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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3042 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 23, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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People are becoming vaccine hesitant because the medical system flushed its credibility down the toilet over a cold from China.

Yes and it's idiotic.

  1. COVID was actually very bad and I'm not going to be able to convince you because you were locked inside along with everyone else when it was bad. No, no, I'm not going to be able to convince anyone still complaining about COVID at this point so let's move on.

  2. Medicine is obviously politically compromised when it comes to culture war topics.

  3. The correct response to 2 is to have a high degree of suspicion when you see recommendations about trans people or whatever not ignore general and uncontroversial medical advice.

A reasonable middle ground is to do things like actual independent high quality research (like a lit review on pubmed) or ask someone who is not politically compromised (me! me!).

Just because someone was wrong one time or on one category of things doesn't mean you stop listening to them for everything. That's woke thinking and I expect better of us.

or ask someone who is not politically compromised (me! me!).

No, ask me! I promise I'm probably cheaper, and if I like you I'll do it for free!

COVID was actually very bad

In which regard? I strongly suspect I agree with you here; this statement is too ambiguous without clarification to be able to truly tell.

  1. Medicine is obviously politically compromised when it comes to culture war topics.

Agreed.

The correct response to 2 is to [...] not ignore general and uncontroversial medical advice.

Agreed. Now define uncontroversial.

A reasonable middle ground is to do things like actual independent high quality research

If only it was legal to do so.

ask someone who is not politically compromised (me! me!).

P(politically compromised | states is not politically compromised) > P(politically compromised | does not state is not politically compromised)

Just because someone was wrong one time or on one category of things doesn't mean you stop listening to them for everything.

It does mean I trust everything they say less, yes.

The solution to "our experts can't be trusted when the topic is political" is not to always ignore experts, that's going to result in more incorrect decision than listening to experts even when they are wrong.

"trust less" does not imply "always ignore". The input is still taken into consideration; it is weighted less than it would otherwise be.

The solution to "our experts can't be trusted when the topic is political" is not to always ignore experts

Someone stating something results in upweighting to some extent or another all hypotheses that are compatible with that observation. (Assuming you have made sure your hypotheses are not overlapping.)

In this case, someone stating a falsehood on something political results in upweighting the hypothesis that they are incorrect on political matters and correct on apolitical matters, as this is compatible with said observation. It also results in upweighting the hypothesis that they are incorrect on political matters and incorrect on apolitical matters, as this is also compatible with said observation.

[N.B. I have stated nothing here about how much said updates change the weighting.]

  1. I was not locked inside during Covid, I did not obey the lockdown orders, the majority of my neighbors did not obey the lockdown orders, I did not wear a mask and this behavior was common in my immediate surrounds. I still don’t believe Covid was that bad.

  2. Correct, medicine is politically compromised. Too bad the branch covidians turned vaccines into culture war fodder.

  3. Let’s be real, the normies can’t tell vaccines aren’t the same thing as gender affirming care or ‘abortion bans are literally killing people’. Because, you know, it’s not just one topic. It’s multiple topics, and evidence of public health lies in the past is everywhere- sodium intakes, for example. Not all of them are controversial issues. Hell, COVID’s not controversial anymore and doctors and public health establishment types are still repeating their lies from during the pandemic.

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So you probably didn't see all the people who died, maybe because they weren't in your social group, maybe you lived away from inner city squalor for instance. It was bad, it really was.

2

COVID vaccine into culture war. I don't know a single republican, anti-woke, fuck the establishment doctor who has anything negative to say about non-COVID vaccines at all. These people do exist and one of the biggest eventually recanted but nobody takes them seriously.

It's like trying to get Toyota's banned because a BMW ran over your dog. Nothing about them is similar.

3

Medical research certainly has its problems but their is an immense world of difference in consideration between things like "get your fucking MMR shot" "here's a complicated discussion about the value of the Rotavirus vaccine" and "here's a retrospective study of complication rates using an N of 600,000.

As a sidebar their weren't a lot of lies during the pandemic, their was a lot of bad messaging. Things like "the fatality rate will go down overtime as the virus burns through the available tinder and mutates to be less deadly" were stated loudly and often but people didn't listen.

Stuff like the initial mask messaging was a lie and I was annoyed by it but it was well meaning.

Unforced errors sure but most of it wasn't lies and a lot of things are still true (yes it is dangerous), were found to be true (no Ivermectin didn't actually work the research that said it did had big flaws), or involve ongoing complicated debates (lab leak).

but most of it wasn't lies

Oh there were blatant lies and ass covering. Absurd bullshit dictats galore. In order to get their emergency funding they waged a gaslighting campaign with the full help of media to portray actual, helpful remedies as being on the same tier as flat earthers and ancient aliens. Anti-retrovirals worked, Ivermectin worked well enough but it had to be destroyed so there were no "effective" medicines widely available.

