posted on September 24, 2021 07:00 PM by
u/DELETED
40
u/kwykwy57 pointsat 1632511691.000000
“better to take this medicine where the only evidence for
effectiveness is fraudulent, rather than this vaccine that half the
planet has taken with minimal side effects and 90%+ effectiveness. I am
very rational.”
The funny thing is, that despite all the supposedly informed and "rational" concern fishing, it just so happened a dude linked her a long ass article from Vox covering just about everything possible with her fertility scarecrow.
It's there, all plain and simple and thorough, and I could bet it wouldn't even be too difficult to find if you were to google for such themes.
Did she seem to be interested about it the slightest? Nope. On the other hand she spent time making best wishes to a soon-to-be dad.
I've heard of nurses resisting the vaccine, not doctors. The AMA strongly suggests you're full of it: https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-survey-shows-over-96-doctors-fully-vaccinated-against-covid-19
The articles I was reading some months ago mentioned doctors, but now they just say hospital workers. I had met with one personally who was hesitant when coming in for an unrelated injury.
FWIW, I know a doctor who approaches medicine with a lot of skepticism. For example, she's encouraged me more than once not to take medication that other doctors have prescribed because she felt that the benefit was small and that the negative side effects were underappreciated or under-researched.
When the mRNA vaccines were first announced, she was quite suspicious of the new and untested technology. By the time they earned their EUA's though, she had looked into it and completely come around.
I realize this comment is just a single anecdote from a stranger on the internet, but she is very pro-vax, and I put a lot of faith in her opinion as someone who would be among the first to raise an alarm if there were a good reason to be worried. Instead, she's about to get her booster and is telling me to get mine as soon as I'm allowed.
An existing medicine to treat parasites. It’s never been shown to have any effectiveness as an antiviral.
You might as well take sugar pills. you won’t have to deal with any side effects and you’ll have the same results.
>An existing medicine to treat parasites. It’s never been shown to have any effectiveness as an antiviral.
That would make its current use as one "experimental". Is that such a nasty idea?
Using a drug that's not effective as an antiviral in vivo or in vitro as an antiviral would not make it "experimental", it would make it "ineffective".
Many of the drugs experimented with were done on the basis of giving them to sick covid patients and seeing if they worked. Whether they were used as a prior antiviral for other diseases or not seems irrelevant.
Drugs aren't normally thrown at a novel disease, because there weren't many large scale novel diseases to throw them at. But in the case of COVID, doctors did try out drugs on patients.
Given how many vaccinated patients caught the delta variant in, say, Israel, there will still be a demand for drugs that help people who are sick anyway.
A vaccine won't help you if you're already sick. Plenty of human fucking beings are willing to take a drug they don't know will help if there's a possibility it might.
This is way off track. People aren't using the drug because they're already sick. They're using it because they're scared, ignorant, and they believe it'll be a prophylactic.
the average republican is not some teenage nazi incel on the motte writing ten page thesis on why racism is actually good. they are in fact low iq morons eating apple flavored horse paste because tucker carlson convinced them not to trust doctors or experts of any kind. and nancy from facebook shared this wicked funny meme about how ivermectin is a secret cure for covid and its all a big conspiracy by bill gates and fauci and obama to jab you with microchips, thats all the evidence your average republican needs to start eating horse paste sandwiches
it must be tiring playing stupid like this all the time
enough that places that sell the stuff felt compelled to put big warning signs up and put it behind locked glass cabinets. some stores made you bring in a picture of yourself with your horse to prove that you actually have one
and also raise the price, cause if they're gonna be stupid you might as well make some money off them
I would think that the media coverage drove the warning signs and price increases, because the media was obsessed with the idea of many people consuming the livestock drug without providing evidence for this.
yes I know the motte is terrified of the media and complains about them every day and blames them for everything. it's a deliberate strategy used by the alt-right to radicalize people
Who else besides the media was providing credible claims that large amounts of people were consuming the livestock form of ivermectin? I guess some twitter bluechecks.
