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Ivermectin Didn’t Reduce Covid-19 Hospitalizations in Largest Trial to Date

217 points by elmalto 5y ago

mhxion 5y ago
Link without the paywall: https://www.wsj.com/articles/ivermectin-didnt-reduce-covid-19-hospitalizations-in-largest-trial-to-date-11647601200?st=v2bvudfsllip5py https://www.wsj.com/articles/ivermectin-didnt-reduce-covid-1...
- wrycoder 5y ago
  Paywall for me.
throwmeariver1 5y ago
- elp 5y ago
  I suspect this was really driven by one Steve Kirsch (https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/05/1036408/silicon-valley-millionaire-steve-kirsch-covid-vaccine-misinformation/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/05/1036408/silicon-...) No idea if he's just a rich nutter or if he's hoping he can profit by being the first to find a cure to something before anyone else. Maybe it's all just a giant scam to pocket donations.
WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
Meanwhile, back in reality, ivermectin is associated with 70%-ish reductions in hospitalization and death. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz4adJXLHgA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz4adJXLHgA
- m-p-3 5y ago
  In countries where a parasitic infection is common and is a COVID-19 co-morbidity.
  - WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
sceptictank 5y ago
- HL33tibCe7 5y ago
  I don’t think I’ve seen anybody “knocking” scientists looking into whether ivermectin works. In fact, most ivermectin skeptics _welcome_ that. What I have seen is the knocking of people who claim that ivermectin is a wonder drug; or that the government is deliberately holding back ivermectin to prolong the pandemic; or that paxlovid etc. are just “big Pharma ivermectin”. Those people are right to be “knocked”, because they’re pushing an agenda and aren’t just wrong, but they aren’t interested in the truth at all.
  - lez 5y ago
    Nobody is right to be "knocked", it's discourse and leaving alone each other's freedoms what could work. Same as with the russians: censoring "knocking" Russian media won't solve anything, just create a more pro-war society. Even the government has an agenda and not interested in the truth at all.
    - skj 5y ago
      Are you knocking the knockers? No one is suggesting they be arrested. They're just being ridiculed.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    >I don’t think I’ve seen anybody “knocking” scientists looking into whether ivermectin works. (...) What I have seen is the knocking of people who claim that ivermectin is a wonder drug That's because they did both, combined: "knocked down scientists looking into whether ivermectin works" by making them appear as claiming that "ivermectin is a wonder drug". Then they get to gloat that they just knocked down those deserving it, and to strawman them more, they say that "they weren’t interested in the truth at all".
    - HL33tibCe7 5y ago
jiggawatts 5y ago
Ivermectin works because the first trials were done in developing economies where the average person had a high chance of parasitic infections. The steroids used as a standard front-line treatment for severe COVID decreases the immune response to parasites, allowing them to multiply unchecked. This killed patients indirectly, but dead is dead, and they "checked in" with COVID, not parasite complaints. Ivermectin is a wildly effective anti-parasitic, so unsurprisingly it reduces mortality rates in countries where the endemic parasite infection rate is something like 50 percent. This study appears to have been done in Canada, where parasite infection rates in the general population are probably 1% or less. Hence... no demonstrable benefit to using Ivermectin! Nonetheless, Ivermectin is safe drug to take in normal doses, and will help people that are hospitalised with COVID and are given steroids. It's not a prophylactic and high doses are not a treatment for COVID itself. The misunderstandings around this drug stem from misunderstandings of basic statistics and the scientific method. This is why you shouldn't get your medical advice from Joe Rogan.
- simonh 5y ago
  To be fair to Joe he wasn't giving medical advice, but licensed doctors on his show were.
  - HL33tibCe7 5y ago
    This sounds reasonable, until you realise that his opinions massively skew which licensed doctors he lets on the show. So effectively you’re ending up with him pushing his opinion anyway. If you cherry-pick your experts enough, you’ll be able to find one that agrees with you, no matter how absurd your position. I’ll also note that much of the time the licensed doctors he invites on aren’t actually in relevant specialties at all. And in many cases they are grifters in some way or another.
    - leereeves 5y ago
      Serious question: What media doesn't choose their guests to fit their opinions or their political stance? I'd like to watch that one.
an9n 5y ago
- giarc 5y ago
  There isn't anything fishy about a lot of those things, but you've been told there is. -SARS table top exercises... is that a surprise since the last 2 major international outbreaks with a risk of becoming pandemics were both coronaviruses, one from China and one from Saudi Arabia (SARS and MERS). -Pfizer/immunity - that's been the case for all vaccines. Look into influenza vaccine for example. No company would make and release a vaccine in August for delivery in October without some protection. In return the government provides that for them. It's a reasonable tradeoff. -suppression of vaccine side effects? you know there is tons of data and published papers on vaccine side effects right? People are going to tell you a lot of things in your life, you need to think critically about them and not default to them being true.
senectus1 5y ago
interesting, but largest ever? not according to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz4adJXLHgA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz4adJXLHgA which got very different results
- dtech 5y ago
  Post in the thread [1] gives a very plausibly-sounding hypothesis for seeing different results in non-western countries like your link. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30720766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30720766
  - senectus1 5y ago
    ahh yes i see. yes that sort of information is quite vacant from these stats.
- bildung 5y ago
  That is a very low quality study because it a) employed self-selection instead of a proper RCT design and b) didn't control for anything. At least tracking pre-existing conditions would have been necessary, when not randomizing, for the results to have any meaning. When studying the effects of invermectin, at least checking for worms in the patients' feces would have been needed.
