Major study of Ivermectin finds 'no effect whatsoever'
msn.com
msn.com
https://dcricollab.dcri.duke.edu/sites/NIHKR/KR/GR-Slides-08...
A fact that the site above somehow doesn’t consider noteworthy.
> But the drug’s promise as a treatment for the virus is in serious doubt after the Elgazzar study was pulled from the Research Square website on Thursday “due to ethical concerns". Research Square did not outline what those concerns were.
Emphasis mine.
It then goes on to quote a man claiming all sorts of fraudulent accusations with no actual sources for anything demonstrating the validity of the accusations. I'm not saying the paper is not fraudulent, it could be, I'm saying I'd like to see more than some guy saying it is and a journal not releasing a similar statement.
That's a far cry from "proven to be a fraud" as you say.
I want to actually know if this treatment works, not emotionally decide beforehand one way or another based on my attitude towards the vaccines. It seems I'm in the minority here. If only you knew how frustrating it is. So I'll read your links, I'll read studies and stories saying it doesn't work, I'll read the FLCCWHYTHEFUCKCANTYOUJUSTTYPEFLCCC and I'll look at methodologies of all of it and figure it out for myself.
If you're going to claim fraud, a strong claim, make sure your source doesn't explicitly state that it is not known whether it is fraud or not. From where I sit, both you and the person you're arguing with have picked your horses and are no longer concerned with the truth. I will say though, at least they're arguing use of a mostly harmless, not experimental medicine that has other positive effects whether it works for covid or not.
This additional analysis on the data [0] to me appears to be of significant concern to the validity of the study and suggests fraud on the behalf of the investigators, or at the very least significant methodological failures with study design and data capture which trickled down into ultimately a flawed the study which at the very least is highly suspect to largely useless in adding knowledge to the question of whether ivermectin is a beneficial treatment for the COVID Arsenal. In an era where the politicisation of COVID and it’s treatments is at such a high level, and the thirst for polluting the discourse so high from bad actors, all players in this space need to be attempting to uphold the highest levels of scientific rigour and unfortunately it appears that standard is not being delivered upon here.
There are many other sources that you can follow from there from investigators (using the term in the academic/scientific sense) reviewing the data and paper that your keen interest in following and reviewing the evidence yourself will lead you to should you so desire
[0] https://steamtraen.blogspot.com/2021/07/Some-problems-with-t...
https://trialsitenews.com/bill-and-melinda-gates-fund-global...
I also wonder what the cost of this study was.
So I dismissed HCQ and Ivermectin out of hand.
[0]: Interferon was on the cover of TIME in ~1980 as a cancer cure.
(EDIT: but I'm not an MD, just a crazy person who likes reading pubmed, so my views are pure superstition)
I guess you have never heard of Viagra.
>This drug has multiple activities, one of which is to alkalise the phagolysosome, which hampers the low-pH-dependent steps of viral replication, including fusion and uncoating. Other mechanisms of antiviral activity are poorly explained.
Which sounds like limited evidence.
You would be surprised how many drugs have an unclear mechanism of action. If you think we know everything in Biology you might want to revise your judgment.
Furthermore, most chemical engineering/pharmacy students learn that with today's regulations, acetaminophen would've never been approved. Do we think that's a good thing? I don't.
That said, I still very much agree with the parent poster's view.
Once they get hits, they run more big assays, winnowing down likely tox issues or off-target effects, then try them in animal models, then eventually get to Phase I.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016635422...
In general small molecule drugs often hit multiple different pathways. It's not reasonable to put them into neat little buckets.
I suppose what this underscores is: biology is immensely complex and first-principles thinking can only get you so far. Eventually, you need to test things with a big RCT to know what's going on.
[0] https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/cancer-in-gene...
Here is a list of 68 drugs that are known to work, but apparently we don't know how or why:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Drugs_with_unknown_me...
I mean, it sometimes works, and obviously it's a very attractive idea (no need to wait on slow trials; drug is already assessed for safety) but precisely because it's such an attractive idea people seem to be overly credulous about it.
There is a ton of politically driven disinformation around. Brazilian president Bolsonaro pushed both as treatments while, we now know, government representatives were stalling direct purchases from labs while negotiating vaccines with intermediaries in order to profit from sales to the government.
