I don't understand the usage of "corollary" (a straightforward consequence of a previous nontrivial statement) here. Is that the word you were meaning to use?
The FDA tweeted the following over a year ago. Is it normal for the FDA to mock drugs like this?
No, but on culture war it is. This was already after Red cultural authorities had thrown their clout behind Ivermectin, no? The FDA, too, is a Blue technocratic institution; of course it would be tempted to put out communication that lowers the status of the Reds, and in this particular case there was the additional motivation for it that the Ivermectin push was a direct attack on the FDA's authority. One would therefore expect the FDA to attack it independently of whether it works, and so the FDA attacking it is not a signal for or against it working.
I thought it was unnecessary to rehash the backstory, but maybe not. My understanding was that it was associated with culture warring almost from the start: the Blue team occupied the "COVID is scary and untreatable, therefore we need lockdowns, mask-wearing and more powers for our technocrats" position. The Red team found the suggested conclusion unbearable, and tried to respond by attacking every point of the premise. One such push was against the "untreatable" part, and took the shape of asserting that a series of widely available remedies that ranged from completely implausible (bleach) to the merely seemingly random (hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin) worked against it (with the implication that if it did, the power grab by Blue authorities would be proven unjustifiable). Therefore, on the balance, up to this point the situation is still as I described: Reds would push Ivermectin regardless of whether it works, and the FDA would pan it regardless of whether it works, so neither observation tells us anything about it. The prior still is that a random drug with no evident mechanism of action on COVID would not work on it.
The "cheap old generic drugs suppressed for profit" argument is a better one, though (there, you would actually suspect more effort to suppress effective ones, as if someone takes a cheap old ineffective drug, they don't get cured and are still on the market for the more expensive one afterwards).
Skylab
Beware of he who would deny you access to information...
4bpp 1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
corollary- a proposition that follows from (and is often appended to) one already proved.
If we grant that Ivermectin's effectiveness is a red tribe talking point, then it follows that Ivermectin's ineffectiveness is culturally important to blue tribe.
However- in a sane world, we would still expect a few Joe Rogan's and Bret Weinstein's to weigh in on their far out beliefs on a podcast. What we wouldn't expect in a sane world is for the FDA to snarkily take a side using a national institution of science, well before the fog of war had cleared.
However, the FDA receives much of their funding from Pfizer/Moderna/JnJ and there is a revolving door among board members.
I doubt Rogan is getting paid by Ivermectin advocates. There's no money in it. You could argue that he gains more followers by choosing the fault line, a kind of reverse audience capture.
I find it easier to place the cultural war aspect of Ivermectin into the category of, probably more effective than it appears since even the FDA will go out of its way to smear the cheap and safe drug as "horse dewormer."
Again, maybe I'm wrong but that was my internal assesment. It was odd to see someone making a symmetrical but opposite argument.
I find it easier to place the cultural war aspect of Ivermectin into the category of, probably more effective than it appears since even the FDA will go out of its way to smear the free and safe drug as "horse dewormer."
Yeah, I don't see how this follows. I would expect both P(FDA smears Ivermectin | Ivermectin doesn't work) and P(FDA smears Ivermectin | Ivermectin works) to be close to 1 under our conditions of Ivermectin's culture war role and the FDA, so P(Ivermectin works | FDA smears Ivermectin) is basically the same as the prior P(Ivermectin works).
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Notes -
I don't understand the usage of "corollary" (a straightforward consequence of a previous nontrivial statement) here. Is that the word you were meaning to use?
No, but on culture war it is. This was already after Red cultural authorities had thrown their clout behind Ivermectin, no? The FDA, too, is a Blue technocratic institution; of course it would be tempted to put out communication that lowers the status of the Reds, and in this particular case there was the additional motivation for it that the Ivermectin push was a direct attack on the FDA's authority. One would therefore expect the FDA to attack it independently of whether it works, and so the FDA attacking it is not a signal for or against it working.
I thought it was unnecessary to rehash the backstory, but maybe not. My understanding was that it was associated with culture warring almost from the start: the Blue team occupied the "COVID is scary and untreatable, therefore we need lockdowns, mask-wearing and more powers for our technocrats" position. The Red team found the suggested conclusion unbearable, and tried to respond by attacking every point of the premise. One such push was against the "untreatable" part, and took the shape of asserting that a series of widely available remedies that ranged from completely implausible (bleach) to the merely seemingly random (hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin) worked against it (with the implication that if it did, the power grab by Blue authorities would be proven unjustifiable). Therefore, on the balance, up to this point the situation is still as I described: Reds would push Ivermectin regardless of whether it works, and the FDA would pan it regardless of whether it works, so neither observation tells us anything about it. The prior still is that a random drug with no evident mechanism of action on COVID would not work on it.
The "cheap old generic drugs suppressed for profit" argument is a better one, though (there, you would actually suspect more effort to suppress effective ones, as if someone takes a cheap old ineffective drug, they don't get cured and are still on the market for the more expensive one afterwards).
corollary- a proposition that follows from (and is often appended to) one already proved.
If we grant that Ivermectin's effectiveness is a red tribe talking point, then it follows that Ivermectin's ineffectiveness is culturally important to blue tribe.
However- in a sane world, we would still expect a few Joe Rogan's and Bret Weinstein's to weigh in on their far out beliefs on a podcast. What we wouldn't expect in a sane world is for the FDA to snarkily take a side using a national institution of science, well before the fog of war had cleared.
However, the FDA receives much of their funding from Pfizer/Moderna/JnJ and there is a revolving door among board members.
I doubt Rogan is getting paid by Ivermectin advocates. There's no money in it. You could argue that he gains more followers by choosing the fault line, a kind of reverse audience capture.
I find it easier to place the cultural war aspect of Ivermectin into the category of, probably more effective than it appears since even the FDA will go out of its way to smear the cheap and safe drug as "horse dewormer."
Again, maybe I'm wrong but that was my internal assesment. It was odd to see someone making a symmetrical but opposite argument.
Yeah, I don't see how this follows. I would expect both P(FDA smears Ivermectin | Ivermectin doesn't work) and P(FDA smears Ivermectin | Ivermectin works) to be close to 1 under our conditions of Ivermectin's culture war role and the FDA, so P(Ivermectin works | FDA smears Ivermectin) is basically the same as the prior P(Ivermectin works).
( P(W|F) = P(F|W)P(W)/P(F) = ~= (1/1) * P(W) = P(W) )
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