[loudtieblahblah]

>Prior to studies being done, how do we evaluate who is a quack and who is correct

You allow the dialog to take place and make up your own mind.

>I would argue that anyone who had a solution to Covid should rush to get it published in a reputable

Any tool thats not a vaccine gets associated with Trump or the right wing and is dismissed.

Its even stifled funding for anti-virals that give a 50% reduction in hospitalizations.

The government could have spent the last 18 months encouraging people to lose weight, stop smoking, drinking, and eating fast food.

The ONLY tool silicon Valley, the msm, much of acamdeia, the DNC and their loyal sycophants care about is the vaccines and even the slightest discussion of any potential alternative gets promoted as inherently anti-vaxx even if it could be used in conjunction with vaccines

[hacksnewer]

How many people actually have the expertise to evalaute medical data like that? They don't. There's a very very small number of Hners that if they are honest with themselves are qualified to do that. I'm not saying that from a high and mghty position, I'm doing that from a place that I see HN talk incredibly ignorantly about all the time. HN is supposed to be smart.

You give the average person the ability to do "research" and they are killing themselves because people fall for all kinds of bullshit. Cults exist. Scam artists are a dime a dozen.

This stuff gets associated with trump and the right because they associate themselves wth it. I don't vote Democratic, I just don't think you're being realistic about how people operate, regardless whether I beleive that "censorship" is the answer or not.

[loudtieblahblah]

You're making the argument against free speech, no matter the subject. You realize that, right?

And if only "experts" are allowed speech, then how do we qualify an expert? Bc if we go by the last 2 years we're not even allowing public debate amongst medical experts, intellectuals or even the person who helped invent an mrna vaccine without gross censorship.

Experts has come to mean government appointments and government agencies,which makes them all potentially influenced by political pressures.

So the only "valid" opinions have obvious flaws and no one else, regardless of qualifications is allowed to speak up.

Bc medical experts and scientists not deemed as part of the agenda get derided as "the average person" bc they dared to have wrongthink.

[iszomer]

The legitimacy process of peer review may also be called into question in reference to the recent joint works done by James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose. And they aren't even "right-wing" though the mainstream portrays them to be.

[loudtieblahblah]

James has been red pilled. Heather and Peter not so much

[nradov]

So are you proposing that we restrict access to PubMed? Because right now there's nothing stopping anyone from doing their own research.

[woodruffw]

> The ONLY tool silicon Valley, the msm, much of acamdeia, the DNC and their loyal sycophants care about is the vaccines and even the slightest discussion of any potential alternative gets promoted as inherently anti-vaxx even if it could be used in conjunction with vaccines

There's been plenty of active mainstream reporting of Merck's new COVID pill, as well as other promising treatments. What are you talking about?

Getting a COVID shot continues to be the single best public health policy, which is why people are going to continue to advocate for it. But there has been no lack of mainstream coverage of developments in both proactive and reactive treatment.

[coolso]

> There's been plenty of active mainstream reporting of Merck's new COVID pill, as well as other promising treatments. What are you talking about?

I'll preface my comment here by saying I'm very pro-vax, and after a several month wait for my own peace of mind, got fully vax'd over the summer. I have encouraged everyone I know who's on the fence to go get one. In the context of being perfectly content if they don't, since it's their body, and since I'm vax'd, I no longer really care if you are or not.

Your comment is extremely disingenuous. Yes, now, finally, two years into COVID, a non-vaccine drug is getting mostly positive active mainstream reporting. But this is after two full years of any and all discussions about anything other than the vaccine immediately being angrily met with demonizing and mockery. If you didn't tow the establishment line, you were and still are labeled an anti-vaxxer.

To the point where it seemed almost as if, pre-vax, people didn't want a solution prior to the election in case in might help a particular someone win again. And almost as if, post-vax, people didn't like the thought of an option being available for someone who didn't want the shot - almost as if the lifestyle they formed and embraced around admonishing everyone regarding the shot could fall apart just at the very idea of something else possibly working even just a bit.

