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 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.

[–]ActuallyNot 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (55 children)

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.

A 1 in 8 change that its no better than nothing, with the papers that I linked in my comment above finding that it doesn't do shit, doesn't cinch it.

You need a more powerful study.

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?

Because it has side effects that would be better to not risk if it doesn't do shit.

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.

I don't remember that context. I would be surprised if they intubated patients except if their oxygenation levels were dangerously low, and they needed mechanical ventilation.

It completely failed to protect the staff, or keep the patients alive, but that was the policy.

You might need to link me to a copy of this policy.

"Results of a systematic review and meta‑analysis of early studies on ivermectin in SARS‑CoV‑2 infection" does not look at any measure directly interpretable as safety or effectiveness. Agree?

[–]weavilsatemyface 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (54 children)

I don't remember that context. I would be surprised if they intubated patients except if their oxygenation levels were dangerously low, and they needed mechanical ventilation.

Here's a small reminder of the panic and hysteria in the early days of Covid:

Keep in mind that medical staff are people too, and just as likely to panic as everyone else. Especially when they are being fed misinformation.

The heaviest use of intubation was in Wuhan (where the reports are heavily censored by the Chinese government, and we have no real way of trusting their case numbers), northern Italy, and New York. Not well reported at the time, but very influential, a DARPA biowarfare expert went to Wuhan (escaping via a black-market smuggler just before lockdown) and gave glowing reports on the success of Wuhan's use of mechanical ventilators to US authorities. By March 2020, ventilators were seen as the standard care for anyone with Covid, and everyone wanted them:

Inexperienced doctors were making life-and-death decisions about a dangerous medical procedure they knew nothing about.

The massive spike in deaths in New York and Italy set the tone for the entire pandemic. Around the world, a combination of malign Chinese influence, panicking medical staff worried that non-invasive ventilation (oxygen masks) could infect them, and pseudo-scientific theories about "patient self-induced lung injury" lead to an over-reliance on intubation for Covid-positive patients even when they could breath normally.

Within months, doctors started to push back:

and most, but not all, hospitals stopped or at least reduced the use of invasive ventilators. But the damage was done: not just thousands unnecessarily dead, but the carnage made it seem like Covid was much more deadly than it actually is. Looking back, it seems likely that ventilators killed 30,000 Americans in April 2020 alone.

For many Covid patients, the simple practice of lying the patient on their front ("prone positioning", as is done for cystic fibrosis suffers) can improve their breathing drastically, without the need for mechanical ventilation.

[–]ActuallyNot 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (53 children)

So in summary there has been a lot of discussion about the decision to ventilate wrt the outcomes for the patient, but no suggestion that "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," either in policy or practice.

[–]weavilsatemyface 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (34 children)

Username checks out.

[–]weavilsatemyface 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (17 children)

no suggestion that "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,"

The Consensus statement from the Safe Airway Society says: "Early intubation should be considered to prevent the additional risk to staff of emergency intubation and to avoid prolonged use of high flow nasal oxygen or non‐invasive ventilation."

"Protecting healthcare workers from SARS-CoV-2 infection" recommends "Prioritise a planned early intubation rather than an emergency intubation, at high risk of contagion".

"A plea for avoiding systematic intubation in severely hypoxemic patients with COVID-19-associated respiratory failure" comments "the initial consensus was to start invasive mechanical ventilation as soon as possible due to the overwhelming number of patients in respiratory failure presenting at the same time in a hospital and to prevent the risk of hypoxic cardiac arrest; avoidance of high-flow nasal cannula (HFNC) to reduce respiratory droplet aerosolization for healthcare workers in what was seen as “inevitable” intubations."

Remember the context. Everyone was panicking about this new disease, and doctors and nurses were not immune to this. Hospitals were dealing with shortages of both staff and PPE. Many nurses and doctors were themselves getting infected, and some were dying. Doctors with no experience in respiratory illness and artifical ventilation were put in charge of Covid patients.

(E.g. one of the most ferocious defenders of the standard Covid narrative, especially the practice of intubation, is the oncologist David Gorski, who was put in charge of intubating Covid patients during the darkest days of the pandemic and watched many of his ventilated patients die.)

It was a shitstorm of chaos, mismanagement and fear. Putting aside the emotional claims of "murder", many patients died due to malpractice and neglect. Hospital administrators enforced harmful treatment protocols against the advice of front-line doctors.

Even if nobody wrote down an official policy to intubate early to protect staff, it as easy for doctors to rationalise the decision: "they're going to need intubation in a day or three, its safer for everyone and better for them if we do it straight away". Especially when they are displaying "happy hypoxemia". There were a multitude of papers coming out, written in a rush by overstressed doctors at the front-line and accepted by journals with the minimum of peer review, claiming that early intubation of patients was better. The risk and severity of ventilator-induced injury was downgraded. The controversial theory of "Patient self-induced lung injury" was accepted as proven. Prone positioning was forgotten in many hospitals.

And let's not forget that over 40% of Covid deaths on ventilators were due to untreated bacterial pneumonia.