They were banning people left and right, censoring even the concept of the whole thing being an accidentally leaked bio weapon from a chinese lab, turns out the bloody fucker who stood there before the cameras telling us how its oh so natural a bat fucked a cat or whatever, he authorized funding of gain of function research through proxies, a thing they were explicitly told to stop doing years ago. So no. Fuck these people.

This was a messy time. Ivermectin appeared to only work in the global south where people had a high parasite burden - when it worked it was saving lives by treatment of parasites which improved outcomes because less parasites.

The lab leak vs. natural is still hotly debated by knowledgeable and they actually gave good arguments on both sides that dont parse very well to laypeople.

Much of what you are complaining is also directionally incorrect, it's the media recruiting doctors, not the other way around.

Which part is directionally incorrect? Fauci funneling money for research of gain of function then hiding it and laying through his teeth to congress? Fauci colluding with scientists to retain media control of the narrative? Scientists directly involved or benefiting from the gain of function research releasing bogus papers with the sole purpose of creating FUD to deflect from the accurate information the same exact lab did experiments on these viruses. The absolutely bullshit assertion the fluorine cleavage site could have occurred naturally in that particular combination?

How about doctors careers being threatened for not going along with the party line about covid and its treatments? Maybe the fucking 1984 panopticon style control of media channels with Facebook/Reddit/Twitter and Youtube shadow banning people, shadow banning search terms. Those Orwellian fact checker boxes under posts? What else was directionally incorrect., having to use retard speak like "the virus of unknown origin" or videos literally getting murdered in the algorytm of youtube if you mention the word "news" and your channel isn't on the pre-approved list of "trust worthy" news networks.

I can tell you ivermectin literally works by making the cells inner PH less conductive to fully forming the viral capsid.

Research indicates that ivermectin can inhibit the replication of SARS-CoV-2 in cell cultures, with a single treatment able to reduce virus levels by about 5000-fold at 48 hours post-infection

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166354220302011

I can tell you ivermectin literally works by making the cells inner PH less conductive to fully forming the viral capsid.

How often have we cured cancer in a lab but when you apply the thing to real life clinical practice it isn't helpful?

It's nearly all the time, in fact it's the majority of medical research.

I can tell you the same mechanism reduces viral viability with other viruses too, also just look at hydroxychloroquine, and niclosamide, same basic mechanism.

Look at the literature that came out later after everyone calmed down, even if it had some lab impacts it didn't seem to have a useful clinical impact.

It's probably at best very similar to Tamiflu.

I'm pretty confident that now that the dust has settled, ivermectin turned out not to do anything.

When did the majority of the media claim antiretrovirals didn't work? Paxlovid was a big deal, because it did reduce mortality.

There were "effective medicines" available even before vaccines or paxlovid, corticosteroids were found to help, but only were necessary for those in ICUs, not the average Joe with sniffles.

Fauci, along with the US Surgeon General, lied about the efficacy of masks to manage supply. Fauci also deliberately moved the goalposts on population percentage targets for herd immunity. Those weren't "bad messaging", they were deliberate falsehoods pushed out onto the public.

The initial don't wear masks this was absolutely a lie and with very good reason - lots of healthcare providers ended up dying due to lack of PPE.

But it was a lie.

The masks work bit is not a lie it's just complicated and still has a ton of debate today. That's picking and choosing which evidence base to use in public policy messaging.

Moving the goalposts on herd immunity is a political and not medical question and not really a lie no matter how well or ill advised it was.

No shit politicians lie (and Fauci is a doctor), but don't mix that up with the medical side of things.

The masks were sold out everywhere around me by early February, not sure what supply he was trying to save.

If you need to save it for healthcare providers say you need to save it for healthcare providers.

TBH, I think the more likely scenario, is he, like most of the contemporary research, believed that masks were not that effective against COVID and COVID like illnesses.

There is no such thing as a safe vaccine, which is why the manufacturers are shielded from liability.

That same shield from liability means that they do not have the incentives to produce useful vaccines, but rather are incentivized to lobby for increasing numbers of vaccines for any and everything. These incentives explain the expanded schedule quite nicely.

Just because someone was wrong one time or on one category of things doesn't mean you stop listening to them for everything. That's woke thinking and I expect better of us.

It's not woke, it's common sense.

Just because someone was wrong one time

There's being wrong, and then there's being wrong with intent.

Just being wrong isn't generally cause for concern. Being wrong with intent, on the other hand, will naturally prompt back-checking of work and a "deny by default" posture until they re-earn that trust... if that's even possible. They did a lot of damage.

