The problem is that Ivermectin is off patent, so no drug company can make any money from it. Since there is no money for expensive research studies or clinical trials, all the research studies that get done will be low budget and subject to being called "lousy science".
How about just properly reporting and studying the actual facts from one of the very large real world trials, like the one in India?
I think how effective modern ad campaigns are run are part to blame. You don't just shove your product as gold, you make sure to throw dirt on the alternatives. Which includes online troll armies these days. We're talking about leaving billions on the table and possibly being pushed out by your competition. A death sentence in modern day economy. it just sounds anti-narrative and is hard to swallow.
that makes the assumption that there's incentive for the people running the government to do so. there's been a lot of information that's come to light, some of which some consider to be common knowledge, which indicates that there may be more incentive for our lawmakers not to do so
Imagine that you are creating a new patented drug that you could charge a lot and the whole govts in the world needed.
Then have this other drug without patent that could do the same? or 80%?
People got enraged about the Epi-Pen patent price gouging years back imagine what would happen if some rigorous study confirm that ivermectin is as good as or better?
This is a sample on how media distorts the narrative.
I'm skeptical of the "there's no money in it" angle. Ivermectin advocates seem to be suggesting that you take it as a preventative measure for covid - i.e., that the way to stop the pandemic is to have everyone take ivermectin. Each individual ivermectin tablet, at current levels of demand and quality control, costs a couple of dollars.
Compare that with the vaccine, which costs governments a couple tens of dollars, but people get at most four shots per year.
I agree that there isn't money in licensing the ivermectin patent, but there is absolutely a lot of money to be made in manufacturing ivermectin itself, convincing people to take preventative ivermectin, and meeting worldwide demand. And every single pharmaceutical company can play that game - not just a couple of very rich ones in rich countries with research labs capable of making their own covid vaccine. Frankly, it should be a little bit surprising that not even one of them has tried this strategy.
As I understand it, the largest produce of ivermectin is... one of the largest drug companies. Which doesn't have a COVID-19 vaccine, and whose website openly states that you should not take ivermectin for COVID-19. Your theory just doesn't make any sense.
$12 per person per what unit of time? $12 gets you like three tablets. That's according to some claimed protocols enough to (probably) get you out of the hospital alive, but that's not a long-term preventative.
Meanwhile, the government pays about $20 per dose of the vaccine. The difference between $12 and $20 is not substantial.
The dose for prevention is a fraction of the dose for people already infected. Maybe per year? I don't know, I don't recall the details, but even so that's without the economies of scale that would intervene if it was a worldwide effort.
Re: vaccines, JP Morgan estimated Pfizer alone will make $100B from vaccines. I don't think manufacturing Ivermectin is complex enough that it would net ANY profit, the effort would be organized completely differently.
Lastly, I don't think this is a conspiracy, either for money or politics, going for vaccines was just the easiest sell for both people and governments, and doing anything different would have been extremely difficult (see Sweden and lockdown policies).
> Lastly, I don't think this is a conspiracy, either for money or politics, going for vaccines was just the easiest sell for both people and governments, and doing anything different would have been extremely difficult (see Sweden and lockdown policies).
This is not true. Governments were and are being hammered by their inability to manage COVID. There is a massive incentive to find a therapeutic that can treat the infected rather than just a vaccine, which is how crazes surrounding Ivermectin and other unproven therapeutics got started to begin with. Not only that, but generic therapeutics that could be easily manufactured and transported to poorer nations are clearly the best option to solve this problem. Vaccines were the hardest sell and the worst option for governments given their long developmental timeline, the FUD surrounding them, and the clear complexities surrounding distribution and scarcity.
Took a look through through that Intercept article. It reads like any of the biased opinion based drivel passing for journalism these days. Trying to conflate politics with medicine and say Doctors who risked their careers to speak up for Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin are "extremely pro Trump". Immediate red flag.
They call out Simone Gold for posting anti-vax content on Twitter by retweeting Joe Rogan's experience that he got covid and treated it with a cocktail of drugs including Ivermectin. This first hand account of recovery was apparently not true because... Ivermectin isn't shown to be effective.
Only, politicians have insinuated themselves into medicine, so that ship has sailed. When a medical professional is both sending strong political signals and their professional opinion is strongly aligned with the party line (and also conspiracy theorists), far out of line with the vast majority of their profession, that's suspect.
Joe Rogan's treatment is a single anecdote, and invermectin was one component of a "cocktail." He recovered, yes, but there's more noise than signal and most people recover from covid without any treatment.
And why is Covid not really a thing in subsaharan Africa where everyone takes ivermectin anyway, because it’s a marvelous antiparasitic drug.
You’d think the poorest parts of Africa with the worst medical systems in the world would be hit harder, but they’re not. And it’s probably not genetic since the African diaspora is hit hard by covid.
There's a whole lot of other possible confounding hypotheses here: more frequent outdoor activity, increased ventilation in buildings, increased sunlight, lower population density, lower spread from international travelers, less robust reporting, the "worst medical systems in the world" resulting in a smaller relative fraction of the population at high risk of covid surviving everything else, less cultural offense at being told to wear a mask, etc.
Everyone takes it, routinely? Or gets prescribed it easily in the case of certain symptoms?
My surface-level, limited perception in a couple countries I have friends/family in (Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria) is that there's little to no testing, but also not apparently a hospital emergency. Then again, these same people also seem to go to their local hospital for what is understood as typhoid and malaria every year or two at least. As a born and raised North American I get told by them that's normal.
