Like many of us here, you clearly seem to be a smart person, with expertise in one or several technical fields, and confidence in your ability to learn a new one and apply your existing knowledge and mental models to it. You've probably done this many times before.

Please accept that this does not make you immune to the good old "Mt Stupid" phase of the Dunning-Krüger curve. In fact, "smart hackers" like us are really prime examples of people who might fall for it. I contend that you are currently stuck there on Covid, and together with other smart people you're finding yourself inadvertently aligned with very dumb run-of-the-mill conspiracy theorists that you would normally want nothing to do with. Please don't take that as an insult and bear with me for a moment :

Without even getting into a debate about Ivermectin, have you considered what else should be true in order for your current take on Covid severity and treatments to be correct ?

It would take a majority of people around the world who have dedicated their lives to this topic to be wrong, or careless, dumb or plain evil. Many of them are doctors and researchers who are not only acting in good faith and genuinely want nothing more than to help their patients or advance science, but perhaps more convincingly, also have personal, visceral, "can't lie about it" interests at stake, like desperately wanting to save a colleague, dear friend, or their own dad or spouse.

Please do not insult them (and delude yourself) by automatically assuming that you know better than them, that they failed to save their mom, dad or friend because they didn't want it enough.
If you believe that the powers that be (institutional research / politicians / regulators / big pharma / whatever) are broken / dysfunctional / stupid and prevent the truth from surfacing, and that people like yourself are gonna disrupt the shit out of the system, stop it now. This is the definition of arrogance, and you're deluding yourself.

I could stop here really.

But let me just answer a few of the points you raised (and then I'll consider my efforts at convincing a stranger done : do whatever you like with it) :

> Just because you have convinced yourself that legitimate treatments for Covid could never possibly be suppressed because they are not profitable,

This is a strawman argument, I do not think that. But I do use Occam's razor, and there is a much simpler explanation to the current absence of early stage treatments than a "suppression" conspiracy theory : that we really did try but simply have not found one that works yet.

This suppression theory was already untenable for the reasons most conspiracy theories are, but it should have been killed for good when 3 things happened :

1. A cheap generic drug, dexamethasone, is found to be our only effective treatment (albeit late stage only) with a 30% fatality reduction.

2. Remdesivir, the "big pharma contender" in an imaginary battle against HCQ that some insisted was happening, is found to be ineffective and is dropped without discussion.

3. In the same trials, HCQ is not outright dismissed just because it originated from quack doctors circles, but given the same fair chance as others.

> The pattern of "HCQ didn't work, therefore Covid is untreatable and any other suggested therapies are quackery

This is again a strawman argument. Covid may be treatable.
When it comes to prioritizing research, it is unlikely that a treatment touted by the same circles that touted HCQ, using the same flawed reasoning (something that does work in vitro should work in vivo) is going to be THE miracle cure. But it should still be allocated some resources to verify that. It has been, and the results are unsurprisingly, nothing to write home about.

> Is it your serious contention that up to one in three people who are infected with SARS-CoV-2 develop long haul symptoms?

Depending on the definition of "long haul", yes :
https://theconversation.com/how-many-people-get-long-covid-a...

"According to a recent survey done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 35% of nonhospitalized patients who had mild COVID-19 cases did not return to baseline health 14 to 21 days after their symptoms started. And this wasn’t just in older people or people with underlying health conditions. Twenty percent of previously healthy 18-to-34-year-olds had ongoing symptoms. Overall, research shows as many as one-third of individuals who had COVID-19 and weren’t hospitalized will still be experiencing symptoms up to three months later."

> Yes, and in how many of those cases are those symptoms debilitating? What percentage of people infected are even hospitalized in the first place?

I will let you look this up, and immediately after ask yourself whether it would make more sense to reason in absolute numbers to better visualize the burden it will cause on society (hint : it would)

Depending on the country, we're talking about giving millions of previously healthy young people brain fog and premature cardiovascular aging. This testimonial is great : https://twitter.com/a_straight_line/status/13714925394511831...

We're talking about letting ICUs run at full capacity for months, causing widespread grief in families, unbearable pressure on doctors/nurses, and consequences for every age group (including the 20 year olds involved in a car accident and not getting the care they could have). Not to mention that every new case is a ticket in the evolution lottery for variants.

So yeah, you probably shouldn't be second-guessing the benefits/risk profile of vaccines for people your age, and in any case please stop with the "99.x% survive this thing"/"as a healthy 30-something I shouldn't be forced to ..." narrative. It doesn't make you look good and more importantly, it definitely hurts society and it could very well hurt you or someone you love directly.