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Comment by sinyug | Hacker News Reader

Does any study ever suggest that a $0.10 drug with expired patents is better than the new and patented $30 alternative? If so which benevolent pharmaceutical company funds such studies?

Between doctors prescribing specific medicine "brands" when generic alternatives are available, insurance companies denying perfectly valid claims and forcing you to challenge their decisions in tribunals and similar venues, and pharmaceutical companies engaging in questionable behavior,[1] I am very reluctant to trust anything championed by this unholy nexus.

[1] There is a multivitamin product from Bayer called Supradyn that I have been using for years. Last year, the company changed the formulation and halved the doses of most of the ingredients while increasing the price by 50% resulting in an effective price increase of 300%.

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Not all investigations like this are funded by drug companies.

For example, and as a perfectly balanced counterpoint to the one you are trying to make about ivermectin, dexamethasone was rapidly identified as a cheap, easily available, out of patent medication that significantly reduces morbidity and mortality in covid hospitalised patients early in the pandemic by NHS doctors

Aspirin regimen for cardiovascular event prevention as an example of a cheap drug studied extensively.

> Aspirin

Good example. It would be a pleasant surprise to find out that these studies were funded by pharma companies.

Better than an alternative? Probably not. Worth using at all? Sure, if the data supports that conclusion. In particular, a lot of labs have been trying a wide variety of drugs to see if any have efficacy against covid. Ivermectin... just doesn't.

Here are three meta-analyses indicating that an SSRI with an expired patent (fluvoxamine) is potentially effective at reducing hospitalization rates for covid:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1... https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.17.21268008v... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35118917/

If it worked, they'd study it to find out what the interaction was or if it was a metabolite that carried the action. Then they'd develop a targetted version of that drug, patent it, and cash in.
It doesn't work. So they haven't.

A good example is major clinical depression and ketamine.

> Does any study ever suggest that a $0.10 drug with expired patents is better than the new and patented $30 alternative? If so which benevolent pharmaceutical company funds such studies?

I hear this a lot to explain the lack of studies. What about this one here though? Isn't this finally a conclusive study debunking all the claims saying Ivermectin alone is a good prevention/treatment for COVID-19?

> Isn't this finally a conclusive study debunking all the claims saying Ivermectin alone is a good prevention/treatment for COVID-19?

No, because they didn't <administer some particular dosage>/<administer it at the right times>/<administer it when the moon was in the right phase/when Mercury was in retrograde>.

A true believer can always keep shifting the goalposts.

>Isn't this finally a conclusive study debunking all the claims saying Ivermectin alone is a good prevention/treatment for COVID-19?

It wont do a good job of that because the study reported 70% fewer deaths for the Ivermectin treated patients than control (3 vs 10), as well as reductions in ICU and ventilator with treatment.

I presume a Malaysian study would (though this one is open label study, not hugely significant either way IMO).

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