> And why is Covid not really a thing in subsaharan Africa where everyone takes ivermectin anyway,
False premise. Africa as a whole trended a lot like Europe and North America until late 2020, but the late 2020 to 2021 reopening explosion that the latter two places had was replaced with a slower gradual growth with a later and lower peak in Africa, which has been fairly hard hit compared to the rest of the world outside Europe and North America.
> And why is Covid not really a thing in subsaharan Africa
I follow news out of South Africa. COVID really is a thing there. It is a big deal there. There have been curfews. (1)
> where everyone takes ivermectin anyway,
No; they don't all take ivermectin every day at breakfast.
> You’d think the poorest parts of Africa with the worst medical systems in the world would be hit harder, but they’re not.
You would think that, yes. it's actually interesting: when the pandemic dawned in early 2020, the medical systems of US and UK were thought best prepared to deal with it (2). That clearly has not been the reality since then. (3)
Why is that? One theory is that recent experience with disease control matters. UK and US were complacent about controlling a virulent pandemic. Whereas asian counties with good economies and recent experience with SARS did very well at doing it again. (4)
African countries did .. not as bad as you might assume, given "the worst medical systems in the world", maybe because of a population the skews younger than the west, and maybe because of experience with various diseases from HIV+TB (In South Africa and other countries) to Ebola (in Central Africa)
The problem with Ivermectin studies is that people will actually review them, so no academic can build a reputation on fraudulent data.
Since there is no way to fake thousands of data point, now expensive research studies and clinical trials are getting done, all the research studies that get done will be of higher budget and subject to being called "basic science"
How about just properly reporting and studying the actual facts that some scientists will just make shit up, publication bias exists, and they can draw the wrong conclusions, like that one on Ivermectin?
P.S. I would be happy if Ivermectin turned out to work, but statistically you expect a few false positives to emerge from doctors in the field doing small studies that agree and appear to point to a cure. If Ivermectin was as effective as say, antihistamine pills, you would get a flood of agreement.
> all the research studies that get done will be low budget and subject to being called "lousy science"
This is not true. Keep an eye out for TOGETHER[1], I-TECH[2], PRINCIPLE[3] and ACTIV-6[4] results (with TOGETHER already having dropped IVM for futility)
The lousy studies aren't lousy because of the constraints of an insufficient budget. They're based on fraudulent/fabricated data.
As far as the "real world trial" of India, the peak of their delta wave roughly coinciding with an updated treatment guideline including ivermectin is hardly strong evidence.
A) Correlation isn't causation.
B) An updated treatment guideline doesn't indicate people were actually taking ivermectin.
C) Using it as a treatment (i.e. after a case occurs) can't possibly be responsible for preventing cases. There was some buzz about it being offered as a prophylactic, but it never panned out.
D) The peak of the wave coinciding with the update necessitates that the reproduction rate was dropping before the update
Further, just look at Peru for a clear demonstration that it isn't the miracle some would like to believe it is.
Why would not some government fund the proper research into Ivermectin and Covid and be done with it. A lot of money was already thrown into the problem, throwing a bit more into a possible cheap and safe preventive treatment is a no brainer, unless I am missing something. Even this article suggests that there are some studies showing promise for Ivermectin, well, go create a big proper one and put an end to this debate. I can't stand Ivermectin zealots and anti-Ivermectin knowitalls.
If the government funds it, that will make it suspicious in the eyes of many people.
There are already a number of high quality studies, and they are interpreted through people's own lens of preconception. The article points out a real problem in medical literature, but the public perception problem is much worse. Medical literature is at least trying to reach a truthful consensus.
Most researchers are interested in the truth. There are incentives for people to be lazy and fast, which leads to bad science, but most of the time they would rather be right. They'll even defend bad results, but out of self protection rather than outright intent to mislead.
So there are plenty of problems, but of an entirely different character from the outright propaganda by non-scientists practicing ideological confirmation bias.
No they are not. They are interested in having a source of income and a career first. Reaching the wrong conclusions can leave them without a job, or funding or stall their career advancement.
I think that we already have enough data showing that this is most likely ineffective treatment that it is hard to justify spending more money on this.
Furthermore, people who are not convinced, will find a reason to doubt the new study as well.
Because in order to end a debate and quantify what "proper research" is, you have to have rules for the debate and establish in advance what proof is enough.
In the eyes of the world governments, the debate is already over. There isn't clear evidence that it works. There's also a straightforward answer already. Whether you believe this is because they're subservient to Big Pharma or because they actually are looking at the science, they're certainly acting as if they've seen all the data they need to see.
In the eyes of the ivermectin proponents, they just need to do the right study. The debate won't be over until it shows the answer they're looking for.
Nobody is saying, "If I see this evidence, I'll believe it; if I see that evidence, I'll believe the opposite." This is basic grade-school-simplified-scientific-method science. You're supposed to define a hypothesis, design an experiment, and then stick to what the experiment shows. But here, some have already finished their experiment, and others just want to keep running experiments.
(And no, it's not a cheap preventive treatment. Ivermectin tablets cost a couple of dollars per tablet. That adds up to be far more expensive than the vaccines. It would be a cheap reactive treatment, but even assuming it works, if you're not using it as a preventive treatment, you're letting people get awfully sick and spread the disease around, it's just that they can get out of the hospital reliably. That's not a solution.)
