[panny]

ICE Block is the app mentioned in the article which the Trump administration pressured Apple to remove from the app store. It allowed you to notify people in the area when you see ICE (presumably to give illegal aliens an opportunity to evade ICE enforcement).

IVM Block is my tongue in cheek reference to the Biden administration doing everything in their power to block discussion of a safe and effective treatment for Covid which would eliminate the legal justification for the EUA on Covid vaccines and spoil their giant investments in those pharma companies.

[triceratops]

> Biden administration doing everything in their power to block discussion of a safe and effective treatment for Covid

I've seen it discussed half a million times.

> spoil their giant investments in those pharma companies.

Whose investments?

[verall]

Are you suggesting ivermectin was a safe and effective enough treatment for COVID that it would obviate the need for the vaccine?

[ToucanLoucan]

So a real thing that people actually made to accomplish something and a fake thing you made up in your head to be angry about.

[sellmesoap]

^^^ Proof that IVM block was very effective!

[khazhoux]

IIRC any FB post claiming that the Wuhan coronavirus originated in the Wuhan coronavirus lab, would be removed and could result in user ban, at request of the federal government.

[ShinyLeftPad]

That was true for a period of time. Something like a couple months if I remember right.

[platevoltage]

What were the consequences for this "request" not being implemented?

[panny]

The revolving door of corruption between the FDA and Pharma industry is pretty well documented. But it looks like my speech freedom is going to cost me some more karma. Darned consequences of speech freedom are at it again.

[ToucanLoucan]

Firstly, freedom of speech does not guarantee you freedom from consequences of your speech. The government can't stop you from saying stupid shit, however it also can't stop other people from telling you you're stupid.

Second, horse dewormer doesn't cure COVID. Censoring dangerous misinformation from fools like yourself who will believe it because it's given to them via the right mouthpiece is a good idea, because if you don't, then you end up with fools like yourself, years after the fact, still regurgitating it.

[jbritton]

There are multiple hypotheses for methods of action for IVM against covid that were plausible and deserved serious funding and investigation by governments. This did not happen. What did happen is the two people who brought it to the attention of congress got slandered the next day in the press and then got their careers destroyed. Anyone else who ever mentioned it also got dumped on by the press. There are over 100 studies now, many of which showed positive results. Most of the studies were small. There have been questions of the quality of many of the studies both the ones showing benefit and the ones showing no benefit. There is one well known fraudulent study and the press loves to extrapolate that to every study. The FDA has admitted to not looking at the data. The CDC and WHO did not write up any kind of analysis. They looked at a couple bigger studies that showed no result and said it’s inconclusive. No government has bothered to look into the RCTs that showed positive results. I don’t know if it works or not. It seems clear to me that profits, politics, power structures, got in the way of finding the answer. IVM is a very safe drug with the proper dosing. 300 to 500 million people in Africa take it yearly for parasites.

[ToucanLoucan]

I know in my heart of hearts that responding to this nonsense is a waste of time, but in the odd event someone reasonable runs across this gish-gallop, I refuse to leave it sitting unchallenged.

To start, sure, ivermectin is safe at proper dosing, yes hundreds of millions of people take it for parasites every year, yes there was an early in-vitro study showing it fucked with viral replication in a petri dish. Cool. This is true of a ton of compounds that do absolutely nothing for you once they're in an actual bloodstream instead of a lab dish, because the concentration needed to see that effect in-vitro was way higher than what you can safely hit in a human's body. For example, one of those compounds is bleach, but if you take enough to hit the concentrations for it to do what you what it to do in your body, you will have much bigger problems than the COVID you were trying to kill.

Further, "nobody ever looked into it" is just not true. TOGETHER and ACTIV-6 were specifically designed, peer-reviewed RCTs with thousands of participants, published in NEJM/JAMA, built for the exact purpose of answering "does this actually work?" They looked. The answer was no. "A couple big studies got waved off as inconclusive" is just an incorrect read, full stop. The studies were done and the evidence was in, and it was not the answer.

