If they had worked as hoped everyone would be using them. The 2005 experiment with quinines on the first SARS worked in the lab, but that was African Green Monkey tissue and in a lab setting. When another SARS showed up in Covid they could try it in the real world on humans and it just didn’t work the same. Ivermectin’s test history I don’t know but it may be similar, something that they had hope for that didn’t pan out. The fact that these things were tried filters out to the public in a confused fashion and becomes “they work and we are being denied them”. Conspiracy sites run with the story and it becomes “fact” through repetition and a suspicion of clowns like Fauci who provide good reason for suspicion.
Thank you-I want to tell you how much I appreciate the rational discussion on this. It is clear that you and I differ, but that doesn’t mean we cannot discuss this.
I just want to be clear on my stance (and I want to keep it civil and have discussion because it doesn’t always happen that way) that I have no full opinion on the efficacy of HCQ, but I do believe IVM has a degree of effectiveness.
Dr. Tess Lawrie has taken the results of 27 different studies on the effectiveness of IVM taken from countries around the world (these are clinician run independent studies, not from pharmaceutical companies and performed a meta analysis on them using tools like Review Manager and Cochrane Collaboration Tool and she has found the IVM does indeed provide a benefit. She has been out front with her professional reputation on this as has Dr. Peter McCullough.
They have invited anyone to debate this issue. And that fact that people are fighting anonymously against them using silent smear campaigns, or fighting proxy campaigns against them through the media tells me people like Lawrie and McCullough have the power of truth behind them.
I have long experience in healthcare in clinical as well as medical informatics, I am not a doctor (and have never claimed to be) but I have two STEM degrees and can (and have) read journal papers and understand for the most part the core of what they are saying, if not detailed information. I have been extracting and collating data for years and presenting it to clinicians and administrators for decision making so I have a fundamental understanding of statistics.
The point I am trying to make is that there are people who say that Ivermectin has no effect, and I disagree with that.
I base my disagreement on at least two people (Dr. McCullough and Dr. Lawrie) who have uncompromisingly put their own careers and reputations on the line because their primary focus is on the welfare of the patient, and they feel strongly that a horrible wrong is being done, and I agree with them on this. They have taken the time to do the analysis across a broader spectrum to obtain the overall picture, and to implement and treat COVID patients in their practices with their own or derived protocols, achieving great success in this that correlates with what they have seen in the papers they have performed the meta analysis on.
I don’t see support for IVM (and again, I have not explored HCQ in the same fashion so I cannot speak to that) as a weak-minded straw that someone grabbed from the watery depths of a conspiracy theory.
Quite the contrary. I see more evidence of an orchestrated whitewash of the effectiveness and use of IVM (as seen in a recorded conversation between Dr. Tess Lawrie and a researcher Dr. Andrew Hill whose IVM study she (and Dr. Hill) had planned to use in her meta analysis. They had discussed using his study in her meta analysis some weeks before the paper was published, and both parties were quite enthusiastic as something that would help IVM eventual get into the hands of patients.
However, when the study was published, the conclusions had been radically changed (the underlying data was unchanged) and he admitted that the sponsor had final say on the findings, and changed it themselves to be unfavorable.
And the company was Unitaid, a global “vaccine at all costs” type of organization.
So, I see far more evidence that IVM may be effective, and that this narrative has been deliberately crushed, than evidence that those who differ from the official narrative are conspiracy theorists and on the whole, unable to parse the data.
"...If they had worked as hoped everyone would be using them..."
I don't see that as a given, and it is an important one. I simply don't believe that everyone hoped that. I believe there were front line physicians who hoped that, but those people had their hands tied. If their institutions discouraged the use of IVM, then it wasn't going to get used.
I believe that the "anti-anti viral" effort started at the top in the governmental agencies (who are fully in bed with the Pharmaceutical companies, this cannot even be in question when it is openly admitted that some of those agencies get up to 45% of their funding from the companies they are supposed to regulate, taken from them in "fees".
I see that as an unbelievable and un-excusable conflict of interest, and makes the ENTIRE healthcare branch of government vulnerable to graft and corruption, and I believe it has been heavily leveraged.
I get the feeling that we both agree on what a snake Fauci and Birx are. (Birx does not get the "credit" she deserves for her part in this debacle, something Scott Atlas described in detail in his book that referenced his dealings with her.