themselves, on their own twitter and facebook accounts
what are you expecting, like a door to door survey? Have you eaten horse paste in the last 2 months?
isn't it irritating to play stupid like this, don't you ever get tired of it? you have to go to such crazy lengths to cling to these delusions that average trumpers and average republican voters have more than a room temperature IQ
you may think they are useful idiots because they vote for the republican pieces of shit that you want in office, but you don't have to pretend like they are fonts of hidden wisdom
On twitter, the average Trump supporter I see is busy following the latest thing Jack Posobiec is saying. There was some discussion of how the ivermectin debacle was strange and ignoring the drug's historical use for humans, but it was short lived. I imagine there were some people on Facebook bragging that they took a livestock drug. Some of them would be trolls and the real number of victims is probably less than a hundred. The reaction people have to that is making a mountain over a molehill.
>you have to go to such crazy lengths to cling to these delusions that average trumpers and average republican voters have more than a room temperature IQ
I don't think the average Democrat voter is a genius either. If we looked at the average IQ in, say, the Bronx or Chicago, it might also be swimming at room temperature.
jack posobiec is a lunatic and it's no surprise your online neo-nazi friends hang on his every word
>Some of them would be trolls and the real number of victims is probably less than a hundred.
denial, not just a river in egypt
>I don't think the average Democrat voter is a genius either. If we looked at the average IQ in, say, the Bronx or Chicago, it might also be swimming at room temperature.
"black people are dumb", nice. rather be casually racist than face up to the stupidity of your political allies
alright I've had enough of talking to racists today, fuck off
Jack Posobiec does get touchy. But I think he gives out less death threats than all the wannabe journalists and bots on r/politics saying to kill the unvaccinated every day.
>"black people are dumb", nice. rather be casually racist than face up to the stupidity of your political allies
Do only black people live in the city ghettoes? They only made up 13% of the country, last I checked.
How many people are included in "they"? Is this based on the clickbait article that thought a hospital was full of ivermectin poisoned patients that wasn't?
The mechanisms and manufacture of mRNA vaccines make them safer, more effective, and more reliable than any vaccines we've pretty much ever come up with in history. They are, mechanically, nearly impossible to get long term side effects from. You develop them in the immediate aftermath, i.e. the first few weeks, or nothing comes of it. There's no pipeline or pathway for damage to even be done other than the odd autoimmune response.
If you're curious about the FDA and booster shots, the advisory committee's data and deliberations are [public](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFph7-6t34M). I was cautious about the necessity of boosters but the Israeli data supports its efficacy, particularly for the old and immunocompromised.
The best way to tell if something is actually safer and more effective is to wait and see what the actual effects are, not to blindly trust the manufacturer's assurances.
Some people (and definitely not you) are actually biologically/medically literate and understand why mRNA vaccines and therapies are safe, but sure, everyone who doesn't believe every Facebook meme they read is 'blindly trusting the manufacturer's assurances'.
It's entirely possible for the side effects of novel drugs to take several years to manifest fully. So the best way to know, is to wait. Even the FDA understands that.
Which ones only manifested several years after being administered? Because while the polio vaccine did have some issues, most notably the cutter incident where hundreds of thousands of people were injected with live polio, I don't know of any that waited a couple of years before striking people down.
The smallpox vaccine also had side effects - I don't know if those were long form or not. New drugs and vaccines should be held to the same standard, regardless.
What standard was the smallpox vaccine held to that the covid vaccine is not? What specific problems do you have here? Not general unease, but concrete examples of this thing you're "just asking questions" about?