justbrandon2u 5y ago
belter 5y ago
We did not eliminate pandemics. Instead, as a Society we barely made it through this one. Despite the massive human and economic cost of this latest pandemic, governments are making the same mistakes again: - Lack of preparation. - Not enough resources allocated to research. - Too much reliance on Pharma and particularly Vaccine producing companies. The best research is still done mostly via foundations or private funding. Some of the most interesting work is still ongoing. At the UK Recovery Study: https://www.recoverytrial.net/ https://www.recoverytrial.net/ They are investigating several treatments including Ivermectin. Results so far here: https://www.recoverytrial.net/results https://www.recoverytrial.net/results Also the PRINCIPLE Study is investigating Ivermectin with no published results yet. They were able to publish some results for other treatments already. Principle Results: https://www.principletrial.org/results https://www.principletrial.org/results The EU also has EU-Response initiative with Study results here: https://eu-response.eu/results/ https://eu-response.eu/results/
- azangru 5y ago
  > - Lack of preparation. > - Not enough resources allocated to research. How do you prepare for something that you don't know is going to happen? How would you have prepared for a major coronavirus outbreak before covid, for example? Some might even argue that it's precisely because of the research done in preparation for a new pandemic, which included studying novel coronaviruses using something that Fauci says was definitely not gain-of-function research, that we got this particular one in the first place :-) > - Too much reliance on Pharma and particularly Vaccine producing companies. Yeah, I think this is the mainstream scientific orthodoxy now. But then, it probably makes the most sense in terms of how we understand the human body works. What would you have done differently — reallocated the resources to study drug repurposing?
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    > How do you prepare for something that you don't know is going to happen? Statistical extrapolation and lessons from previous disasters. We don't know when a flood will happen, but we know what a floodplain looks like. > How would you have prepared for a major coronavirus outbreak before covid, for example? Execute on the preparatory plans generated after H1N1, as one example.
imgabe 5y ago
The whole Ivermectin debacle was ridiculous. I never had Covid. Or if I did, it was so mild I never noticed. So, I really have no dog in this fight. But the way the media handled this coverage was really, really off-putting. First, if it doesn't work, just say that. "It doesn't work". "Ivermectin is not an effective treatment for Covid". That's all that was really necessary, right? But no, there was this whole ridiculous crusade of "It's a horsey drug for horses! If you take it, that means you're a horse!". Which, after two seconds of consideration, was patently absurd. It's an extremely commonly prescribed drug for people. And there's plenty of drugs that are used for both people and animals. Ketamine. Antibiotics. We give antibiotics to horses too. So does that mean if you take antibiotics you're some whackjob taking horse drugs? So now you have the media constantly repeating something which anyone with two brain cells can discern is a blatant lie, and they somehow wonder why people don't trust them?
- watwut 5y ago
  When one side politicize drug, yes, the opponents will mock it. But also, there is version of Ivermectin for people and for horses. Those are two different things, dosages and buy at different places. Guess which one was originally talked about and taken. > We give antibiotics to horses too. Which are not the same for people and horses either. --------- Maybe the ridiculous thing was to make Ivermectin into political calling card into first place. And in the second place, attacking doctors who say it is not tested or does not work. What about that, really.
- _fizz_buzz_ 5y ago
  It was a story because people, for some stupid reason, started buying the horse version of the drug and horse owners couldn't get Ivermectin for their horses anymore: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/20/ivermectin-shortage-horse-owners-covid https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/20/ivermectin-sho... I haven't read any story that said: "It's a horsey drug for horses! If you take it, that means you're a horse!"
  - imgabe 5y ago
    Yeah that didn’t really happen. The article you linked is a 404 Obviously they didn’t use those exact words, but any time it was mentioned they were sure to include something like “…which is used to treat livestock…”, when that is not really relevant since it’s also widely used for people.
mrtri 5y ago
cf141q5325 5y ago
Can anyone link the study? Cant get around the paywall
snidane 5y ago
While the ivermectin story is largely explained by the confounding factor of parasite presence in developing countries, it indirectly helped covid patients by curing them of other problems and thus reducing the potence of covid. Not so much in the developed countries since the parasite problem was small. Concerning though, was the society's attitude to the Ivermectin, an safe drug prescribed by WHO in Africa en masse, established for decades, versus an experimental vaccine-like treatment with unknown side effects and never tested at scale that was to be deployed population wide. At the time of no studies, no information and heavy panic, one of these was condemned, likened to a horse paste for conspiracy theorists, the other revered like a God's potion. This attitude is perfectly rational for pharma companies, for which a vaccine is a better business model, with healthy 95% of the population being customers, than a drug with sick 5% being the customers. Especially for an is off-patent drug Ivermectin which is just a pain in the ass for pharma producers, with no monopoly markup on it. The behavior is not rational for the general populace though. Once country's biggest villains, pharma companies injecting patients unknowingly with opiods, turning them into lifetime subscribers, to world's biggest saviors like a flip of a switch. It was interesting to observe how the pandemic was progressing with a rational attitude as somebody who went through it and developed an immunity right at the beginning. It helped me understand how the minds can be overriden at scale using tactics of fear. Helps explain other dangerous ideologies that were pushed to the populations using fear. Vaccines and Ivermectin are old news though. Who would have though that Vladimir Putin would become the world's most successful doctor and cure the world of the pandemic overnight.
