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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

NIH is _always_ sponsoring clinical trials. That's literally their job.

We also happen to have months worth of studies of IVM already. Given what has happened in literally the last dozen studies, we have a good idea of what will probably happen in that study.

That's 16 high quality studies on IVM already in the link I posted above. Do you think the results of study #17 will change things?

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I mean, maybe it will. But I wouldn't bet on it. Studies in science have this thing where they usually replicate results.

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I wouldn't describe any of the ivermectin studies conducted so far as "high quality". All were relatively small and most had other flaws or limitations. The link you posted above is missing recent studies, some of which show statistically significant positive results.

https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/13/6/989

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.21.21260223v...

https://journals.lww.com/americantherapeutics/fulltext/2021/...

So we just don't know, and it's too early to place any bets one way or the other. That's how science works.

It's not at all too early to place bets; if there is no good data showing that Ivermectin works, we should assume the null hypothesis, that it does nothing.

Otherwise we would have to maintain the same sort of equipose about literally ever possible substance - peanut butter could be an effective COVID treatment, until someone does a proper study, we just don't know.

Be aware that quite a few of the ivermectin studies contain fraud or dodgy data.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/ivermecti...

https://gidmk.medium.com/is-ivermectin-for-covid-19-based-on...

Not to even mention that the only realistic effect it would have is blunting the effects of IL-6. There’s better options for antagonizing IL-6 with less of a side effect profile, specifically tocilizumab and sarilumab.

If you refer to blocking nuclear import, ORF6 in SARS-CoV and other sarbecoviruses already does that to begin with. Adding SARS-CoV ORF6 to a MHV model actually made it more pathogenic, so there is little benefit to not blocking nuclear import.

Here are some associated material on the topic:

https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/JVI.01012-07

https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jvi.01308-07

https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/JVI.79.17.11335-11...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221112472...

We can generalize that a bit and say that most medical research on all topics contains some dodgy data.

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

The quality of COVID-19 research has been pretty bad across the board with researchers racing to publish and journals doing weak reviews. But I haven't seen any credible allegations of fraud against the specific studies that I linked above.

There are multiple other hypothesized mechanisms of action beyond antagonizing IL-6. It's not completely clear what, if anything, is actually happening in vivo.

https://journals.lww.com/americantherapeutics/fulltext/2021/...

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