It has less to do with the manufacturer and more to do with the mechanism of effect. Older vaccines required things like live or inactivated viruses that required a bevy of chemicals to create, stabilize, and preserve them. mRNA vaccines, by contrast, have a very small number of completely harmless molecules. A few lipids(fat) to protect the payload, salts to balance the PH to be safe for your blood, sugar to help preserve it, and the mRNA payload which is a very short-lived sequence of instructions to generate proteins. The mRNA is gone within a few days.
This is why the universe of possibilities for adverse reactions is much smaller than in traditional vaccines. Fewer ingredients, fewer side effects, no chance of the original infection developing as a result of the vaccine. It's quite elegant.
As for side effects, you're limited almost exclusively to autoimmune responses, which are rare, unpredictable, and at a much lower incidence rate and severity than actually contracting the disease would be.
None of this is in any way a dig at traditional vaccines, which are still effective. Just that in the pros and cons columns, mRNA vaccines are about as close to medical magic as we've gotten since we discovered antibiotics, vaccination, or microbes.
By this logic, shouldn't you be logging off of Reddit? It's only been around for 16 years or so, it's entirely possible that there are some side effects of using it that might take several years to manifest fully. Seems like it's probably not worth you taking that chance just to share some dumb opinions.
so have the Effective Altruist charities been raising money to send
ivermectin to Africa, where doctors and nurses wait for their turn to
get their first vaccine doses after every slob in the rich countries has
finished having their second and third helpings, or are we not even
really pretending this is anything other than glorified vaccine
denialism
'Fun' detail, ivermectin was already used in Africa, against malaria, where it was research for its neurotoxin effect. (of the 1000 people 2 died iirc (with preexisting conditions however)).
All of this before covid-19 was a thing.
Ivermectin vs malaria turns out to be really complicated (it reduces transmission but probably doesn't actually cure infection) but like, Plasmodium is at least a parasite! It's not a VIRUS!
That's one of the things that I think is actually insidious about the Ivermectin nonsense. It's a legitimately useful drug! It's an effective treatment for parasitic infections of various sorts. It's just that there's no evidence it does fucking anything for covid.
Yup! It's on the WHO Essential Medicines List! It's one of our very best antihelminthics! But you shouldn't be taking it off-label and in megadoses for a viral infection!
Also against malaria the dosage is at least sort of controlled by the doctors, and not guesstimated by facebook posters using the variant for horses. (No idea if somebody was drinking the sheep shower variant). Dosages matter in these things. (At least it doesnt seem to be dangerous enough that people are mass ODing on it, so that is at least good).
Yes, true, and not just the US the non western world has a huge issue getting access to the supply of vaccines (while we are gearing up to give everybody boosters), so some desperate countries are trying horse paste as a more official strategy.
But we cant release the patents even in the extreme case of a pandemic due to the number needing to go up.
E: Also, I must admit I have some minor sympathies for the antivaxers 'forced vaccinations (or socially enforced vaccinations via forced vaccine checks at entrances of businesses) are bad' idea, but these are countered by the fact that this is an exception (and the MRA vaccination stuff has been researched for over a decade, and we learned from the past in regards to new regs), and the whole issue that none of the anti vax protestors ever think about the patents (which shows just how egotistical they are imho, and it also just counters all the extremists in the movements who worry about the great reset thing (which can't be a real thing if we don't simply forgo the copyright on this (unless you go a step deeper into the conspiracy and it is actually about (((them))) wanting a more pliable population or something, but that is just neo-nazi shit)).
I was talking more about the horse version being more affordable than the human version, which i think is a problem too peverse for any country other than the USA to have.
> so have the Effective Altruist charities been raising money to send ivermectin to Africa
Specifically for Covid, or just in general? Because AIUI, it's been in pretty broad use as an anti-parasitic to good effect, it's just that A) it doesn't fucking treat Covid and B) some people have intentionally been taking dangerously high doses of it. It's basically like taking a fistful of Advil to treat constipation.
Remember when sneerclub was blamed for making covid worse?
