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Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

I hope (but doubt) that the repeated fraudulent studies, the lack of replicable results followed by very strong negative results from more ethical scientists, and the self-serving grift that the HCQ/IVM/Zinc promoters have engaged in is enough to get people to really step back and consider why they believed these charlatans in the first place.

Plenty of ~intelligent people on HN and elsewhere, who would never sign up for a Gwyneth Paltrow detox regime, talked themselves into believing that there was some forbidden knowledge being exposed by these quacks. It was always so transparently silly.

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Part of the problem is that the more reputable hydroxychloroquine studies were abandoned based on an even more blatently fradulent paper in the Lancet claiming it actually increased the risk of patients dying - like, it wasn't even some subtle statistical issue, there was no way the authors could've had access to the data they claimed to use and the number of patients supposedly in the study from some countries was implausibly high. So there wasn't really any good-quality evidence for a long time. Also, there's reason to suspect that the reason the Lancet was so willing to publish that paper is partisan; their editor-in-chief's Twitter had a blatant political axe to grind the whole time.

> Plenty of ~intelligent people on HN and elsewhere, who would never sign up for a Gwyneth Paltrow detox regime, talked themselves into believing that there was some forbidden knowledge being exposed by these quacks. It was always so transparently silly.

I'm afraid that this is thanks to political tribalism. Especially in the system where you have only two sides.

There's a balance to be found: we want enough "quacky" people to try crazy things to find what might work, especially when dealing with newly emergent diseases. On the other hand, we do not want those people to falsify data, and we want to minimize the incentive to do so. But the fame that comes with finding an off-label treatment that works is its own incentive to fraud/being sloppy.

Yep - especially during a novel pandemic of the scale of Covid19 - I'm really glad they looked at all of the available treatment options. Unfortunately it was extremely damaging for them to hold onto them as long as they did while crying "censorship". There were tons of people who refused to get vaccinated since they had access to IVM - the /r/hermancainaward subreddit was filled with people saying as much before they ended up in the ICU.

"Strong convictions loosely held" is an admirable way forward on testing everything we have to save lives. Unfortunately when it became so politicized and the unethical doctors and scientists realized they could print money by claiming they had a secret cure being suppressed, the "loosely held" bit was left behind.

Yes, but no way they are going to come out and acknowledge they were duped. And some are still on that bandwagon.

And imnsho a bigger problem: that they were in turn trying to dupe others. This amplification effect is at least as harmful as the initial fraud.

There's a ridiculous number of youtubers who are basically Gwyneth Paltrow For Men, and selling bogus supplements is a lucrative business that enables a self-sustaining disinformation ecosystem.

Also people really want to "own the libs" at any cost.

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