“a similarly absurd rumor that Ivermectin use is breeding variants.”
Actually, assuming ivermectin has less ability to stop the growth of the virus, it would be a very good candidate to encourage variancy. Same can be said of China vacs: the more spread= the more mutation chances.
UK has started a ‘full-on’ study of ivermectin BTW.
Hope it’s good news. But not expecting it to be as efficacious as even the China vacs.
The problem with ivermectin studies has been low quality. Then they do "meta analysis" on groups of low quality studies to prop them up, but it's still low quality data. The trend seems to be the higher the quality of the study, the worse ivermectin performs. Like many other drugs, they have identified possible mechanisms that "could" make ivermectin work, so there is some hope. But there's almost zero chance that it's the magic bullet some are claiming. The last 2 RCT's I saw (Randomized, double-blind, Placebo-controlled) were disappointing.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2777389
"Findings In this randomized clinical trial that included 476 patients, the duration of symptoms was not significantly different for patients who received a 5-day course of ivermectin compared with placebo "
https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-021-06348-5
"Ivermectin had no significant effect on preventing hospitalization of patients with COVID-19. Patients who received ivermectin required invasive MVS earlier in their treatment. No significant differences were observed in any of the other secondary outcomes."