Treating Covid-19: Everyone was wrong about ivermectin

Health officials condemned ivermectin as a useless and even dangerous treatment for COVID-19. The media smeared the well-known and commonly used anti-parasitic drug as a “horse dewormer,” even though it has always been a human medicine as well. They mercilessly mocked people who thought the drug might help them.

But it turns out ivermectin can actually help certain people fight off COVID-19, according to science writer Scott Alexander.

In a lengthy blog post , Alexander took a deep dive into all available studies on ivermectin and whether it works against COVID-19. It’s worth reading in full, but I’ll highlight his main point: Ivermectin does work, albeit indirectly, especially in areas where parasitic and intestinal worms are common.

There’s a reason the most impressive ivermectin studies came from parts of the world where worms are prevalent, he says. Parasites suppress the immune system, making it more difficult for the human body to fight off viruses. Thus, getting rid of worm infections makes it easier for COVID-19 patients to bounce back from the virus.

If Alexander’s hypothesis is correct, he’s also right that everyone who hastily jumped to a conclusion about ivermectin was wrong. Ivermectin is not the COVID-19 cure that some made it out to be, but it’s also not useless in the fight against COVID-19 either. It does have some benefits — they’re just minimal and far less effective than other therapeutics, such as monoclonal antibody treatments.

“Experts” deserve much of the blame for ivermectin disinformation. Most of them refused to entertain the possibility that ivermectin might help COVID-19 patients. I’d be surprised if even one official in the Food and Drug Administration or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took the time to evaluate the data like Alexander did before publicly declaring it didn’t work.

It is also worth considering why so many people convinced themselves that ivermectin was a COVID-19 super-drug. Alexander argues that ivermectin fanaticism is connected to anti-vax sentiment in the sense that both are wacky pseudoscience beliefs to which certain people are attracted.

But there’s a much simpler explanation: Many of the same people who were drawn to ivermectin are wary of the COVID-19 vaccines because they are skeptical of the public health consensus in general. They see health officials stressing and, in some cases, mandating vaccination and are repelled by this. They see health officials rejecting ivermectin and other COVID-19 treatments as nonsense and are drawn to them. Their beliefs aren’t so much an embrace of pseudoscience as they are a flat rejection of an authority that has failed them.

The problem with this is much of the scientific establishment seems to want to come across as, to borrow Alexander’s phrase, hostile aliens. They don’t care whether the public trust their guidance or not. If they did, it would not have taken a science blogger to get to the bottom of what was happening with ivermectin. The CDC and FDA, the people who literally get paid to research these kinds of things, should have done that months ago.

Thank you for referencing that article SeekAndFind. Please note that the following critique is directed at the article and not at you.

The referenced article “overlooked” that the patent on Ivermectin is long expired. In other words, and emphasizing that I don’t know anything about pharmaceutical industry, it is probably more profitable for Big Pharma to sell experimental “vaccines” that use non-expired patents to big government.

In fact, a freeper mentioned several hundred dollars per shot awhile back.

Also, it would be interesting if medical history would have turned out better if vitamin D3 had been discovered before vaccines were.

Insights welcome.

I can't say that de-worming doesn't help against COVID-19, but it's scientifically IMPOSSIBLE that that's the only reason it helps:

