Never forget that the lab leak was a “conspiracy theory” that the New York Times’ head Covid reporter called “racist.” If you think I’ll tire of recalling this, my friends, you are wrong.

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[–]ActuallyNot 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (76 children)

It was never promising.

The amounts that affected viruses in vitro would've been impossible to achieve or deadly to a human in vivo.

It was just picked up by the antivax movement as a crutch to their crap about the vaccines converting your liver into a 5g transmitter, which allowed Bill Gates to upload positive opinions of Azure to your spleen. (Or whatever the bullshit du jour was.)

[–]weavilsatemyface 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (75 children)

It was never promising.

This is misinformation. Doctors didn't just pluck Ivermectin out of thin air. They picked it because it was already known as a safe, cheap anti-viral.

Ivermectin is one of the most important human drugs in modern pharmaceuticology. It has been in widespread use across the world for over 35 years, with over 3.7 billion doses used, and is considered to be safe, almost side-effect free, effective and cheap. It is on the WHO's list of essential drugs, and the discoverers of its active ingredient, Satoshi Ōmura and William C. Campbell, shared the Nobel Prize For Medicine in 2015 for their discovery. In terms of global human health, it up there with penicillin as a wonder drug.

For the US FDA to dismiss it as "horse dewormer" shows just how dirty the politicized medicine has gone.

Ivermectin affects viral cell entry, nuclear transport, and inhibits replication via RdRp. It also suppresses cytokine production through STAT-3 inhibition, and is an effective protease inhibitor. All of these facts suggest strongly that Ivermectin could be a powerful anti-viral against RNA viruses like Covid. It has been used, off-label, for HIV, Zika, and MERS (a close relative to Covid). In vitro studies also show effectiveness against dengue, West Nile virus, Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus, Chikungunya, pseudorabies virus, adenovirus, and SARS (another close relative to Covid-19) coronaviruses.

So when the pandemic hit in 2020, doctors on the front lines, actually dealing with dying patients, in the absence of any approved effective treatments, turned to off-label use of drugs they knew were safe, well-tolerated, and had anti-viral properties. And they found that Ivermectin worked. There are mountains of clinical cases of patients recovering from Covid after being put on Ivermectin, and I don't mean the Omicron cold, I mean the really dangerous strains early in the pandemic. Even the Gamma strain.

As of April 2023, there are 96 studies with over 135000 patients comparing Ivermectin against control groups that support Ivermectin as a safe, effective treatment for Covid and only a few poor-quality but over-hyped studies such as TOGETHER and COVID-OUT finding otherwise. And keep in mind that there is an enormous publication bias against publishing positive results in favour of Ivermectin. As the anti-Ivermectin blogger Scott Alexander says:

"if you say anything in favor of ivermectin you will be cast out of civilization and thrown into the circle of social hell reserved for Klan members and 1/6 insurrectionists. All the health officials in the world will shout 'horse dewormer!' at you and compare you to Josef Mengele."

Alexander means this as a good thing.

The problem with Ivermectin is that the process for getting drug approval for a new use is so expensive that, as a general rule, only large pharmaceutical companies can afford the trials, and they will only run them if the drug is patented and highly profitable. Ivermectin is no longer protected by patent, and is being manufactured by so many companies around the world that the price is typically cents per dose in places like India, and even in the US only $1-2 per dose. As a generic drug, there's no profit in running a multi-million dollar trial only to see dozens of competitors swoop in and undercut you.

Ivermectin is even worse, because the original patent-holder, Merck, committed to producing and giving away Ivermectin to developing countries for free, to treat river blindness. I'm sure that they felt very charitable about that back in the 1990s when they made that promise, but 30 years on Ivermectin is an albatross around their neck they would love nothing more than to get rid of, and if that means killing its reputation, so be it. That is why they refused to help when the Japanese and Nigerian governments asked them to help trial Ivermectin against Covid. That is why Merck was so publicly negative about Ivermectin, preferring to push people towards their own patented anti-viral Molnupiravir despite significant side-effects and major questions about its effectiveness and safety.

Follow the money. Molnupiravir, backed by a pharmaceutical company that can afford to wine and dine doctors and government officials, and hire lobbyists, has been approved for use. Ivermectin, which has much more evidence in its favour than Molnupiravir, has not.

