Ivermectin reduces SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA by 5000-fold within 48 hours
papers.ssrn.com
papers.ssrn.com
Compared to 1,918 conventionally treated patients we observed a survival benefit for ivermectin (mortality rate 18.6% vs 7.7%; HR 0.18, 95% CI (0.07-0.48), log rank (Mantel-Cox) p<0.001). The hospital length of stay was 15.7 +/- 8.1 days vs 10.9 +/- 6.1 days, p<0.001 and intensive care unit length of stay 8.2 +/- 6.2 days vs 6.0 +/- 3.9 days, p<0.001 respectively.
In COVID-19 illness, critically ill patients with lung injury requiring mechanical ventilation may benefit from administration of Ivermectin. We noted a lower mortality and reduced healthcare resource use in those treated with ivermectin. These observations should not be considered definitive and allow for translation of a hypothesis from bench to bedside which will require confirmation in a controlled clinical trial setting.
It is criminal how overly conservative the FDA is being with potential COVID treatments, especially ones that have fewer side effects than Chloroquine.
Ivermectin + Doxycycline was suggested as an alternative to Chloroquine + Z-pack because it does not cause cardiac issues and can be given for home use more easily. Meaning people could start treatment before going into the hospital.
The risk management at the FDA is criminal. When a pandemic is raging and you have drugs that have been studied for 30-50 years the risk of allowing doctors to use their own judgement is so low, when the benefit could be very high.
What if it prevented even just 10% of hospitalizations? How many millions of dollars could be saved with a $3 drug?
Instead the FDA sends out a letter last week telling doctors not to treat Covid with Ivermectin. Insanity.
Individual doctors should be allowed and encouraged to try any well known, throughly studied drug when we are bleeding trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, and thousands of lives.
We have reached a point where overly conservative risk management is literally killing people.
Physicians can and do use drugs off-label at their discretion all the time; the FDA is not charged with regulating that. (They do, however, regulate the advertising of a drug with claims which are unsupported by clinical trials.)
Would it be possible to use it for home medication?
That this very widely used drug is actually effective against coronaviruses and we never noticed before.
OR
That this drug isn't effective against other coronaviruses but just this one specifically.
Ivermectin is a worm treatment. A variety of human diseases (and some non-human diseases) that involve parasitic worms can be treated with this relatively cheaply (but not Guinea Worm interestingly). It's basically poison for the worms but mammals mostly seem to tolerate it very well. Because it's so cheap it's a go to option even in cases where maybe another drug would be better if money was no object.
So it'd be weird if we never noticed it cures the common cold for example. When its given out as a mass intervention in places that have endemic worm infection, the population report the expected upsides like they feel healthier or they have better sex (likely placebo effect) plus some things connected to worms (it cures other worm infections they had, because the drug doesn't care which worms you were targeting) but we don't get people saying "Oh my cough cleared up" or "That's weird, now I don't have a fever" in data I've looked at.
Now if it doesn't work on other viruses from this family but it does work on this one that's one hell of a coincidence.
Maybe I'm missing something, it could be that over in some corner of the world they've found that this drug has some very particular effect that exactly matches what you'd want from something to treat COVID-19, but otherwise this is a pretty crazy thing to find.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30452439
I suspect it isn't touted as a cure for the common cold because the common cold is rarely severe enough to merit prescription drugs.
This blurb from drugs.com gives a very high-level overview of how it theoretically works:
To get into the nucleus the viral proteins need to bind a cargo transporter which lets them in.
Ivermectin can block the cargo transporter, so the viral proteins can’t get into the nucleus.
This is how the scientists believe Ivermectin works against SARS-CoV-2 virus.