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...