While reading this piece I got a little depressed that most journalism is just such utter trash compared to it. I've read so many articles on ivermectin and none of them gave me even ten percent of the clarity that this article gave me. Can you imagine if writing and journalism of this calibre was commonplace among practising "journalists"? And look at how this piece compares to the CDC's and WHO's science communication. It's a shame that clear thinking and communication is so scarce.
NIH seems to have pretty good analysis into Ivermectin. For some reason or another, people don't know it exists. Its pretty straightforward frankly. Turns out that people on the internet are terrible at meta-analysis.
While Scott has a pretty decent natural talent for writing, he also has a MD, he's a board licensed practicing psychiatrist who has been working for a decade in the field, and he has spent at least the last twenty years gaining a pretty decent broad exposure to statistical and research methods. I don't believe he disclosed what Substack paid him, but he is in the "paid tier" and has said it was a mistake to even agree to that because the subscriptions he has gotten exceed what Substack paid him.
In short, if you want most journalism to hire licensed medical doctors with decades of experience in science and statistics, and natural writing talent on top of that, expect journalism to get a lot more expensive. A market certainly exists for Scott, but I'm not sure the market exists for all journalists to be as highly qualified as Scott. Or, for that matter, even for CDC and WHO PR arms. They definitely aren't paying their communications officers whatever Substack is paying Scott, or probably even what his psychiatry practice is paying him.
> I'm not sure the market exists for all journalists to be as highly qualified as Scott
I'm not sure we need as many journalists as we currently have. Do we really need another rehashing of the latest culture war nonsense? If you strip out all of these pseudo-journalists and consider only journalists covering real facts and in-depth analysis, that's a considerably smaller group that could plausibly consist of a number of Scotts.
That's what the public demands, so that's what news companies cater for in order to make a profit and stay in business.
Few journalists like covering that sort of stuff, a whole bunch dreamed of being investigative journalists breaking corruption and other public interest stories. But there simply aren't enough people reading those stories to maintain nearly enough staff for them.
Scott Alexander can also do what he does because he's not required to be totally accurate. It's opinion, backed by experience and training, but still opinion. He's also not writing to a deadline, except one he sets himself.
Real journalism is a lot harder than informed commentary.
Journalists aren't required to be totally accurate either. Most journalism is opinion, especially these days. Sometimes also informed opinion backed by experience, often not even that.
I'm just not seeing this distinction you claim exists.
> Journalists at established media houses are accountable, including to internal and external ombuds or public editors. They also rely on reputation.
Which is ultimately irrelevant, because most mainstream outlets are partisan and look after their own, both on the right and left. You only need to look at the ridiculous coverage of Obama, Trump, Russia, Rittenhouse and dozens more examples over the past few years. The people who peddled misinformation haven't suffered any consequences.
There are a lot of real facts out there, more of them every day. Not all of them worth considering show up in spreadsheets at central sites, some have to be ascertained and reported by someone on the spot. And I would distinguish between reporting and commentary.
I am not sure that Scott would fit into a newspaper environment.
Scott has some really interesting articles. He has one huge advantage over journalists. He seemingly doesn't work in the same deadline constrained world that typical journalists do:
>> I know I’m two months late here. Everyone’s already made up their mind and moved on to other things.
He has an earlier piece whose point is that the WHO can never be accurate, because they always have to prioritize "sounding trustworthy" over accuracy, and random blogs don't.
Society needs a simple answer. Do this. Do that etc. Put on a mask. Wash your hands. Practice social distancing. Use approved vaccines. Take booster shots etc are pretty simple to follow. Likewise don't take non approved stuff. Easy to understand and simple to follow.
Nuances will likely hurt and confuse the common man. That's why the news and celebs and politicians etc try to keep things simple.
Dr. Fauci knew that a lot of the things he was saying might not be 100% accurate and yet he did it. The reason being that on the whole his message was a net positive effect on the public.
Likewise CNN made fun of Joe Rogan for taking Ivermectin because we don't want general public to experiment with alternative medicine. It's better to just stick to the proven stuff.
