9 ms·

How is it controversial? Ivermectin has a safety profile similar to a placebo.

seattle_spring 5y ago
It's controversial because there's no proof that it works any better than a placebo either (outside of sites like "realcovid19miracledrugproof.net" and "truthaboutivermectin.org/msm_lies.html"). The study I've seen repeatedly pushed here was authored by some guy who also is pushing the idea of "chronic Lyme," a proven fake disease. pro-tip: When naturalnews.com veraciously agrees with something, there's a good chance that "something" is completely made up.
- blhack 5y ago
  You are not only wrong, but you are being rude about it. https://archive.is/s0zkr https://archive.is/s0zkr
  - seattle_spring 5y ago
    Yes, if you pool effect estimates from tiny, very badly conducted trials you get positive effects. Some of the studies in your linked MA have even been retracted / unpublished. If there are any peer reviewed studies from reputable institutions I still have yet to see them.
    - blhack 5y ago
      Perhaps you should stop looking on "realcovid19miracledrugproof.net" and "truthaboutivermectin.org/msm_lies.html". I don't think any of those are good places to get a sense of the current scientific literature.
      - seattle_spring 5y ago
        Considering every response so far has shared links from the sites I was intending to poke fun at...
    - Covzire 5y ago
      Great, let's get Google to stop silencing doctors from telling us this. There is no reason for a tech oligarchy to ban our medical community from having open dialogues, even if they're completely right on this, nothing good will come of it in the long term.
    - bookofsand 5y ago
      We all do. The aggressive politicization of the issue makes (made?) it impossible for reputable institutions to even consider running such studies. The Ivermectin signal has been around since 07/2020. It's a shame it took more than a year for reputable institutions to even consider touching the subject. https://c19ivermectin.com https://c19ivermectin.com. I thought we are in a world-wide emergency crisis, where we are tapping all available resources as soon as humanly possible. There is some hope for reputable answers from https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-06-23-ivermectin-be-investigated-possible-treatment-covid-19-oxford-s-principle-trial https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-06-23-ivermectin-be-investiga..., yet to be completed.
    - loonster 5y ago
      We've known about the potential effectiveness of the drug for 1.5 years and In Vitro effectiveness for 1.2 years. The lack of large completed trials for an off patent medicine should be a black eye for the NIH.
      - cwyers 5y ago
        There's a ton of off-patent medicines. You can't do large-scale trials for all of them, there literally aren't enough COVID patients to do a large-scale trial for every off-patent medicine that exists. You have to have some selection criteria. Ivermectin is an anti-parasite drug. It is not an anti-viral. There is no theory for a mechanism of action for why it would be effective against COVID. There is some laboratory evidence that Ivermectin at very high concentrations can inhibit replication of COVID-19 and other viruses. The problem with this is that extrapolating from those concentrations to a dosing regimen means a dose of Ivermectin far, far higher than the dosage of Ivermectin given in humans. So, without sufficient evidence, there's no compelling reason to do a large trial of Ivermectin.
        jstgord 5y ago
        There _is_ some evidence for Ivermectin being a broad spectrum anti-viral.. discussed here : https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4409/9/9/2100 https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4409/9/9/2100
    - gus_massa 5y ago
      Someone posted these links about Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin a few days ago. It's nice that someone is collecting them. > https://hcqmeta.com/#fcite_rct https://hcqmeta.com/#fcite_rct (Figure 7, scroll down) > https://ivmmeta.com/#fig_fpr https://ivmmeta.com/#fig_fpr Hydroxychloroquine: My personal opinion is that it's just report and publication bias. Ivermectin: My personal opinion is that it looks more interesting, but after taking a deeper look, it's full of small studies that are not pre-registered where a fluke created an optimistic result that is not statistically significant. (I'd just drop most/all of them.) The main difference is that Hydroxychloroquine has a few big studies with a few thousand of patients, but with Ivermectin all the RCT studies have at most a few hundred patients. Complete thread with the original links and more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27691080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27691080 It's also interesting that I pick the first RCT in the site about Ivermectin https://c19ivermectin.com/chowdhury.html https://c19ivermectin.com/chowdhury.html , and it actually compares Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine. It is listed as a success in the Ivermectin site but it's not listed a failure in the Hydroxychloroquine site. Anyway, it's small and not statistically significant, so I'd not read too many conclusions from it.
throwaway5752 5y ago