- NoraCodes 5y ago
  > Who would have though that Vladimir Putin would become the world's most successful doctor and cure the world of the pandemic overnight. Please, don't leave us hanging - i want to hear the rest! I wonder if your novel might be better suited for AO3 or FanFiction.net, though?
  - snidane 5y ago
    Sorry, I don't know how to write fan fiction. I don't know what you guys over there read.
jleyank 5y ago
Given that the activity of ivermectin was orthogonal to covid (virus vs parasite), they were looking for a side effect that would help. Pretty much every drug that was legally approved was tried when covid appeared to get something that might help. They could be immediately prescribed if something was found. It’s a good comment re reducing the parasite load to improve health, but as others pointed out that’s not common in the countries initially hit by covid. Once politics and hearsay took over, logical discussion ended. For any viral infection, the recourse is vaccination, antivirals and reducing the symptoms. The rise of mAB meant that the effect of vaccination could be immediately applied, which was a new improvement for treatment. Vaccines and antivirals take time to develop, mAB require survivors and they’re all “foreign substances and/or proteins”. The woo and political folks don’t want that. The world is very lucky covid was much closer to the flu than Ebola. Unless the “oh, sh*t” response would have broken through and kept people rational. And keep in mind that “a really strong immune system” often leads to a cytokine storm that burns out the lungs.
albertTJames 5y ago
Big surprise
Pinegulf 5y ago
Pity, yet honest person must follow where the evidence leads.
PaulHoule 5y ago
… the point was never to promote the belief that ivermectin was effective so much as to create the idea that there was a controversy about it in a world view where controversy for the sake of controversy is valorized.
chiefalchemist 5y ago
This is going to be an unpopular statement of fact but... It's worth pointing out, the study - intentionally? - offers no insights on deaths rates or length of hospital stay, etc. The scope as is is: Test positive. Receive a treatment. To hospital or not to hospital? But why stop there? In fact, as is, you can flip it over and say placebos are just as effective as Ivermectin, as there's no mention of a no treatment at all control. Or did I miss that? In any case, helpful. But apparently flawed.
janmarsal 5y ago
I don't get it. I don't understand anything about medicine but as far as I know the Japanese used ivermectin to treat COVID so it's not just some developing countries that use it. I'm from Finland and our national news company even reported about some Finnish pharma companies that developed a nasal spay that could treat COVID. That nasal spray included ivermectin and they said it's such a shame ivermectin has such a bad press because supposedly some yanks overdosed on horse dewormer after listening to Joe Rogan too much, but they still insisted that it's an effective drug to treat COVID. I don't know what to believe anymore. To me it seems that not even the trustworthy media can't decide whether it's effective or not. The most bizarre part of this whole ordeal is how there was such a huge backlash to ivermectin usage as if it was some kind of a dangerous drug when that's clearly not the case. Even my layman's knowledge is enough to understand that much. If it's placebo at worst then why did the media try to demonize it so hard?
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  - phoinix 5y ago
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  The danger was not that the medicine itself, but the fact that it was a) unproven to have any effect, b) often taken in horse doses causing nasty side effects (because horse medicine if often good enough for human consumption, even if it's not held to the same standard) and above all c) seen as an alternative to proper measures like vaccination, masks, the whole ordeal. It's a pretty good way to get rid of parasites, but the association with COVID caused a lot of problems.
  - janmarsal 5y ago
    https://yle.fi/news/3-11946611 https://yle.fi/news/3-11946611 ^ Okay so if "a)" is true then are these nasal spray companies full of shit or what? The part "b)" about horse dewormer overdoses have been confirmed to be fake news long ago so I think don't need to dwell on that too much. I still don't know whether ivermectin is effective or not though. If it's not then I still don't understand what's the big deal. Why does it have to be smeared so hard. And this whole "c)" thing. That's the most disturbing part to me. That's basically like religious fundamentalism to me. I just can't wrap my head around it. Why should vaccination be the only acceptable way to treat COVID and that we shouldn't even consider the alternatives as if they were some kind of heresies? I just don't understand. To me it seems like the vaccine fundamentalists are more interested in obedience than science. In science we need opposing views and this obviously means that some of those views will be proven to be false, but if you try to effectively SUPPRESS those opposing views then you can't call it science anymore. Also, there's always a good chance that the mainstream view can be false. I mean, just like with religions but that's one of those worm cans that only make people mad if we pop it open. My whole life I was taught that trying to cure seasonal flu with vaccine is silly because the flu mutates too fast and it just leads to an endless loop of seasonal vaccines. Then covid happens and suddenly I should forget everything I knew about vaccines even though with the talk about all these booster shots it only makes it seems like the old knowledge makes more sense than this new knowledge. My brain refuses to accept this nonsense, I can't help it.
cersa8 5y ago
Isn't Ivermectin most effective at the onset of symptoms [0] ? From the article "They looked at data from all patients; then analyzed data from patients who received ivermectin or a placebo 24 hours before they were hospitalized" This sounds like Ivermectin was given when symptoms where so severe, hospitalization was required. This could well be too late for Ivermectin to be effective. [0] https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)32506-6/fulltext https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)32506-6/ful...