Exactly. The odds that any new research will find ivermectine effective are very low.
If the odds were higher, the government could grant monopoly rights to a willing pharma company. In fact they did this with another very old treatment for gout – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colchicine
One company was granted monopoly, they did studies, confirmed that cochicine is effective, gathered more information about safety. It also lead to significant price increase (2000%).
I don't think any serious pharma company would be willing to accept such an offer for ivermectine.
I think the point of the article is that if some government DID spend the money to properly research this, it would take time, as in MANY years. I remember many decades ago that Vitamin E was thought to be a great supplement to reduce coronary heart disease etc. It was then studied by following 10,000 people for 4.5 years [1] and it was determined that the hint of benefit seen in observational studies turned out to be false hope. So with much time and money, it could be found that there is benefit in ivermectin. But the current state is that the FDA [2] and CDC [2] recommend AGAINST ivermectin use for treatment or prevention of SARS-COV2 infection / Covid-19.
Like the article says: science is slow, pandemics are fast.
It's as though medical literature is going through the same process that the Internet did: built with the assumption of good behavior, and that good actors would swamp bad ones. That turns out to be untrue, and correcting it after the fact is much harder.
This is the fundamental problem of our time. Trust has been traditionally built via personal relationships. But that doesn’t scale, and every attempt people have made to try to curb the bad actors at scale is a cat-and-mouse problem that is eventually worked around. So media influencers of dubious provenance can establish a following and there’s no credible voice with enough “engagement” to debunk them (the truth is boring), so they become the trusted source.
Nobody knows who to trust anymore. And until we solve that problem at global scale, the grifters and con men will rule the world.
The exception I keep pondering is Wikipedia. It has many problems, but most of the time I get decent information. I expected it to be overrun by trolls and spammers. While they do exist, they don't dominate the way most other forums do without appointed police.
This is not the case in German language Wikipedia, though. There are many examples there of users with high reputation abusing their power and pushing their personal agendas.
Hopefully the NIH funded ACTIV-6 Trial will provide more definitive evidence on Ivermectin, given that it is a US based study and has 15,000 participants.
However, I don't know how the trial stacks up against prior work in terms of dose, and the estimated completion date is DEC 2022.
Suppose the raw results from the trial are that ivermectin is effective. What do you yourself expect to hear in such a circumstance? From the study, from the media, etc?
The Actually Real Scandal About Ivermectin is something like the anthropic principle but about the fact that I know that nothing positive about Ivermectin would ever be allowed on the Atlantic. Is Ivermectin at best barely above useless for covid? Maybe. Is it crucial and it's a crime against humanity for being suppressed? Maybe, and I'm inclined to say probably because the same people who lie about everything are mighty certain that Ivermectin is something that doesn't help covid and anyone who says otherwise is a horse paste eating moron.
Smallpox is extinct, diptheria, pertussus and polio are nearly extinct, and measles mumps and rubella would be nearly extinct if not for pockets of antivaxers creating a constant stream of outbreaks.
Go look up how many diseases these people killed prior to the vaccines, and then a few years after. You are absolutely taking for granted what we've accomplished through the use of vaccines.
I agree but those were scientists from the past that practiced real science. Meaning they accepted counter arguments and evidence; not just dictate. They also discovered through the scientific method that you can not vaccinate for corona viruses
They also were acutely aware you should never mass vaccinate during a pandemic.
They were correct and that is why you see the results in Israel, Singapore, England, and now the US, that you are seeing. That these are bad therapeutics at best. They could end up being worse.
The scientist and doctors who accomplished what you enumerated are indeed out there, but their voices are being suppressed by bureaucrats that now represent crony corrupt science; like fauci.
The Israel data shows excellent effectiveness of vaccines. For every age group it shows that the chances of severe COVID are greatly lower in the vaccinated than they are in the unvaccinated.
If you just look at the totals for their whole population it may not look that way because you run into a Simpson's paradox situation. That's because older people are both more likely in general to have their COVID cases be severe, and older people in Israel or more likely to be vaccinated.
To illustrate, imagine a population that has 2000 young people and 2000 old people, and both groups are 50% vaccinated with a vaccine that reduces your chances of severe disease by 90%, and image we are dealing with a disease that is 20x as likely to be severe in old people than it is in young people. Let's say that 1% of young, unvaccinated people get severe disease.
Here are the number of severe cases we'd expect in that population.
1 in the 1000 young vaccinated people
10 in the 1000 young unvaccinated people
20 in the 1000 old vaccinated people
200 in the 1000 old unvaccinated people
If we look at the overall numbers we get 21 severe cases in vaccinated people and 210 severe cases in unvaccinated people.
9.1% of severe cases would be in vaccinated people.
Now consider a population with 2000 young people and 2000 old people, with the same vaccines that reduces your chances of severe disease by 90% and where the diseases is 20x as likely to be severe in old people, but in this population 90% of the old people are vaccinated but the young are still only 50% vaccinated.
Here are the number of severe cases we'd expect in that population.
1 in the 1000 young vaccinated people
10 in the 1000 young unvaccinated people
36 in the 1800 old vaccinated people
40 in the 200 old unvaccinated people
Now for the overall population we get 37 severe cases in vaccinated people and 50 severe cases in unvaccinated people.