[–]ActuallyNot 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (74 children)

This is misinformation. Doctors didn't just pluck Ivermectin out of thin air. They picked it because it was already known as a safe, cheap anti-viral.

It's not an antiviral. It's a antiparasitic. It's antiviral effects noticed in vitro, were only at concentrations that were unreachable in vivo.

Ivermectin affects viral cell entry, nuclear transport, and inhibits replication via RdRp.

In vitro.

As of April 2023, there are 96 studies with over 135000 patients comparing Ivermectin against control groups that support Ivermectin as a safe, effective treatment for Covid

Lets go through them shall we?

Skipping the first one, which is a preprint, the next one "Clinical Disease Characteristics and Treatment Trajectories Associated with Mortality among COVID-19 Patients in Punjab, Pakistan", isn't very compelling for ivermectin: p = 0.129 is plausibly due to chance rather than ivermectin, and the 95% CI includes at the top that it made death up to 20% more likely.

Considering the plethora of evidence that ivermectin is ineffective, this p=0.129 is too weak to claim that it supports that ivermectin is effective.

[–]Vrepit 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (9 children)

I've used it a few times when I was experiencing an early flu onset that was making coworkers be bedridden for a week at a time. It literally stops a viral infection from propagating further within 6-8 hours...does not reverse it, but puts it into a limbo. I was back to work the next afternoon with minimal symptoms. The only side effect I had was drowsiness, which coffee fixed.

[–]ActuallyNot 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (8 children)

It literally stops a viral infection from propagating further within 6-8 hours...does not reverse it, but puts it into a limbo.

All viral infections?

HIV?
Herpes?
Hepatitis B?

Can you link me to the studies?

[–]Vrepit 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (7 children)

My comment was in the context of a flu virus. There's no need for embellishment on my original statement. Even though Ivermectin's antiviral properties have been previously established, with Sars-Cov being a recent concern, much more research has been done in clinical environments.

I'm not your research assistant and it appears you are not genuine or honest with your query. Any one else that has interest in Ivermectin's antiviral properties, can simply search for the studies on Pubmed.

[–]ActuallyNot 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

Even though Ivermectin's antiviral properties have been previously established

Not in vivo. Quite the opposite. To achieve antiviral effect the concentration would have to be about 100 times what is possible to reach in vivo.

Any one else that has interest in Ivermectin's antiviral properties, can simply search for the studies on Pubmed.

JAMA is probably second only to NEJM with respect to American medical journals.

  • These findings do not support the use of ivermectin in patients with mild to moderate COVID-19.

Whereas if you look for research published in NEJM you find:

  • Treatment with ivermectin did not result in a lower incidence of medical admission to a hospital due to progression of Covid-19 or of prolonged emergency department observation among outpatients with an early diagnosis of Covid-19.

You may be able to find lower quality studies that suggest the opposite. But the best information to date is that it doesn't do shit against CoVID-19

I've never heard of it being used to treat influenza. I presume no medical professional prescribed it for that.

[–]Vrepit 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

It certainly does appear to have notable efficacy, particularly when used early. We really don't need to just rely on a handful of studies when doctors from all over the world have been using Ivermectin on covid patients and databased their findings which support that it is effective.

https://c19ivm.org

[–]ActuallyNot 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

It certainly does appear to have notable efficacy.

Why did the two top american journals publish that it doesn't within the past year or so?

Is this some new meaning "certainly"?

We really don't need to just rely on a handful of studies when doctors from all over the world have been using Ivermectin on covid patients and databased their findings which support that it is effective.

Really. What's this database called?

https://c19ivm.org

I've been lnked to that list of papers here before. Whenever I try to go through them from the top to see if one of them is good evidence for the efficacy of ivermectin for treatment of CoVID the person who links to it drops out of the conversation, by hurling insults.

Would you like to see if any of them provides good evidence of the efficacy of ivermectin for the treatment of CoVID?

Or would you prefer to trust me that there is no evidence?