- acdha 5y ago
  No. Ivermectin has not proven effective at any point.
  - pjkundert 5y ago
    - acdha 5y ago
      No, it hasn’t. You’re linking to a famously anonymous site which doesn’t control for quality because the purpose is to give people a number which looks positive secure in the knowledge that very few readers will notice how the studies showing positive effects are flawed or limited.
      - pjkundert 5y ago
        There are those who claim that you can accurately predict project timelines from the top down -- high-quality estimates, so to speak. However, this doesn't work. Talk to anyone in software for any significant duration. You make accurate high-level estimates, using a multitude of small, low-quality estimates. I trust many independent peer-reviewed studies (102) plus a large number of other studies (another 49), whose outcomes are consistent with all other studies (efficacy declines linearly from 0-7 days after onset). I do not trust a single, large study focussed after the efficacy window has expired. The big question is -- why would you trust such a study, if you surveyed and understood the efficacy decline consistent with all other studies?
bsuvc 5y ago
I've never understood why ivermectin is such a hot button issue that gets people worked up. If someone else has a doctor that prescribes it to them, and a pharmacy that fills the prescription, that should not be a problem, right? It's not like they are telling people they have to take ivermectin against their will. What am I missing?
- helen___keller 5y ago
  > What am I missing? Talking about ivermectin is almost always done in the context of political discourse, and political discourse is a shitshow In this particular case, (some) advocates for ivermectin promoted it as a miracle drug alternative to getting vaccinated, which became tied at the hip to anti-vaccine ideology, which is tied to particular political ideologies So ivermectin became a subset of a larger political debate, wielded as a weapon to show that your opponents are anti science (either because it’s effective and the other side won’t admit it because they’re tied to vax; or it’s ineffective and the other side won’t admit it because they’re tied to antivaxx) If this weren’t true nobody would have ever cared for or against ivermectin
- xboxnolifes 5y ago
  It's just another way to attack antivaxxers without directly using the usual terms. That's why it became so hot.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Because it was stupid to want to take it. There was no strong scientific evidence for it. Less observant people would then proceed to not get vaccinated. Ridicule is one effective way for society to push smarter choices when the majority of people know you are being an idiot. Vaccines are HIGHLY effective and ivermectine does nothing, and even at that point we knew there was about a 99% chance it did nothing
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
maskil 5y ago
The "largest trial to date" does not mean that it's case closed. While the case for Ivermectin has been weakened recently, there still seems a significant body of evidence to suggest that it does work. Many (not discredited) trials show efficacy and there is a significant observational correlation between population mass consumption of Ivermectin and better results with Covid. There are also many doctors that swear by it's efficacy from their experience. Trials aren't perfect. The drug companies have been manipulating trial data for decades to prove efficacy when there wasn't, it probably can be done the other way as well. And the incentive is there with such a politicized drug.
- darthparker 5y ago
  You're suggesting the drug companies are manipulating trials in order to _not sell_ a drug? That doesn't sound like any drug company in America.
  - snidane 5y ago
    Covid vaccines got the emergency authorization and still keep it because there "is not" an adequate drug for covid. It totally makes sense from pharma to prevent discovery of a functioning drug because they found a better cash cow - vaccines.
Tade0 5y ago
In my corner in the world the miracle drug was Amantadine(Gocovri) - used in the past to treat influenza, but not recommended anymore. Also no effect, as show by an appropriate study, but that didn't stop a friend of a friend from trying to obtain it instead of going to a doctor. He failed and eventually succumbed to the illness.
rbut 5y ago
c19early.com [1] lists numerous studies for Ivermectin and other drugs in the use of treating COVID-19 for both early treatment, and throughout all stages. Ivermectin currently sits at an average efficacy of 65% after 81 studies. So in reality, this study that WSJ cites should be added to the pool of efficacy, and not used to completely debunk Ivermectin. [1] https://c19early.com/ https://c19early.com/
- czowk 5y ago
  c19early/ivmmeta etc. and all those sites/faux meta analyses are not really reliable for determining (or even hypothesising) efficacy; We don’t see such benefit when looking at defined endpoint points in RCTs, rather than their weird synthesis of disparate cherry picked endpoints from ecological, cohort, case-control studies and RCTs. They mostly show low to very low quality/certainty evidence, as well as in vitro studies, observational studies, retrospective studies, non-randomised studies, and/or non-controlled studies. They even include studies that were negative. They also do not follow any methodological or report guidelines; i.e. not including protocol registration with methods, search strategies, inclusion criteria, quality assessment, certainly of evidence etc.
  - wrycoder 5y ago
    An opinion on ivermectin trials by an MD who tries to be rational: https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/05/09/update-on-ivermectin-for-covid-19/ https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/05/09/update-on-ivermect...
JoeyBananas 5y ago
Some studies say it does, some say it doesn't
mcwone 5y ago
Because of paywall, I'm not sure what study the wsj was referring to but there was a study in JAMA in which Norman Fenton from Queens College commented on which I found interesting: https://www.normanfenton.com/post/study-claiming-ivermectin-fails-actually-shows-a-much-lower-death-rate-in-those-who-received-it https://www.normanfenton.com/post/study-claiming-ivermectin-...
ImHereToVote 5y ago
From the article "They looked at data from all patients; then analyzed data from patients who received ivermectin or a placebo 24 hours before they were hospitalized" 24 hours!? How is that reasonable at all?
crypot 5y ago

