Astral Codex Ten

Pierre Kory

22 min read

Pierre Kory

Article

Pierre Kory is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between November 17, 2021 and May 21, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Pierre Kory, spiritual leader of the Ivermectin Jihad, is a distinguished critical care doctor”; “Doctors can absolutely prescribe ivermectin right now if they want, and many of them (like Pierre Kory) have”; “Pierre Kory MD, an specialist in severe respiratory illnesses who wrote a well-regarded textbook”. It most often appears alongside ivermectin, ivermectin, Anthony Fauci.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: November 17, 2021
  • Last seen: May 21, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
November 17, 2021 · Original source
Source. Real data would follow something like a bell curve. This is going to require a social norm of always sharing data. Even better, journals should require the raw data before they publish anything, and should make it available on their website. People are going to fight hard against this, partly because it’s annoying and partly because of (imho exaggerated) patient privacy related concerns. Somebody’s going to try make some kind of gated thing where you have to prove you have a PhD and a “legitimate cause” before you can access the data, and that person should be fought tooth and nail (some of the “data detectives” who figured out the ivermectin study didn’t have advanced degrees). I want a world where “I did a study, but I can’t show you the data” should be taken as seriously as “I determined P = NP, but I can’t show you the proof.” The second reason I think this, aside from checking for fraud, is checking for mistakes. I have no proof this was involved in ivermectin in particular. But I’ve been surprised how often it comes up when I talk to scientists. Someone in their field got a shocking result, everyone looked over the study really hard and couldn’t find any methodological problems, there’s no evidence of fraud, so do you accept it? A lot of times instead I hear people say “I assume they made a coding error”. I believe them, because I have made a bunch of stupid errors. Sometimes you make the errors for me - an early draft of this post of mine stated that there was an strong positive effect of assortative mating on autism, but when I double-checked it was entirely due to some idiot who filled out the survey and claimed to have 99999 autistic children. In this very essay, I almost said that a set of ivermectin studies showed a positive result because I was reading the number for whether two lists were correlated rather than whether a paired-samples t-test on the lists was significant. I think lots of studies make these kinds of errors. But even if it’s only 1%, these will make up much more than 1% of published studies, and much more than 1% of important ground-breaking published studies, because correct studies can only prove true things, but false studies can prove arbitrarily interesting hypotheses (did you know there was an increase in the suicide rate on days that Donald Trump tweeted?!?) and those are the ones that will get published and become famous. So if the lesson of the original replication crisis was “read the methodology” and “read the preregistration document”, this year’s lesson is “read the raw data”. Which is a bit more of an ask. Especially since most studies don’t make it available. The Sociological Takeaway I’ve been thinking about this one a lot too. Ivermectin supporters were really wrong. I enjoy the idea of a cosmic joke where ivermectin sort of works in some senses in some areas. But the things people were claiming - that ivermectin has a 100% success rate, that you don’t need to take the vaccine because you can just take ivermectin instead, etc - have been untenable not just since the big negative trials came out this summer, but even by the standards of the early positive trials. Mahmud et al was big and positive and exciting, but it showed that ivermectin patients recovered in about 7 days on average instead of 9. I think the conventional wisdom - that the most extreme ivermectin supporters were mostly gullible rubes who were bamboozled by pseudoscience - was basically accurate. Mainstream medicine has reacted with slogans like “believe Science”. I don’t know if those kinds of slogans ever help, but they’re especially unhelpful here. A quick look at ivermectin supporters shows their problem is they believed Science too much. @jonno_bosch I work in hospitality so I need things to return to normal ASAP. I am using Ivermectin as a prophylactic. Hugely influenced by Carvallo trail and Chala trail which showed huge protection","username":"Bannisterious","name":"Andrew Bannister","profile_image_url":"","date":"Fri Feb 12 16:21:14 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":0,"like_count":0,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> @mtskullcrusher @HereComeTheJud @therealjosexy @joeycadre @PeegeRiley @dcwickedestcity @blaireerskine Read Raad. Or Mahmud. Or ICON study from Florida. Or Mexico City hospitalizations study. Or Niaee. Or...