Lesson of ivermectin: meta-analyses based on summary data alone are unreliable
What I find almost more interesting than the article itself is the comments that show a non-zero portion of the HN community (which I think is generally more intellectually curious and educated than average) are actually strongly arguing that ivermectin has strong effect, and even crazier, that it may be safer or more effective than the mRNA vaccines.Is this from being incapable of following science and drawing rational conclusions? Or is it more of a tribal thing, where they are exposed to a biased subset of information/misinformation, and are now emotionally invested in the success of ivermectin because their tribe is?Either way, like someone else in the comments said, these past 2 years have shown us that laypeople are incapable of following active science in real time and drawing reasoned conclusions. Frankly, this is probably true of everyone who is not an expert in the field in question. We need organizations like the CDC and FDA to be much better about their messaging (remember the no-mask debacle? Great way to lose credibility, guys and gals), and we need much better tools to shut down the spread and weaponization of misinformation from the anti-vax crowd et al. I honestly don’t have any idea of how either of those get fixed, however.