42.6% of cases would be in vaccinated people.
If the young people also get vaccinated at the same 90% rate as the old people, here are the numbers for severe cases.
1.8 in the 1800 young vaccinated people
2 in the 200 young unvaccinated people
36 in the 1800 old vaccinated people
40 in the 200 old vaccinated people
That gives for the overall population 37.8 severe cases in vaccinated people and 42 in unvaccinated people.
47.4% of cases would be in vaccinated people.
If no one was vaccinated, the numbers would be
20 in the 2000 unvaccinated young people
400 in the 2000 unvaccinated old people
for a total of 420 severe cases. 0% would be in vaccinated people.
If everyone was vaccinated, the numbers would be
2 in the 2000 vaccinated young people
40 in the 2000 vaccinated old people
for a total of 42 severe cases. 100% of cases would be in vaccinated people.
It is useful to look at the severe case totals in our population of 2000 young people and 2000 old people.
420 severe cases when no one is vaccinated
231 severe cases when 50% of both young and old are vaccinated
87 severe cases when 50% of young and 90% of old are vaccinated
79.8 severe cases when 90% of both young and old are vaccinated
42 severe cases when everyone is vaccinated
He's talking about transmission, you are talking about reduction of symptoms.
The vaccines don't prevent transmission. Now follow that to its logical conclusion: "we forcefully vaccinated everyone on Earth, why are we still having outbreaks?" Because... Well, you get it
After you sit down and mull over this concept for a while, vaccine mandates make absolutely no sense. Vaccine passports make absolutely no sense. Unless your goal is a slight reduction in ICU patients, forcing people to get it is a straight up violation of human rights.
"Pandemic of the unvaccinated" yeah, right. Blame the leaky vaccine, not the people who already have natural immunity.
People vaccinated who get infected tend to have cases that do not last as long as they do in unvaccinated people, which reduces the number of people they spread it do.
Oh yes, the scientists of the unspecified date in the past when everything was perfect and there were no politics and no one was ever subverting science to tell us to smoke cigarettes.
You are living in a fantasy. Science and economics have always been messy, and despite that advances in medical science are now and always have been the best and only real line of defense against disease.
While agreeing with your general premise: pertussis is most definitely not extinct, unfortunately. We see recurrent waves of it in California about every five years. The problem is in adults (who haven't had a booster in ages) it's frequently mistaken for a bad cold, but it can kill young children.
Also, because of their sheer ability to spread, MMR diseases can be big problems outside of the United States, though they are usually restricted to small pockets in the USA for exactly the reasons you mention. This is why we have to pay attention to community levels of vaccination, not just state or county-level. All outbreaks start local.
I have cystic fibrosis. They basically discovered the cure a few years ago. It is called trikafta.
What you are saying is ridiculous. The medical industrial complex has problems, but it does deliver very real miracles to millions of people every year.
Wow you've really convinced me bud you definitely sound nuanced and educated, now I know that the vaccine = good and supported by smart people and ivermectin = bad and supported by dumb people, I know exactly which side I want to be on.
There have been people pushing snake oil instead of vaccines for the entire history of vaccines.
You can draw a straight line through the history of vaccination and find people pushing fake cures and drugs that are basically unsupported by solid evidence instead of vaccines.
> Is it crucial and it's a crime against humanity for being suppressed? Maybe, and I'm inclined to say probably because the same people who lie about everything are mighty certain that Ivermectin is something that doesn't help covid and anyone who says otherwise is a horse paste eating moron.
It is truly an indictment of our time that this is deemed a useful standard of evidence.
As an observation not an argument, irrespective of what comes to be accepted as to the efficacy of ivermectin, there seem to be an awful lot of doctors and other professionals across the world prepared to trash their personal reputations & sometimes their careers if "claims about the drug are based on shoddy science—but that science is entirely unremarkable in its shoddiness." is true.
The mectin hucksters are hopeful that their careers will be sufficiently boosted by their repeated appearances on Joe Rogan and that tens of millions of cognitively-impaired COVID-19 survivors will be easily duped into throwing money away on their next scam.
The current count of medical studies that show Ivermectin being beneficial for treating or preventing COVID-19 is 64. Out of those 64, 44 of them are peer reviewed.
Or we could throw the baby out with the bathwater because this article cherry picked a few of the worst studies to shape a narrative.
They're both biased, and both will be using any facts they mention in a way that's best for their narrative.
everything is like this.
The problem is that we have this utopian notion that somewhere there is an Unbiased Grand Truth that should be given to us in exchange for our attention. We assume and expect that we're being given the Gold Standard Truth when we read anything now.
And then we get upset when we peel the foil off and discover it wasn't even chocolate.
That's up to the reader to judge. I always advise doing your own research. For example look at the history of the Atlantic, which political side do they align with, have they ever said anything unbiased about Ivermectin, etc.
Another thing to consider: one is an article and one is a site which points to medical studies so it's difficult to compare the two. You can weave a biased narrative easily with one article. It's a lot more difficult to do that across 60+ studies.
That website is such obvious bunk that I'm close to assuming anyone still linking it is literally a paid shill. They still have a copycat up in hcqmeta.com touting similar claims for hydroxychloroquine. And a dozen other drugs/vitamins.
A collection of links to studies would be harmless. The site purports to compile data from said studies in a meaningful and complete manner. It very much does not.
There are also issues with some of the studies themselves, but that's a separate issue.