\n\nOr just type \"ivermectin covid\" in Google Scholar and read.","username":"fatlas6","name":"fatlas","profile_image_url":"","date":"Thu Sep 02 21:34:59 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":0,"like_count":1,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> They have a very reasonable-sounding belief, which is that if dozens of studies all say a drug works really well, then it probably works really well. When they see dozens of studies saying a drug works really well, and the elites saying “no don’t take it!”, their extremely natural conclusion is that it works really well but the elites are covering it up. Sometimes these people even have a specific theory for why elites are covering up ivermectin, like that pharma companies want you to use more expensive patented drugs instead. This theory is extremely plausible. Pharma companies are always trying to convince people to use expensive patented drugs instead of equally good generic alternatives. Ivermectin believers probably heard about this from the many, many good articles by responsible news outlets, discussing the many, many times pharma companies have tried to trick people into using more expensive patented medications. Like this ACSH article about Nexium. Or my article on esketamine. Given that dozens of studies said a drug worked, and elites continued to deny it worked, and there are well-known times where elites lie about drugs in order to make money, it was an incredibly reasonable inference that this was one of those times. If you have a lot of experience with pharma, you know who lies and who doesn’t, and you know what lies they’re willing to tell and which ones they shrink back from. As far as I know, no reputable scientist has ever come out and said ‘esketamine definitely works better than regular ketamine’. The regulatory system just heavily implied it. I claim that with ivermectin, even the people who don’t usually lie were saying it was ineffective, and they were saying it more directly and decisively than liars usually do. But most people can’t translate Pharma → English fluently enough to know where the space of “things people routinely lie about and nobody worries about it too much” ends. So they incredibly reasonably assume anything could be a lie. And if you don’t know which statements about pharmaceuticals are lies, “the one that has dozens of studies contradicting it” is a pretty good heuristic! If you tell these people to “believe Science”, you will just worsen the problem where they trust dozens of scientific studies done by scientists using the scientific method over the pronouncements of the CDC or whoever. So “believe experts”? That would have been better advice in this case. But the experts have beclowned themselves again and again throughout this pandemic, from the first stirrings of “anyone who worries about coronavirus reaching the US is dog-whistling anti-Chinese racism”, to the Surgeon-General tweeting “Don’t wear a face mask”, to government campaigns focusing entirely on hand-washing (HEPA filters? What are those?) Not only would a recommendation to trust experts be misleading, I don’t even think you could make it work. People would notice how often the experts were wrong, and your public awareness campaign would come to naught. But also: one of the data detectives who exposed some fraudulent ivermectin papers was a medical student, which puts him somewhere between pond scum and hookworms on the Medical Establishment Totem Pole. Some of the people whose studies he helped sink were distinguished Professors of Medicine and heads of Health Institutes. If anyone interprets “trust experts” as “mere medical students must not publicly challenge heads of Health Institutes”, then we’ve accidentally thrown the fundamental principle of science out with the bathwater. But Pierre Kory, spiritual leader of the Ivermectin Jihad, is a distinguished critical care doctor. What heuristic tells us “Medical students should be allowed to publicly challenge heads of Health Institutes” but not “Distinguished critical care doctors should be allowed to publicly challenge the CDC”? Then what about “believe statisticians”? I’ve never heard anyone propose this before, but re-centering the mystique of scientific-expertise in study-analyzers and study-aggregators rather than object-level scientists is…one way you could go, I guess. Statisticians admittedly sort of failed us here: the first several meta-analyses said ivermectin worked. But the statistical process - the idea that studies are raw materials, but it takes skill to turn them into the finished good of scientific knowledge - sort of comes out looking good. If we need to summarize our takeaway in a slogan of exactly two words, one of which is “trust”, you could do worse than this one. (am I secretly suggesting that we make rationality higher status? Maybe, although rationalists did no better here during the early phase of “looks promising so far” than anyone else, and it was researchers digging into the nitty-gritty of the data who really solved this.) Or maybe this is the wrong level on which to think about this. Maybe there isn’t and can’t be a simple heuristic you can teach everyone in school or via a PR campaign which will lead to them having making good health decisions in an adversarial information environment, without having any negative effects anywhere else. But you also don’t want people to make bad health decisions. So what do you do? The Political Takeaway All of this is complicated by the impression many people (including me) have, that ivermectin boosterism and vaccine