Music Banter - View Single Post - Coronavirus: COVID-19

The Batlord · 09-08-2021, 09:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lisnaholic

Well, I'm guilty as charged as I haven't been dipping into any reports.

To me, the idea that invermectin can effectively treat covid symptoms is counter intuitive. Vaccines that are specifically designed to guard against an illness have been proved, historically as the best way to fight smallpox, polio, etc.
Why would a horse de-wormer work against a respiratory virus? In the past, who has treated their cold/flu/lung infection with something for (I presume) the bowels? No-one. And what countries or scientific institutes have committed to rolling out an ivermectin program? None, afaik. That's enough for me to trust the CDC (and their equivalents worldwide) to do the science, and their conclusion is that vaccines are the way to go.

Does Guybrush still have his memorable signature, "In the information age, ignorance is a choice." While that is true, one peril of the internet age is the idea that we should all of us be second-guessing every opinion issued from an expert or govmnt institution. From what I have seen of Rand Paul's floundering performances, many people seem to be forgetting this old adage: "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

This is surely from Conspiracy Theory 101 ? Undermine the other guy's argument by saying that he's being duped by "them" for commercial/political reasons.

The horse paste thing is because it's a cheap, over the counter drug you can get for animals which is how a lot of people have gotten it, but it is a drug used for humans via prescription and is a general purpose anti-parasitic, not just a de-wormer. It has in fact been adopted by several poorer countries for covid bust mostly because those countries don't have widespread access to vaccines for obvious bull**** reasons.

As to its efficacy for covid it doesn't look great so far and several of the studies have been retracted and heavily criticized for being fraudulent and manipulating data. What is going on with these studies isn't clear at this point unfortunately. This is a pretty decent rundown.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02081-w

Quote:

The paper’s irregularities came to light when Jack Lawrence, a master’s student at the University of London, was reading it for a class assignment and noticed that some phrases were identical to those in other published work. When he contacted researchers who specialize in detecting fraud in scientific publications, the group found other causes for concern, including dozens of patient records that seemed to be duplicates, inconsistencies between the raw data and the information in the paper, patients whose records indicate they died before the study’s start date, and numbers that seemed to be too consistent to have occurred by chance.

Quote:

The paper’s withdrawal is not the first scandal to dog studies of ivermectin and COVID-19. Hill thinks many of the other ivermectin trial papers that he has scanned are likely to be flawed or statistically biased. Many rely on small sample sizes or were not randomized or well controlled, he says. And in 2020, an observational study of the drug was withdrawn after scientists raised concerns about it and a few other papers using data by the company Surgisphere that investigated a range of repurposed drugs against COVID-19. “We’ve seen a pattern of people releasing information that’s not reliable,” says Hill. “It’s hard enough to do work on COVID and treatment without people distorting databases.”