Ivermectin shows that not all science is worth following
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I live in the Missouri Ozarks, near Branson, and I am surrounded by them. I've been following the use of ivermectin since around June 2020 and still have not seen any definitive proof it works better than a placebo.
But I did suspect there might be a run on it over a year ago so I bought an extra package of it for my two burros. Just a few days ago I had to use it. About a month ago I asked an employee at the feed store I buy it at how their stock of it was holding up. He told me "We're selling out within 24 hours of getting a shipment in."
It won't matter if rigerous studies determine it doesn't work at all, they won't care. These are folks who are still refusing to get vaxxed, wear a mask, and social distance. They don't care that over 670,000 of their fellow citizens have been killed by it here. They don't believe that either. They're "Mad as hell" and they're "not going to take it anymore".
Are we still just straight repeating govt propaganda to scare the general public? Did Colin Powell's death not make it extremely clear how inflated these totals are? Gen. Powell was 84 with Parkinson's and an incurable blood cell cancer (and fully vaccinated, btw). But sure, Covid "killed" him. Chalk up one more to help justify the lockdowns and eliminating your freedoms.
Gen. Powell's cause of death was covid. He was in several high risk groups.
If he got ran over by a speeding car and died the next day would you insist his cause of death was his age?
Like the article says: science is slow, pandemics are fast.
[1] https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminE-HealthProfessiona... [2] https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-shoul... [3] https://emergency.cdc.gov/han/2021/pdf/CDC_HAN_449.pdf
So just like the time required to create the COVID vaccines that are "safe" and "effective"?
Snark aside, I'm exhausted hearing how hard it is to do some things, but other's are "science" and don't warrant further exploration.
In the eyes of the world governments, the debate is already over. There isn't clear evidence that it works. There's also a straightforward answer already. Whether you believe this is because they're subservient to Big Pharma or because they actually are looking at the science, they're certainly acting as if they've seen all the data they need to see.
In the eyes of the ivermectin proponents, they just need to do the right study. The debate won't be over until it shows the answer they're looking for.
Nobody is saying, "If I see this evidence, I'll believe it; if I see that evidence, I'll believe the opposite." This is basic grade-school-simplified-scientific-method science. You're supposed to define a hypothesis, design an experiment, and then stick to what the experiment shows. But here, some have already finished their experiment, and others just want to keep running experiments.
(And no, it's not a cheap preventive treatment. Ivermectin tablets cost a couple of dollars per tablet. That adds up to be far more expensive than the vaccines. It would be a cheap reactive treatment, but even assuming it works, if you're not using it as a preventive treatment, you're letting people get awfully sick and spread the disease around, it's just that they can get out of the hospital reliably. That's not a solution.)
If the odds were higher, the government could grant monopoly rights to a willing pharma company. In fact they did this with another very old treatment for gout – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colchicine One company was granted monopoly, they did studies, confirmed that cochicine is effective, gathered more information about safety. It also lead to significant price increase (2000%).
I don't think any serious pharma company would be willing to accept such an offer for ivermectine.
Furthermore, people who are not convinced, will find a reason to doubt the new study as well.
[1] https://www.togethertrial.com/
[2] https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04920942
There are already a number of high quality studies, and they are interpreted through people's own lens of preconception. The article points out a real problem in medical literature, but the public perception problem is much worse. Medical literature is at least trying to reach a truthful consensus.
The article does not give me any hope that medical literature is "trying" anything.
So there are plenty of problems, but of an entirely different character from the outright propaganda by non-scientists practicing ideological confirmation bias.
However, I don't know how the trial stacks up against prior work in terms of dose, and the estimated completion date is DEC 2022.
https://www.nih.gov/research-training/medical-research-initi...
How about just properly reporting and studying the actual facts from one of the very large real world trials, like the one in India?
Also, said company, Merck, is in the process of releasing a new drug that will cost in the thousands.
Meanwhile, the government pays about $20 per dose of the vaccine. The difference between $12 and $20 is not substantial.
Re: vaccines, JP Morgan estimated Pfizer alone will make $100B from vaccines. I don't think manufacturing Ivermectin is complex enough that it would net ANY profit, the effort would be organized completely differently.
Lastly, I don't think this is a conspiracy, either for money or politics, going for vaccines was just the easiest sell for both people and governments, and doing anything different would have been extremely difficult (see Sweden and lockdown policies).
