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Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection

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Re: Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection

#131

Post by wrycoder »

13415 wrote: post #12
goldemerald wrote: post #7

I heard about Ivermectin for the first time this week and was shocked how much it seemed that I had stepped into conspiracy theory land. There seemed to be an overwhelming amount of evidence over the last year that this repurposed drug is effective at treating Covid during a variety of stages (preventative, first positive test, ICU admittance, and even long haul). But since there hadn't been a randomized trial the dr…

Without randomized trials you cannot recommend a drug because you cannot exclude confounders. It seems wrong to me to even speak of "overwhelming evidence" without a randomized trial or other sound ways to control or identify for confounders (e.g. causal models).

https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/05/09/update-on-ivermect...

I’ve included every double-blind randomized placebo-controlled trial I could find of ivermectin as a treatment for covid. Using only double-blind placebo-controlled trials means that only the highest quality studies are included in this meta-analysis, which minimizes the risk of biases messing up the results as far as possible. In order to be included, a study also had to provide mortality data, since the goal of the meta-analysis is to see if there is any difference in mortality .... What we see is a 62% reduction in the relative risk of dying among covid patients treated with ivermectin. That would mean that ivermectin prevents roughly three out of five covid deaths. The reduction is statistically significant (p-value 0,004). In other words, the weight of evidence supporting ivermectin continues to pile up. It is now far stronger than the evidence that led to widespred use of remdesivir earlier in the pandemic, and the effect is much larger and more important (remdesivir was only ever shown to marginally decrease length of hospital stay, it was never shown to have any effect on risk of dying).

I understand why pharmaceutical companies don’t like ivermectin. It’s a cheap generic drug. Even Merck, the company that invented ivermectin, is doing it’s best to destroy the drug’s reputation at the moment. This can only be explained by the fact that Merck is currently developing two expensive new covid drugs, and doesn’t want an off-patent drug, which it can no longer make any profit from, competing with them.

Re: Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection

#132

Post by ds206 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #41
stephc_int13 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this extremely worrying, to be honest. They are legal and widely used drugs in most countries. They might not be miracle drugs to treat COVID-19, but I don't see the point in this ban.

The issue isn't the drug . It's the claim . The drug could be legal for use in the US, and there would still be an issue (unless there were studies good enough to pass FDA scrutiny that demonstrated the drugs effectiveness). In the US, you don't get to make medical claims that you can't prove are valid. Now, the other questions are whether Youtube should be considered "in the US", and whether Youtube should be an enf…

The drug IS legal in the U.S. lol

You just need a prescription

Re: Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection

#133

Post by belltaco »

wrycoder wrote: post #123
belltaco wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dr. Zelenko held studies that 'showed' that HCQ had 100% cure rate by excluding people that moved to an ICU from the treatment group. The studies turned out to be complete bunk. He's a fraud.

https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/03/04/hydroxychloroquine... Two observational studies, both carried out in New York (Carlucci et al. and Derwan et al.), appear to show promising results in patients treated with a combination of hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and azithromycin. The first, involving 932 paitents, showed a 55% reduction in relative risk of death among those getting zinc in addition to hydroxychloroquine a…

>https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/us/coronavirus-doctor-zel...

>In an interview on Friday, Dr. Zelenko said that he was guilty of nothing more than sloppy wording.

>“I’m a clinician, not a researcher,” he said. “I don’t understand fully the language of clinical research.”

Yet he went on TV and on large podcasts and talked like he was an expert on clinical research.

Re: Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection

#134

Post by ceejayoz »

alaxsxaq wrote: post #84
enkid wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source for the EUA stuff? Source that HCQ and zinc are viable treatments? The problem isn't that some of these things might be viable, the problem is we don't know which of the literally hundreds of treatments are actually going to be viable when going through the proper testing and approval process. You can't just scream conspiracy when there much better explanations

This is from the FDA website. "Under section 564 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act), when the Secretary of HHS declares that an emergency use authorization is appropriate, FDA may authorize unapproved medical products or unapproved uses of approved medical products to be used in an emergency to diagnose, treat, or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions caused by CBRN threat age…

The idea that ivermectin (even if it works, and gets approved for this usage, which'd likely take as long as the vaccines are taking to get to that point) is an adequate alternative to a vaccine, which provides ongoing, lasting protection, is silly.

It'd be like claiming the existence of the iron lung is sufficient to yank the polio vaccine out of production.

For example, Remdesivir is approved, without any sign of that fact jeopardizing the EUA on the vaccines. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/therapeutic-op...

