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New York Times forced to correct major error on Ivermectin (washingtonexaminer.com)
21 points by tomohawk on Sept 18, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments


I'm a typical hacker News person. Been suffering from long covid for over a year. Tried horse paste and I got relief. When I stopped taking it the long covid symptoms returned. So taking it regularly now and it helps. I'm a few weeks in though so take this with a large pile of salt.

Oh and the active ingredient is identical to the human pills. The other ingredients are all safe and common.

The arguments about getting the dosage wrong are valid. For most anyone here doing a simple calculation and being confident enough in it to bet your life on it is generally fine, but I can see people in the general population messing up simple arithmetic.

Disclaimer: if you take medicine based on a hacker News post you're a moron.


Some of the same people upset about Texas' abortion law on "my body my choice" grounds were even more eager to talk about "idiots eating horse paste" have to be protected from themselves... and saw no dissonance, apparently.

It seems to me such positions must originate more from faith than principle; and I can't see the reason for such faith.


The state reluctantly allows people to poison themselves (caffeine, sugar, tobacco, alcohol), but there's a principled difference between having the choice to have an actual medical procedure supported by the healthcare industry, and eating horse dewormer because you've been deluded by liars and you think it'll protect you from a pandemic-causing disease (vs intentionally eating it because you want to get buzzed/high/drunk off it). You don't have to agree with that viewpoint, but it's intellectually dishonest to frame it as faith vs principal.



So what is the truth? According to this article, once the editors removed the erroneous information and published a corrected version of their story, here's what you had left.

"Calls to poison control centers about ivermectin exposures have risen dramatically, jumping fivefold over their baseline in July, according to C.D.C. researchers, who cited data from the American Association of Poison Control Centers."

I think that's good to know. Even if you're pro-ivermectin, it's possible to take too much at one time (which could ultimately make people erroneously assume the drug was more dangerous than it actually would've been with a more normal dose.)


Also to be noted: these are just calls to the poison centers from worried people, who may have eaten too much or had kids eat what they shouldn't etc. It is not at all indicative of health issues, or serious health issues.

Ivermectin is rather safe across a very wide dose range (apart from some nausea, tremor, eczema etc.), so it's quite unlikely for any serious harm to occur, and as far as I know not a single death has been attributed to Ivermectin overdose in humans.


> it's possible to take too much at one time

Isn't this true of literally everything, though? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication


Calls to poison control are not confirmed medical problems.

At least one news article about a hospital visit actually admits the person took other drugs somewhat hidden in the article lower down.

200 million people take ivermectin annually.

And they are generally the ignorant people the Left like to deride. Poor and low in schooling since they are in developing countries. (Some rumours in Brazil were it's good for libido)

So we should have proper numbers already.


"A couple more misfires like the ones we've seen from Rolling Stone and the New York Times and people might start to think the misreporting is by design."

The "misreporting" is indeed by design.


Of course the error is favoring one side of the political spectrum. NYT does it all the time.

Along with many other 'news' sources. Yeesh, if they took their thumb off the scales, the world would look a lot different.




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