No idea we would end up with ‘rationalists support drinking a
neurotoxin’ (E for nuance: in high enough doses it is a neurotoxin, it
can also be used as a medication, but do it under proper medical
supervision if you are sufferering from something which gets treated by
it, don’t go hobbying with it like you would do with the more fun horse
drugs (antibiotics and K)).
At the start, iirc it was computer science scott who mentioned sneerclub in a post he wrote on how great the rationalists are at stuff like covid. I assume it was just meant as a 'people who dislike what rationalists do' and not actual people here.
E: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4695 here.
> BASICALLY, THE MORE SNEERCLUB WOULD SNEER AT A GIVEN PERSON, THE MORE THEY’D CALL THEM AN AUTODIDACT STEMLORD DUNNING-KRUGER ASSHOLE WHO’S THE EMBODIMENT OF EVERYTHING WRONG WITH NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM, THE MORE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO THAT PERSON RIGHT NOW FOR THE SAKE OF YOUR AND YOUR LOVED ONES’ FUCKING LIVES.
(At this time nobody had sneered at any of them re: covid (In part I agree with him even, you should have 2 weeks of emergency food/meds/etc in the house regardless of what you do, or if there is an pandemic). (E: Eric Weinstein used to be in that all caps post according to his own comments).
And in the [comments](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4695#comment-1834807):
> Incidentally, if anyone ever wondered why I despise SneerClub and woke Twitter, in ways that might seem wildly out of proportion to their actual importance in the world … well, you now have your answer.
(I do feel sad for Scott btw, the existence of SC just breaks his brain, and he doesn't even seem to read it, but we live rent free in his head, I hope he is doing better now. Also to anybody from reading this dont go reacting to Scotts blog posts over any of this please).
No matter how pathetic and victimhood claiming he may be, its a blog named after some creepy rapey fantasy about an arranged marriage with the prettiest girl of a small town a long time ago. edit: [cite](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=476)
His periodic forays into extreme shittiness like (on no evidence) accusing a specific Chinese scientist of bioweapon research, need to be seen in that context. Ditto for his blog being “neither time nor place” to discuss sexual assault in academia.
edit: pardon, a correction: accusing specific researchers of cover up of lab leak and promoting most of what the alt right attributes to bioweapon research, while denying any belief in the bioweapon theory. Because that's just how people like this roll.
Obviously a civilian lab would tend to first characterize the viruses that it finds in the wild, and do any kind of "tinkering" research on the viruses whose properties they had characterized. That's not what happened, hence those claiming it is a lab leak of some artificially worsened pathogen tend to pivot towards a bioweapon theory.
> “I would’ve been the chief rabbi of my shtetl,” I said. “All day long, I’d debate questions like how much restitution you’d have to pay if your ox gored your neighbor’s sheep. And for this, I’d get an arranged marriage with the most beautiful girl in town.”
Ah, yes, matchmaking: the [famously flawless system](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59Hj7bp38f8)
Look this is just being a dragon with extra steps.
Wait, following this logic, if one of us were to slay the Dragon Rationalism, would we then be allowed to marry the most beautiful girl/guy in town?
Forgot about that blog name thing btw, and yes that is very creepy, and also just very flawed as a system of law.
Punishment for goring a sheep, normally twice the value of the sheep, but not this time as the ox velowngs to my father in law, also the sheep owner sneered at me once, so I award all their sheep to my father in law.
Yeah. I think people take posts there out of context too much. A blog with that kind of story behind the naming of it, pretty much has to host some incel styled complaints against feminism, and various assorted shittiness. If it didn't, that would be highly surprising. It's much like how if WeHuntedTheMammoth wasn't named ironically to mock the manosphere, it'd have to be a manosphere site. It sure wouldn't be somehow apolitical on manosphere topics.
It is mildly surprising that he does blog a fair bit about technical subjects and that the shittiness isn't all there is on the blog.
edit: and I certainly originally thought that the name of the blog was his trying to come up with some new jargon for some CS thing, say some kind of a particle swarm solver or whatever. It does sound innocuous enough.