Take ivermectin as an example; opinions on it aside, and I really don't have many since I'm vaccinated and it's irrelevant to me, but you can not possibly in good faith feign ignorance over the fact that this drug, on the list of the WHO's essential medicines, with over 100K active prescriptions (pre-COVID) in the US alone and millions around the world, which is essentially as "harmless" as an antibiotic, and has saved many lives and eyeballs, was deemed as nothing more than "horse paste" by the blue checkmarks on Twitter and in most media outlets, including some of our very own governmental institutions. Yes, the few people who bought and used actual animal-grade ivermectin were idiots, but perhaps this could've been avoided by not playing into their fears by attempting to silence any and all positive press about the drug, given, again, the drug's extremely minor side effect profile that's considered lower than most common antibiotics that most doctors are known to be extremely willing to prescribe without a second thought at even the slightest possibility that it might help whatever ails their patient, even if they're pretty damn sure it won't. It should be noted that this new Merck drug has the potential for more adverse effects than those antibiotics. But it's being met with more positive press, while a less harmful drug was attacked from all angles. Food for thought.

So in short, yes, this Big Pharma sponsored/discovered COVID drug developed especially for COVID has been receiving coverage - although the comment sections in articles about them are filled to the brim with people angry at its approval given that they believe it may discourage people from getting vaccinated. But almost every single other non-vaccine (most not being establishment-discovered, or being popular in conservative/independent circles, which I'm sure is the reason - as it having more attack-points vs. a drug specifically designed for COVID, which is hard to attack since you can't call it horse paste) has been met with absolute vitriol and mockery.

[woodruffw]

> To the point where it seemed almost as if, pre-vax, people didn't want a solution prior to the election in case in might help a particular someone win again. And almost as if, post-vax, people didn't like the thought of an option being available for someone who didn't want the shot - almost as if the lifestyle they formed and embraced around admonishing everyone regarding the shot could fall apart just at the very idea of something else possibly working even just a bit.

This is a lot of presumption. I got vaccinated as soon as I could (early spring, for my region, age, and health group), which is well after the actual R&D phase for the vaccine that I received. Every person I know got vaccinated as early as they could, in spite of reservations they had about the former president's reliability. They did that because they (and I) trust their healthcare providers to provide informed guidance more than they trust themselves, regardless of their intellectual capacity. They also did it because it's their civic duty, and also because it's the selfish thing to do.

The rest, I have nothing to say to. I haven't spent any meaningful amount of time mocking (much less thinking) about people who have taken ivermectin, so I don't feel compelled to respond on behalf of the crowd you've identified.

[jinpa_zangpo]

Here's an analogy originally from Pam Popper. You wouldn't go to a car dealership and buy the car that the dealer recommends. You study up on the models available and choose the one most appropriate for you. And even if you don't know much about the mechanics of cars, even how to change your oil, you probably do a pretty good job, at least better than choosing the car the dealer recommends. Yet the majority of people accept whatever treatment their doctor recommends without asking questions or doing any research on whether the treatment is appropriate. People can learn how to make independent medical decisions, just as they can learn how to buy a car for themselves.

[nradov]

That's a terrible analogy. Within a general class of vehicles there are typically only a handful of available options. And competition means they're all pretty good. You're not going to go too far wrong buying, let's say, a Toyota RAV4 even if a Subaru Forester might be a better option.

And most consumers don't even bother to do much research before selecting a car. They buy the Toyota because they had one before and liked it, or their friend who knows about cars said it's reliable.

[loudtieblahblah]

The last two drugs doctors put me on have contributed to my life being ruined for the past 5 years

I was given Tremfya, a biologic, for mild psoriasis. I've had a horrible reaction to it and it's exacerbated what used to be a minor autoimmune issue into something debilitating.

After autoimmune destroying my life, I was given Lexapro for anxiety which took my anxiety levels from like a 5 out of 10 to a 1000. Even after being off it for a year, I'm still really messed up and haven't gone back to pre-lexapro levels.

I was given gabapentin for neuropathic pain. It did nothing for my pain but now I have full body shivers and twitches and I have horrible withdrawal trying to get off gabapentin gradually.