Basically, there is no choice here. Or basically two choices:
1. Be 100% accurate and risk confusing people
2. Be strategic about it and for the greater good.
We need a narrative and the cost is accuracy. We need to have more empathy for people who are the decision makers and have to make difficult choices.
I need to clarify. I am not implying that WHO / CDC is lying outright. It's just that they have to be very careful and choose the right message to convey to the general public.
It does mean you might have to downplay some things which might be true but will cause more harm than good if emphasized.
I personally can never do that but I won't judge people who are in a situation where every thing they say has a huge impact on our collective future.
I’m not sure why you’re getting smoked with the DVs there, I agree with you, I think it’s true.
Society has been so trained by political theatre and non-stop news channels for single answers that are capable of defying facts due to their non-life threatening nature that if a message isn’t straightforward, succinct, and unchanging then the messenger gets killed the moment it varies. Like politicians with the other side waiting for the slip up.
Except unfortunately science doesn’t work like this because nature can’t be fooled and at the beginning we don’t have as clear facts as we would like to. And the process of zeroing in on clearer and more concise answers is confusing and scares the shit out of the average punter. And the media are excited to be able to have a messenger who continues to vary their message.
It’s all a really sad state of affairs. I think WHO/CDC/Australian governments (really the only relevant one for me) and everyone else could have done a much better job but I feel I know why and how we ended up with such a communications disaster
Agreed it is patronizing. Knowing quite a few people, I'm not sure that isn't the right approach. People just want to get on with their lives, they don't want to know the degree of uncertainty behind decision x or y. And they'll believe anybody that tells them whatever they want to hear that allows them to get on with their lives. A guy like Fauci has very little choice: he can either lie, or he can cause a mass panic or a run on critical resources. The general public isn't going to hold back when they believe toilet paper or masks are going to be in short supply when they feel that they need them, restraint is for other people.
> he can either lie, or he can cause a mass panic or a run on critical resources
Agree that Fauci was/is in a tough spot, but I think it's a mistake to conceptualize these decisions as a stage game as opposed to a repeated game. "Lying" or selectively emphasizing truths to achieve a specific outcome is borrowing against future trust in an effort to solve the present problem, and is suboptimal long term.
He may have been simply told what to say. The man strikes me as having integrity and trying to do the right thing even in impossible situations, such as being part of the Trump administrations' misdirection engine and refusing to buckle. That's the main reason the right wing of the United States hates his guts, he didn't sign the oath of loyalty. And was promptly replaced.
This is also why trust in these institutions is at an all time low. When your decision-makers are telling you lies and half truths for your own good, it becomes harder to know when they're telling the truth. This is the environment that causes fringe groups and theories to thrive.
Or why they don’t trust doctors in general, because medicine is a very inexact science filled with lies and half truths along with real truths? I get that might be unnerving to many (even if medicine is overall beneficial), but these people really sound like a classic case of “perfect is the enemy of good.”
"Doctors are like monkeys with hammers trying to fix computers. We bang against stuff and will try a lot of things if we don't know what you've got. We may even get it right. But if you have a broken leg, an appendix that needs removal, a clear case of something that can be treated with anti-biotics, then we can perform small miracles."
I don't know enough of the profession to estimate how accurate that statement is but it has colored my view.
Anecdotally this rings very true. Actually I'd be even more cynical than it. I know two people that were facing serious chronic health issues that were not readily diagnosed. They were treated like a hot potato between specialists.
In one case it took nearly 2 year to arrive at a correct diagnosis and corrective action, which involved both medication and surgery.
In the other case the person was moving into liver failure, and placed on the transplant list. Luckily a family friend worked for the same healthcare organization as an IT professional, and knew exactly what to do. She marched the patient into the ER, had her sit down in a wheel chair, and made it crystal clear that she was going to be a gigantic PITA until they found out what was killing the patient. Within the day they had a plausible answer, and confirmed it with lab results within the week as I recall.
It shouldn't be this way, but unfortunately in US healthcare it is. Having an uncommon illness is an absolute nightmare, one that destroys entire families finances if not outright killing people.
This is unfortunately fairly accurate. There is a deep and wide ocean of the things we know inexactly, and a growing pool of things we can work miracles on.
