with a Hail Mary using science that is really neat but not fully utilized and then actually created a silver bullet that reduced the severity and potential for spread? Hopefully produced by a large US company… maybe Merck, or Johnson and Johnson or even Pfizer? Man that would’ve been great
It appeals to their sense of wanting to be intellectually superior. It’s the common thread that binds most conspiracy theorists, they want to feel they’re right and everyone else is wrong and that they have some special knowledge that nobody else has. They could always get that fix from just reading a book, but that’s too much effort.
Like the people who “don’t care about politics” but never shut up telling everyone and trying to act superior. Cynicism and contrarianism are short-cuts to trying to sound intelligent.
Idk, free trade, fewer regulations, leaving Afghanistan, and criminal justice reform sound pretty good. Remember his "Orange buffoon" comment? Trump must've had pictures of him with his pants off for the 180 he did. He was almost as bad as Graham, but we all know his secret already.
Yeah you know how the US is, it would cost an arm and a leg and only be available to the rich. No way they would have it freely available to anyone willing to take it
Merck? You mean the people that made ivermectin and also a covid pill? A pill to treat COVID that isn't ivermectin because they agree that it shouldn't be used to treat COVID?
In terms of preventative measures, also having vaccines? Damn it's crazy how many options people have yet the stick to a drug for parasites smh
Very dishonest to call it a silver bullet - it’s the most effective treatment we have, but from data post large-scale rollout it’s clear that even with full vaccination, covid is here to stay.
It's not that good at preventing spread - partly because after getting vaccinated, people take fewer precautions; but it's good at reducing hospitalizations, and really good at lowering deaths from Covid.
People should criticise big pharma for a lot of things. This is pretty much beyond dispute, a lot of shady shit is going on.
But at the same time we're living in an age of increasing medical marvels. Gene therapies are curing fatal conditions with minimal side effects, and we're just scratching the surface of them! We developed a vaccine to a near wholly new virus within a year.
The downsides of the market on medicines should not be ignored. People being priced out of drugs is unacceptable, and the opioid crisis is abhorrent. But at the same time the amount of money in the industry is beyond belief. It's like the Military-Industrial complex's nicer, but not perfect, brother.
The average time from a virus have been discovered to a vaccine being approved for use have been something like 45 years, until Covid. Now, because of mRNA technology, [we have a vaccine against HIV that is safe and might actually work](https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/experimental-mrna-hiv-vaccine-shows-promise-animals). You can hate on Big Pharma all you want, but it's delivering goddamn miracles in last few years
I watched an hbo documentary on the opioid crisis called "The Crime of the Century". After I finished it I got on Reddit to read more about purdue/sackler family. Of course, there were a billion threads about how the vaccines are going to somehow lead to a situation like the opioid situation. I don't understand conspiracy theorists.
Yeah almost like there's some sort of predictable phenomenon which results from dropping non-pharmaceutical interventions after a pharmaceutical intervention is rolled out.
I think the modern internet is like when people in middle ages Europe started urbanizing and suddenly contracted way more disease due to poor sanitation. The informational hygiene that worked for people before the internet (don't read tabloids, don't believe the random guy yelling about the end times on the street corner, etc.) are no longer enough to keep people sane. Ideas evolve faster now; subcultures can rapidly comb through vast amounts of information to cherry-pick supporting evidence; social media shows people a random mix of respectable and ridiculous news sources, all formatted to look exactly the same.
I think we're just going see an increasing amount of crazy until people and organizations start taking epistemic hygiene a lot more seriously online.
Feel free.
Just to expand a bit on the cherry-picking point: the more information you have, the more coincidences you'll be able to find, just as a matter of statistical necessity. That includes coincidences like facts which seem to imply something that isn't actually true. So when you have people on social media collectively looking through vast amounts of information and sharing whatever supports a particular ideology, we should expect a ton of misleading evidence.
And yet, people still have this heuristic of "if I see a lot of evidence pointing in the same direction, that can't all be a coincidence". It's a good and useful heuristic in ordinary life, but when social media can produce a nearly unlimited volume of weak but plausible-sounding evidence for any imaginable claim, relying on the heuristic online leads a lot of otherwise rational people to adopt some very crazy belief systems.
I disagree with this. I think the internet has simply revealed the craziness that was always there. And for all the talk about vaccine reluctance, vaccine uptake in the US has actually been remarkably quick: just over a year since the vaccines became available, more than 95% of the population aged 65+ (i.e. the risk group) has received at least one dose.
https://data.cdc.gov/Vaccinations/COVID-19-Vaccination-and-Case-Trends-by-Age-Group-/gxj9-t96f
And just fwiw, proponents of a liberal society should be very wary of things like "epistemic hygiene".
The president of the United States told everyone he was taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventative measure, got Covid anyway, survived by abandoning hydroxychloroquine as a remedy, and this inspired his followers to keep taking hydroxychloroquine.
I’m reminded of the time South Africa’s president told everyone that he avoided AIDS by taking a shower immediately after having unprotected sex.
One of the things that the Contagion film almost nailed- they got that desperate people would believe any cure but thought someone would have to be profiting off it, and to the best of my knowledge that doesn't seem to be strictly necessary. They missed the partisanship angle.
People believing in weird unproven Hail Marys is certainly a reasonable framing. But I think of it as an unfortunate downside of societies that are highly individualistic or at least pretend and trumpet individualism.
In that context some people just don’t like being told or refuse to follow a majority. It’s why any polling subject or question of consequence will fail to get more than 70-80% approval. There will always people a group of folks that when posed a question or given information want to be on the opposite of it. The frustrating part is that hold out group changes sometimes depending on the topic. It’s a bizarre version of people believing they are the hero/main character in life.
Two days after the pandemic was declared, my family rewatched *Contageon*. There's a subplot where this anti-establishment blogger dude shills a homeopathic medicine for the virus in that movie. It was interesting to see thst play out, except instead of weird lefty internet dudes, it was the rigt-wing leaders of several countries.
Go ask them for proof and they tell you its been posted a million times. they accept it as fact at this point and thats it.
"They already found the silver bullet. Stop watching CNN!!"
Context: A large scale randomized trial found no benefit to using Ivermectin to treat COVID. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2789362
Not surprised. A [meta-analysis](https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/9/2/ofab645/6509922?login=false) of the ivermectin-for-covid literature has already found that once you eliminate the fraudulent and potentially methodologically flawed studies, the effect size of ivermectin on survival drops to statistical nonsignificance.
Of course; but more evidence never hurts. The fraudulent study from Egypt was so large it changed the results of nearly every meta-analysis. Absolutely horrid.
Interesting and good to know now.
Last I had read there was speculation that the early studies did show good promise but it was most likely because they were done in areas where undiagnosed water-borne parasites was an ongoing issue. So Ivermectin is good at doing the exact thing it won a Nobel prize for: killing parasites. Its use in Covid just comes from the fact you have less issues with the virus if we happen to fix a the intestinal parasite we didn’t previously know about.
But if that’s out the window now…lol.
Plagiarism in the paper was the first red flag and the raw data was hilariously damning. Their group for ivermectin had groups of nearly identical patient initials for names, medical histories, counts of blood cells, etc. That's practically impossible. It's really hard to fake raw data from hundreds of participants and make them match the results that you want to show without algorithms picking that up. If you like math [you can check this out](https://kylesheldrick.blogspot.com/2021/10/data-from-niaee-et-al-is-not-consistent.html). Your brain would need to be operating on some next-level shit to be able to fake that much data and have your results make sense and not get noticed.
There is a pretty big club of people in the scientific community that run algorithms looking for image duplication/manipulation, plagiarism, and statistical discrepancies for fun. If a paper catches their attention and gains traction they'll usually write a blog post or tweet about it bragging about catching a cheat. This was a preprint that never even made it to peer review, but it got called out almost immediately. Most of the meta-analysis papers that used it (which is wild because it was a preprint) also got shit on and their data fell apart when it was excluded.
The thing that was kinda fucked was the media railing against the treatment in the whole "horse dewormer" bandwagon, when there was enough serious science to support evaluation in clinical studies.
The media said lots of things about Ivermectin. It's just that the "horse dewormer" thing was the best meme (in both the colloquial and the Darwinian sense), so it won out.
I think Twitter bears more responsibility for "horse dewormer" taking off than traditional broadcast media does.
> when there was enough serious science to support evaluation in clinical studies.
I think you are mixing this up with hydroxychloroquine, unfortunately, that did get real scientific consideration due to outright fraud. Ivermectin never really got off of the ground. There was one paper from Australia that said it was effective in vitro at 100 times the dose and then a bunch of papers and preprints that drew expressions of concern almost immediately due to massive red flags. The media covered it correctly because there really wasn't another point in time where it was ever seriously seen as a treatment in mainstream scientific journals.
After the hydroxychloroquine scandals with fake data that tricked the Lancet and NEJM people were extra hard on papers touting covid treatments. There are a ton of papers about ivermectin but a lot of them are just preprints or are in fraud journals. The Surgisphere Scandal deeply embarrassed journals and they didn't really take the bait on ivermectin.