217 points by elmalto 5y ago

Link without the paywall: https://www.wsj.com/articles/ivermectin-didnt-reduce-covid-19-hospitalizations-in-largest-trial-to-date-11647601200?st=v2bvudfsllip5py https://www.wsj.com/articles/ivermectin-didnt-reduce-covid-1...

wrycoder 5y ago
Paywall for me.

throwmeariver1 5y ago

elp 5y ago
I suspect this was really driven by one Steve Kirsch (https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/05/1036408/silicon-valley-millionaire-steve-kirsch-covid-vaccine-misinformation/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/05/1036408/silicon-...) No idea if he's just a rich nutter or if he's hoping he can profit by being the first to find a cure to something before anyone else. Maybe it's all just a giant scam to pocket donations.

WaxedChewbacca 5y ago

Meanwhile, back in reality, ivermectin is associated with 70%-ish reductions in hospitalization and death. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz4adJXLHgA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz4adJXLHgA

m-p-3 5y ago
In countries where a parasitic infection is common and is a COVID-19 co-morbidity.
- WaxedChewbacca 5y ago

sceptictank 5y ago

HL33tibCe7 5y ago
I don’t think I’ve seen anybody “knocking” scientists looking into whether ivermectin works. In fact, most ivermectin skeptics _welcome_ that. What I have seen is the knocking of people who claim that ivermectin is a wonder drug; or that the government is deliberately holding back ivermectin to prolong the pandemic; or that paxlovid etc. are just “big Pharma ivermectin”. Those people are right to be “knocked”, because they’re pushing an agenda and aren’t just wrong, but they aren’t interested in the truth at all.
- lez 5y ago
  Nobody is right to be "knocked", it's discourse and leaving alone each other's freedoms what could work. Same as with the russians: censoring "knocking" Russian media won't solve anything, just create a more pro-war society. Even the government has an agenda and not interested in the truth at all.
  - skj 5y ago
    Are you knocking the knockers? No one is suggesting they be arrested. They're just being ridiculed.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >I don’t think I’ve seen anybody “knocking” scientists looking into whether ivermectin works. (...) What I have seen is the knocking of people who claim that ivermectin is a wonder drug That's because they did both, combined: "knocked down scientists looking into whether ivermectin works" by making them appear as claiming that "ivermectin is a wonder drug". Then they get to gloat that they just knocked down those deserving it, and to strawman them more, they say that "they weren’t interested in the truth at all".
  - HL33tibCe7 5y ago

jiggawatts 5y ago

Ivermectin works because the first trials were done in developing economies where the average person had a high chance of parasitic infections. The steroids used as a standard front-line treatment for severe COVID decreases the immune response to parasites, allowing them to multiply unchecked. This killed patients indirectly, but dead is dead, and they "checked in" with COVID, not parasite complaints. Ivermectin is a wildly effective anti-parasitic, so unsurprisingly it reduces mortality rates in countries where the endemic parasite infection rate is something like 50 percent. This study appears to have been done in Canada, where parasite infection rates in the general population are probably 1% or less. Hence... no demonstrable benefit to using Ivermectin! Nonetheless, Ivermectin is safe drug to take in normal doses, and will help people that are hospitalised with COVID and are given steroids. It's not a prophylactic and high doses are not a treatment for COVID itself. The misunderstandings around this drug stem from misunderstandings of basic statistics and the scientific method. This is why you shouldn't get your medical advice from Joe Rogan.

simonh 5y ago
To be fair to Joe he wasn't giving medical advice, but licensed doctors on his show were.
- HL33tibCe7 5y ago
  This sounds reasonable, until you realise that his opinions massively skew which licensed doctors he lets on the show. So effectively you’re ending up with him pushing his opinion anyway. If you cherry-pick your experts enough, you’ll be able to find one that agrees with you, no matter how absurd your position. I’ll also note that much of the time the licensed doctors he invites on aren’t actually in relevant specialties at all. And in many cases they are grifters in some way or another.
  - leereeves 5y ago
    Serious question: What media doesn't choose their guests to fit their opinions or their political stance? I'd like to watch that one.

an9n 5y ago

giarc 5y ago
There isn't anything fishy about a lot of those things, but you've been told there is. -SARS table top exercises... is that a surprise since the last 2 major international outbreaks with a risk of becoming pandemics were both coronaviruses, one from China and one from Saudi Arabia (SARS and MERS). -Pfizer/immunity - that's been the case for all vaccines. Look into influenza vaccine for example. No company would make and release a vaccine in August for delivery in October without some protection. In return the government provides that for them. It's a reasonable tradeoff. -suppression of vaccine side effects? you know there is tons of data and published papers on vaccine side effects right? People are going to tell you a lot of things in your life, you need to think critically about them and not default to them being true.

senectus1 5y ago

interesting, but largest ever? not according to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz4adJXLHgA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz4adJXLHgA which got very different results

dtech 5y ago
Post in the thread [1] gives a very plausibly-sounding hypothesis for seeing different results in non-western countries like your link. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30720766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30720766
- senectus1 5y ago
  ahh yes i see. yes that sort of information is quite vacant from these stats.
bildung 5y ago
That is a very low quality study because it a) employed self-selection instead of a proper RCT design and b) didn't control for anything. At least tracking pre-existing conditions would have been necessary, when not randomizing, for the results to have any meaning. When studying the effects of invermectin, at least checking for worms in the patients' feces would have been needed.