[–]Vrepit 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

The data that supports Ivermectin as being effective alone or in conjunction with other treatments is clearly spelled out in hundreds of studies with patients that I linked. You've crossed the Rubicon and have passed the point where it was better for you to just remain quiet. I'm very sorry to hear of your loss in this convo....at least you tried and maybe you were compensated for it whether that be tangible or more intangible like ego stroking. It's a good indicator of character to understand when to speak and when to remain silent. I will catch up with you later on a topic that your scripted responses have shown to be more reliable to you and give you another chance. Vrepit Sa.

[–]weavilsatemyface 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (63 children)

It's not an antiviral. It's a antiparasitic. It's antiviral effects noticed in vitro, were only at concentrations that were unreachable in vivo.

This is disinformation that has been pushed hard during the Covid pandemic to discredit potential treatments which threaten the massive profits gained from EULA drugs such as Molnupiravir.

There is more evidence for Ivermectin being a safe and effective anti-viral in humans than there is for Tamiflu, nevertheless doctors can lose their license for recommending Ivermectin while the dangerous and ineffective Tamiflu is still readily available nine years after it became clear that it doesn't work.

Is Ivermectin a cure or treatment for Covid-19? I honestly don't know. But what I do know is this: during the Covid pandemic, under the excuse of a state of emergency, the standard for authorizing new, barely tested, often known to be dangerous, and expensive drugs for treatment was massively lowered:

  • One week before the public release of a large WHO trial concluded that Remdesivir is ineffective against Covid, the EU signed a billion dollar deal to purchase the drug;
  • then two weeks later, after the WHO's study was already public, the American FDA approved its use based on a single study of just 1063 patients and 33% improvement;
  • in the UK, Budesonide was approved for use with just 1 study on 1779 patients and 17% improvement.

[–]ActuallyNot 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (62 children)

So you're saying it works in animal models, with viruses other than Covid-19?

I was trying to go through your claim that there are "96 studies with over 135000 patients comparing Ivermectin against control groups that support Ivermectin as a safe, effective treatment for Covid"

I presume you meant in humans an against Covid-19.

If you agree that p = 0.129 isn't very compelling, we should go on to the next one.

Or is p=0129 good enough for you to establish effectiveness considering that there is other work that shows it's not effective?

There's 96 of these bullshit papers to get through, so I'd appreciated it if you include some attempt to address the point amongst your adding of red herrings.

[–]weavilsatemyface 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (61 children)

I was trying to go through your claim

I literally quoted your exact words I was responding to. You denied that there have been any in vivo studies of Ivermectin demonstrating antiviral properties. I showed you multiple in vivo studies where it demonstrates antiviral properties.

You denied that Ivermectin is an antiviral. I quote: "It's not an antiviral." That's false. If you aren't even willing to admit that you were mistaken about that, there's little point in continuing this discussion.

There's 96 of these bullshit papers to get through

Oh that's not biased at all. 🙄

How do you know they're bullshit before you have looked at them?

Earlier in another post you claimed that coma was "common" after Ivermectin overdose. That is untrue. Ivermectin overdoses are exceedingly rare in the first place, and even in overdoses coma is even more rare. One known risk factor is co-infection by O. volvulus together with L. loa (which is mostly a risk in Africa); another very rare suspected risk factor is a mutation to the MDR-1 gene, which can allow Ivermection to cross the blood/brain barrier. Even in cases of coma, recovery is usually complete. Details here.

I will tell you this: given

  1. the very good safety of Ivermectin;
  2. how few other options existed early in the pandemic; and
  3. the amount of direct clinical evidence from doctors on the front line;

the campaign to denigrate and ban the use of ivermectin was a monstrous act. Of all the crazy and not-so-crazy things that doctors tried for their desperately ill patients, Ivermectin by far stood out to front-line doctors as helpful, and yet it was the only treatment where there was a mass campaign from governments, hospital administrators, academics, drug companies, legacy and social media to prevent people from using it.

Even if it was useless it would do no harm and would not interfere with any other treatment, or lack of treatment as the case may be.

[–]ActuallyNot 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (60 children)

You denied that there have been any in vivo studies of Ivermectin demonstrating antiviral properties. You denied that there have been any in vivo studies of Ivermectin demonstrating antiviral properties.

You're quite right.

Ivermectin appears to be effective against some DNA viruses, at levels reachable in mice, pigs and crayfish. I didn't know that.