However as the complexity of patients grows and the burden of disease shifts from infectious disease to chronic causes with lifestyle origins and aging, and anxiety - particularly in the teenage and young adults (a shift that has been underway at the top end for 30 years for the older part of the population, and since smartphones on the lower side! that the ocean is growing as well.
Thank you. I hold that person in very high regard and it stuck with me through the years as something that I see more and more confirmation of and yet, it seems to be a pretty harsh judgment.
I wouldn't be any less harsh about my own profession though.
> I don't know enough of the profession to estimate how accurate that statement is but it has colored my view.
We see the medicine of 200 years ago as barbaric, and I can guarantee that people 200 years in the future will see today's medicine as barbaric. There is simply lots of room for improvement even if improvement has been made in the past, but why should that give us colored views of the whole field?
> There is simply lots of room for improvement even if improvement has been made in the past, but why should that give us colored views of the whole field?
Especially since most of us -- most readers here do something computer-related, right? -- are ourselves in an (even more rapidly) evolving field of work, where what's "true" is constantly changing.
Add 'hard truths' to that list too. Lifestyle & diet have a huge impact on health, but a portion of the population refuse to acknowledge this or want to hear about it from their doctor.
When the same people (and more) that are in the fringe groups try to create a storm of complaint when scientific/medical advice/understanding changes, it's non-trivial for decision-makers to figure out what to say.
"non-trivial" is definitely the right word. I don't envy the decision makers, but I hope they realize that by being dishonest about masks in the beginning they sent the message that they were willing to lie for the greater good. This gave real credibility to the "they're inflating the numbers to make it seem worse than it is" theory because the scarier the virus seems, the more people will follow guidelines and fewer people will die. That theory, that the reported numbers are false, has led to far more deaths.
I hope the lesson that gets learned is to be more honest to the public, and not the opposite.
Scientific consensus didn't change on masks. It was known very early that they best prevent the spread of Covid.
When Western governments lied to get around supply issues, while distracting people with quasi-religious rituals around hand hygiene, they not only caused preventable deaths among populations at risk, they planted the seed for long term education and trust issues. More than a year later westerners still have terrible understanding of how the virus spreads, terrible mask education, AND mistrust of health authorities.
The antidote to misinformation isn't more misinformation, it's truth.
> When Western governments lied to get around supply issues (...)
I don't know what you interpreted as a lie. What I saw was two updates that sparked advisories to curtail surgical mask runs:
* the initial WHO position from between late 2019 to early 2020 on the risk of COVID spread, back when COVID was still the Wuhan epidemic and little was known about it, where they quoted Chinese health officials on how the risk of airborne transmission was deemed low. Therefore, based on those observations, surgical masks and gloves were deemed unnecessary.
* The updated WHO position around early 2020 after airborne transmissions started to be reported and corroborated by multiple sources which caused a supply crunch of surgical masks and gloves which were putting frontline workers in risk.
* a call to the widespread adoption of masks from around mid 2020, whether surgical masks or cloth, when their availability started to not be put into question.
Updating advisories based on new data on a developing problem might be seen as flipfloping in politics, but it's not lying or a bad thing.
I remember this guy. The specific claim was that he does not believe that masks will prevent new infections due to people not socially distancing and wearing them incorrectly, NOT that masks are ineffective. He concedes that the evidence suggests masks themselves work.
I've seen this guy get cited in anti-vaxx circles, using extremely simplified claims. Of course when I bring up the fact that he advocates for social distancing, anti-vaxxers get angry at me.
Yes, there is some nuance there now, but it wasn't always so. That's his way of very slowly walking back his claims, a bit of a no true Scotsman, but now 'no true mask'. "masks don't work" -> "ordinary masks don't work" -> "ordinary masks don't work because people won't take other precautions when they wear masks" and so on.
The damage was already done by the time he started with the qualifications and to this day 100's of thousands, if not millions of people will quote the head of the RIVM (correctly or not) to support their anti-mask (often coupled with anti-vaxx) stance.
And social distancing + masks = better than social distancing without. Even Fauci called him to task about this, his response was that 'he would study their claims' (their claim: that masks do work).