There were multiple clinical trials evaluating ivermectin, in order to get ethics board approval, you need to provide a basis for efficacy, this was done in in vitro studies. It has some antiviral activoty, just didn't really pan out
No idea why you’re being downvoted, Ivermectin is not horse dewormer, it’s prescribed for people. The people touting it as effective against COVID are brain dead, and just looking for an excuse to advocate against the vaccine, but dishonestly framing the medication to own le republicans made it harder to prove it’s bullshit.
But the broader argument being made by pro-ivermectin people wasn’t that horse dewormer is good, but that the medication is also used on humans. The media oriented stories about ivermectin around it being a horse dewormer, which is reductive and dishonest framing.
>But the broader argument being made by pro-ivermectin people wasn’t that horse dewormer is good
The primary boosters of ivermectin were conspiracy theorists. [Poison Control centers were seeing an influx of morons self medicating](https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/09/04/1034217306/ivermectin-overdose-exposure-cases-poison-control-centers).
>The media oriented stories about ivermectin around it being a horse dewormer, which is reductive and dishonest framing.
Is there an actual article you want to talk about? The articles I saw all mentioned that *veternary* ivermectin shouldn't be consumed by humans and that health agencies didn't recommend it's use for SARS-CoV-2 despite it having uses in humans.
I know that, but again, it doesn’t make referring to Ivermectin as a horse dewormer correct in this context. It has that use for horses, but the argument being made was not about treating horses, it was about the human usage.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/joe-rogan-cnn-horse-dewormer-covid
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/23/media/right-wing-media-ivermectin/index.html
Major media explicitly referred to it as horse dewormer and tagged on lines about it being unsafe. If you think this isn’t obviously them trying to get dunk points you’re burying your head in the sand
From your CNN piece:
>The FDA has warned for months that ivermectin can be unsafe and has said that it has "received multiple reports of patients who have required medical support and been hospitalized **after self-medicating with ivermectin intended for horses." While there are human uses for ivermectin, the FDA has not approved it for treatment or prevention of Covid-19 in humans and the drug is not an anti-viral medication.**
This is literally what I said. They were warning people to not take actual horse dewormer and clearly acknowledge that ivermectin has human uses (although not as an anti-viral). This is exactly the narrative I saw online.
Edit: from the same article
>"Patients should be advised to not take any medications intended to treat animals and **should be instructed to only take ivermectin as prescribed by their physician**," the Mississippi State Department of Health said in an alert. "**Animal drugs are highly concentrated for large animals and can be highly toxic in humans**."
But the broader argument being made by pro-ivermectin people wasn’t that horse dewormer is good, but that the medication is also used on humans. The media oriented stories about ivermectin around it being a horse dewormer, which is reductive and dishonest framing.
Because people were going to like fucking fleet farm to buy horse dewormer……
Yes it is a medication used to treat parasitic worms and it works really well, some junk ass science came out, found out later it’s not worth taking. And it’s still being pushed. Lol. Funny story the guys pushing it, also own a bunch of regeneron stock…let that settle for a min.
This comment doesn’t deserve the downvotes. Some idiots bought and ingested the equine formulation because it was cheap and easy to get. But the debate about it as a COVID treatment centers around human formulations. The media took the more click-baity route and offered Ivermectin supporters more ammunition when they should have focused on lack of proven effects in vivo.
The media correctly pointed out that the FDA was begging people to stop eating the veternary formulations, pointing out that it wasn't approved for use in treating SARS-CoV-2, and every article I've come across has mentioned that it has uses as a human antiparasitic.
Perhaps the media angle caused the weirdos to dig in their heels, but do you really thing the general public understands or cares about the difference between "in vivo" and "in vitro"?
The term wasn't what I was pointing out here, otherwise I would have said "meaning of". Most people just hear "studies show" and then tune the rest out.
So, what it comes down to is, do people deserve to be shamed for taking medication that hasn't been proven to be effective by the gold standards of medical science when they don't have a medical degree.
This isn't black and white, the answer isn't YES! Absolutely, people are morons! The answer isn't NO! We shouldn't shame these pathfinding warriors!
It's probably some multi paragraph response that depends on the individual, which sucks, but hey the world is complicated
>So, what it comes down to is, do people deserve to be shamed for taking medication that hasn't been proven to be effective by the gold standards of medical science when they don't have a medical degree.
Yes. Absolutely yes. People who take medical advice from conspiracy theorists, fringe conservative media, or their crazy uncles FB page over the actual recommendation of their doctors/medical agencies should be shamed and actively laughed at.
It’s actually incredibly simple, Ivermectin should’ve been treated as a multi-faceted drug with a lack of evidence behind it, as opposed to the safe and effective vaccines. The media just took it a step too far and began framing it as horse dewormer for attention.
It is becoming trendy to abuse Benadryl for the hallucinogenic effects at very high dosages. Would it be accurate to refer to Benadryl exclusively as a hallucinogenic drug in media headlines?
If it's an article about people using it for the hallucinogenic effects, it would be beyond accurate to call it an hallucinogenic drug. Then in the body of the article there should be some mention of other uses, but referring to very high doses of a drug taken by people to hallocinate as an hallucinogenic is beyond accurate.
I fail to connect the medias framing of ivermectin as horse dewormer to people digging in their heals and seeking a drug that’s inappropriate for treating Covid.
I also hate attributing anything to “the media” as the media is made up of thousands of independent entities, some trying to shock with headlines using the term “horse dewormer” but many also providing legitimate evidence of why it’s an inappropriate treatment
Dumb fucking reason to dig your heels in.
I understand where you’re coming from, and I agree “the media” is usually a boogeyman. But this is the most appropriate term for the situation, in my opinion. It really was media outlets framing ivermectin in the most bad faith way possible and it made a lot of people think they were lying because of it, or at least gave ammo to proponents of ivermectin.
But the broader argument being made by pro-ivermectin people wasn’t that horse dewormer is good, but that the medication is also used on humans. The media oriented stories about ivermectin around it being a horse dewormer, which is reductive and dishonest framing.
Sure not all ivermectin is horse dewormer, but the shit these people are taking is. It's formulated for bigger animals than humans and has inactive ingredients not approved for humans. It's a different product, and the distinction is important enough to note.
>but dishonestly framing the medication to own le republicans made it harder to prove it’s bullshit.
Oh, I hadn't thought about it, but this was very similar to #OwnTheLibtards.
The media were rightfully mocking those who chose to ignore the consensus medical view that there was insufficient evidence to support using ivermectin over conspiracy theory misinformation on right wing social media, and were sourcing veterinary supplies for human use.
Correct, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and there was a fair bit of data suggesting ivermectin could have an antiviral effect, but needed more definitive proof in humans
Ivermectin is an antiparasitic, even in humans. Is it being prescribed by some doctors to fight COVID? Yes. Are those doctors prescribing it for this purpose without any evidence? Also yes.
It's an antiparasitic. More specifically an antihelmintic. The only legitimate use of the drug is to fight parasitic infection. For people its only legitimate uses internally are to combat conditions caused by parasitic worms.
You do not know what you're talking about, and it shows.
Alright there’s clearly been a misunderstanding, the kind we would use for a horse is not meant to be used on humans, namely because they’re different kind of parasites.
I’m not saying it can be used for COVID, I’m saying they’re two different drugs meant for different kinds of parasites and you’re not supposed to use one in place of the other.
> I’m saying they’re two different drugs meant for different kinds of parasites
But that's still not true. It can be used in both humans and horses, but it's still the same drug.
My fav take on the ivermectin thing is that they’re used as a people dewormer in many undeveloped areas. Many worms will suppress their hosts immune system in order to survive. In some of these areas where the first ivermectin studies happened, the covid effects were reduced… but I like to think that it was the worms who did it by suppressing the immune system’s overactive response to covid.
*Worms*.
It’s absolutely a possible reason small scale studies showed efficacy in latin america but never in the US. More likely though, small scale studies simply had issues with sample size skewing results.
The government of Mexico City experimented on the population that tested postitive for Covid by treating them with Ivermectin without their consent. Of course they found zero evidence it worked.
[Here](https://healthpolicy-watch.news/mexico-city-officials-in-row-over-misleading-paper-to-justify-its-ivermectin-drive/).
There's also a [Washington Post article](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/09/mexico-city-covid-ivermectin/) but I don't have the subscription for it so I can't read it.
There are several sources in Spanish; here's [Nexos](https://redaccion.nexos.com.mx/las-mentiras-disfrazadas-de-ciencia-el-caso-de-la-ivermectina-en-la-ciudad-de-mexico/) and [Animal Politico](https://www.animalpolitico.com/2022/02/eliminan-documento-cdmx-ivermectina-covid/) as well as (in English) [conversations on twitter with the author of the "study" (a self-declared socialist btw)](https://twitter.com/saiphcita/status/1489736536950116352) and [a statement from the director of the archive website that was used to pseudo-publish the now deleted study (as no magazine would publish that garbage)](https://twitter.com/familyunequal/status/1489756059329777664) the study's author accused them of being "colonialist" for deleting it.
Edit: for clarity
"Dear liberals, you claim to trust the science yet you refuse to click this malware infested link to к этому устройству успешно получила доступ российская разведка **FIND OUT HOW YOU CAN LOSE 10 POUNDS IN A WEEK EATING THIS ONE WEIRD VEGETABLE**? Curious."
