Mastodawn

Matt Blaze Nov 16, 2023

While I'm glad Trump's criminality and corruption is coming into focus, I also hope that doesn't cause us to ignore his terrifying, deadly level of incompetence at being president. This is the man who urged the public to prevent COVID by injecting bleach.

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gjm Nov 16, 2023

@mattblaze I strongly agree that he was criminal, corrupt, and incompetent, but so far as I can tell he did not in fact ever urge the public to inject bleach.

(He _did_ urge his scientific advisors to investigate whether injecting disinfectant might be effective against COVID-19. Which is a stupid idea, and even if it hadn't been a public press briefing wasn't the place to raise it. But it was definitely "someone should investigate whether this works" not "the general public should start doing this", and I think the distinction matters.)

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Colin Davey Nov 17, 2023

@gjm @mattblaze he did set off that idiotic horse liniment (whatever it was) thing, which actually caused deaths .

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gjm

@colin_davey @mattblaze Ivermectin. Which is actually a drug used for people as well as horses -- to treat parasitic worms and the like, for which it works really well.

So far as I can make out, the most likely reason why some scientific studies suggested that ivermectin is helpful against COVID is that they were done in countries that have a lot of parasites, and if you have COVID _and_ worms then treating the worms makes it less likely that the combination will kill you.

There was enough evidence for ivermectin that I think a reasonable person could have believed it to be useful against COVID-19, even though I'm pretty sure it actually isn't unless you've got worms. Needless to say, Trump is not a reasonable person and did not say what he did about ivermectin as a result of having looked at the scientific evidence and come to a rational conclusion.

I don't think anyone died _from taking ivermectin_, but probably quite a lot did because they thought they didn't need to get vaccinated because they could just take ivermectin if they got the Plague. And yes, some of that's on Trump. I think he probably killed more people by not being vigorously pro-vaccine than he did by advocating ivermectin as such.