Doctors swayed by politics when it comes to hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin for COVID-19: study

Pennsylvania-based researchers concluded that doctors’ acceptance of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19 is influenced by their political leanings.

The study was driven partly by observations of a UMPC emergency room doctor who noticed that many families of people stricken with COVID-19 were asking for treatment with hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, even though neither has been proven effective against COVID-19.

Dr. Jeremy Kahn told MedPage Today the COVID-19 pandemic is the only time patients’ families have asked about specific medicines.

Kahn and some of his colleagues decided to survey doctors and non-doctors regarding their political leanings and views related to ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. They also asked the doctors to devise a treatment strategy for a severely ill COVID-19 patient. They received responses from 410 critical care doctors and about 880 non-physicians.

The full study can be read here.

According to MedPage Today: “On average, they reported, physicians’ beliefs were less polarized than those of laypeople, and that difference was driven by agreement between liberal and moderate physicians, while conservative physicians displayed polarization that was comparable to that of conservative laypeople.”

They also showed physicians and non-physicians overviews of a high-quality trial which found ivermectin isn’t effective in treating COVID-19. Some were given an overview that named ivermectin and some were given an overview that referred to ivermectin as GL-22.

They found responses were more polarized when ivermectin was named, with the more conservative participants more likely to say the study was flawed or affected by bias on the part of the researchers, according to MedPage Today.

The researchers concluded that, unfortunately, exposure to expert sources and scientific evidence has a limited impact on overcoming political bias.

MedPage Today quotes one of the researchers, Joel Levin, as saying:

“It’s very difficult to think about what kind of intervention is going to make a person a better decision maker when we know that the biases that affect our decision making are really ingrained … We’re all susceptible to being influenced by factors that we might not think are relevant. If we teach people to be a little more humble in their thinking, then maybe we can overcome some of these biases and come to more of a consensus around best practices.”

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