The "100+ studies, many positive" thing is doing a lot of heavy lifting too: that number gets real big real fast once you stop separating "huge well-controlled RCT" from "12 people in a non-randomized trial somebody ran out of a spare room." Lumping those together and calling it "the science" is exactly the kind of cherry-picking everyone (correctly) clowns on anti-vax studies for doing.

And the FDA/CDC "didn't look at the data" thing is also just bullshit. They reviewed it as the RCTs rolled in, which is why the guidance moved from "not recommended outside trials" to "no benefit shown:" that is literally the science working exactly as it should be.

Now, to be clear: people getting publicly dog-walked in the press for even mentioning it? Yeah that part was genuinely shitty and probably made some people dig in out of spite instead of curiosity, which I get. However no amount of that being a fair accusation does a damn thing to make it so the amount of IVM OR bleach required to pull this off in the way anti-vaxxers wish doesn't render you stone fucking dead.

It's not like the same damn pharma industry couldn't have gotten just as rich selling IVM, or whatever, cure to the literal entire goddamn world to cure the plague that was skull-fucking every nation on the planet, and to pretend otherwise, that an ineffective medicine was chosen instead is pure, unadulterated nonsense. If it worked, every pharma company would've spun up production of it immediately, and the companies that already made it would've seen the value fly through the goddamn roof. New billionaires minted overnight. It didn't, they weren't, because it didn't work.

[jbritton]

TOGETHER and ACTIV-6 were not good studies.

I-Tech was a good RCT and showed 75% lower mortality in severe patients, p=0.02. Only 490 people though. Clearly this deserved replicating with more people. The fact that it wasn’t is a problem.

The FDA on their website stated they did not look at the data. The statement was eventually taken down, they have never said they looked at it. The CDC looked at 6 studies and didn’t write a report.

When I mentioned method of action, I’m not talking about petri dishes.

An anecdote related to bleach, but peroxide was also mentioned. Another overlooked treatment was artemisinin, which contains an endoperoxide group that could get into cells and kill covid virus.

[carlosjobim]

> Firstly, freedom of speech does not guarantee you freedom from consequences of your speech.

It really does, that's the entire point. If you go find somebody and physically attack them for what they've written on HN about for example medicine, that makes you the law-breaker.

I understand from the way you write that you might consider it your right to do such things to other people who don't have the same opinions as you, but freedom of speech protects them against retribution from you or anybody else, including from the government.

[amanaplanacanal]

Really? Assault is against the law regardless of why you do it.

People are totally free to shun you if they don't like what you are saying though, and that seems totally fine to me. If you insult my family members, you won't be welcome on my house. How could it be otherwise?

[ToucanLoucan]

> It really does, that's the entire point. If you go find somebody and physically attack them for what they've written on HN about for example medicine, that makes you the law-breaker.

Yeah if I did this thing you completely made up, that would be illegal. Just like if the parent commenter was imprisoned for the post he made, that would also be illegal. Have you considered basing your politics on real things?

> I understand from the way you write that you might consider it your right to do such things to other people who don't have the same opinions as you,

Oh don't flatter yourselves. I have no interest at all in going to prison for slapping the shit out of COVID deniers. I'll happily tell you you're wrong though.

> but freedom of speech protects them against retribution from you or anybody else, including from the government.

Correct, but it doesn't protect them from social consequences, in this case getting downvoted, which is what they were pissing and moaning about.

[carlosjobim]

I wouldn't say that a hacker down vote is much of a social consequence, and the other poster wasn't pissing and moaning, he was joking about it. But you were already so full of hate against "the others", that you couldn't see the humour.

[jMyles]

Although I agree that ICE block and its various sibling apps and spinoffs are important and do accomplish something meaningful, it's certainly not a "fake thing" that many of the world's foremost experts on the relevant topics were censored with regard to epidemic response.

Facebook's treatment of the BMJ investigation of the unblinding of the Pfizer trial (which of course, turned out to be spot-on) was absolutely shocking, and is just one of the many instances of "ICE block-level" censorship.

(In case you need a refresher on the Facebook-censors-BMJ drama, I summarized it a few months ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46232902 )