This is not true. Governments were and are being hammered by their inability to manage COVID. There is a massive incentive to find a therapeutic that can treat the infected rather than just a vaccine, which is how crazes surrounding Ivermectin and other unproven therapeutics got started to begin with. Not only that, but generic therapeutics that could be easily manufactured and transported to poorer nations are clearly the best option to solve this problem. Vaccines were the hardest sell and the worst option for governments given their long developmental timeline, the FUD surrounding them, and the clear complexities surrounding distribution and scarcity.
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/28/covid-telehealth-hydroxy...
They call out Simone Gold for posting anti-vax content on Twitter by retweeting Joe Rogan's experience that he got covid and treated it with a cocktail of drugs including Ivermectin. This first hand account of recovery was apparently not true because... Ivermectin isn't shown to be effective.
Joe Rogan's treatment is a single anecdote, and invermectin was one component of a "cocktail." He recovered, yes, but there's more noise than signal and most people recover from covid without any treatment.
How then do you explain the numerous off-patent drugs that are currently in widespread production by the major drug companies?
Then have this other drug without patent that could do the same? or 80%?
People got enraged about the Epi-Pen patent price gouging years back imagine what would happen if some rigorous study confirm that ivermectin is as good as or better?
This is a sample on how media distorts the narrative.
How about just properly reporting and studying the actual facts that some scientists will just make shit up, publication bias exists, and they can draw the wrong conclusions, like that one on Ivermectin?
P.S. I would be happy if Ivermectin turned out to work, but statistically you expect a few false positives to emerge from doctors in the field doing small studies that agree and appear to point to a cure. If Ivermectin was as effective as say, antihistamine pills, you would get a flood of agreement.
This is not true. Keep an eye out for TOGETHER[1], I-TECH[2], PRINCIPLE[3] and ACTIV-6[4] results (with TOGETHER already having dropped IVM for futility)
[1] https://www.togethertrial.com/
[2] https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04920942
Compare that with the vaccine, which costs governments a couple tens of dollars, but people get at most four shots per year.
I agree that there isn't money in licensing the ivermectin patent, but there is absolutely a lot of money to be made in manufacturing ivermectin itself, convincing people to take preventative ivermectin, and meeting worldwide demand. And every single pharmaceutical company can play that game - not just a couple of very rich ones in rich countries with research labs capable of making their own covid vaccine. Frankly, it should be a little bit surprising that not even one of them has tried this strategy.
As far as the "real world trial" of India, the peak of their delta wave roughly coinciding with an updated treatment guideline including ivermectin is hardly strong evidence.
A) Correlation isn't causation.
B) An updated treatment guideline doesn't indicate people were actually taking ivermectin.
C) Using it as a treatment (i.e. after a case occurs) can't possibly be responsible for preventing cases. There was some buzz about it being offered as a prophylactic, but it never panned out.
D) The peak of the wave coinciding with the update necessitates that the reproduction rate was dropping before the update
Further, just look at Peru for a clear demonstration that it isn't the miracle some would like to believe it is.
You’d think the poorest parts of Africa with the worst medical systems in the world would be hit harder, but they’re not. And it’s probably not genetic since the African diaspora is hit hard by covid.
My surface-level, limited perception in a couple countries I have friends/family in (Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria) is that there's little to no testing, but also not apparently a hospital emergency. Then again, these same people also seem to go to their local hospital for what is understood as typhoid and malaria every year or two at least. As a born and raised North American I get told by them that's normal.
I follow news out of South Africa. COVID really is a thing there. It is a big deal there. There have been curfews. (1)
> where everyone takes ivermectin anyway,
No; they don't all take ivermectin every day at breakfast.
> You’d think the poorest parts of Africa with the worst medical systems in the world would be hit harder, but they’re not.
You would think that, yes. it's actually interesting: when the pandemic dawned in early 2020, the medical systems of US and UK were thought best prepared to deal with it (2). That clearly has not been the reality since then. (3)
Why is that? One theory is that recent experience with disease control matters. UK and US were complacent about controlling a virulent pandemic. Whereas asian counties with good economies and recent experience with SARS did very well at doing it again. (4)
African countries did .. not as bad as you might assume, given "the worst medical systems in the world", maybe because of a population the skews younger than the west, and maybe because of experience with various diseases from HIV+TB (In South Africa and other countries) to Ebola (in Central Africa)
1) https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/south-africas-president...