There you have it... if one dares to post anything that conflicts with the official narrative, you are a paid shill. Even if that post is literal science like the comment above which is a collection of studies on Ivermectin.
I absolutely 100% registered for an account here just so I could respond to this random comment.
Friend. “Peer reviewed” doesn’t mean what you think it does. Peer review isn’t something that indicates that a given claim is verified. Instead, it’s something that indicates that a given paper has reached the bare minimum for consideration. It’s generally a red flag when people use “peer reviewed” as a synonym for “true,” particularly when the paper is published in a relatively unknown journal, and an entire parade of red flags when people treat “not peer reviewed” as “almost as good as true.”
Regardless of your opinions on the use of various treatments for COVID-19, I strongly recommend that you read this article and take their methodology to heart. “Doing research” doesn’t mean poking around on scholar.google.com and reading extant studies. Sometimes “doing research” means actually running an experiment to verify that the effects claimed in a published paper are replicable. Sometimes “doing research”, as in this case, entails doing statistical analyses of publications looking for tells of shoddy methodology or even straightforward misrepresentation. Note: There’s some really fun tricks that people can use to detect bogus data — for example, when humans attempt to fabricate “random” data, typically the numbers they come up with don’t match an actual random distribution.
Interesting how this peer review argument comes out selectively and not when something like Surgisphere happens and their bogus findings are immediately passed off as the ultimate truth.
I see that towards the end of your comment that you're inferring the page has issues with the statistical calculations. Here's the easy solution to get past that and get us talking about what matters: disregard whatever problems you have with the page and look at the actual studies. I think it's absolutely preposterous that people are disregarding life saving research based on which web site serves as a vehicle to get them to it. Read through a few of the studies as I have, and let's have a conversation around the most promising.
It's probably not a coincidence that the same people saying "Masks don't work and the proof is I can smell my farts when I wear them", "The virus is a hoax", "The vaccines have a tracking chip in them" are the same folks saying "ivermectin prevents and cures covid".
I live in the Missouri Ozarks, near Branson, and I am surrounded by them. I've been following the use of ivermectin since around June 2020 and still have not seen any definitive proof it works better than a placebo.
But I did suspect there might be a run on it over a year ago so I bought an extra package of it for my two burros. Just a few days ago I had to use it. About a month ago I asked an employee at the feed store I buy it at how their stock of it was holding up. He told me "We're selling out within 24 hours of getting a shipment in."
It won't matter if rigerous studies determine it doesn't work at all, they won't care. These are folks who are still refusing to get vaxxed, wear a mask, and social distance. They don't care that over 670,000 of their fellow citizens have been killed by it here. They don't believe that either. They're "Mad as hell" and they're "not going to take it anymore".
> 670,000 of their fellow citizens have been killed by it here
Are we still just straight repeating govt propaganda to scare the general public? Did Colin Powell's death not make it extremely clear how inflated these totals are? Gen. Powell was 84 with Parkinson's and an incurable blood cell cancer (and fully vaccinated, btw). But sure, Covid "killed" him. Chalk up one more to help justify the lockdowns and eliminating your freedoms.
I spent the better part of a year trying to talk to folks here where I live about masks, preventives, vaccines and social distancing. Nothing made a difference.
Gen. Powell's cause of death was covid. He was in several high risk groups.
If he got ran over by a speeding car and died the next day would you insist his cause of death was his age?
It's important to remember that by and large, people decide what they support on the basis of what makes them emotionally feel better, and then find evidence for it.
People who castigate the medical and pharmaceutical industries for being corrupt and then wholeheartedly advocate for one treatment or another as "the solution" based on articles they found on the Internet from unknown sources aren't and were never operating from a place of logic - as though nobody on the Internet was ever maliciously motivated or trying to make a buck.
There's no point in a discussion based on "the evidence" with these individuals, except maybe to point out the cognitive dissonance at play.
Brazil received strong govt propaganda for ivermectin use. Some people even got liver problems due to Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine overdose [1].
Yet, the country is one of the most affected by the pandemic. It has more than 600k deaths. For comparison, India is around 6x bigger regarding population, and only had 454K deaths.
That's the real-world Ivermectin study. If it worked, you can be sure that Brazil would be in a much better situation.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadHow about just properly reporting and studying the actual facts from one of the very large real world trials, like the one in India?
How then do you explain the numerous off-patent drugs that are currently in widespread production by the major drug companies?
Then have this other drug without patent that could do the same? or 80%?
People got enraged about the Epi-Pen patent price gouging years back imagine what would happen if some rigorous study confirm that ivermectin is as good as or better?
This is a sample on how media distorts the narrative.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHzGH3aLSgc
Compare that with the vaccine, which costs governments a couple tens of dollars, but people get at most four shots per year.
I agree that there isn't money in licensing the ivermectin patent, but there is absolutely a lot of money to be made in manufacturing ivermectin itself, convincing people to take preventative ivermectin, and meeting worldwide demand. And every single pharmaceutical company can play that game - not just a couple of very rich ones in rich countries with research labs capable of making their own covid vaccine. Frankly, it should be a little bit surprising that not even one of them has tried this strategy.
Also, said company, Merck, is in the process of releasing a new drug that will cost in the thousands.
Meanwhile, the government pays about $20 per dose of the vaccine. The difference between $12 and $20 is not substantial.