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5542
Even more disgusting, using Aaron Swartz's suicide as a prop.
Various discussion of specific virologists occur in the comments, various accusations of cover ups and so on. A lot of "we aren't like the less intellectual dark web, we don't think covid itself is an engineered bioweapon" (while listing off pretty much verbatim the "bioweapon" crowd's arguments with the humanized mice and so on).
Of course, no thought is given to the human impact of bullshit accusations, despite starting off with Aaron having killed himself.
edit: Also that seems to be a common pattern in those circles. The core alt-right pushes a more extreme version of something (It's an engineered bioweapon!) supported with a set of alternative facts, while fellow travelers are confirming belief in most of the alternative facts, while denying the interpretation (which given those claimed facts wouldn't be particularly implausible; if they were inserting furin cleavage sites and passing *unpublished viruses* through humanized mice, and had very lax safety, and had been able to cover it up perfectly afterwards, and so on, chances of that being somehow bioweapon related wouldn't be small at all).
I don't know to which extent they do it consciously, or as some sort of convergence of general shittiness, where someone likes the shitty opinions of a movement but doesn't like to identify with it.
I love their writing style. The very subtle, “just asking questions”,
“keep an open mind and heart” B/S that spreads fear, uncertainty, and
doubt. They would do great in enterprise sales.
Personally, I think it's unsubtle. It's very 'omg this may be catastrophically important, **"but"**\italics\danger here's what i discovered'
I honestly appreciate the stuff that come after. Tuoc seems to being doing good analysis here. It's just super fucking weird to me she seems to think it's necessary to wrap it in a rationalist format. What does it add???
I mostly enjoyed Galef's book but around 2/3rds of the way through she promotes the idea of saying you have "Updated" instead of "made a mistake" and promotes it as what people with the 'scout mindset' do. And its there that it totally shifted from a nice quick book to feeling like your going to be sold something.
That fucking slide from “and we’re really not talking much about what
can help people after exposure or symptom onset” to “In the interest of
transparency: I have ivermectin on hand, and barring an alternative I
will probably take it if I start to get sick.”
IOW, I’m not anti-vax, I’m just asking questions. fuck you for not
helping us get back to normal.
Edit: This is why we need (more) vaccine mandates. We’ve given people
lots and lots of time to choose to get the stupid vaccine. Now it’s time
to give them a little bit more of a shove.
Anyone here notice that this Mason person not only is pro horse paste
(despite trying to really gently say “just asking questions!”) but,
critically, is anti-vaccine under some imagined fear of fertility
problems?
Part of the problem here is that in the USA people are actually taking (orally) the livestock formulations (including the formulations designed for topical application). It's not that *ivermectin* is "horse paste", it's that *horse paste* is in fact horse paste. (And sheep dip, similarly, is sheep dip. People are orally ingesting both.)
It's also a neurotoxin and really bad for your liver. Taking it as directed probably won't hurt you, but most people who are doing this shit *aren't taking it as directed* and in fact are overdosing the shit out of themselves. It's worth discouraging that.
Eh, I have some issues with this framing. I don't disagree with your point that the root issue is the media depiction of ivermectin, but I don't think it's sufficient to take a neutral position on it as you do here.
Even if we agree that ivermectin is mostly neutral with regards to it's risks and benefits, the way it's being depicted in the larger social framework is actively harmful, since it's being touted as a cure-all don't-get-vaccinated alternative. And if you give those people an inch, they'll take the mile.
So, if you take a permissive, ivermectin-centrist position, it can very easily by co-opted by the bad faith ivermectin crowd. You say "feel free to take ivermectin in safe, controlled way if you're scared, it's fine and won't harm you", but that gets turned into "see, even this person says ivermectin is safe", and you've helped further their narrative.
