Ivermectin Didn’t Reduce Covid-19 Hospitalizations in Largest Trial to Date

Can anyone link the study? Cant get around the paywall

While the ivermectin story is largely explained by the confounding factor of parasite presence in developing countries, it indirectly helped covid patients by curing them of other problems and thus reducing the potence of covid. Not so much in the developed countries since the parasite problem was small.

Concerning though, was the society's attitude to the Ivermectin, an safe drug prescribed by WHO in Africa en masse, established for decades, versus an experimental vaccine-like treatment with unknown side effects and never tested at scale that was to be deployed population wide.

At the time of no studies, no information and heavy panic, one of these was condemned, likened to a horse paste for conspiracy theorists, the other revered like a God's potion.

This attitude is perfectly rational for pharma companies, for which a vaccine is a better business model, with healthy 95% of the population being customers, than a drug with sick 5% being the customers. Especially for an is off-patent drug Ivermectin which is just a pain in the ass for pharma producers, with no monopoly markup on it.

The behavior is not rational for the general populace though. Once country's biggest villains, pharma companies injecting patients unknowingly with opiods, turning them into lifetime subscribers, to world's biggest saviors like a flip of a switch.

It was interesting to observe how the pandemic was progressing with a rational attitude as somebody who went through it and developed an immunity right at the beginning. It helped me understand how the minds can be overriden at scale using tactics of fear. Helps explain other dangerous ideologies that were pushed to the populations using fear.

Vaccines and Ivermectin are old news though. Who would have though that Vladimir Putin would become the world's most successful doctor and cure the world of the pandemic overnight.

Stating something with no scientific backing is literal misinformation.

Theres been not a single study to show parasite Covid ivermectin connection.

Claiming it's fact instead of a theory is literal misinformation, even if it's a good theory.

It was a story because people, for some stupid reason, started buying the horse version of the drug and horse owners couldn't get Ivermectin for their horses anymore: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/20/ivermectin-sho...

I haven't read any story that said: "It's a horsey drug for horses! If you take it, that means you're a horse!"

Given that the activity of ivermectin was orthogonal to covid (virus vs parasite), they were looking for a side effect that would help. Pretty much every drug that was legally approved was tried when covid appeared to get something that might help. They could be immediately prescribed if something was found.

It’s a good comment re reducing the parasite load to improve health, but as others pointed out that’s not common in the countries initially hit by covid. Once politics and hearsay took over, logical discussion ended. For any viral infection, the recourse is vaccination, antivirals and reducing the symptoms. The rise of mAB meant that the effect of vaccination could be immediately applied, which was a new improvement for treatment. Vaccines and antivirals take time to develop, mAB require survivors and they’re all “foreign substances and/or proteins”. The woo and political folks don’t want that.

The world is very lucky covid was much closer to the flu than Ebola. Unless the “oh, sh*t” response would have broken through and kept people rational. And keep in mind that “a really strong immune system” often leads to a cytokine storm that burns out the lungs.