Which was the excuse they gave when they designed actual drug trials that gave patients lethal doses and ignored the testimony of doctors who found it useful at sub-lethal doses. And therefore a drug used by tens of millions of people a year(if not more) for the past five decades was declared too dangerous to use.
Addendum: I wound up arguing with someone that thus-and-such a trial was actually using what was considered an overdose in 2017 and they would not look at the entry in the PDR.
Plus it still includes the large Egyptian study by Els-Alam et al that was retracted last month.
> 7/15: Elgazzar et al. was retracted and has been removed.
It’s more to the point and less inflammatory to focus on the mounting evidence that it’s just not an effective COVID-19 therapeutic.
Derek Lowe wrote an informative post discussing the lackluster nature of the current body of evidence after the big Egyptian study was retracted for fraudulent data the other week.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/07/iv...
(A) not published (B) not peer reviewed (C) not science (see a and b) (D) not actually studying the treatment protocols recommended by the flccc
This is not so much a study as it is tracking the outcomes of someone taking their pets' heartworm medicine without any advice from their doctor. It's farcical.
Farm supply stores are running out of Horse ivermectin due to people going and buying it to try and self-treat their COVID. https://slate.com/technology/2021/08/ivermectin-covid-cure-f...
However:
> The trial originally tested the results from a single Ivermectin dose in January this year, but was later changed to involve one daily dose for three days of 400 micrograms of the drug for every kilogram
So the dose was actually within the range your FLCCWTF recommends, which is “0.4–0.6 mg/kg”. Only it was given for three days instead of five, with the difference easily explained by one group choosing the regular dose that Ivermectin has been proven mostly safe at.
If it has no effect when taken for three days, it isn’t going to do wonders when taken for five.
Moreover, as to the claim that the flccc is recommending ivermectin with no proof it works; they have 60+ peer-reviewed studies showing that it works, a couple un-reviewed studies by avowed skeptics which show that it does nothing, and zero studies ever in the history of the drug showing it to be harmful. That is better than can be said for any other purported treatment for COVID.
Without a randomized controlled trial, they have nothing but speculation as to what is effective or not.
> Moreover, as to the claim that the flccc is recommending ivermectin with no proof it works; they have 60+ peer-reviewed studies showing that it works
Note that meta-analysis of those published studies shows zero knowable effect for Ivermectin. https://www.cochrane.org/CD015017/INFECTN_ivermectin-prevent...
Like this one? https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.31.21258081v... Or you can go find one of the 21 others FLCCC cites (excluding Elgazzar's).
I hope you didn't bury those goalposts too deep as you'll need to move them again.
Meanwhile the meta-review you cite is the one that managed to "find" only 18 trials and those somehow just happened to be the ones showing neutral results; no one has yet figured out how they somehow accidentally missed all the studies with positive findings cited by the FLCCC. Maybe in a few years there will be a peer-reviewed RCT explaining this apparent selective blindness, which is the most alarming epidemic happening right now.
Look, I don't know what to make of all the conflicting evidence. But I sure as hell know what to make of all the people lying about the evidence.
Quote; “ This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.”
Did you read the top comment on your link? “There are a number of concerns with the methodology and consistency in this study: [. . .] might be true that Ivermectin does reduce viral shedding time in mild to moderate COVID-19. However this study is not rigorous enough, includes amendments which could have introduced bias, and has methodological issues. In my opinion it should not be accepted as good evidence that ivermectin reduces viral loads and could reduce isolation time in patients with COVID-19.“
> hope you didn't bury those goalposts too deep as you'll need to move them again.
My point is FLCCC assertion is meaningless. Why cite to them and not direct to trials or meta analysis of trials?
> Meanwhile the meta-review you cite is the one that managed to "find" only 18 trials
As with any high quality meta analysis it describes their search strategy for finding and selecting studies for inclusion: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
Notice how in your own two posts you’ve switched the number dramatically? ‘they have 60+ peer-reviewed studies showing that it works’ vs now ‘find one of the 21 others FLCCC cites (excluding Elgazzar's).’ This is a good demonstration of how easily the number can be changed when you use a different search method and less or more filtering.