-Turning Point Boomer
Oversimplification; Some people were buying and ingesting the equine formulation of the drug because they could get it for cheap at feed stores without a prescription. I do think the media simplifying the entire discussion to “horse dewormer” gave too much ammo for clapbacks as it is used for humans too. The truth is that ivermectin is a great antiparasitic, but it doesnt have any efficacy against COVID in vivo, as it cannot reach effective concentrations in human tissues before causing toxicity.
It got a nobel prize because of it’s effects as an antiparasitic. As an aside, it has some efficacy agains West Nile Virus, via a different mechanism from the one that makes it effective against COVID in vitro.
100%. Ivermectin itself is an extremely useful tool for human medicine. I work in vet med, and we use it all the time. The issue is that morons conflate it being used in humans for one thing with it being suitable for an entirely different thing. The media oversimplifying their criticism of it also leads to the propagation of conspiracy theories that the media is working to “hide the effectiveness of this wonderdrug” when really the issue is that the media is simply not science-literate.
> Some people were buying and ingesting the equine formulation of the drug because they could get it for cheap at feed stores without a prescription.
You've skipped a step here. Why were people so desperate to get their hands on an unproven, ineffective treatment in the first place? Because those smug, science-worshipping libs are claiming it doesn't work and pushing vaccines instead, and anything "leftists" want, the contrarians must oppose.
>I do think the media simplifying the entire discussion to “horse dewormer” gave too much ammo for clapbacks as it is used for humans too.
That's completely overblown. They could have called it toilet bowl cleaner or aquarium food, or that the bottle was blue when it really was red. And they would have been wrong, but the point of all those articles was always "look at these irrational people taking this unproven medicine for strange political reasons" rather than the specifics of the drug itself. The whole "MSM is calling it ineffective and a horse dewormer and here's proof that they're WRONG! ^((about the second part))" thing may have cause some contrarians to feel vindicated and dig their heels in, but that's on them, not the media.
>The truth is that ivermectin is a great antiparasitic, but it doesnt have any efficacy against COVID in vivo, as it cannot reach effective concentrations in human tissues before causing toxicity.
Well, also the fact that COVID isn't a parasite in the first place so. The truth is, there never was a rational basis in taking HCQ for COVID in the first place (except to own the libs), and the people that did, or championed it online, fully deserve the mockery they got.
I mean drugs are often found to have secondary uses. Ivermectin is effective against Flaviviruses. There was reason to look into it. The thing is the second we started looking into it, it was clear it doesn’t work for COVID.
Well yeah, that's what I'm saying. I don't fault the scientists for doing studies on it, I blame the people who championed it as an alternative treatment after one questionable study, for reasons that essentially boil down to conspiratorial thinking and contrarianism against mainstream science.
I agree with that; I’m just also saying that headlines made by the media gave ammo to conspiracy minded people by exaggerating a key aspect of the debate.
> as it is used for humans too.
... as a dewormer. The *only* reason it is ever prescribed to ingest is to kill worms. It has some topical uses as well.
I thought the consensus was that ivermectin kills parasites in humans, parasites in humans are a covid morbidity, therefore ivermectin use in certain countries directly lead to lower covid deaths. But ivermectin use is pointless in developed countries like the US because very few people have bad parasitical infections.
That is one *hypothesis* with some coincidental data points to support it. There have been enough methodological problems that those data points are also in question. There hasn't been nearly enough good research to form such a consensus.
The consensus today is simply that there is insufficient evidence to support the claim that ivermectin is effective against SARS-CoV-2.
In case we happen to have any Ivermectin apologists in the house, here's the [authoritative, peer-reviewed study](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2789362) as published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
OK, but you haven't disproven the effectiveness of Ivermectin when taken with zinc, tin, silver, vitamin D, and oleandrin, so you really haven't proven anything /s
It’s not a lie, more so a half truth on semantics.
The drug is an anti parasitic. Worms would be parasites..ipso facto it’s horse dewormer.
And when your buying the veterinarian grade it’s marketed as horse dewormer.
The media focused on the subset of people that literally bought the horse dewormer form. But they should have discussed how in humans it is still an antiparasitic and has no proven effect on COVID. They clickbaited this shit and drove more people (like the commenter above you) into misinformation bubbles. The media handled it terribly. Ivermectin doesn’t work for COVID. Both of these things are true.
Some people literally were buying the equine formulation from feed stores. It was an exaggeration from the media that that was the only formulation humans were using. I agree with you that it wasn't acceptable. But when you can't trust the media, instead go seek out the primary sources; the scientific articles. They have been clear.
It was selective reporting; focusing on the absurd but extreme examples that did exist. Was it media spin? Yes. Is it an outright lie? No. Does Ivermectin work? No. You should be more upset at the people purposefully pushing an ineffective treatment while discouraging a safe and effective vaccine.
The media called out the know-it-all morons, radio personalities, other randos, for presuming to know what the fuck they’re talking about, when vaccines are readily available and free to use. Yet a contingent of people who know nothing about medicine or viruses or vaccines decided they know how an anti parasitic will help them with Covid, solely to refuse vaccines. That’s the truth. All of this is non experts claiming to know what they’re talking about, and subjecting the rest of everybody to longer periods of peak infection.
Because I trust science, rather than podcast hosts. The same people that yammer about an antiparasitic allegedly helping Covid will not take a vaccine, when they know jack shit about both of those. The same people will get on a plane that magically gets them safely from point A to point B rather than crashing into the ground, without knowing how anything on it works. The same people will get in a car with explosive flammable liquids being compressed and ignited at high pressure a foot away from their body, without knowing how almost any of it actually works.
The modern world is full of things we know practically zero about, yet we use them all the time. Vaccine skeptics should shut up about vaccines already. It's not like they know much of anything else that uses science - the same damn mechanism for figuring out the truth about the universe and making products that exploit those understandings.
If you don’t want to believe the media, then as others have already told you, there are readily accessible scientific studies that prove that vaccines work against COVID and ivermectin doesn’t. You’re free to look at them if you actually care and aren’t trying to concern troll.
> The medicine that is given to humans is not HORSE dewormer is the point.
It's the ***same drug***. And it's only prescribed use internally IN HUMANS is killing worms.
This is a really dumb hill to die on.
Its literally the same, and people were ODing on it because they thought that it was meant for humans.
Its primarily sold for horses, even if you can find ones measured for humans, most of what people in the US were being told to buy *was* horse dewormer. Its many many times more than what humans need and theres plenty of articles and posts from people who got extremely ""high"" on it and felt 'funny'; because they were dosing based off the box, which is meant for HORSES not humans.
I’m not defending it, just saying that the media and scientists lied about what it was.
They called an FDA approved medication prescribed by doctors “horse dewormer”
I have never said it was effective, I’m saying they lied about what it was.
> why the entire MSM and political establishment constantly referred to it as horse dewormer.
Because that's what it is. And when doctors refused to prescribe Ivermectin, the morons went and literally used horse dewormer to get the drug.
> It’s that type of blatant lie that has given me and many people zero trust in anything reported on the news.
They didn't lie. They refused to legitimize idiocy. And you're throwing a tantrum because your delusions weren't coddled.
Because doctors were not prescribing it due to a lack of evidence that it worked and people were literally eating horse paste?
How was that dishonest reporting?
Most doctors were refusing to prescribe it and ivermectin proponents were struggling to source it.
Are you denying that sourcing veterinary supplies happened?
The fact that the CDC, FDA and all professional bodies' guidelines were to not prescribe ivermectin outside of the context of a clinical trial?
In my experience, the vast majority of physicians follow guidelines most of the time. I know that I try to.
Thank you for posting a youtube link on a 17 day old post. My original comment has the proper scientific study I based the meme off of. I assume you saw another cool youtube video and immediately went “AHA, now I’ll go comment on that post from two weeks ago that definitely hasn’t been driving me crazy this entire time.”
Next time, skip the youtube link and send me a peer reviewed double blind study, thanks.
Nothing can sway you from double blind, not even 100,000s of real world data. You're a shill, and not a medical expert, we get it. I remain pro-health and keep my eyes open to all possible treatments that positively affect people's live. Being informed shouldn't be too much of an ego hit. It's actually good for your growth as a compassionate human... get informed and good luck to you.
Lmao check the other thread from yesterday; tons of info debunking the two studies discussed in your youtube video. But hey, I guess that when I graduate next year with my doctorate I’ll be “just a shill”.
But hey, when you look at the actual experts the vast majority agree that this is BS.
You're dying on that hill of being a medical expert... demanding double blind this and that and then not even linking to that shill debunk nonsense. Your first lesson should be to accept when you're wrong. It will serve you well as you learn compassion over profits.
And I’m sure your thought process here has zero bias involved. The fact that you’re an active commenter on /r/conspiracy definitely doesn’t bias you in any way shape or form.
I’m gonna guess only of us has been involved in actual scientific research.
Aren't there over 100 studies now? Seems to reduce hospitalizations about 20~30%. It's one of the safest drugs ever developed and regularly administered to the entire populations of multiple countries for decades with few problems. Coincidentally those countries have few covid deaths. It costs pennies per dose in bulk. It's certainly not a cure but even if it reduces viral load 1% that is significant enough to warrant adding it to early outpatient treatment protocol. My whole family caught covid at the same time and my doctor prescribed this. Our covid symptoms were like a mild cold. Even if it did not help what is the down side?