justbrandon2u 5y ago

belter 5y ago

We did not eliminate pandemics. Instead, as a Society we barely made it through this one. Despite the massive human and economic cost of this latest pandemic, governments are making the same mistakes again: - Lack of preparation. - Not enough resources allocated to research. - Too much reliance on Pharma and particularly Vaccine producing companies. The best research is still done mostly via foundations or private funding. Some of the most interesting work is still ongoing. At the UK Recovery Study: https://www.recoverytrial.net/ https://www.recoverytrial.net/ They are investigating several treatments including Ivermectin. Results so far here: https://www.recoverytrial.net/results https://www.recoverytrial.net/results Also the PRINCIPLE Study is investigating Ivermectin with no published results yet. They were able to publish some results for other treatments already. Principle Results: https://www.principletrial.org/results https://www.principletrial.org/results The EU also has EU-Response initiative with Study results here: https://eu-response.eu/results/ https://eu-response.eu/results/

azangru 5y ago
> - Lack of preparation. > - Not enough resources allocated to research. How do you prepare for something that you don't know is going to happen? How would you have prepared for a major coronavirus outbreak before covid, for example? Some might even argue that it's precisely because of the research done in preparation for a new pandemic, which included studying novel coronaviruses using something that Fauci says was definitely not gain-of-function research, that we got this particular one in the first place :-) > - Too much reliance on Pharma and particularly Vaccine producing companies. Yeah, I think this is the mainstream scientific orthodoxy now. But then, it probably makes the most sense in terms of how we understand the human body works. What would you have done differently — reallocated the resources to study drug repurposing?
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  > How do you prepare for something that you don't know is going to happen? Statistical extrapolation and lessons from previous disasters. We don't know when a flood will happen, but we know what a floodplain looks like. > How would you have prepared for a major coronavirus outbreak before covid, for example? Execute on the preparatory plans generated after H1N1, as one example.

imgabe 5y ago

The whole Ivermectin debacle was ridiculous. I never had Covid. Or if I did, it was so mild I never noticed. So, I really have no dog in this fight. But the way the media handled this coverage was really, really off-putting. First, if it doesn't work, just say that. "It doesn't work". "Ivermectin is not an effective treatment for Covid". That's all that was really necessary, right? But no, there was this whole ridiculous crusade of "It's a horsey drug for horses! If you take it, that means you're a horse!". Which, after two seconds of consideration, was patently absurd. It's an extremely commonly prescribed drug for people. And there's plenty of drugs that are used for both people and animals. Ketamine. Antibiotics. We give antibiotics to horses too. So does that mean if you take antibiotics you're some whackjob taking horse drugs? So now you have the media constantly repeating something which anyone with two brain cells can discern is a blatant lie, and they somehow wonder why people don't trust them?

watwut 5y ago
When one side politicize drug, yes, the opponents will mock it. But also, there is version of Ivermectin for people and for horses. Those are two different things, dosages and buy at different places. Guess which one was originally talked about and taken. > We give antibiotics to horses too. Which are not the same for people and horses either. --------- Maybe the ridiculous thing was to make Ivermectin into political calling card into first place. And in the second place, attacking doctors who say it is not tested or does not work. What about that, really.
_fizz_buzz_ 5y ago
It was a story because people, for some stupid reason, started buying the horse version of the drug and horse owners couldn't get Ivermectin for their horses anymore: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/20/ivermectin-shortage-horse-owners-covid https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/20/ivermectin-sho... I haven't read any story that said: "It's a horsey drug for horses! If you take it, that means you're a horse!"
- imgabe 5y ago
  Yeah that didn’t really happen. The article you linked is a 404 Obviously they didn’t use those exact words, but any time it was mentioned they were sure to include something like “…which is used to treat livestock…”, when that is not really relevant since it’s also widely used for people.

mrtri 5y ago

cf141q5325 5y ago

Can anyone link the study? Cant get around the paywall

snidane 5y ago

While the ivermectin story is largely explained by the confounding factor of parasite presence in developing countries, it indirectly helped covid patients by curing them of other problems and thus reducing the potence of covid. Not so much in the developed countries since the parasite problem was small. Concerning though, was the society's attitude to the Ivermectin, an safe drug prescribed by WHO in Africa en masse, established for decades, versus an experimental vaccine-like treatment with unknown side effects and never tested at scale that was to be deployed population wide. At the time of no studies, no information and heavy panic, one of these was condemned, likened to a horse paste for conspiracy theorists, the other revered like a God's potion. This attitude is perfectly rational for pharma companies, for which a vaccine is a better business model, with healthy 95% of the population being customers, than a drug with sick 5% being the customers. Especially for an is off-patent drug Ivermectin which is just a pain in the ass for pharma producers, with no monopoly markup on it. The behavior is not rational for the general populace though. Once country's biggest villains, pharma companies injecting patients unknowingly with opiods, turning them into lifetime subscribers, to world's biggest saviors like a flip of a switch. It was interesting to observe how the pandemic was progressing with a rational attitude as somebody who went through it and developed an immunity right at the beginning. It helped me understand how the minds can be overriden at scale using tactics of fear. Helps explain other dangerous ideologies that were pushed to the populations using fear. Vaccines and Ivermectin are old news though. Who would have though that Vladimir Putin would become the world's most successful doctor and cure the world of the pandemic overnight.

