Scott Alexander does write long articles. All of this one is at least somewhat interesting, but I particularly recommend scrolling down to the final section, the "Political Takeaway." He's on one of my favorite topics, the difficulty of persuading people of anything when you clearly hold them in enough contempt to lie to them, and you give them excellent reason to believe you're hostile to their best interests because you consider them outside your tribe.
Spoiler on the specific issue of Ivermectin: he leans toward the view that's becoming more common, and which I'm guessing has some validity, that Ivermectin seems most effective in societies with lots of worm problems, perhaps because worm infestations inhibit an effective immune response to COVID. This is at best a tentative conclusion, however, and we'd all benefit from adopting a reasonably skeptical scientific viewpoint until the data are much clearer.
3 comments:
The worm connection is an interesting correlation, but not a slam-dunk conclusion.
While a serious worm infection will reduce your reserves and capacity to fight off diseases, and recovering from that infection should give you more strength to fight the covid, the process of killing the worms leaves your body with a lot of dead worms, and you can get an allergic reaction. An allergic reaction would seem to have the opposite effect, weakening you for a few days. The result might be a wash.
If the worm infection is minor, there shouldn't be much reaction to the dead helminths, but then the effect of the infection would also be small.
It might be true, but would need a little investigation--which shouldn't be hard: do other anti-helminthics also give a small improvement in recovery time?
I wonder if the off-label application for ivermectin as an antiviral for other RNA viruses - Dengue fever for example - is also because of an anti-parasitical second-order effect. And having lived in lots of second and third-world developing countries, although health care isn't at the same level as the fully-developed world, it's also not completely backward. Parasite infections are more common, but that doesn't mean it's overrunning the countries. Ivermectin is available over-the-counter throughout the Caribbean, and I would imagine anywhere else in South America and probably Africa as well. There's a lot of bush in these countries, but if one was plopped down in an urban pharmacy you could pretty much get anything that you could get from a Walgreen's.
The Corona bio weapon is a type of energy parasite.
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