2) https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/11/countries-preparednes...
3) https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/all-bets-are-measu...
4) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/027507402094370...
False premise. Africa as a whole trended a lot like Europe and North America until late 2020, but the late 2020 to 2021 reopening explosion that the latter two places had was replaced with a slower gradual growth with a later and lower peak in Africa, which has been fairly hard hit compared to the rest of the world outside Europe and North America.
I'm not sure that I buy that; cities in Africa have large dense slums, where it's going to be hard to distance. And crowded transport to/from work.
https://www.kulturevulturez.com/story-south-africa-slums-gan...
It is truly an indictment of our time that this is deemed a useful standard of evidence.
The people pushing the vaccine are the only people who have consistently been curing serious illnesses for the last 100 years.
The ivermectin group are the people who have been pushing snake oil for the last 1000 years and cured nothing.
I didn't say anyone was dumb, but people have been fighting against vaccines and pushing snake oil for the entire history of vaccines.
Should I ask him for a source?
You can draw a straight line through the history of vaccination and find people pushing fake cures and drugs that are basically unsupported by solid evidence instead of vaccines.
Smallpox is extinct, diptheria, pertussus and polio are nearly extinct, and measles mumps and rubella would be nearly extinct if not for pockets of antivaxers creating a constant stream of outbreaks.
Go look up how many diseases these people killed prior to the vaccines, and then a few years after. You are absolutely taking for granted what we've accomplished through the use of vaccines.
Also, because of their sheer ability to spread, MMR diseases can be big problems outside of the United States, though they are usually restricted to small pockets in the USA for exactly the reasons you mention. This is why we have to pay attention to community levels of vaccination, not just state or county-level. All outbreaks start local.
They also were acutely aware you should never mass vaccinate during a pandemic.
They were correct and that is why you see the results in Israel, Singapore, England, and now the US, that you are seeing. That these are bad therapeutics at best. They could end up being worse.
The scientist and doctors who accomplished what you enumerated are indeed out there, but their voices are being suppressed by bureaucrats that now represent crony corrupt science; like fauci.
You are living in a fantasy. Science and economics have always been messy, and despite that advances in medical science are now and always have been the best and only real line of defense against disease.
If you just look at the totals for their whole population it may not look that way because you run into a Simpson's paradox situation. That's because older people are both more likely in general to have their COVID cases be severe, and older people in Israel or more likely to be vaccinated.
To illustrate, imagine a population that has 2000 young people and 2000 old people, and both groups are 50% vaccinated with a vaccine that reduces your chances of severe disease by 90%, and image we are dealing with a disease that is 20x as likely to be severe in old people than it is in young people. Let's say that 1% of young, unvaccinated people get severe disease.
Here are the number of severe cases we'd expect in that population.
1 in the 1000 young vaccinated people
10 in the 1000 young unvaccinated people
20 in the 1000 old vaccinated people
200 in the 1000 old unvaccinated people
9.1% of severe cases would be in vaccinated people.
Now consider a population with 2000 young people and 2000 old people, with the same vaccines that reduces your chances of severe disease by 90% and where the diseases is 20x as likely to be severe in old people, but in this population 90% of the old people are vaccinated but the young are still only 50% vaccinated.
Here are the number of severe cases we'd expect in that population.
1 in the 1000 young vaccinated people
10 in the 1000 young unvaccinated people
36 in the 1800 old vaccinated people
40 in the 200 old unvaccinated people
42.6% of cases would be in vaccinated people.
If the young people also get vaccinated at the same 90% rate as the old people, here are the numbers for severe cases.
1.8 in the 1800 young vaccinated people
2 in the 200 young unvaccinated people
36 in the 1800 old vaccinated people
40 in the 200 old vaccinated people
47.4% of cases would be in vaccinated people.
If no one was vaccinated, the numbers would be
20 in the 2000 unvaccinated young people
400 in the 2000 unvaccinated old people
If everyone was vaccinated, the numbers would be
2 in the 2000 vaccinated young people
40 in the 2000 vaccinated old people
It is useful to look at the severe case totals in our population of 2000 young people and 2000 old people.
