It is probably impossible to know whether or not ivermectin and/or HCQ help battle Covid without doing laboratory experiments. In other words, place the Covid 19 virus in a petri dish (or whatever) and add ivermectin. See if it harms the virus at all. If it does, then it works. If not, it probably does not. Do the same with HCQ.
There is no realistic way of knowing whether or not any particular medication works on anyone’s body. Folks who were sick for three days with ivermectin might have still been sick three days without it.
The trouble is, lots of things look promising (even amazingly effective) in vitro, but have zero or very weak effect in vivo. The only way to truly test is in well-designed randomized placebo-controlled human studies.
DennisR wrote: “It is probably impossible to know whether or not ivermectin and/or HCQ help battle Covid without doing laboratory experiments. In other words, place the Covid 19 virus in a petri dish (or whatever) and add ivermectin. See if it harms the virus at all. If it does, then it works. If not, it probably does not. Do the same with HCQ.”
https://www.healthline.com/health/in-vivo-vs-in-vitro#real-life-examples
Not all ‘petri’ dish results are transferable to in the body results.
How do you think they test the not vaccines ?
Here’s a study that did just that, reported in Dec 2020:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33278625/
In 2005 the National Institute of Health (NIH) performed in vitro studies of hydroxychloroquine on the original SARS virus. This study could once be found on the CDC website but is no longer there as far as I know. Their experiments showed that hydroxychloroquine, a zinc ionophore, acted as a gateway for zinc to pass through the cell membrane into the cytoplasm and inhibit the replication of the virus by blocking its access to the RNA dependent RNA polymerase.
In other words, The CDC has known since 2005 that hydroxychloroquine was effective in vitro against the SARS virus.
I’ve attached one of the most interesting lectures I’ve ever seen. It’s a Medcram lecture from early in the pandemic that talks about the CDC study and walks you through the Cellular processes to explain why they believed hydroxychloroquine is so effective. I highly recommend this lecture, it is fascinating.