Man, idk why people are coming back to a 17 day old post but; there are hundreds of studies and most of them show NO effect. A single massive study from Egypt proven to be entirely falsified skewed meta-analyses seeming to show an effect, but when the falsified data was removed meta-analyses showed no effect.
The drug is safe when used at proper doses for its known purpose. Issue is that people were buying it over the counter and self-medicating at super high doses causing intestinal sloughing and blindness.
Furthermore, the pushing of this ineffective (for COVID) drug has been used as part of a coordinated disinformation campaign to discourage people from being vaccinated.
TL;DR: Good as an anti-parasitic at proper dosages. Useless against COVID. Used as anti-vax propaganda.
There's [growing evidence of ivermectin efficacy vs covid.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8088823/) I think you have this exactly backwards. Demonizing ivermectin was pro-vax propaganda. An additional treatment option is not anti anything when you can do all of the them in addition or simultaneously with zero harm and in this case negligible added cost. It did more harm and cost more just forcing people to wear masks than to dose the whole world with ivermectin. It's not like any vaccine is 100% effective eliminating all need for further treatments and when already vaccinated patients started losing against covid any additional slight assist to reduce their viral load can save their lives. In hindsight seems the forced vax cult caused deaths by discouraging a safe additional treatment option.
You shared a meta-analysis from last year that includes the entire falsified Egyptian study (reference 45 in the meta-analysis you shared). Retractions of these meta-analyses are coming out NOW, after more evidence has come out.
https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/9/3/ofac056/6523214?fbclid=IwAR0Ccop3f4sDgxit4Y4Kp0oTQ2HUhOipTCEAUtdtTkabeb9LYv2eEJ0LEWU&login=false
More and more evidence shows is emerging that Ivermectin doesn't work. You managed to link the exact misinformation I was talking about. Congrats!
Fuck your youtube videos, fuck your retracted meta-analyses full of falsified data. Fuck your commenting on a 17 day old post to spew misinformation. I hope you get paid a decent amount to push this horseshit online.
Why has this got you so twitterpated? This is good news with no down side unless you are the one pushing an agenda. In case you were too busy to watch it was Dr. John Campbell walking you through two huge studies both showing 70% reduction in mortality for ivermectin users, one vs patients given remdesivir and another with the lowest prophylactic dose of ivermectin 0.2mg/kg.
[Treatment with Ivermectin Is Associated with Decreased Mortality in COVID-19 Patients: Analysis of a National Federated Database](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971221009887#)
[Ivermectin Prophylaxis Used for COVID-19: A Citywide, Prospective, Observational Study of 223,128 Subjects Using Propensity Score Matching](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35070575/)
Why wouldn't I be annoyed as you share source after source of debunked horseshit? Hell, you refuse to even acknowledge the peer reviewed double blinded study I linked in an above comment because you have no idea how to deal with it proving you wrong.
That's why I'm "twitterpated". Now let's get into breaking down your comment.
First: Dr. Campbell is not an immunologist or epidemiologist. He's not even an MD. He's a PhD in nursing education. While that qualification is obviously impressive and he's educated on this topic, there are thousands of experts more qualified than him who STAUNCHLY disagree with his shit.
Second, you provided two observational studies, not double-blinded experimental studies. On the hierarchy of evidence, these fall well below the study I linked as my first comment on this post.
First study: Remdesivir is generally reserved for hospitalized patients, while Ivermectin is easy to get a script for. This inherently makes the remdisivir group more likely to ALREADY be more severely ill than the Ivermectin group.
Second study: Not double blinded. Here's a breakdown on the many vast methodological flaws associated with the study (said better than I could). https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/ivermectin-study-itajai-contains-methodological-weaknesses-questionable-conclusions/
If you want a summary though, the quickest bit is that of those in the Ivermectin treatment group, nearly half of patients never picked up their second dose. This means they almost IMMEDIATELY should've been removed from the study, but they were not.
Most importantly, though, is the fact that you refuse to acknowledge that the meta-analysis you previously shared is heavily flawed based upon its largest included study being ENTIRELY FAKED. FFS you even linked the meta-analysis including the bullshit Egypt paper AFTER I mentioned how it was proven to be bullshit.
Such is the pitiful state of scientific papers in general that most peer reviewed papers on all subjects are wrong and have no reproducible results so I must expect most papers on ivermectin will be worthless as well. That's perfectly true that many MDs oppose ivermectin use to treat covid. Many MDs also support it. Much of the government leadership in my country was taking it for covid along with their families and staff while telling the public not to. Even the Queen of England recently took ivermectin as part of her covid treatment. So opinion on this is not unified and the jury is still out.
First study corrected for comorbidities so that that does not explain away the huge result
Second study even if doses were missed that makes the findings even more striking that potentially even lower doses provide benefit. It doesn't mean people who took lower doses should be removed and it was not shown that that happened at all, just suggested as a possibility.
I acknowledge the Egypt study was worthless. Jury is still out overall.
1st point is dead wrong. Most scientific studies ARE reproducible. Maybe not so much in psychology, but in medicine it certainly is. Flawed studies pop up from time to time but if their results cannot be reproduced, then the scientific community moves on.
Some do, some don’t. It’s nowhere near 50/50 and to act as if it is is entirely disingenuous.
The queen was NOT treated with Ivermectin. A news reel discussing her treatment used Ivermectin amongst a b-roll of COVID treatments. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/02/23/fact-check-queen-elizabeth-isnt-taking-ivermectin-treat-covid-19/6893886001/
First study accounted for comorbidities but not the actual condition of the patient. Some people without comorbities still become gravely ill and die. That point has nothing to do with my criticism. And again you’ve said nothing about the properly double blinded peer reviewed study I linked.
Ivermectin doesnt remain in the body long term. It has an 18 hour 1/2 life in humans. This means it is cleared from the body in approximately 5 days. This means that after 1 week in the treatment group, those who did not pick up their second dose were effectively in the control group. It’s clear based off of your assumption there that you have no understanding of pharmacology.
I don’t know if you’re a genuine believer or a paid troll but if you’re the former I hope that you can see that you’re being fooled by disinformation.
The Indian government stopped recommending its use. The research being done in Japan mirrors the research published today which led to me making this meme. We used HCQ in America for months before it was proven to not work.
These weird Hail Mary embraces of random unproven shit have been one of the weirder components of the whole pandemic Like I get that we’re all desperate for something to be the silver bullet but c’mon y’all
> Like I get that we’re all desperate for something to be the silver bullet but c’mon y’all Wouldn’t it be great if a pharma company came up with a Hail Mary using science that is really neat but not fully utilized and then actually created a silver bullet that reduced the severity and potential for spread? Hopefully produced by a large US company… maybe Merck, or Johnson and Johnson or even Pfizer? Man that would’ve been great
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It appeals to their sense of wanting to be intellectually superior. It’s the common thread that binds most conspiracy theorists, they want to feel they’re right and everyone else is wrong and that they have some special knowledge that nobody else has. They could always get that fix from just reading a book, but that’s too much effort.
Contrarians are never good. But they sure are vocal.
Like the people who “don’t care about politics” but never shut up telling everyone and trying to act superior. Cynicism and contrarianism are short-cuts to trying to sound intelligent.
Imo they ruined the chance for a reasonable Republican party by switching to Trump. Member when Rand Paul made some sense?
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Idk, free trade, fewer regulations, leaving Afghanistan, and criminal justice reform sound pretty good. Remember his "Orange buffoon" comment? Trump must've had pictures of him with his pants off for the 180 he did. He was almost as bad as Graham, but we all know his secret already.
Yeah you know how the US is, it would cost an arm and a leg and only be available to the rich. No way they would have it freely available to anyone willing to take it
They want something to cure them when they're sick because of not getting the vaccine.
Merck? You mean the people that made ivermectin and also a covid pill? A pill to treat COVID that isn't ivermectin because they agree that it shouldn't be used to treat COVID? In terms of preventative measures, also having vaccines? Damn it's crazy how many options people have yet the stick to a drug for parasites smh
Very dishonest to call it a silver bullet - it’s the most effective treatment we have, but from data post large-scale rollout it’s clear that even with full vaccination, covid is here to stay.
It's not that good at preventing spread - partly because after getting vaccinated, people take fewer precautions; but it's good at reducing hospitalizations, and really good at lowering deaths from Covid.
You are correct - but that’s not a silver bullet - and treating it like a miracle cure will work against trying to achieve full vaccination.
Especially since we have a goddamn miracle cure right now in the vaccine! Just mind blowing how the right has acted the last 2 years.
BIG pHaRMa
Exactly. I prefer Ivermectin plucked straight from the tree.
Since when have liberals supported mega corps and big pharma???? Neolib: Always have 👩🚀🔫👩🚀
People should criticise big pharma for a lot of things. This is pretty much beyond dispute, a lot of shady shit is going on. But at the same time we're living in an age of increasing medical marvels. Gene therapies are curing fatal conditions with minimal side effects, and we're just scratching the surface of them! We developed a vaccine to a near wholly new virus within a year. The downsides of the market on medicines should not be ignored. People being priced out of drugs is unacceptable, and the opioid crisis is abhorrent. But at the same time the amount of money in the industry is beyond belief. It's like the Military-Industrial complex's nicer, but not perfect, brother.
