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Comment by tmn | Hacker News Reader

Regarding your last sentence, 'If ivermectin is actually effective.." Pharma execs wouldn't have to push for it? They would just tell their family member to take it. I know anecdotes are not medical studies, but I know two people who caught covid, were feeling relatively 'incapacitated'. They were prescribed ivermectin by a doctor I know personally. They took it and started getting significantly better very quickly. Just anecdotes, but it's real life data point for me (high confidence). Not for you as you cannot know if I'm telling the truth unfortunately.

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What I mean is that it would be hard to collectively keep a secret that ivermectin works. Your acquaintance's doctor happened to prescribe it - but I'm guessing most doctors would not. So this pharma exec (or researcher, or whomever) would need to tell their family to go find a doctor willing to prescribe it, or would send information to the doctor to convince them to prescribe it, or something. And that would leak.

Also I'm mostly referencing the idea, which I believe I've seen in some of these papers, that people should take ivermectin on an ongoing basis to protect against getting infected in the first place. If I were a pharma exec who knew that ivermectin secretly worked, I wouldn't want my family to get sick at all if I could help it - I'm pretty sure no paper is claiming it's 100% effective, it just reduces the chance of poor outcomes. So I'd have to tell them to find a doctor willing to prescribe ivermectin even before they're sick, and that would definitely leak.

So I hope I'm not talking past you, my perspective on the situation seems to somewhat oppose your intuition. Ivermectin is not a tightly kept secret. It has just been suppressed in the mainstream channels. Bret Weinstein has discussed this.

https://covid19criticalcare.com/guide-for-this-website/take-...

That website lists doctors who will hotline you a prescription. Maybe it's harder outside the US, but I know you can get off branded forms of it (perhaps those are worth less confident in?)

I would argue the secret isn't being kept. It just circulates in one silo and not all silos of our reality schism.

Like how hydroxychloroquine was suppressed in mainstream channels? Like ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine also had some initial positive studies, but when large scale studies were done it was shown to actually cause more deaths than not taking it.

Brett Weinstein has made a lot of dubious claims so I am skeptical to what he says. He at one point has claimed that Ivermectin is 100% effective when taking prophylactically based on a single study that has received a lot of criticism for having numbers that dont make sense. To me it seems that he needs to be more critical of the sources he uses.

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