When people like Jaap van Dissel cross the official line published by the country it immediately erodes the platform that we all depend on to get through this. From someone in his position one would assume a basic familiarity with the difference between official policy and scientific fact and when it is appropriate to take which viewpoint.
That does not seem to be true. Wikipedia's article on Jaap van Dissel[1] links to a Reuters news article from September 2020[2] where van Dissel is referred to have made the following claim:
> The head of infectious diseases at the Netherlands’ National Institute for Public Health (RIVM), Jaap van Dissel, has argued there is no scientific proof of cloth masks’ effectiveness, and that they might do more harm than good by giving users a false sense of security.
Please note that the criticism refers to cloth mask (not surgical), whose effectiveness has been since then reported to be lower than 40%. Also, the thesis is that relying on an ineffective protection measure does more harm than good as this potentiates the spread of the disease.
That's exactly what I meant when I wrote that over time he has moved his position. First it was all masks, then cloth masks, then they didn't work because then other measures wouldn't work etc. But he never came out to say he simply got it wrong.
> That's exactly what I meant when I wrote that over time he has moved his position.
Isn't your source citing the WHO's advisory from early 2020 on how face masks were counterproductive as they convey a false sense of security and thus contribute to violate critical measures such as social distancing and washing hands?
> “Masks can also create a false sense of security, leading people to neglect measures like hand hygiene and physical distancing,” Adhanom said. “I cannot say this enough: Masks will not protect you alone from COVID-19.”
This was a quote from a WHO representative, made two months after your source was published.
Speaking of "the public" as a single entity is about as useful as approximating a curve with a straight line - i.e. unless it's the most trivial case, it's oversimplified to the point of being doomed to failure.
The public is comprised of people with vast differences in cognitive ability, education, and scientific training. Most members of the public, even in highly educated countries, are easily fooled by a wide variety of logical fallacies, emotional manipulation, and statistical misdirection.
So why didn’t you post this reply one comment up when he calls the public morons? Instead you choose to correct the person who says the public is actually smarter than we think?
I’m not implying you meant anything by it. But it should be noted that people here are arguing, and you’re coming down with a sort of correction that could be applied to either side of the argument. You appear to take a side by choosing this comment without any further nuance.
Apologies if it sounds like I’m saying you’re doing something horribly wrong here, I just find this particular dynamic interesting in internet discussions. It happens all the time.
Where, exactly, did the previous comment call the public "morons"? Are you discarding any other interpretation of that comment in order to avoid any nuance?
> Nuances will likely hurt and confuse the common man. That's why the news and celebs and politicians etc try to keep things simple.
You can pretend there is "nuance" to saying that the common man would be hurt and confused by facts. I see this plainly as calling people morons in a polite manner. Sorry if it hurts your sensibilities that someone would lay bare the underlying meaning of a comment.
Also, please by all means ignore the actual point of my comment, which is, why do people go around correcting a specific comment when that applies to at least one more comment up the chain. Any replies re: "morons" will be ignored.
"Nuances will likely hurt and confuse the common man. "
I think this condescension does more harm than good. The "common man" is plenty smart enough to make decisions for themselves using reasonable judgement. They will make mistakes, but at a similar rate to the experts.
A message of "we're not sure, but this virus seems to be transmitted mostly by air, and we thinks wearing a mask will probably help. We suggest you wear one when reasonably possible" will likely encourage a lot of people to wear masks, while a message of "OMG PANIC AND WEAR MASKS ALWAYS AND YELL AT PEOPLE WHO DON'T" is not likely to.
> Dr. Fauci knew that a lot of the things he was saying might not be 100% accurate and yet he did it. The reason being that on the whole his message was a net positive effect on the public.
This is now milked for more than it is worth by those that would like to discredit him but at the same time have probably never held a position of some responsibility towards a populace that is ill equipped to deal with scientific uncertainty.
> Likewise CNN made fun of Joe Rogan for taking Ivermectin because we don't want general public to experiment with alternative medicine. It's better to just stick to the proven stuff.
Ivermectin is not alternative medicine. Ivermectin used for COVID symptoms is off-label use.
CNN made fun of him because he dared stray from the official narrative and he dared try doing something through his own research rather than doing exactly as the government and media told him to do.
