Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bargl 1956 days ago
So YouTube is canceling a video about a Dr. who is an expert in the field, attempting to get more of a spotlight on a potential treatment of COVID that is not being used and widely shared.

You actually got part of your summary wrong, he's saying it can prevent the disease from infecting individuals. So it's a preventative drug not an early treatment drug.

He was also saying it's not popular because it's a COTS drug that is widely accepted.

Now, I'm no freaking scientist, but it is FAIR to say that if this guy did his homework, found evidence of this in peer reviewed studies and is trying to present it to congress for further investigation, that is a good thing.

I'm not saying he's correct, but if there is a reasonable about of evidence that it's been overlooked and it would significantly help, then that's something we should at least do more (very urgent) research on.

If instead he's completely bunk, I'd love to see an analysis of further research proving him wrong.

But taking a video down, of a scientist posing a credible, alternative solution to waiting for a vaccine is clearly a shit thing to do.

The best solution would be to allow experts to link to and from each others videos doing a "this is wrong and here's why" style conversation. Taking information away is never a good thing imo.

https://www.drugs.com/medical-answers/ivermectin-treat-covid...

EDIT: This does not mean you should go self medicate, that's always an awful idea. Do not give yourself ay drugs that are not over the counter without consulting with a doctor. Seriously, that I have to say that is ridiculous, and I would totally understand if YouTube put something up on the video saying that too.

EDIT 2: >Our manuscript needs to be reviewed by the NIH, and they need to formulate treatment recommendations, now.

https://dryburgh.com/ivermectin-pierre-kory/

This guy has said some stuff I think is overly political, but for this disease it's worth investigating if it might help prevent infection, even if we just gave it to our front line workers.

1 comments

If instead he's completely bunk, I'd love to see an analysis of further research proving him wrong.

That's not how it works. The burden of proof is on him:

When two parties are in a discussion and one makes a claim that the other disputes, the one who makes the claim typically has a burden of proof to justify or substantiate that claim especially when it challenges a perceived status quo.[1] This is also stated in Hitchens's razor, which declares that "what may be asserted without evidence, may be dismissed without evidence." Carl Sagan proposed a related criterion – "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" – which is known as the Sagan standard.

That's from wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)

I believe he's already met the burden of proof, there have been multiple minor studies that are peer reviewed and show a lot of promise.

At this point, there is a reason to believe he's correct. In the state of emergency we are in that's enough to throw a few million dollars at research to clear this up.

Also, the NIH has upgraded their recommendation from "Don't use ivermectin outside of clinical trials" to "there's insufficient data." which I translate to, we now need to peer review this.

https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/antiviral-the...

EDIT: I may have gone too soft on the way that I say things w/r to scientific studies. They are never settled until. They can and should always be considered disprovable. The fact that I believe Dr. Kory has enough evidence to clearly suggest we need to dig deeper into ivermectin quickly, doesn't mean I believe that research will prove him right or wrong. I do however believe it is completely worth the money it would take to potentially save lives if ivermectin does prevent COVID.

YouTube moderators are obviously the highest experts in the field of medicine and usually every field. They should be deciding what get seen, promoted, or blocked because they have done the hard research and I have no doubt they have read at least one Snopes article on a subject written by someone who is also clearly an expert in the medicine, not a journalist that may or may not have visited the CDC website for guidance.