420 severe cases when no one is vaccinated
231 severe cases when 50% of both young and old are vaccinated
87 severe cases when 50% of young and 90% of old are vaccinated
79.8 severe cases when 90% of both young and old are vaccinated
42 severe cases when everyone is vaccinatedThe vaccines don't prevent transmission. Now follow that to its logical conclusion: "we forcefully vaccinated everyone on Earth, why are we still having outbreaks?" Because... Well, you get it
After you sit down and mull over this concept for a while, vaccine mandates make absolutely no sense. Vaccine passports make absolutely no sense. Unless your goal is a slight reduction in ICU patients, forcing people to get it is a straight up violation of human rights.
"Pandemic of the unvaccinated" yeah, right. Blame the leaky vaccine, not the people who already have natural immunity.
All you have to do to stop the spread of a virus is lower R below 1. The vaccine would do that if we vaccinated everyone.
People vaccinated who get infected tend to have cases that do not last as long as they do in unvaccinated people, which reduces the number of people they spread it do.
What you are saying is ridiculous. The medical industrial complex has problems, but it does deliver very real miracles to millions of people every year.
The current count of medical studies that show Ivermectin being beneficial for treating or preventing COVID-19 is 64. Out of those 64, 44 of them are peer reviewed.
Or we could throw the baby out with the bathwater because this article cherry picked a few of the worst studies to shape a narrative.
Friend. “Peer reviewed” doesn’t mean what you think it does. Peer review isn’t something that indicates that a given claim is verified. Instead, it’s something that indicates that a given paper has reached the bare minimum for consideration. It’s generally a red flag when people use “peer reviewed” as a synonym for “true,” particularly when the paper is published in a relatively unknown journal, and an entire parade of red flags when people treat “not peer reviewed” as “almost as good as true.”
Regardless of your opinions on the use of various treatments for COVID-19, I strongly recommend that you read this article and take their methodology to heart. “Doing research” doesn’t mean poking around on scholar.google.com and reading extant studies. Sometimes “doing research” means actually running an experiment to verify that the effects claimed in a published paper are replicable. Sometimes “doing research”, as in this case, entails doing statistical analyses of publications looking for tells of shoddy methodology or even straightforward misrepresentation. Note: There’s some really fun tricks that people can use to detect bogus data — for example, when humans attempt to fabricate “random” data, typically the numbers they come up with don’t match an actual random distribution.
Anyway, I hope that helps.
I see that towards the end of your comment that you're inferring the page has issues with the statistical calculations. Here's the easy solution to get past that and get us talking about what matters: disregard whatever problems you have with the page and look at the actual studies. I think it's absolutely preposterous that people are disregarding life saving research based on which web site serves as a vehicle to get them to it. Read through a few of the studies as I have, and let's have a conversation around the most promising.
Why should we trust this source and not the one linked above?
everything is like this.
The problem is that we have this utopian notion that somewhere there is an Unbiased Grand Truth that should be given to us in exchange for our attention. We assume and expect that we're being given the Gold Standard Truth when we read anything now.
And then we get upset when we peel the foil off and discover it wasn't even chocolate.
Another thing to consider: one is an article and one is a site which points to medical studies so it's difficult to compare the two. You can weave a biased narrative easily with one article. It's a lot more difficult to do that across 60+ studies.
Trust nothing, do your own research always.
Here's a nice read on the subject: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1422044335076306947.html
Find anything amiss with any of actual 64 studies? Or are you content to just not move past the web site itself.
There are also issues with some of the studies themselves, but that's a separate issue.
Yet, the country is one of the most affected by the pandemic. It has more than 600k deaths. For comparison, India is around 6x bigger regarding population, and only had 454K deaths.
That's the real-world Ivermectin study. If it worked, you can be sure that Brazil would be in a much better situation.
[1] https://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2021/03/29/apos-desc... (in Portuguese)
Nobody knows who to trust anymore. And until we solve that problem at global scale, the grifters and con men will rule the world.
People who castigate the medical and pharmaceutical industries for being corrupt and then wholeheartedly advocate for one treatment or another as "the solution" based on articles they found on the Internet from unknown sources aren't and were never operating from a place of logic - as though nobody on the Internet was ever maliciously motivated or trying to make a buck.
There's no point in a discussion based on "the evidence" with these individuals, except maybe to point out the cognitive dissonance at play.