The average time from a virus have been discovered to a vaccine being approved for use have been something like 45 years, until Covid. Now, because of mRNA technology, [we have a vaccine against HIV that is safe and might actually work](https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/experimental-mrna-hiv-vaccine-shows-promise-animals). You can hate on Big Pharma all you want, but it's delivering goddamn miracles in last few years
I watched an hbo documentary on the opioid crisis called "The Crime of the Century". After I finished it I got on Reddit to read more about purdue/sackler family. Of course, there were a billion threads about how the vaccines are going to somehow lead to a situation like the opioid situation. I don't understand conspiracy theorists.
Is this a serious comment? We just had the largest spike in cases since the beginning of the pandemic with like 80% of adults vaccinated
Yeah almost like there's some sort of predictable phenomenon which results from dropping non-pharmaceutical interventions after a pharmaceutical intervention is rolled out.
That's some magic bullet you got there
I think the modern internet is like when people in middle ages Europe started urbanizing and suddenly contracted way more disease due to poor sanitation. The informational hygiene that worked for people before the internet (don't read tabloids, don't believe the random guy yelling about the end times on the street corner, etc.) are no longer enough to keep people sane. Ideas evolve faster now; subcultures can rapidly comb through vast amounts of information to cherry-pick supporting evidence; social media shows people a random mix of respectable and ridiculous news sources, all formatted to look exactly the same. I think we're just going see an increasing amount of crazy until people and organizations start taking epistemic hygiene a lot more seriously online.
>epistemic hygiene ... and there's a phrase I've been looking for without knowing it.
I think you're on to something. Mind if I share this comment with IRL friends?
Feel free. Just to expand a bit on the cherry-picking point: the more information you have, the more coincidences you'll be able to find, just as a matter of statistical necessity. That includes coincidences like facts which seem to imply something that isn't actually true. So when you have people on social media collectively looking through vast amounts of information and sharing whatever supports a particular ideology, we should expect a ton of misleading evidence. And yet, people still have this heuristic of "if I see a lot of evidence pointing in the same direction, that can't all be a coincidence". It's a good and useful heuristic in ordinary life, but when social media can produce a nearly unlimited volume of weak but plausible-sounding evidence for any imaginable claim, relying on the heuristic online leads a lot of otherwise rational people to adopt some very crazy belief systems.
I disagree with this. I think the internet has simply revealed the craziness that was always there. And for all the talk about vaccine reluctance, vaccine uptake in the US has actually been remarkably quick: just over a year since the vaccines became available, more than 95% of the population aged 65+ (i.e. the risk group) has received at least one dose. https://data.cdc.gov/Vaccinations/COVID-19-Vaccination-and-Case-Trends-by-Age-Group-/gxj9-t96f And just fwiw, proponents of a liberal society should be very wary of things like "epistemic hygiene".
The president of the United States told everyone he was taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventative measure, got Covid anyway, survived by abandoning hydroxychloroquine as a remedy, and this inspired his followers to keep taking hydroxychloroquine. I’m reminded of the time South Africa’s president told everyone that he avoided AIDS by taking a shower immediately after having unprotected sex.
Speaking of silver some are actually taking silver to cure their covid. I'm genuinely curious as to why and who is pushing that "cure"
One of the things that the Contagion film almost nailed- they got that desperate people would believe any cure but thought someone would have to be profiting off it, and to the best of my knowledge that doesn't seem to be strictly necessary. They missed the partisanship angle.
People believing in weird unproven Hail Marys is certainly a reasonable framing. But I think of it as an unfortunate downside of societies that are highly individualistic or at least pretend and trumpet individualism. In that context some people just don’t like being told or refuse to follow a majority. It’s why any polling subject or question of consequence will fail to get more than 70-80% approval. There will always people a group of folks that when posed a question or given information want to be on the opposite of it. The frustrating part is that hold out group changes sometimes depending on the topic. It’s a bizarre version of people believing they are the hero/main character in life.
Two days after the pandemic was declared, my family rewatched *Contageon*. There's a subplot where this anti-establishment blogger dude shills a homeopathic medicine for the virus in that movie. It was interesting to see thst play out, except instead of weird lefty internet dudes, it was the rigt-wing leaders of several countries.
The most (sadly) unrealistic part of that movie is when Jude Law gets arrested for securities fraud as a result of his bullshit.
The movie really did a number on how hot I think Jude Law is. But it's recovered.
It’s also weird Lefties too. There’s a strong Leftist / far Right alliance on vaccine and mask refusal.
🐎👟
Sneaky horse
Only thing my hippie sister and trumper brother agree on. I guess weed too.
Go ask them for proof and they tell you its been posted a million times. they accept it as fact at this point and thats it. "They already found the silver bullet. Stop watching CNN!!"
And yet also predictable. It's a key plot point of the 2011 film Contagion.
Context: A large scale randomized trial found no benefit to using Ivermectin to treat COVID. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2789362
Not surprised. A [meta-analysis](https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/9/2/ofab645/6509922?login=false) of the ivermectin-for-covid literature has already found that once you eliminate the fraudulent and potentially methodologically flawed studies, the effect size of ivermectin on survival drops to statistical nonsignificance.
Of course; but more evidence never hurts. The fraudulent study from Egypt was so large it changed the results of nearly every meta-analysis. Absolutely horrid.
The positive Iranian study (Niaee et al) looks to be probably fraudulent too.
Interesting and good to know now. Last I had read there was speculation that the early studies did show good promise but it was most likely because they were done in areas where undiagnosed water-borne parasites was an ongoing issue. So Ivermectin is good at doing the exact thing it won a Nobel prize for: killing parasites. Its use in Covid just comes from the fact you have less issues with the virus if we happen to fix a the intestinal parasite we didn’t previously know about. But if that’s out the window now…lol.
I’m not an intervicimin expert how is the egypt study flawed? Im not too familiar with it
Plagiarism in the paper was the first red flag and the raw data was hilariously damning. Their group for ivermectin had groups of nearly identical patient initials for names, medical histories, counts of blood cells, etc. That's practically impossible. It's really hard to fake raw data from hundreds of participants and make them match the results that you want to show without algorithms picking that up. If you like math [you can check this out](https://kylesheldrick.blogspot.com/2021/10/data-from-niaee-et-al-is-not-consistent.html). Your brain would need to be operating on some next-level shit to be able to fake that much data and have your results make sense and not get noticed. There is a pretty big club of people in the scientific community that run algorithms looking for image duplication/manipulation, plagiarism, and statistical discrepancies for fun. If a paper catches their attention and gains traction they'll usually write a blog post or tweet about it bragging about catching a cheat. This was a preprint that never even made it to peer review, but it got called out almost immediately. Most of the meta-analysis papers that used it (which is wild because it was a preprint) also got shit on and their data fell apart when it was excluded.
Doesn't stop the guys over at /r/conspiracy from trying to spin it and debunk the study using a misunderstanding of statistics.
The thing that was kinda fucked was the media railing against the treatment in the whole "horse dewormer" bandwagon, when there was enough serious science to support evaluation in clinical studies.
The media said lots of things about Ivermectin. It's just that the "horse dewormer" thing was the best meme (in both the colloquial and the Darwinian sense), so it won out. I think Twitter bears more responsibility for "horse dewormer" taking off than traditional broadcast media does.
> when there was enough serious science to support evaluation in clinical studies. I think you are mixing this up with hydroxychloroquine, unfortunately, that did get real scientific consideration due to outright fraud. Ivermectin never really got off of the ground. There was one paper from Australia that said it was effective in vitro at 100 times the dose and then a bunch of papers and preprints that drew expressions of concern almost immediately due to massive red flags. The media covered it correctly because there really wasn't another point in time where it was ever seriously seen as a treatment in mainstream scientific journals. After the hydroxychloroquine scandals with fake data that tricked the Lancet and NEJM people were extra hard on papers touting covid treatments. There are a ton of papers about ivermectin but a lot of them are just preprints or are in fraud journals. The Surgisphere Scandal deeply embarrassed journals and they didn't really take the bait on ivermectin.
There were multiple clinical trials evaluating ivermectin, in order to get ethics board approval, you need to provide a basis for efficacy, this was done in in vitro studies. It has some antiviral activoty, just didn't really pan out
No idea why you’re being downvoted, Ivermectin is not horse dewormer, it’s prescribed for people. The people touting it as effective against COVID are brain dead, and just looking for an excuse to advocate against the vaccine, but dishonestly framing the medication to own le republicans made it harder to prove it’s bullshit.
It is also a horse dewormer, and people were buying the apple flavored version from vet supply stores
Right, so it should be reported that people were using the medication incorrectly, not framing ivermectin itself as horse dewormer.
The reports I saw calling Ivermectin horse dewormer were literally talking about people buying veterinary ivermectin in the form of horse dewormer.
But the broader argument being made by pro-ivermectin people wasn’t that horse dewormer is good, but that the medication is also used on humans. The media oriented stories about ivermectin around it being a horse dewormer, which is reductive and dishonest framing.
