Ivermectin for Covid-19 in adults in the community | Hacker News Reader

Ivermectin for Covid-19 in adults in the community

journalofinfection.com

5 pointstypeofhuman18 comments

This study is suspiciously underpowered.

Another title could be, "65% more hospitalizations and 2 more median days of illness without ivermectin isn't sufficient evidence that it works".

Certainly this isn't evidence that it doesn't work..

As in my previous comment, the lesson we should learn is that the government got many things wrong with the COVID response, people insulted their countryman for taking it, and experts who defended Ivermectin were silenced.

If I had worms but didn't know it, tested positive for COVID-19 and took sufficient ivermectin to kill off the worms, I'd probably feel better.

causation/correlation?

Was about to downvote, but:

"Ivermectin for COVID-19 is unlikely to provide clinically meaningful improvement in recovery, hospital admissions, or longer-term outcomes. Further trials of ivermectin for SARS-Cov-2 infection in vaccinated community populations appear unwarranted."

Huh.

OOC why were you about to downvote before reading it?

I thought this was relevant because of all the disinformation spread on social media, largely driven by the US FDA, during COVID was that Ivermectin was "horse dewormer" and derided anyone who chose to take it. Social media companies silenced anyone who disagreed - including distinguished doctors and experts.

The COVID response should be studied. We need to learn what NOT to do.

Ivermectin is a very useful broad spectrum anti parasitic agent suitable for many mammals, not just horses, and not just against worms.

In large unvaccinated populations in, say, Brazil, where there is a siginificant worm problem in humans Ivermectin correlates well with COVID recovery - treating parasitics improves health and the ability to fight infections such as COVID.

However, as this report points out in the body, in large unvaccinated populations with no significant human worm infestation:

    The ACTIV-6 and COVID-OUT placebo controlled trials of ivermectin at 400ug/kg for 3 days,   and 600ug/kg for 6 days in largely vaccinated Americans, regardless of risk factors, found no clinically significant benefit in sustained recovery, hospital admissions or incidence of long COVID over 10 months

Ivermectin doesn't directly do anything for fighting COVID .. but, as one would expect, you're better off getting rid of parasites if you want to fight off a virus.

Things to not do include: randomly picking medicine "X", have it hyped up by a weird republican hype machine, and then bitterly complain when the unwarranted, evidence-free hype is denounced for being unwarranted and evidence free.

Phrased differently: Ivermectin was picked up by the republican hype machine, pretty much at random. The medical community, seeing a lot of absolute hucksters pitch a whacky treatment, fought back with mockery and derision. As it turns out, the medical community was right.

You sound like someone who clearly bought into the derision. All the comments you made were the same shallow arguments made against it without providing any meaningful point.

All those things could be true and yet it means nothing in terms of whether Ivermectin was ineffective in treating COVID. This article proves that it was at worst on-par with general treatments and at worse better!

> article proves that it was at worst on-par with general treatments and at worse better

This is a misreading of even the abstract.

There was no ivermectin-only test. The study found ivermectin was, at best, ineffective as a complement to usual treatment. It doesn’t bother to characterise the downsides.

Going purely off memory, I don't believe the Ivermectin hype was purely random. It was thought early on that anti-parasitics may be helpful with CoViD, and Ivermectin was one that people explored. It showed some early promise, although I can't recall how rigorous this promise was. Eventually the hype machine got hold of it, but that was largely an engineered situation, where those who were interested in its early promise dug their heels in in the face of over-the-top derision and bad faith attacks like "horse dewormer" jibes, which then mixed with anxiety and conspiracy thinking on both sides and resulted in a total inability to discuss this stuff reasonably. You should also keep in mind that while all this derision is going on, there isn't actually a medicine around that shows promise. People talk about this stuff like there was a perfectly good cure going around, but that was never the case.

Finally, the OP already stated this post wasnt made to prove Ivermectin effective, but to show that its utility is not something dismissed out of hand by actual redearchers. Knowing nothing of the providence of this paper, I can't comment on whether it achueve that, but you're not moving the conversation in any kind of positive direction with your (plural) reactionary commentary, that's clearly hitting a nerve with the OP.

Could you point me to some of the distinguished doctors and experts? Unfortunately, and as you've noted, there's a lot of flack on all sides about ivermectin, making search difficult to impossible.

There is a lot of research showing that ivermectin has broad effectiveness against a number of viruses long before the pandemic and including SARS and MERS. There is also strong research (published in Nature) that shows ivermectin to be highly effective at blocking some aspects of a SARS Cov2 infection. The main concern is getting a high enough concentration in the body for it to be effective.

There are additional antiparasitics that also appear quite effective against COVID, some of which are being reformulated and brought to market.

There are also a host of treatments that were demonstrated to be quite effective against COVID via placebo controlled double blind trials that were ignored. If something is off patent, it will almost never be repurposed for another indication by a US pharmaceutical company.

Gosh, that's wonderful, but like I wrote, specific articles are hard to pick out of all the chaff ejected around ivermectin.

Go to pubmed, which is free, search for "ivermectin + antiviral" and look for any article before 2020.

There is no cure for COVID yet. There have been many studies of ivermectin, which won a Nobel prize for its usefulness in other human diseases. The results are mixed, but on average it is quite effective against COVID. Note that there is no one drug that cures AIDs, either, but a mixture of drugs is powerful. I think it will turn out the same with COVID.

https://c19ivm.org/meta.html

> OOC why were you about to downvote before reading it?

Because previous links about Ivermectin and Covid were usually of the conspiratorial "tHinGs THEY doN'T wAnT yOu tO knOw" kind of nonsense.

Oh gotcha. Thanks for replying.

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