If there's one thing I've learned over and over during this pandemic, it is that "do your own research" is immediately followed by a train of bullshit that only demonstrates extreme susceptibility to confirmation bias.
The first Western people protecting themselves with face masks, those were "do your own research" people. Before April 2020, the Western mainstream claimed/lied that masks don't work.
And it’s amazing how his own research throws the vaccine out whilst going headlong for monoclonal antibodies, and the cognitive dissonance that makes processing this so deafening is that one is new and there are no long term trials and… the other doesn’t get the same treatment by his brain?
I also love the blinkered trope he continues to roll out that public health doesn’t tell everyone to exercise and not smoke and eat healthily. Which it does constantly, but he can’t see this because he can’t compute that the magnitude of the response to covid drowns out the baseline public health messages that have been in widespread adoption and classroom teaching for 30 years.
As much as he’d like to be, he’s not an independent thinker - him saying ‘I hate tribes’ doesn’t make it so - he’s part of tribes as well
> 1. Be 100% accurate and risk confusing people 2. Be strategic about it and for the greater good.
Humans have a very poor track record at actually advancing any "greater good" when they choose option 2. In practice, "the greater good" turns out to be whatever helps those particular humans keep their power and status. That's why option 1 is the only acceptable one.
> We need a narrative and the cost is accuracy.
If this is actually true (I don't think it is), then our civilization is doomed.
> We need to have more empathy for people who are the decision makers and have to make difficult choices.
No, we need to stop thinking that certain people should be given the power to be "decision makers" and tell the rest of us what to do. The only acceptable thing for people in public health positions to do should be your option 1 above.
I feel like your underlying assumption here is that the average human has a similar level of intelligence and critical thinking skills as the average HN community member.
At the risk of coming across as extremely snobby, that just isn't true at all.
> At the risk of coming across as extremely snobby, that just isn't true at all.
If you think the people who grow our food, make our clothes, build our houses and cars, fix our plumbing and heating and air conditioning when it breaks, run our electrical wiring safely, run the utility plants that provide our power and water and sewage disposal, and do the thousands of other things that are necessary to keep our technological society working, have less intelligence and common sense than you do, you don't come across to me as snobby, just woefully uninformed.
> Yes, you did. You said "the average human". All of those folks are average humans.
In that case, so are all other humans too. The GP did not mention any specific occupational or educational categories; that was all your own invention.
> I feel like your underlying assumption here is that the average human has a similar level of intelligence and critical thinking skills as the average HN community member.
No. My underlying assumption is that my country (the US) is supposed to be a free country, where people are expected to make their own decisions and manage their own lives. If a significant fraction of people aren't capable of doing that, then, as I said in another post downthread, that's a problem, yes, but it's not a problem that can be fixed by just telling everyone to trust the experts. That makes the problem worse, not better.
That's highly dependent on a bunch of stuff that you can not choose at birth. For some variations of those you are going to find yourself decidedly less free than others.
Agreed that blind trust in experts makes the problem worse - in principle. But with hysteria just around the corner (of which the wishful thinking that a cheap and common cure exists is one exponent) I can see why authorities chose to try to massage the message. Where they wrong? Probably, in the general case, yes. Were they wrong in this case? Possibly, but I would not be too sure of that, taking into account that even the highest levels of politics were actively spreading mis-information against informed scientific consensus. If we actually had trusted the experts things would likely look a lot better. But instead, we outsourced our trust and hence our decision making to committees, politicians and the lens of the media.
The fact that every country acted on its own was yet another confounding factor, if this had been a giant synchronized operation then it likely would have worked out differently as well. Even today we are still seeing giant differences between countries, rather than that the rich countries structurally help the poor.
> That's highly dependent on a bunch of stuff that you can not choose at birth.
Meaning, which country you are born in? Yes, of course; that's why I specified which country I was talking about.
My original comment about the poor track record humans have of actually advancing "the greater good" when they think that's what they are doing was meant to be general, however.
> If we actually had trusted the experts things would likely look a lot better.
Which experts are these? From what I can see, with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, two actions that the world could have taken to drastically reduce the impact of COVID, much more than anything anyone actually did, are:
(1) Stop all international travel, sometime around late January or early February 2020.
