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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

Which drugs are you referring to?

Presumably something similar to how people (who had to be detached from reality at that point) swore by ivermectin, a horse dewormer as treatment.

This irrational belief isn't going away either. It seems to be spreading, in fact. A relative of mine recently was diagnosed with cancer and a "friend" of hers suggested she try ivermectin.

Not sure how well this article has held up to time but Scott Alexander had a pretty compelling analysis of the situation.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-y...

The tl;dr, as I recall it: it seems ivermectin really did work in some populations, in reducing COVID mortality. However, those populations were ones where one was much more likely to have worms, so the hypothesis is that indeed did work, but only because it worked as a dewormer and not having worms concurrently with COVID decreased the likelihood of mortality.

The FDA was sued and lost (or at least agreed to a settlement) over those comments, which were consequently deleted. Ivermectin is a human antiparasitic that's even on the WHO List of Essential Medicines. [1] Their comment was akin to saying that amoxicillin is a horse antibacterial drug, which is true, but quite misleading. Off-label usage for pharmaceuticals is extremely common and an important right of doctors. I mean that's pretty much the entire point of this topic!

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivermectin

This is the truth.

I'm assuming this, like my similar comments, will continue to be downvoted by people who are out of touch with reality.

Ah.. that said, even that wikipedia article points out that multiple research studies were done that demonstrated little to no benefit in the context of covid19 (and the ones that did were eventually proven faulty or fraudulent) - I agree that Ivermectin is an important drug, just not in the context of covid19

The fact that people were obtaining it from sources intended for horses is mostly unrelated to the fact that it is not effective as a Covid treatment for people who don’t have some other parasite in addition to Covid.

I don’t think calling it a horse dewormer is helpful, despite the fact that people were obtaining it from people who were selling it for the treatment of horses. People who (wrongly) think it works as treatment for covid will probably be aware that it is not exclusively a treatment for horses, so I don’t think calling it a horse dewormer will change any of their minds.

Even if it did, I am uncomfortable relying on misleading people in order to convince them of something true. (If someone believes X, and X is false, and you want to convince them of a true statement Z, then it is fine to say “X is false, but, I know you believe that X. Y is true, and X and Y together clearly imply Z. Therefore you should conclude Z.” (Assuming Y is true.) That’s not misleading someone. It is something different.)

It seems like allowing oneself to mislead, even if only when the misleading statements are sorta true in a sense, just not in the way they will be interpreted, in order to convince someone of something that is true, is rather dangerous. If such behavior were universalized, I think it would be rather bad for collective understanding. (What if someone U is trying to convince someone V of some statement P which U only believe is true because someone W misled U in to believe P in order to convince U of some other statement Q that is true, and then U says something misleading to V (leading V to believe a false statement R) in order to convince V that P ? Not good.)

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