On the other hand, though, "number go down because a bunch of insane outgroupers had their way" is the only lever I have to pull for them to be forced to face any consequences whatsoever, so it's in my political interest that skepticism be maximized even though it would strictly speaking be better (and a local maximum of health outcome) for most people (who are themselves much dumber than the medical establishment) to blindly trust said medical establishment.

I'm not asking people to blindly trust the medical establishment I'm asking people to actually research the thing they want to do.

You can find papers with actuarial analysis, side effect rates and presentations, justification for the schedule and so on.

So do it.

With respect to COVID the whole thing was stupidly complicated and while I don't support the rights restrictions except in very narrow cases a great deal of it was correct and just poorly implemented/messaged.

Their is also a huge problem with outright conspiracy theories that got a lot of mileage because trust was so low but that doesn't make those things not effectively insane conspiracy theories, it just hampers people getting them cleared up.

You can find papers with actuarial analysis, side effect rates and presentations, justification for the schedule and so on.

So do it.

I can't. You know I can't. I don't have the background training, or the time, or possibly even the raw intelligence. And even if I did, I don't have the credentials that are required to make my opinion valid.

This is just ordinary epistemic helplessness. I do know two things: first, that this is beyond my primary knowledge. Second, the people I trusted to inform me betrayed me.

I know of no other option than extreme skepticism until such time as trust can be rebuilt. But it does take time.

The resources available to address vaccine hesitancy are in general very good, they have ones that lay the problems and considerations out in plain English with good details and citations to high quality research. I'd send you one but my desire to find the best one means I'd be going on a research rabbit hole I don't have to time for at this exact moment, but if you look you should find one (sorry I'm not a pediatrician, if I was I'd probably have one I like on hand).

The problem is the the left-wing political capture of the field and therefore the refusal to abandon any of the "teams" talking point which right now means over recommending the COVID vaccine.

"Hey we recognize that the COVID vaccine recommendations are unpopular but the evidence base is much stronger for everything else, here's how" would probably please a good chunk of the skeptics but broken woke brains can't do that, leaving frustrated people like me with a mess.

Which has been why I've been (loudly here and very very quietly in real life) been complaining about captured political expression in medicine since before Trump 1.

You can find papers with actuarial analysis

Agreed. Pop quiz: substance X causes you to drop dead in 20 years with no side effects before then. It has been 10 years since substance X has been introduced. What does actuarial analysis show on the effect of substance X?

This is begging the question.

The realistic question would be, for interventions, that at the time of invention, did not have conclusive evidence in either direction regarding making people "drop dead in 20 years", what proportion were found to do so after 20 years had passed?

The answer would be almost none.

"The last ten times I played Russian Roulette I was fine". Beware selection bias. If a prior mass intervention had caused this, you likely wouldn't be here to make that statement.

(Also, "drop dead in 20 years" is an obvious extreme example to illustrate the point. I am far more concerned in practice about e.g. long-term impacts on fertility, as that legitimately can have lags of 15-20 years.)

The original polio vaccine was kind of like this:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/02/the-virus-and-the-vaccine/377999/

Interesting, I didn't know about this, but to be fair it was before my time.

The polio vaccine hasn't remained the same since inception, for example, in India the live polio vaccine is being phased out for an inert vaccine.

This is because the live vaccine uses an attenuated variant of the virus, which is much less likely to cause harm than the real one, while also having the perk of being infectious in itself.

However, it can cause full blown polio. This was once considered acceptable, but as the number of cases of natural polio dropped, the number of iatrogenic cases became more relevant, and the decision was made to switch to forms without any living virus whatsoever.

Sure, that is a potential limitation for the COVID vaccinate at this time, other vaccines have mostly been around long enough to feel good about this, it is worth noting that while what you are suggesting is a hypothetical risk their isn't a good explanation for how that would biologically happen however.

Sometimes we do miss on things where there is initially no good biological explanation but it is extremely rare.

I'm trying to not get deep into the weeds of defending the COVID response though because it's far from the matter at hand however.

other vaccines have mostly been around long enough to feel good about this

This suffers from precisely the same issue as talking about e.g. refrigerants. There have been those that stood the test of time - that you can no longer purchase.

Or to put it another way: let's talk excipients.

their isn't a good explanation for how that would biologically happen however.

"drop dead in 20 years" is a blatent example to illustrate the point.

I am far more concerned in practice about things like, oh...

"This causes you to express a particular IgG antibody. Oops, said antibody breaks oocytogenesis. Oops, now any of your subsequent female children have nonviable oocytes". As this is something that:

a) has massive longterm effects (infertility of female offspring).
b) is essentially completely invisible for ~15 years or so.
c) is nontrivial to figure out even down the line.

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