[mikeyouse]

It's my contention that it's actively harmful to truth, science, and public health when we pretend like there's value in having a "civil conversation" with bad faith actors.

There's no benefit to cosplaying as Socrates when there is no data point or research result that could change the mind of these weird conspiracy theorists. If a well-done study came out tomorrow that demonstrated Ivermectin worked to help Covid patients, it would literally be in every hospital's protocol tomorrow.

On the opposite side, these charlatans have been promoting IVM since March 2020 with absolutely no evidence of efficacy (often at the expense of convincing people to not get vaccinated). What little evidence has come out has only weakened the case for it as a treatment, and yet, they're still promoting it as fervently as ever.

If you want a long-covid treatment protocol, you should absolutely look somewhere else aside from the pages of the most stubbornly wrong people in this whole pandemic. They've shown repeatedly that they don't care about updating their priors when there's contradictory evidence. At least the HCQ dorks have mostly retired to complaining about cancel culture.

[texasbigdata]

I personally formed a three person reading group with 2 friends (one chemistry PhD and one retired tech CEO that's a longevity genius) and we read a stack of these papers end to end and even attempted to fumble through a recalcution of a meta-analysis following the retraction of one paper.

Before personally taking the medicine we spent 1.5 weeks reading everything we could find. Straight from Google Scholar or pubmed. Respectfully, I disagree with you. But that's based on my own reading and I'm not an MD or medical professional.

I would say, a) it is very common in certain countries, and like hey, they awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine partially for it in 2015, but b) we have to agree to disagree here, were just too far apart on tone. But respect your point of view.

[mikeyouse]

Ivermectin is a fine anti-parasite, and plausibly has a mechanism of action that could benefit specific patients infected with specific viruses. Unfortunately for all of us, it has no measurable benefit on Covid. As shown again and again.

We have hundreds of millions of active infections, it's dead-simple to do research studies to determine whether something prevents hospitalization, or shortens length-of-stay, etc etc. You don't have to spend weeks of your life reading primary materials -- here's the EUA for Paxlovid (Section 14):

https://www.fda.gov/media/155050/download

A pre-registered RCT, with specific endpoints and statistically significant evidence that it lowers viral load, and prevents hospitalization and death. It only took 4 months from study enrollment -> results to see how effective it was. Paxlovid works! Hurray! IVM doesn't. Rats.

Good faith individuals would move on and investigate something else that could help humanity but admitting you were wrong doesn't get you invited onto Joe Rogan so here we are, with people still referencing their nonsense.