Comment by ren_engineer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ren_engineer | Hacker News Reader

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>horse medicine

studies that used it properly as a prophylactic show around a 90% reduction in mortality and around 50% reduction in infection rate. All the studies claiming it didn't work used it post-infection which even the proponents of ivermectin claimed wouldn't work

https://www.cureus.com/articles/111851-regular-use-of-iverme...

here's the main study used to claim it doesn't work- note the participants are already confirmed to have covid so the study is already worthless and essentially done in bad faith

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2797483

and here's another doing the same thing

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2115869

not saying Ivermectin is some miracle drug like many, but simply downplaying it as "horse medicine" is just as bad

That is great, and those studies are very promising, but I think you are being flippant when you say "which even the proponents of ivermectin claimed wouldn't work". In my understanding. the majority of 'proponents of ivermectin' were politicized and had no conception of prophylactic use -- the major harm caused by the ivermectin narrative was a large population refusing to vaccinated and then relying on ivermectin when they became infected.

If you could could point to evidence that those pushing ivermectin during the height of the pandemic and the hospital crush were advocating low/moderate prophylactic use I would be grateful.

you can find stuff towards the middle and end of 2020 related to Ivermectin. It didn't get really politicized until 2021 when Joe Rogan used it

Isn't the consensus that Ivermectin is effective at treating parasitic infection, and treating an active, preexisting parasitic infection can help with COVID indirectly (e.g., the body doesn't have to fight a 'two-front' war against both the viral infection and a parasite at the same time). If you don't have any parasites, however, any benefit vanishes. So by all means, if you think you have worms, go get treated for worms. But if you don't, and most people in first-world countries don't, then it's pointless.

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