Oklahoma Doctors Have Tremendous Success in Treating Nursing Home COVID Patients with Ivermectin
Do Antiviral Pills Negate The Need For Vaccine Mandates?
Two of the major pharmaceutical companies are about to get approval to market "anti-viral" therapeutic pills that are more or less as effective as the vaccines they currently market. Those pills' method of action is based on the same anti-viral mechanism the Ivermectin drug uses.
Review of the Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy of Ivermectin in the Prophylaxis and Treatment of COVID-19
Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance. Furthermore, results from numerous controlled prophylaxis trials report significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19 with the regular use of ivermectin. Finally, the many examples of ivermectin distribution campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality indicate that an oral agent effective in all phases of COVID-19 has been identified.
Effectiveness and Safety of Ivermectin in COVID‐19 Patients: A Prospective Study at A Safety‐Net Hospital [Ozer et al., Journal of Medical Virology, doi:10.1002/jmv.27469 (Peer Reviewed)]
Small prospective PSM study in the USA, showing 75% lower mortality with ivermectin treatment, without reaching statistical significance, significantly shorter ventilation and ICU time, and longer hospitalization time.
Authors leave the statistically significant improvements in ventilation and ICU time out of the abtract and conclusions, and incorrectly state that there were no differences in other outcomes (there were no statistically significant differences) [1]. Authors are ambiguous on the primary outcome, referring to the primary mortality outcome in one case, and "clinical outcomes, measured by the rate of intubation, length of hospital stay, and mechanical ventilation duration" in another case.
The longer hospitalization time may be partially due to the greater mortality in the control group.
risk of death, 75.0% lower, RR 0.25, p = 0.09, treatment 2 of 60 (3.3%), control 8 of 60 (13.3%), PSM.
Repositioning Ivermectin for Covid-19 treatment: Molecular mechanisms of action against SARS-CoV-2 replication [Low et al., Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) - Molecular Basis of Disease, doi:10.1016/j.bbadis.2021.166294 (Review) (Peer Reviewed)]
Review of the antiviral characteristics of ivermectin and mechanisms of action. Authors note that ivermectin has proven effective for HIV-1, Adenovirus, flu, SARS-CoV, and more; due to genomic similarity between SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV, the role of the IMPα/β1 complex for viral protein (NSP12-RdRp) shuttling between the nucleus and cytoplasm holds great potential; and that ivermectin exhibits great potential in reducing SARS-CoV-2 viral replication via numerous modes of action, such as the disruption of the Importin heterodimer complex (IMPα/β1).
Favipiravir and Ivermectin Showed in Vitro Synergistic Antiviral Activity against SARS-CoV-2 [Jitaboam et al., Research Square, doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-941811/v1 (Peer Reviewed) (In Vitro)]
In Vitro study showing a strong synergistic effect of ivermectin and favipiravir. Combining multiple antiviral drugs with different mechanisms of action helps to minimize drug resistance and toxicity.

Bottom line: To claim that a therapeutic drug with known, proven antiviral action against virii in general, and against SARS-Cov-2 in particular, is only effective because it kills worms is an extraordinary claim, and so requires extraordinary proof.

Thanks for posting! This analysis is very detailed and explains why so many have been fooled by ivermectin.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted
The Summary

Ivermectin doesn’t reduce mortality in COVID a significant amount (let’s say d > 0.3) in the absence of comorbid parasites: 85-90% confidence

Parasitic worms are a significant confounder in some ivermectin studies, such that they made them get a positive result even when honest and methodologically sound: 50% confidence

Fraud and data processing errors are of similar magnitude to p-hacking and methodological problems in explaining bad studies (95% confidence interval for fraud: between >1% and 5% as important as methodological problems; 95% confidence interval for data processing errors: between 5% and 100% as important)

Probably “Trust Science” is not the right way to reach proponents of pseudoscientific medicine: ???% confidence

Ivermectin, ‘Wonder drug’ from Japan: the human use perspective Feb. 10, 2011 - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Discovered in the late-1970s, the pioneering drug ivermectin, a dihydro derivative of avermectin—originating solely from a single microorganism isolated at the Kitasato Intitute, Tokyo, Japan from Japanese soil—has had an immeasurably beneficial impact in improving the lives and welfare of billions of people throughout the world.
(snip)
There are few drugs that can seriously lay claim to the title of ‘Wonder drug’, penicillin and aspirin being two that have perhaps had greatest beneficial impact on the health and wellbeing of Mankind. But ivermectin can also be considered alongside those worthy contenders, based on its versatility, safety and the beneficial impact that it has had, and continues to have, worldwide—especially on hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people.

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