Re: vaccines, JP Morgan estimated Pfizer alone will make $100B from vaccines. I don't think manufacturing Ivermectin is complex enough that it would net ANY profit, the effort would be organized completely differently.
Lastly, I don't think this is a conspiracy, either for money or politics, going for vaccines was just the easiest sell for both people and governments, and doing anything different would have been extremely difficult (see Sweden and lockdown policies).
This is not true. Governments were and are being hammered by their inability to manage COVID. There is a massive incentive to find a therapeutic that can treat the infected rather than just a vaccine, which is how crazes surrounding Ivermectin and other unproven therapeutics got started to begin with. Not only that, but generic therapeutics that could be easily manufactured and transported to poorer nations are clearly the best option to solve this problem. Vaccines were the hardest sell and the worst option for governments given their long developmental timeline, the FUD surrounding them, and the clear complexities surrounding distribution and scarcity.
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/28/covid-telehealth-hydroxy...
https://archive.md/eyopT
They call out Simone Gold for posting anti-vax content on Twitter by retweeting Joe Rogan's experience that he got covid and treated it with a cocktail of drugs including Ivermectin. This first hand account of recovery was apparently not true because... Ivermectin isn't shown to be effective.
Joe Rogan's treatment is a single anecdote, and invermectin was one component of a "cocktail." He recovered, yes, but there's more noise than signal and most people recover from covid without any treatment.
You’d think the poorest parts of Africa with the worst medical systems in the world would be hit harder, but they’re not. And it’s probably not genetic since the African diaspora is hit hard by covid.
My surface-level, limited perception in a couple countries I have friends/family in (Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria) is that there's little to no testing, but also not apparently a hospital emergency. Then again, these same people also seem to go to their local hospital for what is understood as typhoid and malaria every year or two at least. As a born and raised North American I get told by them that's normal.
I'm not sure that I buy that; cities in Africa have large dense slums, where it's going to be hard to distance. And crowded transport to/from work.
https://www.kulturevulturez.com/story-south-africa-slums-gan...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibera
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_taxi
False premise. Africa as a whole trended a lot like Europe and North America until late 2020, but the late 2020 to 2021 reopening explosion that the latter two places had was replaced with a slower gradual growth with a later and lower peak in Africa, which has been fairly hard hit compared to the rest of the world outside Europe and North America.
I follow news out of South Africa. COVID really is a thing there. It is a big deal there. There have been curfews. (1)
> where everyone takes ivermectin anyway,
No; they don't all take ivermectin every day at breakfast.
> You’d think the poorest parts of Africa with the worst medical systems in the world would be hit harder, but they’re not.
You would think that, yes. it's actually interesting: when the pandemic dawned in early 2020, the medical systems of US and UK were thought best prepared to deal with it (2). That clearly has not been the reality since then. (3)
Why is that? One theory is that recent experience with disease control matters. UK and US were complacent about controlling a virulent pandemic. Whereas asian counties with good economies and recent experience with SARS did very well at doing it again. (4)
African countries did .. not as bad as you might assume, given "the worst medical systems in the world", maybe because of a population the skews younger than the west, and maybe because of experience with various diseases from HIV+TB (In South Africa and other countries) to Ebola (in Central Africa)
1) https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/south-africas-president...
2) https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/11/countries-preparednes...
3) https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/all-bets-are-measu...
4) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/027507402094370...
How about just properly reporting and studying the actual facts that some scientists will just make shit up, publication bias exists, and they can draw the wrong conclusions, like that one on Ivermectin?
P.S. I would be happy if Ivermectin turned out to work, but statistically you expect a few false positives to emerge from doctors in the field doing small studies that agree and appear to point to a cure. If Ivermectin was as effective as say, antihistamine pills, you would get a flood of agreement.
This is not true. Keep an eye out for TOGETHER[1], I-TECH[2], PRINCIPLE[3] and ACTIV-6[4] results (with TOGETHER already having dropped IVM for futility)
[1] https://www.togethertrial.com/
[2] https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04920942
[3] https://www.principletrial.org/
[4] https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04885530
As far as the "real world trial" of India, the peak of their delta wave roughly coinciding with an updated treatment guideline including ivermectin is hardly strong evidence.
A) Correlation isn't causation.
B) An updated treatment guideline doesn't indicate people were actually taking ivermectin.
C) Using it as a treatment (i.e. after a case occurs) can't possibly be responsible for preventing cases. There was some buzz about it being offered as a prophylactic, but it never panned out.
D) The peak of the wave coinciding with the update necessitates that the reproduction rate was dropping before the update
Further, just look at Peru for a clear demonstration that it isn't the miracle some would like to believe it is.
There are already a number of high quality studies, and they are interpreted through people's own lens of preconception. The article points out a real problem in medical literature, but the public perception problem is much worse. Medical literature is at least trying to reach a truthful consensus.
The article does not give me any hope that medical literature is "trying" anything.
So there are plenty of problems, but of an entirely different character from the outright propaganda by non-scientists practicing ideological confirmation bias.
No they are not. They are interested in having a source of income and a career first. Reaching the wrong conclusions can leave them without a job, or funding or stall their career advancement.
Modern academia does not select for truth.
Furthermore, people who are not convinced, will find a reason to doubt the new study as well.
In the eyes of the world governments, the debate is already over. There isn't clear evidence that it works. There's also a straightforward answer already. Whether you believe this is because they're subservient to Big Pharma or because they actually are looking at the science, they're certainly acting as if they've seen all the data they need to see.