Coronaviruses are RNA viruses.

How do you know they're bullshit before you have looked at them?

The first one only has a p of 0.129. I'm ready to go through the next one next.

Earlier in another post you claimed that coma was "common" after Ivermectin overdose.

I included the link to the source for that. The exact words were "No specific antidote for ivermectin exists, so prehospital should be supportive. Coma is common in large overdoses and the airway should be appropriately managed."

That is untrue.

I suspect that you're mistaken about that. But maybe you're straw manning on purpose by changing the front line parapharmacist's words from "in large overdoses" to "after ivermectin overdose".

Nevertheless, coma is common in large overdoses.

Ivermectin overdoses are exceedingly rare in the first place, and even in overdoses coma is even more rare.

Source, please.

the very good safety of Ivermectin;

"Ivermectin is typically safe at the commonly prescribed one-time oral dose of 100-300 mcg/kg."

That's okay safety but not in the self-dosing case.

FLCCC

This is a group of quacks that has advocated for various unapproved, dubious, and ineffective treatments for COVID-19. e.g. hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and other miscellaneous combinations of drugs and vitamins.

the campaign to denigrate and ban the use of ivermectin was a monstrous act.

Only if there's any evidence for it.

Do you think p=0.129 good evidence? I would say at best it needs testing, and only then used to treat people if and when it is proven effective and safe.

[–]weavilsatemyface 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Ivermectin appears to be effective against some DNA viruses, at levels reachable in mice, pigs and crayfish. I didn't know that.

Coronaviruses are RNA viruses.

You skipped the part about mouse hepatitis virus being not just an RNA virus but an actual coronavirus.

How about Ivermectin in golden hamsters with an RNA virus?

So can we please skip the "Ivermectin is not an antiviral" disinformation now?

Not as an anti-viral, but as an anti-inflammatory: here is a study that suggests that Ivermectin can be used to treat lung injury including acute respiratory distress syndrome. Hmmm, I wonder if there is a relationship between Covid and lung injury?

Nevertheless, coma is common in large overdoses.

No it isn't. Large overdoses are rare, and coma even rarer, except under certain conditions which I've already discussed. I've already given supporting links.

Ivermectin overdoses are exceedingly rare in the first place, and even in overdoses coma is even more rare.

Source, please.

Ivermectin is available as an over the counter drug in dozens of countries where parasite infection is common. It is one of the safest drugs in common use. We routinely accept overdose risks from much more dangerous drugs, including some that are available over the counter.

This is a group of quacks that has advocated for various unapproved, dubious, and ineffective treatments

No, it is a group of clinical, front-line doctors who have successfully treated tens of thousands of patients, as opposed to the quacks who have never seen a patient in their life but have pushed dangerous, ineffective but oh so very profitable snake oil treatments with the full backing of regulators who dance to the tune of the pharmaceutical companies that pay their wages.

You are aware that the FDA gets 75% of its funding from the companies it is supposed to regulate? In Australia, the TGA gets almost 100% of its funding from the drug companies it regulates. Conflicts of interest between the regulators and the drug companies are everywhere. The US NIH owns 50% of the patent on the Moderna vaccine. Members of the CDC who are directly responsible for advising on health issues own the patents of the vaccines they recommend. There is an on-going revolving door of people moving from the pharmaceutical companies to the regulators and back again.

Regulatory capture in the FDA is so complete that sometimes the FDA even shocks the pharmaceutical companies themselves by approving drugs even the company had given up on as useless.

That explains the drugs approved for treating Covid in the USA (circled in red).

[–]weavilsatemyface 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (58 children)

Do you think p=0.129 good evidence?

On its own, its not great evidence, but its still good enough to take it seriously. Low p-values are physics envy, and we shouldn't take them too seriously. They are easy to manipulate, easy to misunderstand, frequently misinterpreted, and don't tell us whether an experimental study is either true or important. They don't even tell us whether a study is credible, since there are so many ways that studies can be truly awful and yet still get p < 0.05.

Generally speaking, a poor p-value just means your study was too small to eliminate the risk of certain statistical flukes. It doesn't mean that one of those flukes occurred, or that the effect seen isn't real. It certainly doesn't mean that the null hypothesis is proven, or that there is "no difference" between the two groups. Anyone who interprets p > 0.05 as meaning there is no difference between the groups fails statistics -- and that includes many professional scientists and medical researchers.

