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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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/

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.

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

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