Comment by pacerwpg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pacerwpg | Hacker News Reader

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This is from the fact check and it sounds to me like they're treating the claims fairly and not using a ridiculous version.

'Several posts circulating online wrongly suggest that the pills are the same because ivermectin also acts like a protease inhibitor and keeps the virus from replicating. Ivermectin continues to be studied in relation to COVID-19, however, it has yet to be proven that it can treat COVID-19.

Images of the structure of Pfizer’s new pill and ivermectin can be found online and do not show similarities like the posts describe.

Ivermectin binds to glutamate-gated chloride channels and is used to treat parasite infections, said Joseph Glajch, a consultant in pharmaceutical and analytical chemistry.

“These two are so far apart,” he said. “If you look at how they interact with the body..., they don’t even go to the same pathways or receptors.”'

They are dancing around the fact that ivermectin is indeed a 3CL protease inhibitor, despite that the molecule is very different from the new anti-virals being developed, and despite that 3CL protease inhibition was not primarily what made ivermectin an anti parasitic.

That’s how you know these fact checks are bullshit propaganda. They obviously did their research, but they will discuss everything short of the thing that will actually give credence to the claim being fact checked.

It doesn’t matter that the primary mechanism of action of ivermectin is different from the thing that makes it anti-viral. It doesn’t matter that the molecule looks very different from the new antivirals. These are not important and are just distractions from one simple fact:

the new antivirals work by inhibiting 3CL protease, ivermectin inhibits 3CL protease too.

So who subversive-checks the fact-checker publications? I hope no-one since the idea of an outsourced fact-checker is farcical and we shouldn't fall for any factception play.

Just because they label themselves as meta-news fact-checkers doesn't mean we forget news includes meta news or that fact-checking is an act of bias-prone publication.

The eternal problem of news is one of defining the level of controversy accurately, if we could do that there'd be no need for more than one news publication. And yet somehow no-one that benefits from constant fact-checker approval mentions that these fact-checkers act entirely like syndicated news publications with a lower word count (which doesn't make any claims of being a single-source-of-truth more valid). They are only blunting the minds of their audience by their omissions.

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