denialism are closely linked. The ivermectin evidence is complicated. There’s room for doubt. I can maybe see room for doubt on some marginal vaccine-related issues like how seriously to take the occasional reports of myocarditis in teens. But the basic issue - that the vaccine works really well and is incredibly safe for adults - seems beyond question. Yet people keep questioning it. I think it’s important to address ivermectin support on its own terms - as a potentially plausible scientific theory in a debris field of confusing evidence, which should be debated to the usual standards of scientific debate. I’ve tried to do that above. But this picture wouldn’t be complete without acknowledging the overlap with vaccine denial - a segment of people who are completely crazy and wrong and who happen to have fixated on this mildly interesting question as opposed to some other one with even less evidence. I’ve been trying to figure out a model where ivermectin support and vaccine denialism both make visceral sense to me, and here’s what I’ve got: Imagine that in 2025, an alien invasion fleet reaches Earth. But it got hit by a supernova on the way, the spaceships are partly disabled, and they’re only able to conquer some out-of-the-way place - let’s say Australia. There’s a few cycles of conflict and cease-fire, a few cities get nuked, and finally we settle into an uneasy peace. Over the next few years, humanity grudgingly admits the invaders into the world community. They get a seat in the United Nations. We sort of cooperate with them on projects that are important to both sides, like stopping climate change. We still hate them, but only at the level of ordinary international rivalries, like USA/USSR. In 2035, the aliens announce that a quantum memetic plague from the Andromeda Sector has reached Earth. Billions of people will die unless we let them put an immunity-granting cybernetic implant in all humans’ brain. The aliens admit we haven’t always been friends, and honestly they would still like to conquer us someday. But this plague is an ancient enemy of all sentient beings, they dealt with it on their homeworld eons ago, and they want to help us out here. Humans apparently don’t have the ability to detect quantum memetic plagues, but mortality rates for over-65s do seem weirdly high this year, something like 10x worse than a normal flu season. Do you let the aliens put an implant in your brain, or not? If it helps, the aliens look like this. Surely anyone with a brain that size must know what they’re talking about, right? (source) Fine, you don’t have to decide immediately. The brain implants aren’t even ready yet. Some human scientists suggest wearing face masks in the interim. The aliens say no, that will never work, that’s not how you deal with quantum memetic plagues, if you do anything other than wait for the brain implants you’re anti-science idiots who are wasting precious time and will kill millions of people. Human nations try face masks anyway…and they clearly and conspicuously work. The aliens say whatever, we’re still the advanced spacefaring civilization here, maybe it works for humans but that’s not the point, the point is you’ve got to let us put implants in your brains. Some human scientists suggest reopening vital services. The aliens say no, millions will die, this is “mass human sacrifice”, humans apparently must care nothing about their families’ lives. The humans try reopening anyway, and…it goes kind of okay? Maybe the death rate goes up 10% to 20% or so, hard to say? The aliens say whatever, maybe their calculations were off by a few orders of magnitude, the point is, you have to let us put implants in your brain or you’ll all die. Then some human scientists suggest vaccinating against the plague. The aliens say this is idiotic, vaccines originally come from cowpox, even the word “vaccine” comes from Latin vaccus meaning “cow”, are you saying you want cow medicine instead of actual brain implants which alien Science has proven will work? They make lots of cartoons displaying humans who want vaccines as having cow heads, or rolling around in cow poop. Meanwhile, the first few dozen studies show vaccines work great. Many top human leaders, including war heroes from the struggle against the aliens, get vaccines and are seen going out in public, looking healthy and happy. The aliens say that human science is hopelessly flawed because of complicated statistical concepts that inferior life forms like us don’t even have words for. You need to ignore all the studies and meta-analyses showing that vaccines definitely work, and let the aliens give you brain implants instead. So do you let the aliens put an implant in your brain, or not? Obviously you think long and hard before doing this. And obviously this is an extended metaphor for vaccine denialism. So what’s the difference between the metaphor (where you’re presumably anti-implant) and the real world (where you’re presumably pro-vaccine?) For me, it’s a combination of: The aliens are hostile, so I don’t trust them no matter how smart they are
Inline links: Source, this post, this ACSH article about Nexium, my article on esketamine, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1UIV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F598d7d6c-de95-4b94-b13a-3c8a452b0409.jp2, source
When Will The FDA Approve Paxlovid?
