Opposite day
On the one hand boo vaccines, on the other hand yay ivermectin. Whaaat?
A contingent of Americans has embraced the anti-parasite drug ivermectin as a miracle cure for COVID-19 despite warnings from the American scientific community that little to no evidence exists of its efficacy.
At the same time, many Americans have rejected the COVID-19 vaccines in spite of enormous evidence supporting their efficacy.
No good reason to think ivermectin any use so let’s embrace it, but tons of reason to think the vaccines work so let’s refuse to get them.
I’m not seeing the reasoning here – not even the party or partisan or political reasoning. Your politics are kind of beside the point once you’re dead.
The persistent trust in ivermectin and hesitancy to take a widely-proven vaccine is a logical consequence of rejecting American institutions, and a consequence exacerbated by those who have politicized science.
Used to be, it was the left that was suspicious of institutions. At what point did conservatives say “Hold my beer, I’ll show you suspicious of institutions, you weakling”?
Despite this generally accepted commitment to the process of peer review, a subset of American physicians and politicians took the Egyptian pre-print and ran with it. They endorsed ivermectin in front of Congress, on cable news shows, and in viral social media posts.
We have seen this behavior before from irresponsible actors creating conspiracies about “big science” covering up the wonders of a supposed miracle drug. Playing into anti-vaccine fears, some went as far as to argue “there shouldn’t be vaccines that we’re administering” if ivermectin was so safe and effective.
The words of these “experts” have caused substantial harm by contributing to our current “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
Which could mean we never get free of the virus and it just becomes a permanent risk. All because people play stupid games.
This is not a game. There are real lives at stake. And those who continue to push the idea that ivermectin is an effective treatment for COVID-19 know exactly what they are doing.
Which is killing people.
At first I thought you were doing baby-talk (as you sometimes do) for “insurrection”.
Some of this is obviously just sheer perversity: the medical authorities advocate vaccines and don’t advocate Ivermectin, so therefore vaccines are bad and Ivermectin is good, because MOMMY YOU CAN’T MAKE ME.
The other thing I think is a work here is that vaccines are preventative and Ivermectin is (supposedly) treatment. If your worldview is “COVID is no big deal, we shouldn’t have social distancing or masks or any restrictions,” then you can then rationalize that vaccines aren’t worth it — why bother running any risk of side effects (or OUCHIE NEEDLES) when you can just do nothing, and then in the unlikely event that you get COVID, so what, there’s this great treatment out there. Which “they” don’t want you to know about, of course, because “they” really want you to take the vaccine and socially distance because microchips Illuminati social control blah blah blah.
You can see similar “reasoning” (to use the term loosely) on the subject of guns. We shouldn’t have more gun control, because guns aren’t that dangerous, you see, a lot of the mass shootings are actually hoaxes with crisis actors. Plus, if you’re ever endangered by someone using a gun, there is a safe and easy remedy — your own gun! But “they” don’t want you to know this, and “they” want you scared of guns because Illuminati social control communist takeover re-education camps blah blah blah.
Indeed it is, aka Oppositional Defiant Disorder, which used to make me laugh but now seems all too precise.
You know what else almost certainly kills the virus? Coal tar! All those nitwits should eat coal tar. What could possibly go wrong…
I think jumping off of cliffs works to prevent both long and short Covid.
Screechy, you forgot Jewish lasers in space. I am sure the same people who launched the Jewish lasers really, really, really want you to take the vaccine because they’ve put some sort of mind control substance in it that will make you….I don’t know, weak? Democrat? Communist?
Someone needs to grow up. A lot of someones.
Political partisanship is reason-overriding religion. That’s the only way I can make sense of the behavior. Just as religious zealots are ready to commit atrocities or join each other in death, political zealots will, well, commit atrocities or join each other in death. Conveniently, this also explains the spread of trans shit.
Probably so. I just wrote a column for Free Inquiry on the subject and that was basically the explanation I assumed & discussed.
Did somebody say “ivermectin”? Ivermectin will forever be dear to me for curing the permethrin-resistant (and truly sanity-eroding) case of scabies that I picked up in a hostel somewhere along the route of a backpacking trip. I wouldn’t take it for COVID, though—I’m not a medical doctor, but I can’t even begin to imagine how or why it would be effective.