(2) Make the vaccines that were discovered in January 2020 available, at least to high risk people (e.g., the elderly, health care workers) in high risk areas, sometime in February or March 2020.
I'm not aware of any "expert" that ever recommended either of those things. Indeed, experts were vociferously recommending against #1.
I would say I am smart enough to recognize how ignorant I am. I put more weight in what experts say because they have the years of education and experience to help guide them, and I won't get that from a night on wikipedia, facebook, or youtube.
> I put more weight in what experts say because they have the years of education and experience to help guide them
Unless those years of education and experience translate into actually being able to make better predictions about what to do than you can, they're useless as something to rely on.
How much time are you going to spend learning enough virology to make your own decisions in this case? How much time are you going to spend on the tens of thousands of other fields that you need to understand in order to make your own decisions?
Alternatively, what do you do for a living? Do you make decisions that affect others? Or do you provide 100% accurate information in sufficient detail that they can make those decisions individually?
> How much time are you going to spend learning enough virology to make your own decisions in this case?
If experts in various fields could be trusted to just tell the truth about what they've found and not try to spin it or filter it, their information would be much more useful. It's precisely because the average person cannot trust experts to just tell the truth about what they've found that it's so hard for average people to get information they feel they can trust.
Also, being an expert in virology, for example, does not make a person an expert in human psychology; but trying to spin or filter your information about virology (or anything else) based on how you think people are going to receive it is a human psychology problem, not a virology problem. And if spinning and filtering scientific information was viewed, as it properly should be, as a matter of psychology, it would be much more obvious how manipulative it is--do you really want so-called psychology "experts" spinning and filtering the information you get based on their model of how human minds work?
In short: your implicit assumption that I, as a non-expert in a given field, can just trust the experts to tell me what to do is wrong--dangerously so. If the decision really matters to you, you take the time to learn enough about the field to at least be able to apply some intelligent common sense.
> How much time are you going to spend on the tens of thousands of other fields that you need to understand in order to make your own decisions?
You don't need to take time to learn tens of thousands of fields in order to apply intelligent common sense to your everyday life decisions, or even to decisions about something like COVID. Intelligent common sense just about viral illnesses in general, which should be common knowledge to any adult in a first world country in the 21st century, should have been enough to tell people in the US, for example, to wear masks and social distance around the end of February 2020, which is when my wife and I started doing it. If it's really true that a majority of the US population is unable to exercise that much intelligence and common sense, then our society certainly has a problem, but "just trust the experts" is not going to solve it, it will make it worse.
> what do you do for a living? Do you make decisions that affect others?
Not in any way that requires me to communicate information to others, no. What I do does affect others, but only in the sense that my work, which is in a technical field, has to be done right in a technical sense.
That said, I should be clear that my comments about what public officials should do are made from the viewpoint of a citizen, not from the viewpoint of an official.
why not have 2 levels? One for ACX level deep dives complete with assumptions, contingencies, and probability distributions and another for public consumption.
romeros is right. public health people have to do third-order thinking to maximize the overall health impact. I haven't done RCTs but we studied them in detail in my stats class in grad school.
no they don't. They just need to be honest about what they do know and what they don't and don't assert something is true when it's "we're not sure". Just do zero-order thinking. Don't patronize the public.
Guess what. If you don't trust the public. Why should the public trust you?
The public has been taught by people who don't do science that knowledge and truth are supposed to be immutable. When faced with scientists who acknowledge that their understanding and advice is contingent, the public as a statistical entity says "WTF?" and chooses not to trust.
You are bootstrapping your understanding of society on that assumption itself and thus begging the question.
Do you actually get out and talk to people? Most people are ok with nuance. Most things we consume as entertainment, from lowbrow housewives of Atlanta to highbrow pbs space time are full of dizzying nuance and unknowable truths (but not star trek. Star trek no longer has nuance).
We're fine with nuance in entertainment, in romance, in food, in professional team sports, in many things. I would dispute that the same level of comfort extends to "when elected (or not) leaders tell us what we should do."