NoraCodes 5y ago
> Who would have though that Vladimir Putin would become the world's most successful doctor and cure the world of the pandemic overnight. Please, don't leave us hanging - i want to hear the rest! I wonder if your novel might be better suited for AO3 or FanFiction.net, though?
- snidane 5y ago
  Sorry, I don't know how to write fan fiction. I don't know what you guys over there read.

jleyank 5y ago

Given that the activity of ivermectin was orthogonal to covid (virus vs parasite), they were looking for a side effect that would help. Pretty much every drug that was legally approved was tried when covid appeared to get something that might help. They could be immediately prescribed if something was found. It’s a good comment re reducing the parasite load to improve health, but as others pointed out that’s not common in the countries initially hit by covid. Once politics and hearsay took over, logical discussion ended. For any viral infection, the recourse is vaccination, antivirals and reducing the symptoms. The rise of mAB meant that the effect of vaccination could be immediately applied, which was a new improvement for treatment. Vaccines and antivirals take time to develop, mAB require survivors and they’re all “foreign substances and/or proteins”. The woo and political folks don’t want that. The world is very lucky covid was much closer to the flu than Ebola. Unless the “oh, sh*t” response would have broken through and kept people rational. And keep in mind that “a really strong immune system” often leads to a cytokine storm that burns out the lungs.

albertTJames 5y ago

Big surprise

Pinegulf 5y ago

Pity, yet honest person must follow where the evidence leads.

PaulHoule 5y ago

… the point was never to promote the belief that ivermectin was effective so much as to create the idea that there was a controversy about it in a world view where controversy for the sake of controversy is valorized.

chiefalchemist 5y ago

This is going to be an unpopular statement of fact but... It's worth pointing out, the study - intentionally? - offers no insights on deaths rates or length of hospital stay, etc. The scope as is is: Test positive. Receive a treatment. To hospital or not to hospital? But why stop there? In fact, as is, you can flip it over and say placebos are just as effective as Ivermectin, as there's no mention of a no treatment at all control. Or did I miss that? In any case, helpful. But apparently flawed.

janmarsal 5y ago

I don't get it. I don't understand anything about medicine but as far as I know the Japanese used ivermectin to treat COVID so it's not just some developing countries that use it. I'm from Finland and our national news company even reported about some Finnish pharma companies that developed a nasal spay that could treat COVID. That nasal spray included ivermectin and they said it's such a shame ivermectin has such a bad press because supposedly some yanks overdosed on horse dewormer after listening to Joe Rogan too much, but they still insisted that it's an effective drug to treat COVID. I don't know what to believe anymore. To me it seems that not even the trustworthy media can't decide whether it's effective or not. The most bizarre part of this whole ordeal is how there was such a huge backlash to ivermectin usage as if it was some kind of a dangerous drug when that's clearly not the case. Even my layman's knowledge is enough to understand that much. If it's placebo at worst then why did the media try to demonize it so hard?

tinus_hn 5y ago
- phoinix 5y ago
jeroenhd 5y ago
The danger was not that the medicine itself, but the fact that it was a) unproven to have any effect, b) often taken in horse doses causing nasty side effects (because horse medicine if often good enough for human consumption, even if it's not held to the same standard) and above all c) seen as an alternative to proper measures like vaccination, masks, the whole ordeal. It's a pretty good way to get rid of parasites, but the association with COVID caused a lot of problems.
- janmarsal 5y ago
  https://yle.fi/news/3-11946611 https://yle.fi/news/3-11946611 ^ Okay so if "a)" is true then are these nasal spray companies full of shit or what? The part "b)" about horse dewormer overdoses have been confirmed to be fake news long ago so I think don't need to dwell on that too much. I still don't know whether ivermectin is effective or not though. If it's not then I still don't understand what's the big deal. Why does it have to be smeared so hard. And this whole "c)" thing. That's the most disturbing part to me. That's basically like religious fundamentalism to me. I just can't wrap my head around it. Why should vaccination be the only acceptable way to treat COVID and that we shouldn't even consider the alternatives as if they were some kind of heresies? I just don't understand. To me it seems like the vaccine fundamentalists are more interested in obedience than science. In science we need opposing views and this obviously means that some of those views will be proven to be false, but if you try to effectively SUPPRESS those opposing views then you can't call it science anymore. Also, there's always a good chance that the mainstream view can be false. I mean, just like with religions but that's one of those worm cans that only make people mad if we pop it open. My whole life I was taught that trying to cure seasonal flu with vaccine is silly because the flu mutates too fast and it just leads to an endless loop of seasonal vaccines. Then covid happens and suddenly I should forget everything I knew about vaccines even though with the talk about all these booster shots it only makes it seems like the old knowledge makes more sense than this new knowledge. My brain refuses to accept this nonsense, I can't help it.

cersa8 5y ago

Isn't Ivermectin most effective at the onset of symptoms [0] ? From the article "They looked at data from all patients; then analyzed data from patients who received ivermectin or a placebo 24 hours before they were hospitalized" This sounds like Ivermectin was given when symptoms where so severe, hospitalization was required. This could well be too late for Ivermectin to be effective. [0] https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)32506-6/fulltext https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)32506-6/ful...