Starting from the alternative non-permissive ivermectin-centrist position, one might say "Don't take ivermectin. The people promoting it are lying to you and there's no evidence it will help you. Get vaccinated." You've avoided starting from a position that agrees with the framing of the fraudsters, you've expressly rejected their harmful position, and you've still not said anything untrue.
So, yeah, I don't think you're *wrong* about the facts here, but I do think you (and Kelsey Piper in that down in that thread) are taking a bad approach with regards to the framing of the situation and the larger context in which this situation exists. If you want some suggestion for people who have just gotten covid and might be scared, my local medical clinic recommends zinc and vitamin c. There's just no need to both sides about ivermectin, and it's irresponsible to do so. The people who tout ivermectin as a cure-all grasp for every desperate straw they can, and there's just no need to hand them one.
> it isn’t gonna kill you to take it if you’re scared or whatever
i mean maybe, but if you're hospitalized from irresponsible use that does kill people by denying them resources
also it's gonna kill *you* (and the car accident patient who could use your ICU bed) if you get severe COVID because you've forgone getting an extremely effective vaccine in favour of slurping on sheep drench
Doing the antivax-but-afraid-to-say-so 'but what about early treatment' 'do your own research' 'fertility' 'get the vax IF MEDICALLY APPROPRIATE' routine is sneerworthy actually
also this person's other tweets are full of thinly-veiled antivax tropes
[https://twitter.com/webdevMason/status/1440719026947125257](https://twitter.com/webdevMason/status/1440719026947125257)
https://twitter.com/webdevMason/status/1441290356167823360
Ah the 'I dont understand theoretical research person', seems clever.
(They also posted a topic in a computer science thread going 'the halting problem doesn't make sense to me').
It may kill you if you take it in the kind of megadoses that are supposed to be effective for covid. (No idea if r-OP would do anything that stupid but given their tendency to “research” things in depth thats certainly a risk).
Its kind of like that whole "homeopathy wont kill you there's no molecules of the active ingredient" thing. Numerous poisonings ([example](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hundreds-of-babies-harmed-by-homeopathic-remedies-families-say/)) were caused by incorrect dilution, so yes it may even kill you directly, in addition to killing you indirectly.
“better to take this medicine where the only evidence for effectiveness is fraudulent, rather than this vaccine that half the planet has taken with minimal side effects and 90%+ effectiveness. I am very rational.”
so have the Effective Altruist charities been raising money to send ivermectin to Africa, where doctors and nurses wait for their turn to get their first vaccine doses after every slob in the rich countries has finished having their second and third helpings, or are we not even really pretending this is anything other than glorified vaccine denialism
Remember when sneerclub was blamed for making covid worse?
No idea we would end up with ‘rationalists support drinking a neurotoxin’ (E for nuance: in high enough doses it is a neurotoxin, it can also be used as a medication, but do it under proper medical supervision if you are sufferering from something which gets treated by it, don’t go hobbying with it like you would do with the more fun horse drugs (antibiotics and K)).
I love their writing style. The very subtle, “just asking questions”, “keep an open mind and heart” B/S that spreads fear, uncertainty, and doubt. They would do great in enterprise sales.
My priors remain unperturbed.
That fucking slide from “and we’re really not talking much about what can help people after exposure or symptom onset” to “In the interest of transparency: I have ivermectin on hand, and barring an alternative I will probably take it if I start to get sick.”
IOW, I’m not anti-vax, I’m just asking questions. fuck you for not helping us get back to normal.
Edit: This is why we need (more) vaccine mandates. We’ve given people lots and lots of time to choose to get the stupid vaccine. Now it’s time to give them a little bit more of a shove.
more sneers as well as sneer-worthy content in the replies
Anyone here notice that this Mason person not only is pro horse paste (despite trying to really gently say “just asking questions!”) but, critically, is anti-vaccine under some imagined fear of fertility problems?
Aktyually, the human-rated version comes in pills.
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