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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

Ever have one of those experiences in life where you write people off as "conspiracy nuts" until you have to deal with the issue yourself so in desperation you try their crazy?

Well there's no way to convince the disbelievers but Ivermectin is already a cure for covid, weak and imperfect but it definitely does something. I know and believe only because it personally saved me from death's door.

Don't try mentioning this on twitter or facebook though, you'll get your account blocked/banned.

Funding for a more targeted and powerful cure definitely should happen but there is something really really weird in life when you see something being buried that you know is different than the official stroy.

Doesn't help that every quack is coming out of the woodwork to try to cash in on it somehow, not by profit from the drug itself but their only 15 minutes of "fame". But there has to be someway to fix that signal-to-noise ratio when it comes to saving people's lives.

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So you took it when you had Covid and you didn’t die so you conclude it works? You realize that the most likely thing to happen for anyone at almost any stage of Covid is to actually get better right? You took a powerful anti parasitic drug and decided the default course of action was the result of this drug?

This is like saying you broke your arm and prayed to god and you’re alive so god saved you.

look I'm not going to sit here and argue with some random person on the internet (and fwiw I'm atheist) I was literally in your disbelieving shoes and I still don't know how to convince people or if I even want to waste the effort trying

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7261036/figure/...

just sit back for a moment and consider the possibility you are being lied to not by consipiracy but rather much easier apathy and ivermectin actually has proven antiviral properties that actually do something, just not specifically targeted to covid19 so it's not a "miracle" by any means

I was not just sick with covid, I was at death's door. Steroids were not doing anything/enough and pneumonia/clots were destroying my lungs. This was very early on in the pandemic and there were no treatments available.

Again, I've got nothing to prove, I don't expect people are going to listen, I'm just putting this on the record. Something's up with this being not just dismissed but buried.

Okay not everyone’s going to blatantly disregard any reasonable hypothesis. Now that you have linked to articles it is at the least, reasonable. I went through the review and it’s clear no one has actually tested it systematically in vivo. A lot of drugs have antiviral activity in vitro, I know because I used to do those assays. Let’s just say that it’s worth testing this drug in Covid patients at the least.

I used to believe IVIG will also work on Covid patients, but given the small number of studies that have been done and the fact that no one noticed any effects accidentally suggests that there’s probably not much of a fire under that smoke. Two of the most important qualities one needs as a scientist is to embrace crazy but reasonable hypotheses and drop them the moment it becomes clear they are not full true.

Please also note that The fundamental issue with Covid is that it’s actually mostly mild. The majority of people don’t get serious from it. By the moment you do get serious from it, no drugs work anymore. That’s why dexa is the best medicine till now and no ones bothering with the antibody cocktails even after it’s proven to be worthwhile. By the time people are seriously sick I doubt even ivermectin would work that well.

Anyways glad it worked for you and hope someone does test this drug systematically so we will know for sure and sooner rather than later.

The way to convince the disbelievers is with large randomized controlled trials.

And it's not like Ivermectin wasn't studied. In randomized control trials and was found to be probably ineffective. Still being studied by various people. But also likely that even if it were effective the doses required would be too toxic for humans. So not a wise thing to spread around as "health advice" and presumably why Facebook etc have clamped down on this.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_drug_repurposing_rese...

Also if it worked, I'm pretty sure Merck (the creator of Ivermectin) would be all over selling it for that purpose.

it's off patent for decades now, it's less than 10 cents a pill in the third world and less than a dollar a pill in usa, there's no money to be made off it, which might be the problem, I don't know

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7261036/figure/...

also see ivmmeta for studies, endless studies

I'm not going to sit here with tinfoil hat, I don't really care anymore because we have the vax now, but something was up with the way this is being buried, not just dismissed but literally buried, it's weird.

I don't see it as buried at all. Multiple studies done. All out in the open.

It's so easy to bypass the "but it's off-patent and therefore not profitable"

A) homochiral enantiomers

B) analogues

C) cocktails

"Our formulation of Norivermectin plus Foobarmanolib is 10% more effective and has 3.5% fewer incidence of side effects. The small increase in effectiveness is projected to decrease hospital stays by 4.5 h, leading to 2 million lives potentially saved."

Boom, profitable, patentable COVID cure. Doctors could still prescribe plain ivermectin off-label but would be incentivized by pharma reps to sell name brand.

Norivermectin and Foobarmanolib are hypothetical, of course. But the trick is real, see escitalopram, armodafinil, aripiprazole + antidepressants, etc.

ivmmeta probably has all the data you want

Could you be more specific about your experience with Ivermectin? Its side-effects can be pretty serious, right?

It's virtually impossible overdose or have bad effects from ivermectin, it's not that HCQ nonsense. Ivermectin is even given to people to self-dose in countries for it's original anti-parasitic purpose without fear of them using too much.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7261036/figure/...

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