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Comment by mercy_dude | Hacker News Reader

Not to start a political off topic war, but the then sitting president of the US was heavily mocked for suggesting treatment options with UV be evaluated. [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/health/sunlight-coronavir...

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The quote (referring to a presentation on surface disinfectant studies):

> I asked Bill a question that probably some of you are thinking of, if you're totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous—whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light—and I think you said that that hasn't been checked, but you're going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you're going to test that too. It sounds interesting…

And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you're going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds—it sounds interesting to me.

That's charitable. He was mocked (unjustly, as all presidents are), but criticized (justly) for taking simple observations (UV kills the virus, disinfectant kills the virus) and extrapolating medically in a way that the president should not do in a public statement, and that's even regardless of the sloppiness of his descriptions.

Trump was not just mocked unjustly... words were inserted into his statement by major, reputable news sources, such as the New York Times, which was one of the first to begin using the word 'bleach' (which is actually dangerous to inject) instead of the stated word 'disinfectant' (which is non-specific enough to be less dangerous).

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/26/opinion/coronavirus-bleac...

IMO, this is incredibly irresponsible. Antibiotics are a disinfectant, which are completely safe to inject. Other anti-virals are also safe to inject. The Times took the word 'disinfectant', which while perhaps used incorrectly, does not immediately suggest doing any actual dangerous action, and, instead of restricting their criticism to the fact that no known COVID injectable disinfectant exists, they linked the word to actually dangerous 'cures'. While doing so, they popularized an otherwise fringe movement, and made baseless claims connecting this movement to Trump's motivations behind saying the word (the fact that such a group lobbied Trump is not in any way evidence that this is why he used that word... lots of groups lobby presidents all the time).

Joe Biden and Obama are and were surely mocked as well, but not by the likes of the New York Times, WaPo, and other major news outlets. I mean... is the New York Times running articles on Brandon? I don't think so.

They'd just been discussing bleach and isopropyl alcohol specifically. There's a pic of the slide, which states "COMMONLY AVAILABLE DISINFECTANTS (Bleach & Isopropyl Alcohol) work to kill the virus:: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/AA47/production/...

Antibiotics are not disinfectants. Both kill bacteria, but that doesn't make them the same thing.

Isopropyl alcohol is a disinfectant with many other other medical uses. e.g. wound care, skin disinfection.

Bleach (Sodium hypochlorite) is also medically used to kill pathogens during root canal procedures.

Yes. There's a reason we don't nebulize them to deal with respiratory viruses, though.

https://xkcd.com/1217/

Not a Trump fan, but having previously heard of deep tissue UV treatments, I thought they were completely reasonable questions.

It is interesting that so many people are divided on the president asking medical questions in the public setting.

When the president qualifies for the 25th amendment, it's reasonable to question whether his ideas and policies will negligently kill people.

Question, sure. But not Ignore common sense, assume irresponsible behavior, and assume public harm.

If he were unfit for office, he would have been removed. He wasn’t. I’m no Trump fan nor voter, but it’s pointless to keep posting opinions like this pretending they are facts.

It’s the continued little lies like this that helped add up to 74M votes (12M more than 2016). So if you really want to see him in office again, keep it up.

I’ve never understood this either. There is much to not like about the guy and much to mock him for, but Trumps comments here have plenty of science behind them.

It’s stuff like this that earns the media a reputation for being elitist and cruel.

At the time of that statement, Cedars-Sinai researchers were actively evaluating use of UV lights in the lungs for treating COVID-19 and other infectious diseases.

https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/cedars-sinai-statement...

Preliminary research results look promising but it will probably take several more years for such devices to be available for routine patient care.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.05.21252997v...

People make fun of him, and I'm not going to go into whether it was responsible to phrase it the way he did or not, but in my mind the most likely explanation as to why he said it was that some scientists explained it to him and he just regurgitated what he heard without putting it into context (I don't imagine Trump is particularly technically inclined).

When I worked at a news company as a software engineer, at some point in time I was given editorial permissions. On that day I was told not to write anything negative about Dems. Ad revenue.

The root of the criticism is that a sitting president wields a lot or authority and is not supposed to tout experimental treatments. The actual media spectacle we've got though...