Doctors push what the pharmaceutical companies tell them too.

Look into the effects of cipro and -floxin type antibiotics causing lifelong neuropathy.

My mother developed AVN from prednisone - causing her to need dual hip and dual shoulder replacements bc her reaction to the steroid caused her joints to turn necrotic.

Her lack of mobility and age has come with higher blood pressure.

Her blood pressure medication gave her gout.

"trust the experts"

[zamadatix]

Buying a car factors too much personal preference in to be analogous to diagnosing a particular issue. I think a better analogy would be when you go to a shop to get your car fixed. Depending how obvious the problem is you may be given a single obvious course of action or be given a list of possible problems and a review of possible solutions. If it's severe enough you may be inclined to ask for a second opinion from another shop just to be sure but you don't default to questioning automotive repair practices because you go and google how a transmission works that week. Not because the first mechanic you see is always right but because there are multiple people that spend their lives trying to figure these things out available to you and your best bet is to always try to leverage them not try to become one of the alternative experts overnight.

[chiefalchemist]

> The government could have spent the last 18 months encouraging people to lose weight, stop smoking, drinking, and eating fast food.

Instead, the "solution" did the opposite. But worse, kids stayed inside, didn't exercise, put on (likely more) weight, didn't share illness (read: weakened immune system) and then those kids were ordered back to school in that highly vulnerable state.

The solution? The jab. With absolutely not acknowledgement or recognition they were prepped to be put in harns way.

This isn't a conspiracy theory. This is what happened and continues to happen. Unfortunately, such observations and analysis get marginalized as being a Covid denier or anti-vax. That doesn't make sense.

[javagram]

If you seriously think the government could have made us all lose weight in the last 18 months... they’ve been running anti obesity campaigns for decades and failing while obesity grows every year.

BTW covid is plenty dangerous to non obese as well.

The vaccine shot actually works well and is incredibly easy to use compared to a grueling year long weight loss and sustaining it for a lifetime, for most people.

[nradov]

Obesity is a critical risk factor.

https://www.wfae.org/health/2021-09-30/novant-says-9-of-10-c...

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-3742#f1-M203742

https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/obesity-and-covid-19.html

https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/07/21/bjsports-2021-...

[javagram]

Look at your cdc link and it proves my point. I never said obesity wasn’t a risk factor, just that covid is plenty dangerous to the non obese as well.

“ More than 900,000 adult COVID-19 hospitalizations occurred in the United States between the beginning of the pandemic and November 18, 2020. Models estimate that 271,800 (30.2%) of these hospitalizations were attributed to obesity.6”

This is from your link - even if the government put everyone in concentration camps and forced them to lose weight, it would do nothing for the other 70%

Meanwhile vaccines are about 80-90% effective against hospitalization and death.

[tinus_hn]

> Meanwhile vaccines are about 80-90% effective against hospitalization and death

And falling. Remember how people were parading around 95%?

Just like ‘99% of people in hospital are unvaccinated’. While now in some areas it’s ‘70% vaccinated’.

Vaccines are not a magic bullet and delaying covid using measures that make people fat is not a smart move. Not to mention stealing 1.5% of peoples lifetime to delay a disease that less than 1% would die from.

[javagram]

Obesity hasn’t changed that much. Around 70% of Americans were overweight or obese before the pandemic. Diet is the most important factor in weight gain or weight loss. And except for a few dumb months at the beginning, parks and outdoor areas are open for recreation. I’ve been running 4x a week for the whole pandemic without issue where I live, nothing stopped people from exercising if they wanted to follow the health advice that they’ve been hearing for decades.

Vaccines aren’t a magic bullet. But they’re the most cost effective item we have. You cite some irrelevant statistics but appear to agree with my statement that the vaccines remain more than 80% effective against death.

The vaccine costs less than $100 and takes about an hour of time to do. There is no way to lose weight that cheaply or quickly and as a result people continue to ignore government advice and health campaigns urging them to do so.

