It’s no secret that ideology is one of the factors that influences the evidence people accept. But in the face of a pandemic that has killed more than one million people in the United States, it was a bit of a surprise that ideology could dominate decision-making. It shows that the stance shows a clear partisan divide.
And it’s not just ordinary citizens who have problems. People like doctors would think they would carefully evaluate the evidence before making treatment decisions, but correlations between voting patterns and ivermectin prescribing suggest otherwise.
Of course, that kind of population-level correlation leaves many open questions about what’s going on. We are trying to fill in some of these blanks by doing so. This work clearly shows how ideology can cloud professional judgment, even when it comes to reading the results of scientific research.
call the doctor
This work is primarily focused on a panel of approximately 600 critical care physicians who are most likely to be the first source of care for patients who develop severe COVID-19. Also included was his panel of 900 people who were not involved in health care to provide a comparative population. Some early research was done earlier, but most data are from spring 2022, long after the COVID-19 vaccine had established efficacy in reducing severe symptoms of the disease. By then, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, some of the more widely touted “remedies,” had been definitively ruled out as therapeutic agents.
All participants were asked to rate themselves on a seven-point scale, ranging from very liberal to very conservative. In most studies, responses from liberal and conservative participants were assessed in terms of how much they differed from those of moderate participants.
When asked about treatment efficacy, non-physicians behaved exactly as one would expect from politically polarized subjects. Conservatives exhibited opposite behavior, were enthusiastic about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, and did not believe the vaccine would work. Plotting these results along the liberal vs. conservative axis yields an approximately straight line with a slope representing the liberal-conservative disagreement.
In these graphs, purple represents doctors and green represents the general public. Liberals and moderates rate the effectiveness of these drugs alike, but conservative physicians rate them the same as the general public.
Levin, et al. eel.
For doctors, the situation was quite different. Here the line is nearly straight and flat, from very liberal to moderate, indicating that all these doctors held similar opinions about the value of the three medicines. increase. But Graf has since gone from moderate to conservative. This shows that, among experts, political polarization is one-sided. In other words, liberal MD opinion looks like moderate MD opinion, but conservative MD opinion is hard to distinguish from non-professional opinion.