>The root of the criticism is that a sitting president wields a lot or authority and is not supposed to tout experimental treatments.

I hope the irony of this is not lost on readers.

"Boosters for all Americans" -Sitting President "Boosters only for people at high risk and/or over 65" -FDA a couple days later

This is interesting, and not in a good way. I'm not sure FDA as we know it can survive a two-track regime, where some medicine is fast tracked and/or cleared of legal liability. Sooner or later most new medicine will end up on the fast track, it's in the logic of large bureaucratic bodies.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/top-fda-regulators-b...

Vaccines have had special liability protection since 1986. That's nothing new.

https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/about/index.html

Yep, same thing with calling ivermectin horse medicine instead of representing it accurately, a nobel prize winning medicine of which billions of doses have been safely administred to humans.

Good journalism is hard to find nowadays. But journalism infested with politics is worse, and so widespread nowadays.

I rarely (maybe never?) saw any journalist say that all ivermectin is horse medicine. However, people did take horse medicine because of the similarly irresponsible use of ivermectin as another weird political side-taking thing, the same way people bought UV products to use on themselves or ingested disinfectant. So, I think the criticism is mostly fair.

Bunch of articles on CNN... https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/21/us/mississippi-poison-con... for instance.

I'm aware of this article. She says "they're taking something called Ivermectin, which is an anti-parasite drug for horses", which isn't the whole story, but is also a reasonable sentence, since they were in fact taking a horse medicine called ivermectin and the same article explicitly states that there are human formulations and you can take those if your doctor prescribes them. So, I think it's unfair to use this as evidence of your assertion, or as rationale for the broader, usually politically-motivated bitterness about the media. I'm sure you could find some example of an article I haven't seen that committed the sin you claim, especially from somewhere as biased as CNN, but I would only have to take back the "maybe never?" part of my statement, and it may reasonably still stand.

https://twitter.com/us_fda/status/1429050070243192839 how about the FDA?

https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1448637553129648129?ref...

Fauci/Acosta on CNN

Joe Rogan just clubbed Sanjay Gupta over the head about CNN and their lying about ivermectin. Pretty brutal. Had Gupta denouncing his own network about it.

> a nobel prize winning medicine

For treating parasites.

Give a heart transplant to a kid with a cold and you'll get yelled at, too, despite it being a wonderful procedure to have in our medical quiver.

And Viagra is for treating high blood pressure.

No, Viagra is clinically tested and FDA approved specifically for erectile dysfunction.

And it also happens to lower blood pressure which is the condition it was originally developed to treat. So if you have high but not "give this dud an Rx" high blood pressure, want Viagra and your doctor is a bro...

Sure. They were able to demonstrate to the FDA's satisfaction that it had a beneficial use outside the original intent of developing the drug. That's not unusual, but there's also a procedure you go through.

The FDA specifically warns against using ivermectin to treat COVID. So does its manufacturer (https://www.merck.com/news/merck-statement-on-ivermectin-use...). Comparing the two scenarios is silly.

Merck is expecting to rake in billions on sales of molnupiravir. Ivermectin is off patent.

It's the intentional misrepresentation of facts which I am referring to. I have no problems with journalists writing science backed articles about using ivermectin for treating covid19. I have problems with journalists intentionally calling it horse dewormer as if that is only what it is.

So your analogy really doesn't make sense here.

I'm noting that calling it "Nobel Prize winning medicine" is just as technically accurate and potentially misleading as calling it "horse dewormer". You're doing the same thing you're complaining about.

From the intro on Wikipedia: Ivermectin was discovered in 1975 and came into medical use in 1981;[12][13] William Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for its discovery and applications.

When you are referring to this in regards to covid19, calling it horse dewormer is intentionally mispresenting an argument in an attempt to discount it.

> When you are referring to this in regards to covid19, calling it horse dewormer is intentionally mispresenting an argument in an attempt to discount it.

"Nobel Prize winning medication" is similarly a misrepresentation in the context of COVID.

It's both a Nobel Prize winning medicine, and horse dewormer. It's also a human antiparisitic. None of these individually describe it completely, but there's one thing it's not currently - a proven COVID treatment.

That's a lazy dismissal. This paper describes twenty ways in which ivermectin can mitigate corona virus infection: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8203399/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28864889

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