The very first thing I found searching for information on this was https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-should-not-use-ivermectin-treat-or-prevent-covid-19 https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-shoul... They note that there is a large amount of misinformation circulating, that it is harmful at high doses, and that it not an anti-viral. Is the study mentioned on https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/93485 https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/9348... the source of this? It seems to be a small sample size with ambiguous results at best (decreased mortality but unchanged hospitalization rate).
- bookofsand 5y ago
  Somewhat tongue in cheek: dihydrogen monoxide is also harmful at high doses. While checking the spelling, I stumbled upon https://www.dhmo.org/facts.html https://www.dhmo.org/facts.html, with a delightful quote: Each year, Dihydrogen Monoxide is a known causative component in many thousands of deaths and is a major contributor to millions upon millions of dollars in damage to property and the environment. Some of the known perils of Dihydrogen Monoxide are: * Death due to accidental inhalation of DHMO, even in small quantities. * Prolonged exposure to solid DHMO causes severe tissue damage. * Excessive ingestion produces a number of unpleasant though not typically life-threatening side-effects. * DHMO is a major component of acid rain. * Gaseous DHMO can cause severe burns. * Contributes to soil erosion. * Leads to corrosion and oxidation of many metals. * Contamination of electrical systems often causes short-circuits. * Exposure decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes. * Found in biopsies of pre-cancerous tumors and lesions. * Given to vicious dogs involved in recent deadly attacks. * Often associated with killer cyclones in the U.S. Midwest and elsewhere, and in hurricanes including deadly storms in Florida, New Orleans and other areas of the southeastern U.S. * Thermal variations in DHMO are a suspected contributor to the El Nino weather effect.
  - throwaway5752 5y ago
    That's quite funny. It's even funnier to see people pushing the use of an anti-parasitic medicine to treat a virus with no particular hypothesized mechanism of action, when a nearly 100% effective vaccine with similarly great safety profile is widely and cheaply available. Sorry, maybe tragic is a better word. Look at Latin American and ivermectin usage. This is yet another non-treatment that is being used to scam the vulnerable and ignorant. It has been a depressing 20 minutes catching up on ivermectin + covid news. Barely effective at best, yet there's a black market of animal-grade medicine now in some countries.
perl4ever 5y ago
>Ivermectin has a safety profile similar to a placebo At the level needed to show an antiviral effect, or the levels in some medication people are randomly misusing, I'm reading it is very toxic.
- loonster 5y ago
  The study that used a very high dose was an in vitro study from Spring 2020[1]. If anything, that study should be a proof that it is worth studying further. The dose makes the poison. The typical dose of Ivermectin for treating parasites (and Covid19) is 0.2mg/Kg. The LD50 is around >15mg/Kg in humans. Around the world it is one of the most administered medicines. AFAIK, not a single death has been attributed to it. Extremely safe. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166354220302011 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016635422...
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    >The typical dose of Ivermectin for treating parasites (and Covid19) is 0.2mg/Kg. The LD50 is around >15mg/Kg in human I could easily be confused, since I've never taken a biology course after high school. However, here is what I get from your link. It mentions "addition of 5 μM ivermectin". I believe "5 μM" is a ratio, meaning 5 μmol per liter. Ivermectin is C48H74O14 so the weight of a mole is about 875g. By my arithmetic that comes out to about 4.4 mg per liter. So, if that can be loosely equated with the dosage "in vivo", assuming a liter is about a kg because everything is mostly water, it's more than 20 times the normal ratio, and nearly 1/3 of the LD50. I notice this comment: "no toxicity was observed with ivermectin at any of the concentrations tested" I may be missing something, but this seems like the comments about proving safety could be misleading or even disingenuous, if ivermectin's toxicity first or mainly applies to the nervous system and not the kind of cells they were experimenting with. What kind of cells were they using? It says "Vero/hSLAM". Vero = "kidney epithelial cells extracted from an African green monkey" and hSLAM means Vero cells "that have been stably transfected with a plasmid encoding the gene for the human [signaling lymphocytic activation molecule]" It's quite possible there's something very basic I don't understand, but after doing my best to interpret it, I would personally tend to qualify the results as "antiviral in dosages that are probably nontoxic to some parts of the kidneys of green monkeys". If was put on the spot, given such a dose for covid-19 purposes, I would not be very confident that it wouldn't be neurotoxic, even if I also believed it was less than the LD50. However, this all hinges on me understanding the dosage/ratio, and I may have screwed that up.