In the eyes of the ivermectin proponents, they just need to do the right study. The debate won't be over until it shows the answer they're looking for.
Nobody is saying, "If I see this evidence, I'll believe it; if I see that evidence, I'll believe the opposite." This is basic grade-school-simplified-scientific-method science. You're supposed to define a hypothesis, design an experiment, and then stick to what the experiment shows. But here, some have already finished their experiment, and others just want to keep running experiments.
(And no, it's not a cheap preventive treatment. Ivermectin tablets cost a couple of dollars per tablet. That adds up to be far more expensive than the vaccines. It would be a cheap reactive treatment, but even assuming it works, if you're not using it as a preventive treatment, you're letting people get awfully sick and spread the disease around, it's just that they can get out of the hospital reliably. That's not a solution.)
If the odds were higher, the government could grant monopoly rights to a willing pharma company. In fact they did this with another very old treatment for gout – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colchicine One company was granted monopoly, they did studies, confirmed that cochicine is effective, gathered more information about safety. It also lead to significant price increase (2000%).
I don't think any serious pharma company would be willing to accept such an offer for ivermectine.
Like the article says: science is slow, pandemics are fast.
[1] https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminE-HealthProfessiona... [2] https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-shoul... [3] https://emergency.cdc.gov/han/2021/pdf/CDC_HAN_449.pdf
So just like the time required to create the COVID vaccines that are "safe" and "effective"?
Snark aside, I'm exhausted hearing how hard it is to do some things, but other's are "science" and don't warrant further exploration.
[1] https://www.togethertrial.com/
[2] https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04920942
[3] https://www.principletrial.org/
[4] https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04885530
The big tech and Narrative talkers already decided since the beginning what is good or bad for us.
And what is truth or not.
/s
Maybe even a simple Buffy (Joe Rogan) guy may have some common sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHzGH3aLSgc
Nobody knows who to trust anymore. And until we solve that problem at global scale, the grifters and con men will rule the world.
However, I don't know how the trial stacks up against prior work in terms of dose, and the estimated completion date is DEC 2022.
https://www.nih.gov/research-training/medical-research-initi...
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04885530
The people pushing the vaccine are the only people who have consistently been curing serious illnesses for the last 100 years.
The ivermectin group are the people who have been pushing snake oil for the last 1000 years and cured nothing.
Smallpox is extinct, diptheria, pertussus and polio are nearly extinct, and measles mumps and rubella would be nearly extinct if not for pockets of antivaxers creating a constant stream of outbreaks.
Go look up how many diseases these people killed prior to the vaccines, and then a few years after. You are absolutely taking for granted what we've accomplished through the use of vaccines.
They also were acutely aware you should never mass vaccinate during a pandemic.
They were correct and that is why you see the results in Israel, Singapore, England, and now the US, that you are seeing. That these are bad therapeutics at best. They could end up being worse.
The scientist and doctors who accomplished what you enumerated are indeed out there, but their voices are being suppressed by bureaucrats that now represent crony corrupt science; like fauci.
If you just look at the totals for their whole population it may not look that way because you run into a Simpson's paradox situation. That's because older people are both more likely in general to have their COVID cases be severe, and older people in Israel or more likely to be vaccinated.
To illustrate, imagine a population that has 2000 young people and 2000 old people, and both groups are 50% vaccinated with a vaccine that reduces your chances of severe disease by 90%, and image we are dealing with a disease that is 20x as likely to be severe in old people than it is in young people. Let's say that 1% of young, unvaccinated people get severe disease.
Here are the number of severe cases we'd expect in that population.
If we look at the overall numbers we get 21 severe cases in vaccinated people and 210 severe cases in unvaccinated people.9.1% of severe cases would be in vaccinated people.
Now consider a population with 2000 young people and 2000 old people, with the same vaccines that reduces your chances of severe disease by 90% and where the diseases is 20x as likely to be severe in old people, but in this population 90% of the old people are vaccinated but the young are still only 50% vaccinated.
Here are the number of severe cases we'd expect in that population.
Now for the overall population we get 37 severe cases in vaccinated people and 50 severe cases in unvaccinated people.42.6% of cases would be in vaccinated people.
If the young people also get vaccinated at the same 90% rate as the old people, here are the numbers for severe cases.
That gives for the overall population 37.8 severe cases in vaccinated people and 42 in unvaccinated people.47.4% of cases would be in vaccinated people.
If no one was vaccinated, the numbers would be
for a total of 420 severe cases. 0% would be in vaccinated people.If everyone was vaccinated, the numbers would be
for a total of 42 severe cases. 100% of cases would be in vaccinated people.It is useful to look at the severe case totals in our population of 2000 young people and 2000 old people.
The vaccines don't prevent transmission. Now follow that to its logical conclusion: "we forcefully vaccinated everyone on Earth, why are we still having outbreaks?" Because... Well, you get it
After you sit down and mull over this concept for a while, vaccine mandates make absolutely no sense. Vaccine passports make absolutely no sense. Unless your goal is a slight reduction in ICU patients, forcing people to get it is a straight up violation of human rights.
"Pandemic of the unvaccinated" yeah, right. Blame the leaky vaccine, not the people who already have natural immunity.