Moreover, losing weight does not stop you from catching or spreading COVID at all, whereas the vaccines have been shown to reduce transmission.

[chiefalchemist]

> More than 900,000 adult COVID-19 hospitalizations occurred in the United States between the beginning of the pandemic and November 18, 2020. Models estimate that 271,800 (30.2%) of these hospitalizations were attributed to obesity.6”

Hospitalization is a deceptive metric. What's more important is: long term hospitalizations, as well as higher use of treatment (e.g., ICU).

That's that data needed. This other stat - like so many Covid stats - is too high level. The Devil is in the details.

[UnFleshedOne]

Remember the swiss cheese model? Or lockdowns to manage the curve? Those 30% could be reduced. Also whatever percentage had bad cases because of vitamin D deficiency. Yet no messaging on staying healthy at all...

Because since not everyone can improve their immune function, nobody should, right? Messaging otherwise would be ableist or give people an idea that they could do something aside from hunkering down, and that's more important than reducing hospitalizations and saving lives...

[foolinaround]

if they have been running pro-vaccine campaigns, thats very welcome..

It is the coercion / loss of livelihood and other threats, that are getting people up in arms (figuratively, and who knows, someday in real life)

Imagine if various establishments used a weight/health card where one is scored on some heuristic, and allowed access.

Just look at intellectuals like Noam Chomsky's prescriptions on how to treat the unvaccinated...

[javagram]

> It is the coercion / loss of livelihood and other threats, that are getting people up in arms (figuratively, and who knows, someday in real life)

People were up in arms and fearmongering over the vaccine since 2020. This isn’t about coercion - there’s a reason the same people typically don’t get vaccinated themselves. If they believed in the effectiveness of the vaccine they’d be vaxxed themselves (like Republican Governors and Fox News tv hosts).

I personally know someone who thought the vaccine had a good chance of killing me and other acquaintances who took it, all because he read some random posts on the net.

[tinus_hn]

This is a straw man.

It’s perfectly possible to be for vaccinations and against mandates.

[javagram]

I never said it wasn’t possible, in fact I gave some examples of people who are - politicians and tv hosts who have gotten vaxxed.

Most people don’t fall into that category though. The “people” who are up in arms usually cite stuff like the vaccines rewriting DNA, being unsafe, untested, Nuremberg violations, “did my own research” and a hundred other reasons they found online to claim the vaccine is unsafe or ineffective.

[aemreunal]

> You allow the dialog to take place and make up your own mind.

I'm not sure this applies to medicine or vaccines. I don't think any of us are in the position of "making up our own mind" about what works in medicine and what doesn't, which is why we have double-blind clinical studies. We can't even explain why/how placebo works.

[vorpalhex]

You have to be in the position of being your own medical advocate.

I had a condition that was misdiagnosed repeatedly, including in the ER. My condition is not even "rare", just slightly uncommon, and I had a very textbook case of it.

Your doctor is not an oracle. They are a car mechanic that works on organics.

[tinus_hn]

Not to mention that it’s hardly extraordinary for two doctors to have two different opinions on the same case.

What does that mean? That there are two conflicting absolute truths?

[loudtieblahblah]

There's only one truth.

That's the doctors that MSNBC interviews. Nothing else.

[loudtieblahblah]

You're not allowed to be your own medical advocate now.

Don't get onboard - you'll lose your job. Even if you work from home.

[tinus_hn]

Really? It’s pretty clear that a lot of people made up their mind and chose to get vaccinated. But that’s fine of course, it’s only a problem if they make up their mind and decide something else.

[loudtieblahblah]

you do realize a ton of FDA drugs that have been studied and studied and approved.....

have tons of side effects and still are up to patients as to whether or not to take them - gabapentin for neuropathic pain.

biologics for autoimmune disorders.

we don't force anti-biotics on anyone.

we don't force anxiety meds on anyone.

find me a drug that's doled out by the establishment who hasn't destroyed someone's life or even ended their live.

the same establishment that created the opiate epidemic is saying "trust us now"..

The same one that over prescribes antibiotics, especially dangerous ones like Cipro that gives people neurapthic pain for their entire lives.