It's controversial because there's no proof that it works any better than a placebo either (outside of sites like "realcovid19miracledrugproof.net" and "truthaboutivermectin.org/msm_lies.html"). The study I've seen repeatedly pushed here was authored by some guy who also is pushing the idea of "chronic Lyme," a proven fake disease. pro-tip: When naturalnews.com veraciously agrees with something, there's a good chance that "something" is completely made up.

blhack 5y ago
You are not only wrong, but you are being rude about it. https://archive.is/s0zkr https://archive.is/s0zkr
- seattle_spring 5y ago
  Yes, if you pool effect estimates from tiny, very badly conducted trials you get positive effects. Some of the studies in your linked MA have even been retracted / unpublished. If there are any peer reviewed studies from reputable institutions I still have yet to see them.
  - blhack 5y ago
    Perhaps you should stop looking on "realcovid19miracledrugproof.net" and "truthaboutivermectin.org/msm_lies.html". I don't think any of those are good places to get a sense of the current scientific literature.
    - seattle_spring 5y ago
      Considering every response so far has shared links from the sites I was intending to poke fun at...
  - Covzire 5y ago
    Great, let's get Google to stop silencing doctors from telling us this. There is no reason for a tech oligarchy to ban our medical community from having open dialogues, even if they're completely right on this, nothing good will come of it in the long term.
  - bookofsand 5y ago
    We all do. The aggressive politicization of the issue makes (made?) it impossible for reputable institutions to even consider running such studies. The Ivermectin signal has been around since 07/2020. It's a shame it took more than a year for reputable institutions to even consider touching the subject. https://c19ivermectin.com https://c19ivermectin.com. I thought we are in a world-wide emergency crisis, where we are tapping all available resources as soon as humanly possible. There is some hope for reputable answers from https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-06-23-ivermectin-be-investigated-possible-treatment-covid-19-oxford-s-principle-trial https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-06-23-ivermectin-be-investiga..., yet to be completed.
  - loonster 5y ago
    We've known about the potential effectiveness of the drug for 1.5 years and In Vitro effectiveness for 1.2 years. The lack of large completed trials for an off patent medicine should be a black eye for the NIH.
    - cwyers 5y ago
      There's a ton of off-patent medicines. You can't do large-scale trials for all of them, there literally aren't enough COVID patients to do a large-scale trial for every off-patent medicine that exists. You have to have some selection criteria. Ivermectin is an anti-parasite drug. It is not an anti-viral. There is no theory for a mechanism of action for why it would be effective against COVID. There is some laboratory evidence that Ivermectin at very high concentrations can inhibit replication of COVID-19 and other viruses. The problem with this is that extrapolating from those concentrations to a dosing regimen means a dose of Ivermectin far, far higher than the dosage of Ivermectin given in humans. So, without sufficient evidence, there's no compelling reason to do a large trial of Ivermectin.
      - jstgord 5y ago
        There _is_ some evidence for Ivermectin being a broad spectrum anti-viral.. discussed here : https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4409/9/9/2100 https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4409/9/9/2100
  - gus_massa 5y ago
    Someone posted these links about Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin a few days ago. It's nice that someone is collecting them. > https://hcqmeta.com/#fcite_rct https://hcqmeta.com/#fcite_rct (Figure 7, scroll down) > https://ivmmeta.com/#fig_fpr https://ivmmeta.com/#fig_fpr Hydroxychloroquine: My personal opinion is that it's just report and publication bias. Ivermectin: My personal opinion is that it looks more interesting, but after taking a deeper look, it's full of small studies that are not pre-registered where a fluke created an optimistic result that is not statistically significant. (I'd just drop most/all of them.) The main difference is that Hydroxychloroquine has a few big studies with a few thousand of patients, but with Ivermectin all the RCT studies have at most a few hundred patients. Complete thread with the original links and more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27691080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27691080 It's also interesting that I pick the first RCT in the site about Ivermectin https://c19ivermectin.com/chowdhury.html https://c19ivermectin.com/chowdhury.html , and it actually compares Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine. It is listed as a success in the Ivermectin site but it's not listed a failure in the Hydroxychloroquine site. Anyway, it's small and not statistically significant, so I'd not read too many conclusions from it.