People vaccinated who get infected tend to have cases that do not last as long as they do in unvaccinated people, which reduces the number of people they spread it do.
All you have to do to stop the spread of a virus is lower R below 1. The vaccine would do that if we vaccinated everyone.
You are living in a fantasy. Science and economics have always been messy, and despite that advances in medical science are now and always have been the best and only real line of defense against disease.
Also, because of their sheer ability to spread, MMR diseases can be big problems outside of the United States, though they are usually restricted to small pockets in the USA for exactly the reasons you mention. This is why we have to pay attention to community levels of vaccination, not just state or county-level. All outbreaks start local.
What you are saying is ridiculous. The medical industrial complex has problems, but it does deliver very real miracles to millions of people every year.
I didn't say anyone was dumb, but people have been fighting against vaccines and pushing snake oil for the entire history of vaccines.
Should I ask him for a source?
You can draw a straight line through the history of vaccination and find people pushing fake cures and drugs that are basically unsupported by solid evidence instead of vaccines.
It is truly an indictment of our time that this is deemed a useful standard of evidence.
https://ivmmeta.com/
The current count of medical studies that show Ivermectin being beneficial for treating or preventing COVID-19 is 64. Out of those 64, 44 of them are peer reviewed.
Or we could throw the baby out with the bathwater because this article cherry picked a few of the worst studies to shape a narrative.
Why should we trust this source and not the one linked above?
everything is like this.
The problem is that we have this utopian notion that somewhere there is an Unbiased Grand Truth that should be given to us in exchange for our attention. We assume and expect that we're being given the Gold Standard Truth when we read anything now.
And then we get upset when we peel the foil off and discover it wasn't even chocolate.
Another thing to consider: one is an article and one is a site which points to medical studies so it's difficult to compare the two. You can weave a biased narrative easily with one article. It's a lot more difficult to do that across 60+ studies.
Trust nothing, do your own research always.
Here's a nice read on the subject: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1422044335076306947.html
Find anything amiss with any of actual 64 studies? Or are you content to just not move past the web site itself.
There are also issues with some of the studies themselves, but that's a separate issue.
Friend. “Peer reviewed” doesn’t mean what you think it does. Peer review isn’t something that indicates that a given claim is verified. Instead, it’s something that indicates that a given paper has reached the bare minimum for consideration. It’s generally a red flag when people use “peer reviewed” as a synonym for “true,” particularly when the paper is published in a relatively unknown journal, and an entire parade of red flags when people treat “not peer reviewed” as “almost as good as true.”
Regardless of your opinions on the use of various treatments for COVID-19, I strongly recommend that you read this article and take their methodology to heart. “Doing research” doesn’t mean poking around on scholar.google.com and reading extant studies. Sometimes “doing research” means actually running an experiment to verify that the effects claimed in a published paper are replicable. Sometimes “doing research”, as in this case, entails doing statistical analyses of publications looking for tells of shoddy methodology or even straightforward misrepresentation. Note: There’s some really fun tricks that people can use to detect bogus data — for example, when humans attempt to fabricate “random” data, typically the numbers they come up with don’t match an actual random distribution.
Anyway, I hope that helps.
I see that towards the end of your comment that you're inferring the page has issues with the statistical calculations. Here's the easy solution to get past that and get us talking about what matters: disregard whatever problems you have with the page and look at the actual studies. I think it's absolutely preposterous that people are disregarding life saving research based on which web site serves as a vehicle to get them to it. Read through a few of the studies as I have, and let's have a conversation around the most promising.
I live in the Missouri Ozarks, near Branson, and I am surrounded by them. I've been following the use of ivermectin since around June 2020 and still have not seen any definitive proof it works better than a placebo.
But I did suspect there might be a run on it over a year ago so I bought an extra package of it for my two burros. Just a few days ago I had to use it. About a month ago I asked an employee at the feed store I buy it at how their stock of it was holding up. He told me "We're selling out within 24 hours of getting a shipment in."
It won't matter if rigerous studies determine it doesn't work at all, they won't care. These are folks who are still refusing to get vaxxed, wear a mask, and social distance. They don't care that over 670,000 of their fellow citizens have been killed by it here. They don't believe that either. They're "Mad as hell" and they're "not going to take it anymore".
Are we still just straight repeating govt propaganda to scare the general public? Did Colin Powell's death not make it extremely clear how inflated these totals are? Gen. Powell was 84 with Parkinson's and an incurable blood cell cancer (and fully vaccinated, btw). But sure, Covid "killed" him. Chalk up one more to help justify the lockdowns and eliminating your freedoms.
Gen. Powell's cause of death was covid. He was in several high risk groups.
If he got ran over by a speeding car and died the next day would you insist his cause of death was his age?
People who castigate the medical and pharmaceutical industries for being corrupt and then wholeheartedly advocate for one treatment or another as "the solution" based on articles they found on the Internet from unknown sources aren't and were never operating from a place of logic - as though nobody on the Internet was ever maliciously motivated or trying to make a buck.
There's no point in a discussion based on "the evidence" with these individuals, except maybe to point out the cognitive dissonance at play.
Yet, the country is one of the most affected by the pandemic. It has more than 600k deaths. For comparison, India is around 6x bigger regarding population, and only had 454K deaths.
That's the real-world Ivermectin study. If it worked, you can be sure that Brazil would be in a much better situation.
[1] https://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2021/03/29/apos-desc... (in Portuguese)