Sapper Redux said:

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You ascribing your recovery to Ivermectin is not evidence. That's an assumption you're making with nothing to support it besides your belief. That's why the "plural of anecdote isn't data." As for the idea that "ivermectin killed no people," if taking it meant people did not get proper medical treatment in a timely fashion, then it likely did result in people's deaths.

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No. This is pathetic. You can discount the evidence. You can ignore the evidence. You can call the evidence an anecdote. But is absolutely evidence.

I got covid. I took ivermectin and acetaminophen. 12 hours later I felt incredibly better.

Faith is what I had BEFORE I took the ivermectin. Then I took the ivermectin and got the evidence of what happened. I got better.

I'm not saying this alone proves ivermectin works. But it is evidence. I took it, I got better. Joe Rogan took it, he got better. Millions of people in India, Japan, Mexico, Peru and America took ivermectin and got positive results.

All these anecdotal experiences are evidence. You use that evidence to reach conclusions. Many doctors used evidence of all their patients getting over covid using ivermectin to report that ivermectin is beating covid.

I'm forever grateful to those doctors. I took their evidence and bought ivermectin. As bad as I felt, covid may have killed me if I hadn't had ivermectin there and taken it immediately.

So I had ivermectin because of evidence accrued by doctors and advice from a nurse practitioner. Then I got sick. Then I took ivermectin and immediately got better.

That is evidence that ivermectin worked in my case. I feel like I'm talking to children. This is so basic. You can choose to use this evidence however you want. Ignore it if you want. But it is evidence.

Words in English often have more than one meaning, so I understand
both sides as being correct in this argument about what is evidence.
One side is simply saying a massive observation should not be ignored, the other side is saying it was not ignored - it was tested and found wanting by the standards of clinical trials.

A similar thing often happens when police are asked about "suspects" - the general public is likely to consider anyone being investigated to be a suspect, the police will use a more legally fitted definition.

Now, if one accepts my above posting as workable, the question becomes were the clinical trials accurate? Did they get suborned by money from the big pharmaceuticals? I don't know...

The problem is that there's never a pure enough trial for people who refuse to accept the scientific and medical consensus. Good trials and good investigations require extensive time and resources. There are only two good sources for those resources: industry and government. Even retrospective cohort studies require data collected and stored thanks to grants and investments. If you're determined to see any study supported by funds and grants as inherently biased because of that money (despite the fact that distribution of those funds is tied to the proposal and not the results), then you'll never accept that Ivermectin doesn't work for Covid. There's always a way to claim the study is tainted. It's the classic "heads I win (your study isn't robust enough and lacks x,y,z), tails you lose (your study was funded by BIG PHARMA AND FAUCI)."

Great post Jabin - but I'd actually say it is a binary choice between trust or don't trust, and we should all fall on the side of don't trust.

There's a problem with replication going on, there is a lot of fraudulent and poor research, and the funding free for all during covid made that worse. So we should be even more skeptical of everything, hold everything under scrutiny, and be extremely jealous of our opinions.

The issue with how a lot of this has played out regarding ivermectin (or zithromycin or HCQ) is this really fascinating combination of extreme credulity and extreme incredulity. Or in other words, an overpowering bias.

I'd be much more comfortable with someone being an antivaxxer if they were similarly skeptical of ivermectin.

The other problem is people these days want so very badly to belong to something. Especially in the age of social media, and especially especially in the post covid world. Communities have become more and more intangible and people want to belong. What we call conspiracy theories appeal to this - it is an instant community. There is this all intensified during covid. Stress, isolation, fear, all promote in the same direction.

I am reminded of a comment I heard the other day - that people generally don't believe things or hold on to ideas because they're true. If that were the case people would rarely be wrong or disagree. People believe in things when those ideas become useful in explaining experience or structuring our lives. Which of course is just Quine in other words. But this is a powerful sort of bias in and of itself. It pulls you toward accepting answers which explain things without interrogating them as to whether or not they are true - which doesn't necessarily get you ideas or beliefs which are true.

So I would suggest that we combine extreme skepticism with a guard against our very real desire to latch onto the first or simplest predictive explanation, knowing that we have bias for that and for belonging. But that is extremely difficult, it takes an active choice, focus, effort...and sometimes robs us of comforting ideas. Most people are unaware, or simply uninterested.

I will return the compliment: good post. In addition, I've noticed that most people look for single answers to problems, whereas most problems may have multiple answers.