November 23, 2021 · Original source
I know I’m not going to convince many ivermectin supporters. So consider this: ivermectin is FDA approved. It’s approved against parasitic worms, but that’s fine: once a drug is approved for anything, any doctor can (more or less) use it for whatever they want. Doctors can absolutely prescribe ivermectin right now if they want, and many of them (like Pierre Kory) have. The ones who don’t prescribe it are avoiding it because they think it doesn’t work, not because the FDA is trying to prevent them. Heck, people can get ivermectin even without a prescription as long as they use the veterinary version.
Trying Again On Fideism
February 15, 2023 · Original source
Eliezer Yudkowsky’s position is Let Them Debate College Students. I’m not a college student, but I’m not Anthony Fauci either, and I am known for blogging about extremely dignified ideas like the possibility that the terrible Harry Potter fanfiction My Immortal is secretly an alchemical allegory. I haven’t seen ivermectin advocates using “Scott takes this seriously enough to argue against it!” as an argument, and I have seen them getting angry about it and writing long responses trying to prove me wrong. Sometimes they have used me getting some points wrong as a positive argument, and I would be open to the argument that I failed in not arguing against it well enough that they couldn’t do that, but nobody has been making that argument, and if they did, then it would imply that people who are smarter than me should take over the job, which I endorse. III. I worry Scott Aaronson thinks I’m saying you shouldn’t trust the experts, and instead you should always think for yourself. I’m definitely not trying to say that. I’ve tried to be pretty clear that I think experts are right remarkably often, by some standards basically 100% of the time - I realize how crazy that sounds, and “by some standards” is doing a lot of the work there, but see Learning To Love Scientific Consensus for more. Bounded Distrust also helps explain what I mean here. I also try to be pretty clear that reasoning is extremely hard, it’s very easy to get everything wrong, and if you try to do it then a default option is to get everything wrong and humiliate yourself. I describe that happening to me here, and presumably it also happens to other people sometimes. What I do think is that “trust the experts” is an extremely exploitable heuristic, which leads everyone to put up a veneer of “being the experts” and demand that you trust them. I come back to this example again and again, but only because it’s so blatant: the New York Times ran an article saying that only 36% of economists supported school vouchers, with a strong implication that the profession was majority against. If you checked their sources, you would find that actually, it was 36% in favor, 19% against, 46% unsure or not responding. If you are too quick to seek epistemic closure because “you have to trust the experts”, you will be easy prey to people misrepresenting what they are saying. I come back to this example less often, because it could get me in trouble, but when people do formal anonymous surveys of IQ scientists, they find that most of them believe different races have different IQs and that a substantial portion of the difference is genetic. I don’t think most New York Times readers would identify this as the scientific consensus. So either the surveys - which are pretty official and published in peer-reviewed journals - have managed to compellingly misrepresent expert consensus, or the impressions people get from the media have, or “expert consensus” is extremely variable and complicated and can’t be reflected by a single number or position. And I genuinely think this is part of why ivermectin conspiracies took off in the first place. We say “trust science” and “trust experts”. But there were lots of studies that showed ivermectin worked - aren’t those science? And Pierre Kory MD, an specialist in severe respiratory illnesses who wrote a well-regarded textbook, supports it - isn’t he an expert? Isn’t it plausible that the science and the experts are right, and the media and the government and Big Pharma are wrong? This is part of what happens when people reify the mantras instead of using them as pointers to more complicated concepts like “reasoning is hard” and “here are the 28,491 rules you need to keep in mind when reading a scientific study.” IV. All of this still feels rambly and like it’s failing to connect. Instead, let me try describing exactly what I would advice I would give young people opening an Internet