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Comment by danaris | Hacker News Reader

Penicillin is also a highly-available, incredibly safe medication that's been given billions of times.

It still doesn't make any sense to try giving it to COVID patients, because there's no reasonable way it would actually help them.

Just because a particular medication is unlikely to kill you doesn't mean it's a good idea to promote its use against a particular threat, when that threat is completely unrelated to what the medication actually does. Penicillin is an antibacterial. Ivermectin is an antiparasitic. Neither of these are likely to be helpful against a virus.

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Ivermectin has research going back to the mid-2000's showing it has anti-viral properties.

EDIT: Thought I'd come across a study indicating that from 2006, but I can't seem to find it. Let's settle on mid 2010's instead because the point is mostly that there was research showing anti-viral properties before the pandemic started, and therefore it was a very logical thing for frontline doctors to try on their patients.

There is a known mechanism by which ivermectin is expected to work against covid - it inhibits the protease family of enzymes. Incedentally, Pfizer is developing a new (read: expensive and on patent) covid drug which also happens to work via the same mechanism. So the fact that ivermectin is an antiparasitic is irrelevant, as is the comparison to penicillin.

Sorry, but you are wrong. Antibiotics are used in the treatment of severe viral infections, because your body is not able to fight secondary infections with bacteria very well. Antibiotics are given to help your body in cases of bad viral infections. Covid-19 is no exception. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...

The point is: there are more mechanisms by which our body can be helped fight covid, and the Ivermectin proponents say that it works only in the early days of the infection, not like a full cure.

There are more ways to fight this disease, you are aware that the virus itself is not what's killing most people, right? Most people die because their body overreacts to the virus and damages the lungs (that is why standard treatment includes steroids to calm down the antibodies). A drug doesn't have to kill off the virus to win.

I have no idea if Ivermectin is helpful or not, but the trashing in the media (even calling it horse dewormer - while it's a human drug as well) before there is any proof against it is just bad, it makes me think there are ulterior motives for this.

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