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Comment by yieldcrv | Hacker News Reader

They keep testing the wrong thing:

It helped people with tapeworms. They didn't know they had tapeworms. They would never know they had tapeworms. They have a symbiotic relationship with tapeworms until their immune system is distracted with something else, such as Covid, then the tapeworm becomes a hostile host unchecked. Ivermectin treatment subdued the tapeworm and the immune system was not distracted anymore, avoiding death during severe covid.

If nobody does the study that way, then there won't be anything to cite. Here's your extremely probable hypothesis. Good luck finding the people with tapeworms given the state of US healthcare.

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That's a similar conclusion Scott Alexander came to: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...

I find this highly likely the reason (making truth, again, much more nuanced than it seems). Also it's disturbing to look up the statistics and realize that a surprising percentage of the US has undiagnosed parasites. It changes depending on definition used but it's quite substantial...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3m88j/millions-of-americans...

It doesn't even need to be tapeworm. There are a ton of parasites that can be reactivated...

Its really dismaying to me that this is "political". It distracts the credentialed people and respected institutions from considering this hypothesis. All the studies are reactionary like "I told you so!" while testing the wrong thing and exacerbating why this is political at all.

Its simple geography. Suburban and rural areas are living in greater squalor than anyone would care to admit. Hence the tapeworms. The people in those areas are not considered or serviced well by Democrats and happen to be Republican. The people there made an incorrect conclusion due to a correlation, the people elsewhere called them dumb and eventually did study after study on the incorrect conclusion just to say "you're dumb".

The causation in those areas are not considered or well serviced.

I completely agree. It's amazing because, arguably, both sides are correct!

Science: It does nothing against COVID! (True, in isolation.)

Lived Experience: It sure helped me! (And it actually probably did!)

Also, your comments about squalor - most of the test subjects probably don't live in rural areas where they would be more likely to get the parasites... And if you do live in such an area, ivermectin may actually be a completely reasonable treatment strategy (for the same reasons that "lots of rest," "stay hydrated," etc. are beneficial). Yikes.

> Its simple geography. Suburban and rural areas are living in greater squalor than anyone would care to admit. Hence the tapeworms.

Would be nice to present any evidence at all for this claim. The vice article that parent post linked to doesn't talk about tapeworms or about area geography. Why would people in suburban areas be so much more at risk for tapeworms than people in urban areas? This feels like the height of motivated reasoning.

Also, wouldn't we expect to see this in these studies?

because that only appears if that's what was studied. which it wasn't.

this study and many others aren't checking patients to see if Ivermectin is by coincidence being used for what it was approved for - tapeworm treatment. they are doing studies on people with covid.

> because that only appears if that's what was studied.

Why would that be the case? If there's a statistically significant portion of the population suffering from parasites and this treatment improves outcomes for those people in a statistically significant way, then why isn't that going to show up in a study looking for improvement of outcomes?

Because they still never tested us they had tapeworms

This hypothesis is guessing that this distribution of the population did and that’s why they are convinced they are seeing such positive correlations when using Ivermectin after a Covid ailment.

Supporting aspects are that Covid affected a broad enough population for the tapeworm statistics to map 1:1 with a population, and that many severe covid cases and deaths were exacerbated by opportunistic infections.

So we have to look for what the opportunistic infections could be? How strange that a horse dewormer happens to work moderately okay in those regions.

I'm not following. What this study shows is that ivermectin doesn't improve COVID outcomes (regardless of parasite status). This means that either the study wasn't sufficiently random over the 1,000 participants and somehow underrepresented those suffering from parasites OR that it was adequate and that either ivermectin doesn't change the outcome for those suffering parasites or those suffering parasites aren't a significant portion of the population. If you think it's the former, then you ought to point out whatever they messed up in their methodology, but if it's the latter, then it debunks your whole concept. In order for your hypothesis (which I believe is that there are a lot of people with parasites AND ivermectin helps them with COVID by killing those parasites) to be true, we'd have to see improvement in recovery to _some_ degree in this study.

> Why would people in suburban areas be so much more at risk for tapeworms than people in urban areas?

in my priority of variables, I think the greater point is that people in urban areas were not using Ivermectin to compare efficacy, simply because treatment preferences went along party lines.

if they too had tapeworms and also wanted Ivermectin for severe covid treatment, it would have killed the tapeworms and more people would have recovered from severe covid on their own there too.

If vice or the researchers cited aren't doing a study on tapeworms then it wouldn't come up. If you need something to cite, it doesn't exist. That's how hypothesis work. The utility of pointing it out then is for someone to be motivated into looking at it this way, it is folly to assume that these respected institutions ruled it out.

Forget the "squalor" idea - it is wrong. It's common to get worms and such infestations even help a child's immune system develop. But, and esp. if you live in the South, one should check each child every year at least (stool sample, please) for parasites.

Tapeworm infections are rare. They are caused by eating tapeworm eggs in improperly prepared foods. But tapeworm infections aren't nearly as common as roundworm/hookworm infections. And while ivermectin isn't effective in treating tapeworm it kills roundworms and hookworms and other parasites - see "Ivermectin: enigmatic multifaceted ‘wonder’ drug continues to surprise and exceed expectations" at

https://www.nature.com/articles/ja201711

Children and adults get hookworms from walking barefoot: a hookworm can penetrate the skin of the foot. There are roundworms in the soil, so children and adults outside often ingest roundworms (put hands in their mouth) or step on hookworms. The natural environment is filled with such parasites. Children and adults in suburban areas usually encounter a wider variety of animals and parasites in their environment than do people in the city.

The article has a few errors/omissions about the so-called "kissing bug":

There is a family of insects, "assassin bugs", having a hypodermic proboscis, that manifest the "kissing bug" behavior. They land and pierce the skin with the proboscis. At 14 I was bitten on the arm. A burning sensation alerted me, whereupon I noted a young red-and-black assassin bug on my arm and brushed it off. In contrast my 8-year-old cousin was bitten by a large (1-1/2" long) assassin bug and screamed for an hour. There is no such thing as a "mild bite" and I fail to see how one could sleep through it. As well, the burning and pain is caused b/c the insect injects digestive enzymes into its prey to kill and eat it (like a spider). The larger the bug, the more enzymes.

The "kissing-bug" moniker dates from at least the early part of the previous century: a North American infestation of assassin bugs occurred (near Chicago IIRC) and it was indeed a newsworthy event: I once saw a copy of an old newspaper article about the outbreak.

The astonishing thing is how far north this was reported decades ago. It is only within the last 30 years that medical authorities have even begun to admit that Chagas Disease could be present in the continental USA and there was much debate about its presence in Texas, one of the southernmost states.

Not tapeworm.

Ivermectin works on other types of worms and is used esp. for roundworm (Ascariasis). And ivermectin kills lice, bedbugs et al.

In any case, anyone living in the southern USA likely carries some parasite that ivermectin kills off. E.g., children often pick up head lice and other parasites at day care or school.

Ivermectin is well-tolerated and easily applied, really a "wonder drug" that we're lucky to have (but aren't they all?).

>They have a symbiotic relationship

Isn't symbiotic the wrong word if there's no benefit to the host?

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