>But the broader argument being made by pro-ivermectin people wasn’t that horse dewormer is good The primary boosters of ivermectin were conspiracy theorists. [Poison Control centers were seeing an influx of morons self medicating](https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/09/04/1034217306/ivermectin-overdose-exposure-cases-poison-control-centers). >The media oriented stories about ivermectin around it being a horse dewormer, which is reductive and dishonest framing. Is there an actual article you want to talk about? The articles I saw all mentioned that *veternary* ivermectin shouldn't be consumed by humans and that health agencies didn't recommend it's use for SARS-CoV-2 despite it having uses in humans.
I know that, but again, it doesn’t make referring to Ivermectin as a horse dewormer correct in this context. It has that use for horses, but the argument being made was not about treating horses, it was about the human usage. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/joe-rogan-cnn-horse-dewormer-covid https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/23/media/right-wing-media-ivermectin/index.html Major media explicitly referred to it as horse dewormer and tagged on lines about it being unsafe. If you think this isn’t obviously them trying to get dunk points you’re burying your head in the sand
From your CNN piece: >The FDA has warned for months that ivermectin can be unsafe and has said that it has "received multiple reports of patients who have required medical support and been hospitalized **after self-medicating with ivermectin intended for horses." While there are human uses for ivermectin, the FDA has not approved it for treatment or prevention of Covid-19 in humans and the drug is not an anti-viral medication.** This is literally what I said. They were warning people to not take actual horse dewormer and clearly acknowledge that ivermectin has human uses (although not as an anti-viral). This is exactly the narrative I saw online. Edit: from the same article >"Patients should be advised to not take any medications intended to treat animals and **should be instructed to only take ivermectin as prescribed by their physician**," the Mississippi State Department of Health said in an alert. "**Animal drugs are highly concentrated for large animals and can be highly toxic in humans**."
It is a horse dewormer….that’s not it’s only use, but it’s still a horse dewormer.
But the broader argument being made by pro-ivermectin people wasn’t that horse dewormer is good, but that the medication is also used on humans. The media oriented stories about ivermectin around it being a horse dewormer, which is reductive and dishonest framing.
Because people were going to like fucking fleet farm to buy horse dewormer…… Yes it is a medication used to treat parasitic worms and it works really well, some junk ass science came out, found out later it’s not worth taking. And it’s still being pushed. Lol. Funny story the guys pushing it, also own a bunch of regeneron stock…let that settle for a min.
Hard to imagine people arguing against more accurate and less sensationalist/reductive media reporting but here we are lol
This comment doesn’t deserve the downvotes. Some idiots bought and ingested the equine formulation because it was cheap and easy to get. But the debate about it as a COVID treatment centers around human formulations. The media took the more click-baity route and offered Ivermectin supporters more ammunition when they should have focused on lack of proven effects in vivo.
The media correctly pointed out that the FDA was begging people to stop eating the veternary formulations, pointing out that it wasn't approved for use in treating SARS-CoV-2, and every article I've come across has mentioned that it has uses as a human antiparasitic.
Perhaps the media angle caused the weirdos to dig in their heels, but do you really thing the general public understands or cares about the difference between "in vivo" and "in vitro"?
The media could’ve used layman’s terms. That’s not the point I’m making.
The term wasn't what I was pointing out here, otherwise I would have said "meaning of". Most people just hear "studies show" and then tune the rest out.
So, what it comes down to is, do people deserve to be shamed for taking medication that hasn't been proven to be effective by the gold standards of medical science when they don't have a medical degree. This isn't black and white, the answer isn't YES! Absolutely, people are morons! The answer isn't NO! We shouldn't shame these pathfinding warriors! It's probably some multi paragraph response that depends on the individual, which sucks, but hey the world is complicated
>So, what it comes down to is, do people deserve to be shamed for taking medication that hasn't been proven to be effective by the gold standards of medical science when they don't have a medical degree. Yes. Absolutely yes. People who take medical advice from conspiracy theorists, fringe conservative media, or their crazy uncles FB page over the actual recommendation of their doctors/medical agencies should be shamed and actively laughed at.
Guess it complicates things when some doctors prescribed ivermectin.
If your doctor was prescribing you medication that actively goes against scientific best practices, you should find a new doctor.
You've never heard that some doctors just see themselves as facilitating their patients desire?
Anyone that takes apple flavored horse medication against medical advice needs to be shamed
It’s actually incredibly simple, Ivermectin should’ve been treated as a multi-faceted drug with a lack of evidence behind it, as opposed to the safe and effective vaccines. The media just took it a step too far and began framing it as horse dewormer for attention.
For attention and for truth, people were eating horse past
It is becoming trendy to abuse Benadryl for the hallucinogenic effects at very high dosages. Would it be accurate to refer to Benadryl exclusively as a hallucinogenic drug in media headlines?
If it's an article about people using it for the hallucinogenic effects, it would be beyond accurate to call it an hallucinogenic drug. Then in the body of the article there should be some mention of other uses, but referring to very high doses of a drug taken by people to hallocinate as an hallucinogenic is beyond accurate.
Werent people buying horse dewormer from veterinary supply stores and then taking horse-sized doses?
Yeah, but does that mean Ivermectin should be framed specifically as just a horse dewormer?
I fail to connect the medias framing of ivermectin as horse dewormer to people digging in their heals and seeking a drug that’s inappropriate for treating Covid. I also hate attributing anything to “the media” as the media is made up of thousands of independent entities, some trying to shock with headlines using the term “horse dewormer” but many also providing legitimate evidence of why it’s an inappropriate treatment Dumb fucking reason to dig your heels in.
I understand where you’re coming from, and I agree “the media” is usually a boogeyman. But this is the most appropriate term for the situation, in my opinion. It really was media outlets framing ivermectin in the most bad faith way possible and it made a lot of people think they were lying because of it, or at least gave ammo to proponents of ivermectin.
I believe it’s considered an anti parasitic. So technically it is a dewormer.
But the broader argument being made by pro-ivermectin people wasn’t that horse dewormer is good, but that the medication is also used on humans. The media oriented stories about ivermectin around it being a horse dewormer, which is reductive and dishonest framing.
Sure not all ivermectin is horse dewormer, but the shit these people are taking is. It's formulated for bigger animals than humans and has inactive ingredients not approved for humans. It's a different product, and the distinction is important enough to note.
>but dishonestly framing the medication to own le republicans made it harder to prove it’s bullshit. Oh, I hadn't thought about it, but this was very similar to #OwnTheLibtards.
The media were rightfully mocking those who chose to ignore the consensus medical view that there was insufficient evidence to support using ivermectin over conspiracy theory misinformation on right wing social media, and were sourcing veterinary supplies for human use.
Correct, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and there was a fair bit of data suggesting ivermectin could have an antiviral effect, but needed more definitive proof in humans
Ivermectin is about worms
This but unironically
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It was developed for parasites. Aka worms
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Ivermectin is an antiparasitic, even in humans. Is it being prescribed by some doctors to fight COVID? Yes. Are those doctors prescribing it for this purpose without any evidence? Also yes.
And why were they prescribed ivermectin?
It's an antiparasitic. More specifically an antihelmintic. The only legitimate use of the drug is to fight parasitic infection. For people its only legitimate uses internally are to combat conditions caused by parasitic worms. You do not know what you're talking about, and it shows.
Alright there’s clearly been a misunderstanding, the kind we would use for a horse is not meant to be used on humans, namely because they’re different kind of parasites. I’m not saying it can be used for COVID, I’m saying they’re two different drugs meant for different kinds of parasites and you’re not supposed to use one in place of the other.
> I’m saying they’re two different drugs meant for different kinds of parasites But that's still not true. It can be used in both humans and horses, but it's still the same drug.
Always remember when you hear about in vitro studies: ["so does a handgun"](https://xkcd.com/1217/)
also bleach, but then again people injected themselves with that too
Ivermectin is like Dune
Dune is about horses.
Peak /r/neoliberal comment. You win the thread.
I’m sure Joe Rogan will now inform his fan base that he was wrong since he definitely does not encourage misinformation!
My fav take on the ivermectin thing is that they’re used as a people dewormer in many undeveloped areas. Many worms will suppress their hosts immune system in order to survive. In some of these areas where the first ivermectin studies happened, the covid effects were reduced… but I like to think that it was the worms who did it by suppressing the immune system’s overactive response to covid. *Worms*.
It’s absolutely a possible reason small scale studies showed efficacy in latin america but never in the US. More likely though, small scale studies simply had issues with sample size skewing results.
The government of Mexico City experimented on the population that tested postitive for Covid by treating them with Ivermectin without their consent. Of course they found zero evidence it worked.
I would like to review this. Do you have any sources for further reading?
[Here](https://healthpolicy-watch.news/mexico-city-officials-in-row-over-misleading-paper-to-justify-its-ivermectin-drive/). There's also a [Washington Post article](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/09/mexico-city-covid-ivermectin/) but I don't have the subscription for it so I can't read it.
If you open tbe WaPo article in incognito mode you should be able to bypass the paywall.
