Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by chrsig 1643 days ago
Given the subreddit, I don't think there's much in the way of disguise happening.

I don't find the post itself to be political at all though. It's the recount of a doctor's recent experience being physically assaulted after refusing to treat an unvaccinated covid patient with ivermectin and vitamin-c, believing that the former may be actively harmful to their health, and the latter simply ineffective.

The post isn't political. It only seems political because the rejection of modern science is along a political line.

1 comments

> It's the recount of a doctor's recent experience being physically assaulted after refusing to treat an unvaccinated covid patient with ivermectin and vitamin-c, believing that the former may be actively harmful to their health, and the latter simply ineffective.

If this doctor believes that ivermectin is "harmful", the doctor was so poorly informed that medical fact was mixing up with something he saw on CNN. The assertion about effective dosage being lethal, in particular, was completely fictional -- I don't believe that it works, but the people advocating for it aren't talking about crazy doses.

Ivermectin is a very safe drug. It is given to millions of people a year to prevent parasitic infections. There is a large RCT underway to see if is an effective therapeutic for Covid-19. We should all hope that it works. This incessant political polarization of science has to stop.

Everything in this reads like a low-quality re-hash of click-bait headlines from the last year, several of which were completely debunked.

Just get vaccinated already.
Except it hasn't been shown yet to be effective against Covid-19 yet. So why would they prescribe it? The irony is you're saying the doctor got it from CNN when antivaxxers have been screaming about ivermectin for months, without any proof it's effective.

>This incessant political polarization of science has to stop.

Lol. In comments to a post about a doctor venting about being assaulted for not giving into conspiracy theorists demands re: treatment, and people say he's making it "political". Anyone can doubt the veracity all they want, there's 1000 more stories just like this.

> Except it hasn't been shown yet to be effective against Covid-19 yet. So why would they prescribe it? The irony is you're saying the doctor got it from CNN when antivaxxers have been screaming about ivermectin for months, without any proof it's effective.

Didn't I write that I don't believe it's effective? I'm not sure who you think you're arguing with, here.

The point is, this person made a specific claim -- that the "effective dose" would be so high as to be fatal. That claim is so laughable and baseless in fact that it calls into question the credibility of the entire story. No informed doctor would say such a thing. We simply don't know what the "effective dose" is (if any), but we know what other people are recommending as effective doses, and these are not toxic.

When "doctors" go on QAnon forums on reddit, and post things that sound like re-mixes of CNN headlines while making egregious mistakes of medicine, at the very least it should make you question their objectivity, if not the credibility of the claim.

The reason to prescribe it is to add another test subject to the study. The fact that there isn't a protocol for people to organize a public study of their own bodies suggests a patriarchal approach to medicine science.

People learn faster when they get to choose their own options.