Dermalogists hand out Biologics for even mild psoriasis - which states in the literature "we do not entirely now how or why this works" (Tremfya) and "may cause cancer". (Humira)

Cardiologists will prescribe blood pressure pills without realizing someone might have kidney damage or high uric acid and then the pills end up giving them gout.

anti-anxiety meds are a "try all of them and see which one works for you!" but every single one of them has a list of side effects and can make your anxiety/depression a million times worse. getting off of them has a "discontinuation syndrome" which can fuck you up for years.

Prednisone gave my mother AVN - an autoimmune disorder that turned her joints necrotic - requiring 2 shoulder and 2 hip replacements.

"Trust us" they say - as they lie about the usefulness of masks.

Trust us they say as they lie about lab leak theories

Trust us they say as they told us that we'd need 60% of herd immunity, then changed it to 70% then to 80% and now saying we'll never reach it b/c you don't get herd immunity with a corona virus. It's just with us forever, but hey.. keep getting 3, 4 5 shots forever.

Trust us. We're the experts. The captured FDA. BigPharma and all the doctors you go to that control them

Trust us as we yank peer reviewed studies from journals b/c it conflicts with our messaging.

So yes - people are in a good god damned position to at least TRY to process it.

[bhouston]

>> Prior to studies being done, how do we evaluate who is a quack and who is correct

> You allow the dialog to take place and make up your own mind.

You want to replace a reliance on empirical evidence (science) with rhetoric debates instead? This is going backwards in terms of progress as a society. I think you do not really want to do that.

[_kulang]

IMO most people are completely incapable of critically approaching new information 24/7 and so are susceptible to weighing incorrect and misleading information highly if they are repeatedly exposed to it. At the risk of being a heathen, I think information and discourse in public forums needs to be moderated and curated - the other option is to do what we do today and devalue people’s opinions based on our personal perception of the quality of their information, which is subjective. Any fears about censorship and control are a reflection of the ridiculous centralisation of the internet, and breaking up or socialising large platforms is the appropriate response.

Ultimately I think the expectation that platforms ought to facilitate and tolerate discussion of topics just because they are “ideas”, “suggestions”, “opinions” and not presented as fact is toxic. If you want to do actual research do it in the correct setting (not a public forum). And fortunately, that is where actual research is happening.

It is not some overarching plan by some godly G-man, you don’t see these drugs being promoted because there is ultimately no scientific proof of their effectiveness. If Moderna had the same attitude towards science and statistics as the people who are pushing “alternative” treatments, we would have had a COVID vaccine much sooner.

[quotemstr]

> You allow the dialog to take place and make up your own mind.

The number of replies to your comment against this idea is terrifying. What's even worse is the outright hostility --- it's not good enough that they trust the experts and you don't. You have to go along with it too, according to them, or they'll attack you. It's a totalitarian mindset.

[api]

> You allow the dialog to take place and make up your own mind.

Medicine is perhaps the field least amenable to this.

It's so hard to figure out what drugs and therapies even work that full-time Ph.D and MD level experts in biology and medicine very often get things very wrong. Look at fat, cholesterol, sugar, and how certain foods like eggs have been classified as healthy or unhealthy multiple times. These people are not idiots nor are they all involved in some conspiracy. It's just unbelievably hard to disambiguate all the confounding factors and see actual cause and effect with a system as complex as the human body.

Even highly educated highly intelligent laypeople don't stand a chance against quacks. Anything can be made to sound plausible in medicine.

You might say "well then couldn't they be wrong about the vaccines?" The answer is that yes, they could. It's just that medical experts have maybe a 60-70% chance of getting everything wrong vs a 99.9% chance for the general public.

[beamatronic]

>> You allow the dialog to take place and make up your own mind.

I have reviewed all of the available dialog, and I have concluded that not only is the coronavirus fake, the world is flat.

[malfist]

Additionally, after further review, I know that birds aren't real, if I need to charge my iphone quickly I can do so in the microwave, smoking isn't harmful and climate change isn't real.