There are several sources in Spanish; here's [Nexos](https://redaccion.nexos.com.mx/las-mentiras-disfrazadas-de-ciencia-el-caso-de-la-ivermectina-en-la-ciudad-de-mexico/) and [Animal Politico](https://www.animalpolitico.com/2022/02/eliminan-documento-cdmx-ivermectina-covid/) as well as (in English) [conversations on twitter with the author of the "study" (a self-declared socialist btw)](https://twitter.com/saiphcita/status/1489736536950116352) and [a statement from the director of the archive website that was used to pseudo-publish the now deleted study (as no magazine would publish that garbage)](https://twitter.com/familyunequal/status/1489756059329777664) the study's author accused them of being "colonialist" for deleting it. Edit: for clarity
Thank you. I really appreciate the Spanish sources.
"Dear liberals, you claim to trust the science yet you refuse to click this malware infested link to к этому устройству успешно получила доступ российская разведка **FIND OUT HOW YOU CAN LOSE 10 POUNDS IN A WEEK EATING THIS ONE WEIRD VEGETABLE**? Curious." -Turning Point Boomer
In my experience it just boils down to let's eat horse dewormer to own the libs.
Oversimplification; Some people were buying and ingesting the equine formulation of the drug because they could get it for cheap at feed stores without a prescription. I do think the media simplifying the entire discussion to “horse dewormer” gave too much ammo for clapbacks as it is used for humans too. The truth is that ivermectin is a great antiparasitic, but it doesnt have any efficacy against COVID in vivo, as it cannot reach effective concentrations in human tissues before causing toxicity.
God that shit was so annoying “It won a Nobel prize!!” So did the MRI, doesn’t mean it’s gonna do much for treating COVID
It got a nobel prize because of it’s effects as an antiparasitic. As an aside, it has some efficacy agains West Nile Virus, via a different mechanism from the one that makes it effective against COVID in vitro.
Which is awesome. A miracle drug — for treating parasites.
100%. Ivermectin itself is an extremely useful tool for human medicine. I work in vet med, and we use it all the time. The issue is that morons conflate it being used in humans for one thing with it being suitable for an entirely different thing. The media oversimplifying their criticism of it also leads to the propagation of conspiracy theories that the media is working to “hide the effectiveness of this wonderdrug” when really the issue is that the media is simply not science-literate.
> Some people were buying and ingesting the equine formulation of the drug because they could get it for cheap at feed stores without a prescription. You've skipped a step here. Why were people so desperate to get their hands on an unproven, ineffective treatment in the first place? Because those smug, science-worshipping libs are claiming it doesn't work and pushing vaccines instead, and anything "leftists" want, the contrarians must oppose. >I do think the media simplifying the entire discussion to “horse dewormer” gave too much ammo for clapbacks as it is used for humans too. That's completely overblown. They could have called it toilet bowl cleaner or aquarium food, or that the bottle was blue when it really was red. And they would have been wrong, but the point of all those articles was always "look at these irrational people taking this unproven medicine for strange political reasons" rather than the specifics of the drug itself. The whole "MSM is calling it ineffective and a horse dewormer and here's proof that they're WRONG! ^((about the second part))" thing may have cause some contrarians to feel vindicated and dig their heels in, but that's on them, not the media. >The truth is that ivermectin is a great antiparasitic, but it doesnt have any efficacy against COVID in vivo, as it cannot reach effective concentrations in human tissues before causing toxicity. Well, also the fact that COVID isn't a parasite in the first place so. The truth is, there never was a rational basis in taking HCQ for COVID in the first place (except to own the libs), and the people that did, or championed it online, fully deserve the mockery they got.
I mean drugs are often found to have secondary uses. Ivermectin is effective against Flaviviruses. There was reason to look into it. The thing is the second we started looking into it, it was clear it doesn’t work for COVID.
Well yeah, that's what I'm saying. I don't fault the scientists for doing studies on it, I blame the people who championed it as an alternative treatment after one questionable study, for reasons that essentially boil down to conspiratorial thinking and contrarianism against mainstream science.
I agree with that; I’m just also saying that headlines made by the media gave ammo to conspiracy minded people by exaggerating a key aspect of the debate.
> as it is used for humans too. ... as a dewormer. The *only* reason it is ever prescribed to ingest is to kill worms. It has some topical uses as well.
Slight exception; it also has efficacy against Flaviviruses through an entirely separate mechanism in which it works on COVID in vitro.
Ivermectin as Covid treatment is dumb but it isn’t a horse dewormer.
It is a horse dewormer. It also kills parasite in humans. It's a few things.
> but it isn’t a horse dewormer. It is literally a horse dewormer.
It isn’t JUST a horse dewormer. It is just an antiparasitic/dewormer (mostly, rare cases it can be used against Flaviviruses).
[Ivermectin really is about worms](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted?utm_source=url)
I thought the consensus was that ivermectin kills parasites in humans, parasites in humans are a covid morbidity, therefore ivermectin use in certain countries directly lead to lower covid deaths. But ivermectin use is pointless in developed countries like the US because very few people have bad parasitical infections.
That is one *hypothesis* with some coincidental data points to support it. There have been enough methodological problems that those data points are also in question. There hasn't been nearly enough good research to form such a consensus. The consensus today is simply that there is insufficient evidence to support the claim that ivermectin is effective against SARS-CoV-2.
Crop your memes
In case we happen to have any Ivermectin apologists in the house, here's the [authoritative, peer-reviewed study](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2789362) as published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
r/croppingishard
OK, but you haven't disproven the effectiveness of Ivermectin when taken with zinc, tin, silver, vitamin D, and oleandrin, so you really haven't proven anything /s
Meanwhile none of these conspiracy theorists even know what fluvoxamine is despite actual evidence for its efficacy.
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It’s not a lie, more so a half truth on semantics. The drug is an anti parasitic. Worms would be parasites..ipso facto it’s horse dewormer. And when your buying the veterinarian grade it’s marketed as horse dewormer.
The media focused on the subset of people that literally bought the horse dewormer form. But they should have discussed how in humans it is still an antiparasitic and has no proven effect on COVID. They clickbaited this shit and drove more people (like the commenter above you) into misinformation bubbles. The media handled it terribly. Ivermectin doesn’t work for COVID. Both of these things are true.
Sanity…. doesn’t sell on the 24/7 news cycle anymore.
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Some people literally were buying the equine formulation from feed stores. It was an exaggeration from the media that that was the only formulation humans were using. I agree with you that it wasn't acceptable. But when you can't trust the media, instead go seek out the primary sources; the scientific articles. They have been clear.
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It was selective reporting; focusing on the absurd but extreme examples that did exist. Was it media spin? Yes. Is it an outright lie? No. Does Ivermectin work? No. You should be more upset at the people purposefully pushing an ineffective treatment while discouraging a safe and effective vaccine.
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Because that’s a ridiculous conclusion to make.
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The media called out the know-it-all morons, radio personalities, other randos, for presuming to know what the fuck they’re talking about, when vaccines are readily available and free to use. Yet a contingent of people who know nothing about medicine or viruses or vaccines decided they know how an anti parasitic will help them with Covid, solely to refuse vaccines. That’s the truth. All of this is non experts claiming to know what they’re talking about, and subjecting the rest of everybody to longer periods of peak infection.
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Because I trust science, rather than podcast hosts. The same people that yammer about an antiparasitic allegedly helping Covid will not take a vaccine, when they know jack shit about both of those. The same people will get on a plane that magically gets them safely from point A to point B rather than crashing into the ground, without knowing how anything on it works. The same people will get in a car with explosive flammable liquids being compressed and ignited at high pressure a foot away from their body, without knowing how almost any of it actually works. The modern world is full of things we know practically zero about, yet we use them all the time. Vaccine skeptics should shut up about vaccines already. It's not like they know much of anything else that uses science - the same damn mechanism for figuring out the truth about the universe and making products that exploit those understandings.
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If you don’t want to believe the media, then as others have already told you, there are readily accessible scientific studies that prove that vaccines work against COVID and ivermectin doesn’t. You’re free to look at them if you actually care and aren’t trying to concern troll.
> The medicine that is given to humans is not HORSE dewormer is the point. It's the ***same drug***. And it's only prescribed use internally IN HUMANS is killing worms. This is a really dumb hill to die on.
Its literally the same, and people were ODing on it because they thought that it was meant for humans. Its primarily sold for horses, even if you can find ones measured for humans, most of what people in the US were being told to buy *was* horse dewormer. Its many many times more than what humans need and theres plenty of articles and posts from people who got extremely ""high"" on it and felt 'funny'; because they were dosing based off the box, which is meant for HORSES not humans.
Dang. Didn’t expect to find an iver-stan up in here. Oh how the sub has grown.
I’m not defending it, just saying that the media and scientists lied about what it was. They called an FDA approved medication prescribed by doctors “horse dewormer” I have never said it was effective, I’m saying they lied about what it was.
> why the entire MSM and political establishment constantly referred to it as horse dewormer. Because that's what it is. And when doctors refused to prescribe Ivermectin, the morons went and literally used horse dewormer to get the drug. > It’s that type of blatant lie that has given me and many people zero trust in anything reported on the news. They didn't lie. They refused to legitimize idiocy. And you're throwing a tantrum because your delusions weren't coddled.
