Better Data on Ivermectin Is Finally on Its Way, Wired.
But Ivermectin finished in a statistical dead heat with placebos! So unimpressive was its performance that it's been dumped from the trial
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It's pretty obvious this fixation with Ivermectin is only a figleaf for anti-vaxxers. They get to push an alternative to vaccines as they know they can't just tell people not to take a life-saving vaccine. They get to argue they're not anti-science at all (even though they're unwilling to acknowledge what the scientists say). And it becomes a political rallying point.
Quote:EDWARD MILLS CAME to the meeting last month with very good data. A clinical trials expert at McMaster University, Mills was presenting new results from a trial that is looking at how well half a dozen different drugs treat Covid-19—not for the people so sick they’re in the emergency room or the hospital, but in people whose symptoms haven’t gotten that bad yet. People sick at home, in other words.
At his online talk, put on by the National Institutes of Health, Mills’ slides told the tale: A relatively safe, familiar, cheap drug reduced the relative risk of mild Covid getting worse by nearly 30 percent. The drug is fluvoxamine, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor—an antidepressant. (It’s also an anti-inflammatory, and inflammation and an overreacting immune system are hallmarks of serious Covid infection, so that might be why it seems to help).
But Ivermectin finished in a statistical dead heat with placebos! So unimpressive was its performance that it's been dumped from the trial
)Quote:But political activists didn’t turn metformin into a rhetorical tool; ivermectin has stans so aggressive they make Gamergaters seem chill. Mills says he and his colleagues have been abused and threatened by ivermectin adherents; the trial designers even went through the rigorous process of changing the dosage administered to comport better to the fans’ preferred regimen of three days instead of just one. “We tested, what, seven other drugs? Nobody abuses us about the other drugs. We even showed one of them worked,” Mills tells me. His team touted positive results for fluvoxamine, “and that crowd doesn’t seem to care. If you ask them, ‘Why do you feel so strongly about ivermectin?’ they will say, ‘Because we feel there should be a cheap, effective drug that can be used by poor people.’ OK, well, we have that. We have it with fluvoxamine, and with inhaled budesonide. Why do they not care about those drugs? They don’t have an answer. They just want to talk about ivermectin.”
It's pretty obvious this fixation with Ivermectin is only a figleaf for anti-vaxxers. They get to push an alternative to vaccines as they know they can't just tell people not to take a life-saving vaccine. They get to argue they're not anti-science at all (even though they're unwilling to acknowledge what the scientists say). And it becomes a political rallying point.