> FDA has approved one drug, remdesivir (Veklury), for the treatment of COVID-19 in hospitalized patients aged 12 years and older who weigh at least 40 kg.

Re: Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection

#135

Post by takeda »

ralph84 wrote: post #79

Whether ivermectin helps with covid or not, it's certainly not an advertising company's role to censor the debate.

We don't have extensive studies that injecting bleach helps as well.

There is a huge liability to those companies if it would end with deaths or health issues ("Facebook only looked for profits and didn't care that people were killed by misinformation")

You should not get medical advice from social media, and Facebook is also not the right place to discuss medical research.

Ironically few days ago people here commented that HN was linking to a rant on Facebook about performance in Python affected by shared libraries.

FB was considered not suitable for that kind of discussion and link was changed to bug database, yet some people don't have problem about discussing medical treatment there.

Re: Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection

#136

Post by dang »

throwaway4good wrote: post #96

What is this thing with alt-right figures like Bret Weinstein (and others) promoting particular medicines / self-medication through theirs shows? It is weird and cult like - why not just stick to politics?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27562573.

Re: Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection

#137

Post by _Microft »

ds206 wrote: post #121
birken wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pfizer, a company that has contributed probably trillions of dollars to global GDP over the past 6 months, is massively underperforming the stock market when you compare pre-pandemic to now [1]. The stock price in theory should price in all the future cash flows from the vaccine. What is your basis that the pharma companies are making tons of money on these vaccines? It isn't like the vaccines are pure profit. The ph…

"everybody in the world is benefiting" Did the patent issues get resolved? Last I heard, the drug companies didn't want to share because of reasons.

The parent commenter might have wanted to say with that that the vaccines help end the pandemic. The world benefits from that because we are losing massive amounts of money per day while still being stuck in the pandemic.

Re: Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection

#138

Post by glenra »

reedjosh wrote: post #85
gmnash wrote: post #76

It's banned on YouTube because of multiple authoritative sources indicating it's not a safe and effective treatment for COVID-19. Here is the FDA's stance: https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-shoul... Here is the European equivalent of the AMA advising against it's use: https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/ema-advises-against-use-iv... Here is an RCT in JAMA finding it ineffective: https://jamanetwork…

There's a large body of evidence in the opposite direction as well. I just pulled the following from Bret Weinstein's show notes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSWjl-JOIqs British Ivermectin Recommendation Development group: https://bird-group.org The BIRD Recommendation on the Use of Ivermectin for Covid-19: Executive Summary: https://bird-group.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/bird-execu... Carvallo et al 2020. Stu…

Nearly all of your links are broken. I think you copy-pasted the text of links that had been truncated with a "...", where the part prior to "..." is not sufficient to constitute a valid web address. For instance, the link for Carvallo et al 2010 should be this, which resolves: https://medicalpressopenaccess.com/upload/1605709669_1007.pd...

..rather than this, which doesn't:

https://medicalpressopenaccess.com/up

Re: Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection

#139

Post by enkid »

Dma54rhs wrote: post #128
enkid wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you point to anything that says the FDA would consider HCQ or any of these other drugs as alternatives to vaccines? They are not the same, and though they could both treat COVID, my reading is not that this would limit vaccine emergency authorization if there was a non vaccine treatment. This is especially true considering there are multiple vaccines approved under emergency use which would be direct competitors.…

I believe it means vaccines should go typical testing and vetting process, not the emergency shortened, is what the op wanted to tell.

I understand that's what op is trying to say, but op isn't providing sufficient evidence for that. Non vaccines are not alternatives for vaccines. And we have EUAs for things that would be alternatives to each other, multiple vaccines. So there's not reason to think a viable treatment for COVID would prevent a vaccine from getting a EUA.

Re: Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection

#140

Post by dang »

takeda wrote: post #135
ralph84 wrote: post #79

Whether ivermectin helps with covid or not, it's certainly not an advertising company's role to censor the debate.

We don't have extensive studies that injecting bleach helps as well. There is a huge liability to those companies if it would end with deaths or health issues ("Facebook only looked for profits and didn't care that people were killed by misinformation") You should not get medical advice from social media, and Facebook is also not the right place to discuss medical research. Ironically few days ago people here comment…

Just to be clear, if we changed a URL from one source to another, that would be rooted in 10+ years of HN moderation practice and would have been about the specific articles, for example we would tend to replace a "rant" with a more substantive/original source. It would imply nothing about FB being "considered not suitable". Plenty of FB articles have been discussed here over the years; though there tend to be issues with login walls and whatnot and I think the community tends to prefer the open web for content.
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