acdha 5y ago
No. Ivermectin has not proven effective at any point.
- pjkundert 5y ago
  - acdha 5y ago
    No, it hasn’t. You’re linking to a famously anonymous site which doesn’t control for quality because the purpose is to give people a number which looks positive secure in the knowledge that very few readers will notice how the studies showing positive effects are flawed or limited.
    - pjkundert 5y ago
      There are those who claim that you can accurately predict project timelines from the top down -- high-quality estimates, so to speak. However, this doesn't work. Talk to anyone in software for any significant duration. You make accurate high-level estimates, using a multitude of small, low-quality estimates. I trust many independent peer-reviewed studies (102) plus a large number of other studies (another 49), whose outcomes are consistent with all other studies (efficacy declines linearly from 0-7 days after onset). I do not trust a single, large study focussed after the efficacy window has expired. The big question is -- why would you trust such a study, if you surveyed and understood the efficacy decline consistent with all other studies?

bsuvc 5y ago

I've never understood why ivermectin is such a hot button issue that gets people worked up. If someone else has a doctor that prescribes it to them, and a pharmacy that fills the prescription, that should not be a problem, right? It's not like they are telling people they have to take ivermectin against their will. What am I missing?

helen___keller 5y ago
> What am I missing? Talking about ivermectin is almost always done in the context of political discourse, and political discourse is a shitshow In this particular case, (some) advocates for ivermectin promoted it as a miracle drug alternative to getting vaccinated, which became tied at the hip to anti-vaccine ideology, which is tied to particular political ideologies So ivermectin became a subset of a larger political debate, wielded as a weapon to show that your opponents are anti science (either because it’s effective and the other side won’t admit it because they’re tied to vax; or it’s ineffective and the other side won’t admit it because they’re tied to antivaxx) If this weren’t true nobody would have ever cared for or against ivermectin
xboxnolifes 5y ago
It's just another way to attack antivaxxers without directly using the usual terms. That's why it became so hot.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Because it was stupid to want to take it. There was no strong scientific evidence for it. Less observant people would then proceed to not get vaccinated. Ridicule is one effective way for society to push smarter choices when the majority of people know you are being an idiot. Vaccines are HIGHLY effective and ivermectine does nothing, and even at that point we knew there was about a 99% chance it did nothing
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

maskil 5y ago

The "largest trial to date" does not mean that it's case closed. While the case for Ivermectin has been weakened recently, there still seems a significant body of evidence to suggest that it does work. Many (not discredited) trials show efficacy and there is a significant observational correlation between population mass consumption of Ivermectin and better results with Covid. There are also many doctors that swear by it's efficacy from their experience. Trials aren't perfect. The drug companies have been manipulating trial data for decades to prove efficacy when there wasn't, it probably can be done the other way as well. And the incentive is there with such a politicized drug.

darthparker 5y ago
You're suggesting the drug companies are manipulating trials in order to _not sell_ a drug? That doesn't sound like any drug company in America.
- snidane 5y ago
  Covid vaccines got the emergency authorization and still keep it because there "is not" an adequate drug for covid. It totally makes sense from pharma to prevent discovery of a functioning drug because they found a better cash cow - vaccines.

Tade0 5y ago

In my corner in the world the miracle drug was Amantadine(Gocovri) - used in the past to treat influenza, but not recommended anymore. Also no effect, as show by an appropriate study, but that didn't stop a friend of a friend from trying to obtain it instead of going to a doctor. He failed and eventually succumbed to the illness.

rbut 5y ago

c19early.com [1] lists numerous studies for Ivermectin and other drugs in the use of treating COVID-19 for both early treatment, and throughout all stages. Ivermectin currently sits at an average efficacy of 65% after 81 studies. So in reality, this study that WSJ cites should be added to the pool of efficacy, and not used to completely debunk Ivermectin. [1] https://c19early.com/ https://c19early.com/

czowk 5y ago
c19early/ivmmeta etc. and all those sites/faux meta analyses are not really reliable for determining (or even hypothesising) efficacy; We don’t see such benefit when looking at defined endpoint points in RCTs, rather than their weird synthesis of disparate cherry picked endpoints from ecological, cohort, case-control studies and RCTs. They mostly show low to very low quality/certainty evidence, as well as in vitro studies, observational studies, retrospective studies, non-randomised studies, and/or non-controlled studies. They even include studies that were negative. They also do not follow any methodological or report guidelines; i.e. not including protocol registration with methods, search strategies, inclusion criteria, quality assessment, certainly of evidence etc.
- wrycoder 5y ago
  An opinion on ivermectin trials by an MD who tries to be rational: https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/05/09/update-on-ivermectin-for-covid-19/ https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/05/09/update-on-ivermect...

JoeyBananas 5y ago

Some studies say it does, some say it doesn't

mcwone 5y ago

Because of paywall, I'm not sure what study the wsj was referring to but there was a study in JAMA in which Norman Fenton from Queens College commented on which I found interesting: https://www.normanfenton.com/post/study-claiming-ivermectin-fails-actually-shows-a-much-lower-death-rate-in-those-who-received-it https://www.normanfenton.com/post/study-claiming-ivermectin-...

ImHereToVote 5y ago

From the article "They looked at data from all patients; then analyzed data from patients who received ivermectin or a placebo 24 hours before they were hospitalized" 24 hours!? How is that reasonable at all?

crypot 5y ago