Precisely. Just observe the discussion about scientific theories and you can see firsthand that the public wants simple and clear black-and-white stuff (and to be told what to do) and not some kind of qualified statement that turns 99.9% certainty into something that can be spun as 50/50.
"In another promising medical development, the biotechnology company Moderna has announced its COVID-19 vaccine could be up to 94.5% effective. The news comes a week after Pfizer announced its vaccine could be up to 90% effective based on a similar, early analysis from its Phase 3 trial." (https://abcnews.go.com/Health/moderna-announces-initial-phas...)
"And then there were three. U.K. pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, along with its partners at Oxford University, became on Monday the third team to announce positive late stage trial results for a COVID-19 vaccine. The "AZD1222" vaccine was "highly effective'' in preventing disease, with up to 90% efficacy in patients receiving one of the dose regimens used in trials, AstraZeneca announced." (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-oxford-astrazenca...)
The GP's point isn't something that is verified with controlled randomized data...And moreso, it's about what happens after the controlled trial. Communicating science is about taking it from a controlled lab and moving it into the real world where unfortunately politics purposefully muddies all the waters.
The point is that WHO is a political organization with a political mission that needs science to get it done. While it employs and funds countless great scientists doing meticulous work...the people you will see and hear from at WHO are international politicians.
This is clearly satire and good satire at that. I’m sorry this site has not recognized this for the great social commentary that it is. You have my vote.
This is a huge factor. Dumbing things down creates a dumber audience. If you look at newscasts and newspapers from the 70's and compare them to today the difference is amazing.
There are a lot of conspiracy theories about this but I think it’s just a race to the bottom in search of the largest audience.
It seems to still be getting worse. I remember cable news being tolerable 10 years ago. Now when I see it at an airport or something I can almost feel the ice pick ramming up into my brain and swishing around.
Whilst journalist/PR summaries are so notoriously bad they're a punchline when you talk to actual researchers, I think we have to be charitable here and acknowledge that most communication about COVID doesn't have the luxury of writing about every single trial registered (or making puns on the word "fluke"!) So it tends to summarise it as "initially promising results for Invermectin were fraudulent, whilst large trials found no effect at all. Also it has side effects, like most other drugs, so the people ordering it in doses for horses aren't being as clever as they think" which isn't nearly as entertaining or as thorough as Scott's writing, but is a broadly accurate summary of the state of scientific evidence.
(Of course you can also summarise it as "there's weak evidence for Invermectin having some therapeutic benefit which is probably related to preexisting conditions"... but we know how quickly that snowballs into "Invermectin stops COVID, scientists ADMIT IT" by the same people that deny the much stronger evidence for vaccine efficacy. Science journalism is bad, but not as bad as the selective reading of it.)
Well, I have never witnessed some thing in real life that was correctly reported on the news. Not even once.
And I'm talking about basic things like getting the order of the facts correct, or who said what. Some times there is even video of the thing on the news, and the journalist narrates on the sequence, and says something different form what is on the video.
I do really not expect those teams to get the details behind medical research right.
By the way, with the amount of fraud going on those studies, I wouldn't trust "weak evidence that it has some effect" in any real extent. Also, the Brazilian numbers (that are uncontested on the article, just non-randomized) are completely fraudulent, it's a large scandal here, with the police investigating it and many people that may get some prison time for murdering; the people that took ivermectin died about 3 times more often than the ones that didn't.
No no... You can't expect a journalist to carefully make a very detailed and informed article like this carefully evaluating 30 scientific articles of meta-anilisys sites wich favored a specific view. They are not spcialists in most things and this was published long after the peak of of the pandemic.
What they should do is to query specialists to obtain better information, instead of opinions. Consult different views, argue why on view is right or wrong and then inform the public.
for free online news, perhaps. pay for stat, nytimes, economist, scientific american etc you will find journalists who cover science with good understanding.
by the way few good science journalists would cover the story this way. instead they would mostly be quoting experts interpreting the significance of the various studies.
And Scott Alexander would never be one of them. Can you imagine a nytimes science writer quoting a psychiatrist on ivermectin's effectiveness? Never happen.
(also all of these sources' coverage of ivermectin has been much more limited because of the fact that the drug is a scam)