[–]ActuallyNot 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (57 children)

On its own, its not great evidence, but its still good enough to take it seriously.

So more study needed before recommending the treatment?

I agree. Let's go on to the next one. "Results of a systematic review and meta‑analysis of early studies on ivermectin in SARS‑CoV‑2 infection"

This paper looks at the mean time to viral clearance. It does not look at any measure related to safety or effectiveness, except where effectiveness means only a reduction in time to viral clearance.

So it doesn't, of itself, say anything about whether ivermectin is safe, nor does it say anything about any change in risk of adverse health events, such as death or hospitalization.

Agree?

[–]weavilsatemyface 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (56 children)

So more study needed before recommending the treatment?

In the context of a pandemic where The Science™ was claiming massive death tolls due to the disease, when supposedly there were no good treatments and everyone was terrified that the hospital systems would collapse? No.

In the context of a mild cold-like illness that very few people will be sick enough to actually need medical treatment? Sure, why not?

Remember the context: in the early months of the pandemic, hospitals were literally forcing patients into ventilators even if they could still breathe without assistance, in order to protect the medical staff from Covid infection, knowing full well that intubation is a very dangerous procedure that will kill many of those patients. (Especially when hospitals failed to treat the secondary bacterial pneumonia when it invariably occurred.) It completely failed to protect the staff, or keep the patients alive, but that was the policy. There was literally no evidence in favour of this policy, except for China's insistence that that's what they did. Never mind that during the first SARS epidemic it killed more patients than it saved.

Governments were panicking that they would run out of ventilators and were even contemplating getting hospitals to jerry-rig their own. Here in Australia, we ordered thousands of ventilators for the expected flood of Covid cases, which are now sitting in a warehouse unused because front line doctors soon realized that intubation was doing to SARS-2 patients exactly what it had done to SARS patients: killing them.

(If you are unaware, intubation is not a minor medical procedure. It's not like wearing an oxygen mask. It is an incredibly invasive, expensive and dangerous procedure that requires the patient be anesthetized for the entire period they are on ventilation, a tube pushed into their lungs, and a machine pumping high-pressure oxygen into the lungs. They cannot eat or drink and need to be fed by drip. Even at the best of times intubation does severe damage to the lungs, with some doctors estimating five weeks recovery for every week on ventilation, and it has a very high chance of secondary bacterial pneumonia. But that's okay. We have counted every single one of those deaths as a Covid death. Iatrogenesis? What's that?)

So in that context, there was almost nothing to lose by giving front line medical staff a prophylactic dose of Ivermectin, or giving people a "Covid care package" containing a couple of doses of vitamin D, ivermectin, zinc, hydroxychloroquine, dexamethasone or whatever the local authorities thought was best. Cheap drugs that are well tolerated, in small quantities to lower the risk of overdose. That's what a lot of developing countries did, and it seemed to work very well for them. Everyone was sure that Covid would run through the global south like the Black Death, but it didn't happen. It was the west that suffered the highest excess mortality.

Everyone knows that you have to use antivirals as early as possible, during the active viral replication phase, or they are useless, and yet every early treatment was rejected. In Australia, our government's official instructions for anyone with a positive Covid test was to go home, take a painkiller, and wait for it to get worse. Only if and when you could not longer breathe should you ask for medical treatment.

Even Remdesivir, a proven antiviral, was given approval but only in a way that was guaranteed to be useless -- and everyone knew it. Even the EUA from the FDA pointed out that Remdesivir "inhibits viral RNA synthesis, and as such, the drug would most likely work early in the infection cycle when SARS-CoV-2 replication is occurring at a high level" and that "It is not clear that remdesivir will have much of an impact on viral replication this late into the infection cycle".

So the FDA knew, and Gilead (the drug's owner) knew, that Remdesivir was being given in a way that couldn't work to reduce Covid illness. This explains why RCTs of Remdesivir give such shitty results.

Nevertheless despite the terrible results in Remdesivir studies, and the massive amount of kidney damage and renal failure, Remdesivir has FDA approval, and most of the world has followed them. Funny about that.