throwaway5752 5y ago

The very first thing I found searching for information on this was https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-should-not-use-ivermectin-treat-or-prevent-covid-19 https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-shoul... They note that there is a large amount of misinformation circulating, that it is harmful at high doses, and that it not an anti-viral. Is the study mentioned on https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/93485 https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/9348... the source of this? It seems to be a small sample size with ambiguous results at best (decreased mortality but unchanged hospitalization rate).

bookofsand 5y ago
Somewhat tongue in cheek: dihydrogen monoxide is also harmful at high doses. While checking the spelling, I stumbled upon https://www.dhmo.org/facts.html https://www.dhmo.org/facts.html, with a delightful quote: Each year, Dihydrogen Monoxide is a known causative component in many thousands of deaths and is a major contributor to millions upon millions of dollars in damage to property and the environment. Some of the known perils of Dihydrogen Monoxide are: * Death due to accidental inhalation of DHMO, even in small quantities. * Prolonged exposure to solid DHMO causes severe tissue damage. * Excessive ingestion produces a number of unpleasant though not typically life-threatening side-effects. * DHMO is a major component of acid rain. * Gaseous DHMO can cause severe burns. * Contributes to soil erosion. * Leads to corrosion and oxidation of many metals. * Contamination of electrical systems often causes short-circuits. * Exposure decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes. * Found in biopsies of pre-cancerous tumors and lesions. * Given to vicious dogs involved in recent deadly attacks. * Often associated with killer cyclones in the U.S. Midwest and elsewhere, and in hurricanes including deadly storms in Florida, New Orleans and other areas of the southeastern U.S. * Thermal variations in DHMO are a suspected contributor to the El Nino weather effect.
- throwaway5752 5y ago
  That's quite funny. It's even funnier to see people pushing the use of an anti-parasitic medicine to treat a virus with no particular hypothesized mechanism of action, when a nearly 100% effective vaccine with similarly great safety profile is widely and cheaply available. Sorry, maybe tragic is a better word. Look at Latin American and ivermectin usage. This is yet another non-treatment that is being used to scam the vulnerable and ignorant. It has been a depressing 20 minutes catching up on ivermectin + covid news. Barely effective at best, yet there's a black market of animal-grade medicine now in some countries.

perl4ever 5y ago

>Ivermectin has a safety profile similar to a placebo At the level needed to show an antiviral effect, or the levels in some medication people are randomly misusing, I'm reading it is very toxic.

loonster 5y ago
The study that used a very high dose was an in vitro study from Spring 2020[1]. If anything, that study should be a proof that it is worth studying further. The dose makes the poison. The typical dose of Ivermectin for treating parasites (and Covid19) is 0.2mg/Kg. The LD50 is around >15mg/Kg in humans. Around the world it is one of the most administered medicines. AFAIK, not a single death has been attributed to it. Extremely safe. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166354220302011 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016635422...
- perl4ever 5y ago
  >The typical dose of Ivermectin for treating parasites (and Covid19) is 0.2mg/Kg. The LD50 is around >15mg/Kg in human I could easily be confused, since I've never taken a biology course after high school. However, here is what I get from your link. It mentions "addition of 5 μM ivermectin". I believe "5 μM" is a ratio, meaning 5 μmol per liter. Ivermectin is C48H74O14 so the weight of a mole is about 875g. By my arithmetic that comes out to about 4.4 mg per liter. So, if that can be loosely equated with the dosage "in vivo", assuming a liter is about a kg because everything is mostly water, it's more than 20 times the normal ratio, and nearly 1/3 of the LD50. I notice this comment: "no toxicity was observed with ivermectin at any of the concentrations tested" I may be missing something, but this seems like the comments about proving safety could be misleading or even disingenuous, if ivermectin's toxicity first or mainly applies to the nervous system and not the kind of cells they were experimenting with. What kind of cells were they using? It says "Vero/hSLAM". Vero = "kidney epithelial cells extracted from an African green monkey" and hSLAM means Vero cells "that have been stably transfected with a plasmid encoding the gene for the human [signaling lymphocytic activation molecule]" It's quite possible there's something very basic I don't understand, but after doing my best to interpret it, I would personally tend to qualify the results as "antiviral in dosages that are probably nontoxic to some parts of the kidneys of green monkeys". If was put on the spot, given such a dose for covid-19 purposes, I would not be very confident that it wouldn't be neurotoxic, even if I also believed it was less than the LD50. However, this all hinges on me understanding the dosage/ratio, and I may have screwed that up.