connection for the first time: You are not immune to conspiracy theories. You have probably developed a false sense of security by encountering many dumb conspiracy theories and feeling no temptation to believe them. These theories were designed to trap people very different from you; others will be aimed in your direction. The more certain you are of your own infallibility, the less aware you will be, and the worse your chances. The ones that get you won’t look like conspiracy theories to you (though they might to other people). When you run into conspiracy theories you don’t believe, feel free to ignore them. If you decide to engage, don’t mock them or feel superior. Think “there, but for the grace of God, go I.” Get a sense of what the arguments for the conspiracy theory look like - not from skeptics trying to mock them, but from the horse’s mouth - so you have a sense of what false arguments look like. Ask yourself what habits of mind it would have taken the people affected by the theory to successfully resist it. Ask yourself if you have those habits of mind. Yes? ARE YOU SURE? To a first approximation, trust experts over your own judgment. If people are trying to confuse you about who the experts are, then to a second approximation trust prestigious people and big institutions, including professors at top colleges, journalists at major newspapers, professional groups with names like the American ______ Association, and the government. You might ask: Don’t governments and other big institutions have biases? Won’t they sometimes be wrong or deceptive? And even if you’ve lucked into the one country and historical era where the government 100% tells the truth and the intellectuals have no biases, doesn’t someone need to keep the flame of suspicion alive so that it’s available to people in other, less fortunate countries and eras? The answer is: absolutely, yes, but also this is how conspiracy theories get you. They will claim that they are the special case where you need to take up the mantle of Galileo and Frederick Douglass and Jane Jacobs and all those people who stood up to the intellectual authorities and power structures of their own time. The whole point of “you are not immune to conspiracy theories” is that the evidence for them can sound convincing because something like it is sort of true. This is equally so for second-level claims like “prestigious institutions are fallible and biased”. Probably something like “make a principled precommitment never to disagree with prestigious institutions until you are at least 30 and have a graduate degree in at least one subject” would be good advice, but nobody would take that advice, and taking it too seriously might crush some kind of important human spirit, so I won’t assert this. But always have in the back of your mind that you live in a world where it’s sort of good advice. If you feel tempted to believe something that has red flags for being a conspiracy theory, at least keep track of the Inside vs. Outside View. Say “on the Inside View, this feels like the evidence is overwhelming; on the Outside View, it sounds like a classic conspiracy theory”. You don’t necessarily have to resolve this discomfort right away. You can walk around with an annoying knot in your beliefs, even if it’s not fun. Look for the strongest evidence against the idea. Keep in mind important possibilities like: Is it possible that everyone who disagrees with the idea is a bad mean cruel stupid person, but also, the idea really is false?
Inline links: Let Them Debate College Students, like the possibility that the terrible Harry Potter fanfiction My Immortal is secretly an alchemical allegory, Learning To Love Scientific Consensus, Bounded Distrust, happening to me here, ran an article, ARE YOU SURE?
The Other COVID Reckoning
May 21, 2025 · Original source
Five years later, we can’t stop talking about COVID. Remember lockdowns? The conflicting guidelines about masks - don’t wear them! Wear them! Maybe wear them! School closures, remote learning, learning loss, something about teachers’ unions. That one Vox article on how worrying about COVID was anti-Chinese racism. The time Trump sort of half-suggested injecting disinfectants. Hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, fluvoxamine, Paxlovid. Those jerks who tried to pressure you into getting vaccines, or those other jerks who wouldn’t get vaccines even though it put everyone else at risk. Anthony Fauci, Pierre Kory, Great Barrington, Tomas Pueyo, Alina Chan. Five years later, you can open up any news site and find continuing debate about all of these things.