2 Comments

I like your article a lot, it contains a lot of brain food. But I have 2 comments:

1) About the second McCullough quote, one thing that people don't understand is that science doesn't stand for the truth, but for the known measured truth, and that changes as you get more measures. The CDC could be used to debunk the CDC itself, because, as new facts become available, the recommendations and statements are updated, sometimes even contradicting the previous position. But that is science! And that is even more true when a lot of money is invested in an urgent investigation and new facts surface, like this COVID situation. That is an issue when you're in a crisis and you need everybody to follow your lead, but you change new facts that affect that lead: people stop believing in you, specially when, as you said, they have repeated the previous facts "so many times that they have internalized that information and simply demonize any other science", even the new science facts.

One unrelated example: Pluto becoming a dwarf planet instead of a whole planet. Why? Because they found objects bigger than Pluto in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. There were 2 options: call those new objects planets -that was absurd because of their size and physical behavior- or recognizing that the science facts supported a new space object type. And there were a lot of protests.

2) About ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and other alternative medicine. Now research has been blamed. Actually, a lot of research has been done and is being done. The reason some people is being punished is for encouraging people to use a medical procedure that didn't work. Ivermectin was researched in many different hospitals around the world, but the evidences that were found to support it didn't resist a peer review. That happened with a lot of trials because the beginning of the COVID pandemic was so crazy and doctors were so unprepared that they did a lot of Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19 Therapy. And that lead to some great treatments that are used today, after review and retest. But Ivermectin, given the current facts -that's what science is about-, didn't. And you can defend that randomised evaluation at the beginning of a pandemic, but once you have a set of approved and reviewed treatments you have to go back to normal: use the safe medicines in real life, evaluate new treatments under strict conditions. The NIH doesn't recommend either for or against the use of ivermectin, but the statement is clear: https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/therapies/antiviral-therapy/ivermectin/

A research paper about Ivermectin: https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/26/bmjebm-2021-111678

"research related to ivermectin in COVID-19 has serious methodological limitations resulting in very low certainty of the evidence, and continues to grow.37–39 The use of ivermectin, among others repurposed drugs for prophylaxis or treatment for COVID-19, should be done based on trustable evidence, without conflicts of interest, with proven safety and efficacy in patient-consented, ethically approved, randomised clinical trials."

About hydroxychloroquine, the story is worse. The NIH says that "despite demonstrating antiviral activity in some in vitro systems, neither hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin nor hydroxychloroquine alone reduced upper or lower respiratory tract viral loads or demonstrated clinical efficacy in a rhesus macaque model" and recommends against its usage (https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/therapies/antiviral-therapy/chloroquine-or-hydroxychloroquine-and-or-azithromycin/). If you read the text, other than in vitro studies, the patients treated with hydroxychloroquine lasted more in the hospital, but the death rate didn't decrease.

As a doctor, I wouldn't recommend treatments that after 22 stressful months of trials have not been proved to work, specially when other treatments have been proved to work and they have been peer reviewed. But I'm not a doctor.

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