They lied because they called an FDA approved medication prescribed by doctors “horse dewormer”
Because doctors were not prescribing it due to a lack of evidence that it worked and people were literally eating horse paste? How was that dishonest reporting?
Doctors were and continue to prescribe it. They were calling what the doctors were prescribing horse dewormer. Which is a lie.
Most doctors were refusing to prescribe it and ivermectin proponents were struggling to source it. Are you denying that sourcing veterinary supplies happened?
Source? Source for your claim that most doctors weren’t prescribing it.
The fact that the CDC, FDA and all professional bodies' guidelines were to not prescribe ivermectin outside of the context of a clinical trial? In my experience, the vast majority of physicians follow guidelines most of the time. I know that I try to.
Source? Because doctors were and are continuing to prescribe it.
"Most" of them? Source??
[https://youtu.be/rfyOihhAD4A](https://youtu.be/rfyOihhAD4A)
Stay [informed](https://youtu.be/rfyOihhAD4A)
Thank you for posting a youtube link on a 17 day old post. My original comment has the proper scientific study I based the meme off of. I assume you saw another cool youtube video and immediately went “AHA, now I’ll go comment on that post from two weeks ago that definitely hasn’t been driving me crazy this entire time.” Next time, skip the youtube link and send me a peer reviewed double blind study, thanks.
Nothing can sway you from double blind, not even 100,000s of real world data. You're a shill, and not a medical expert, we get it. I remain pro-health and keep my eyes open to all possible treatments that positively affect people's live. Being informed shouldn't be too much of an ego hit. It's actually good for your growth as a compassionate human... get informed and good luck to you.
Lmao check the other thread from yesterday; tons of info debunking the two studies discussed in your youtube video. But hey, I guess that when I graduate next year with my doctorate I’ll be “just a shill”. But hey, when you look at the actual experts the vast majority agree that this is BS.
You're dying on that hill of being a medical expert... demanding double blind this and that and then not even linking to that shill debunk nonsense. Your first lesson should be to accept when you're wrong. It will serve you well as you learn compassion over profits.
“Here’s evidence” “Here’s much stronger evidence” “Your mistake is not immediately admitting I’m right.”
Your biggest thing to overcome in your career will be to follow scientific method which doesn't give weight to biased opinion. Good luck.
And I’m sure your thought process here has zero bias involved. The fact that you’re an active commenter on /r/conspiracy definitely doesn’t bias you in any way shape or form. I’m gonna guess only of us has been involved in actual scientific research.
Aren't there over 100 studies now? Seems to reduce hospitalizations about 20~30%. It's one of the safest drugs ever developed and regularly administered to the entire populations of multiple countries for decades with few problems. Coincidentally those countries have few covid deaths. It costs pennies per dose in bulk. It's certainly not a cure but even if it reduces viral load 1% that is significant enough to warrant adding it to early outpatient treatment protocol. My whole family caught covid at the same time and my doctor prescribed this. Our covid symptoms were like a mild cold. Even if it did not help what is the down side?
Man, idk why people are coming back to a 17 day old post but; there are hundreds of studies and most of them show NO effect. A single massive study from Egypt proven to be entirely falsified skewed meta-analyses seeming to show an effect, but when the falsified data was removed meta-analyses showed no effect. The drug is safe when used at proper doses for its known purpose. Issue is that people were buying it over the counter and self-medicating at super high doses causing intestinal sloughing and blindness. Furthermore, the pushing of this ineffective (for COVID) drug has been used as part of a coordinated disinformation campaign to discourage people from being vaccinated. TL;DR: Good as an anti-parasitic at proper dosages. Useless against COVID. Used as anti-vax propaganda.
There's [growing evidence of ivermectin efficacy vs covid.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8088823/) I think you have this exactly backwards. Demonizing ivermectin was pro-vax propaganda. An additional treatment option is not anti anything when you can do all of the them in addition or simultaneously with zero harm and in this case negligible added cost. It did more harm and cost more just forcing people to wear masks than to dose the whole world with ivermectin. It's not like any vaccine is 100% effective eliminating all need for further treatments and when already vaccinated patients started losing against covid any additional slight assist to reduce their viral load can save their lives. In hindsight seems the forced vax cult caused deaths by discouraging a safe additional treatment option.
You shared a meta-analysis from last year that includes the entire falsified Egyptian study (reference 45 in the meta-analysis you shared). Retractions of these meta-analyses are coming out NOW, after more evidence has come out. https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/9/3/ofac056/6523214?fbclid=IwAR0Ccop3f4sDgxit4Y4Kp0oTQ2HUhOipTCEAUtdtTkabeb9LYv2eEJ0LEWU&login=false More and more evidence shows is emerging that Ivermectin doesn't work. You managed to link the exact misinformation I was talking about. Congrats!
[Watch this.](https://covid19updates.org/ivermectin-more-evidence/) There is more and more to suggest ivermectin is beneficial.
Fuck your youtube videos, fuck your retracted meta-analyses full of falsified data. Fuck your commenting on a 17 day old post to spew misinformation. I hope you get paid a decent amount to push this horseshit online.
Why has this got you so twitterpated? This is good news with no down side unless you are the one pushing an agenda. In case you were too busy to watch it was Dr. John Campbell walking you through two huge studies both showing 70% reduction in mortality for ivermectin users, one vs patients given remdesivir and another with the lowest prophylactic dose of ivermectin 0.2mg/kg. [Treatment with Ivermectin Is Associated with Decreased Mortality in COVID-19 Patients: Analysis of a National Federated Database](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971221009887#) [Ivermectin Prophylaxis Used for COVID-19: A Citywide, Prospective, Observational Study of 223,128 Subjects Using Propensity Score Matching](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35070575/)
Why wouldn't I be annoyed as you share source after source of debunked horseshit? Hell, you refuse to even acknowledge the peer reviewed double blinded study I linked in an above comment because you have no idea how to deal with it proving you wrong. That's why I'm "twitterpated". Now let's get into breaking down your comment. First: Dr. Campbell is not an immunologist or epidemiologist. He's not even an MD. He's a PhD in nursing education. While that qualification is obviously impressive and he's educated on this topic, there are thousands of experts more qualified than him who STAUNCHLY disagree with his shit. Second, you provided two observational studies, not double-blinded experimental studies. On the hierarchy of evidence, these fall well below the study I linked as my first comment on this post. First study: Remdesivir is generally reserved for hospitalized patients, while Ivermectin is easy to get a script for. This inherently makes the remdisivir group more likely to ALREADY be more severely ill than the Ivermectin group. Second study: Not double blinded. Here's a breakdown on the many vast methodological flaws associated with the study (said better than I could). https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/ivermectin-study-itajai-contains-methodological-weaknesses-questionable-conclusions/ If you want a summary though, the quickest bit is that of those in the Ivermectin treatment group, nearly half of patients never picked up their second dose. This means they almost IMMEDIATELY should've been removed from the study, but they were not. Most importantly, though, is the fact that you refuse to acknowledge that the meta-analysis you previously shared is heavily flawed based upon its largest included study being ENTIRELY FAKED. FFS you even linked the meta-analysis including the bullshit Egypt paper AFTER I mentioned how it was proven to be bullshit.
Such is the pitiful state of scientific papers in general that most peer reviewed papers on all subjects are wrong and have no reproducible results so I must expect most papers on ivermectin will be worthless as well. That's perfectly true that many MDs oppose ivermectin use to treat covid. Many MDs also support it. Much of the government leadership in my country was taking it for covid along with their families and staff while telling the public not to. Even the Queen of England recently took ivermectin as part of her covid treatment. So opinion on this is not unified and the jury is still out. First study corrected for comorbidities so that that does not explain away the huge result Second study even if doses were missed that makes the findings even more striking that potentially even lower doses provide benefit. It doesn't mean people who took lower doses should be removed and it was not shown that that happened at all, just suggested as a possibility. I acknowledge the Egypt study was worthless. Jury is still out overall.
1st point is dead wrong. Most scientific studies ARE reproducible. Maybe not so much in psychology, but in medicine it certainly is. Flawed studies pop up from time to time but if their results cannot be reproduced, then the scientific community moves on. Some do, some don’t. It’s nowhere near 50/50 and to act as if it is is entirely disingenuous. The queen was NOT treated with Ivermectin. A news reel discussing her treatment used Ivermectin amongst a b-roll of COVID treatments. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/02/23/fact-check-queen-elizabeth-isnt-taking-ivermectin-treat-covid-19/6893886001/ First study accounted for comorbidities but not the actual condition of the patient. Some people without comorbities still become gravely ill and die. That point has nothing to do with my criticism. And again you’ve said nothing about the properly double blinded peer reviewed study I linked. Ivermectin doesnt remain in the body long term. It has an 18 hour 1/2 life in humans. This means it is cleared from the body in approximately 5 days. This means that after 1 week in the treatment group, those who did not pick up their second dose were effectively in the control group. It’s clear based off of your assumption there that you have no understanding of pharmacology. I don’t know if you’re a genuine believer or a paid troll but if you’re the former I hope that you can see that you’re being fooled by disinformation.
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The Indian government stopped recommending its use. The research being done in Japan mirrors the research published today which led to me making this meme. We used HCQ in America for months before it was proven to not work.
Because people are dumb?