CV and mad panic behaviour

[Mav]

Interesting article about Ivermectin:
‘You will not believe what I’ve just found.’ Inside the ivermectin saga: a hacked password, mysterious websites and faulty data, Market Watch.

I've never heard of Market Watch - it appears to be what you'd imagine, a stock market news site. As to why it has a long story on Ivermectin, I have no idea. The article itself seems to be well-written & informative.

Most of it has previously been covered by other articles. It summarises the research fraud that has been behind the Ivermectin push. But it takes the Ivermectin story a bit further with the following:

Edward Mills, a health-sciences professor at Canada’s McMaster University, is co-investigator of the Together clinical trial, another rigorous study that is evaluating nine different repurposed drugs as COVID-19 therapies, including ivermectin. It recently completed the ivermectin analysis but found it “did not demonstrate an important benefit,” Mills said in an email. The research may be published this month, he said.

Nevertheless, there is an idea circulating among scientists like Mills that ivermectin may be more likely to benefit COVID-19 patients in areas of the world with a high prevalence of parasitic worms. “What is possible is that co-infection of parasites with COVID may worsen health outcomes,” Mills said.

This is an idea also raised by Boulware, the scientist working on the University of Minnesota’s ivermectin study. Corticosteroids, like dexamethasone, are now considered the standard of care for severely ill COVID-19 patients; however, these drugs can cause what is called a “hyperinfection” and sometimes be fatal in a patient who has a parasitic infection. It’s possible that additional data about ivermectin gathered from different patient populations could show the drug being more beneficial in people who live in parasitic regions of the world, they say.

However, most native-born Americans don’t have parasites. And, since 2005, the U.S. policy has been to recommend that refugees from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean receive treatment or presumptive antiparasitic treatment — including ivermectin — before arriving in the U.S.

“In certain patient populations, if you have a parasitic infection, it certainly can be beneficial if you’re giving steroids,” Boulware said. “Does that mean [as an] outpatient-setting early therapy in the U.S. that there’s a benefit? We don’t know that, and so I think that is an unknown question.”

For now, the healthcare professionals who have been put in the position of saying “no” to prescribing ivermectin are waiting for the data from the U.S. trials. Dr. Rani Sebti, an infectious-disease physician at Hackensack Meridian Health hospital system in New Jersey, says he’s been fielding calls from primary-care doctors in the U.S. and abroad about whether to prescribe ivermectin when patients ask for it.

“I cannot sit here and tell you ivermectin is the worst drug in the world,” he said. “I need to see a good prospective, double-blind, placebo-controlled study. And then when we get that study, it will answer the question for good.”

That Ivermectin might have a role to play in treating Covid patients who have parasitic infections either hasn't been raised in articles I've read before (or at least the point wasn't made clearly enough for me to appreciate it). It's a very interesting speculation about the interplay between steroids & Ivermectin. Of course, even if that speculation is correct, it does nothing to justify the hard-on Ivermectin shills have for treating patients In the USA & Australia where few patients would be affected by parasites.

It also reports that fairly conclusive evidence about Ivermectin's effectiveness will be published soon (quite apart from the 1st paragraph of the above quote which notes the Together trial found no important benefit from Covid):

Good data on ivermectin coming soon

Sometime this winter or early spring, a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health that is testing ivermectin in 1,000 patients is expected to produce results, says Dr. Susanna Naggie, the vice dean for clinical research at Duke University’s medical school and the researcher running the trial.

The University of Minnesota’s randomized study has enrolled 1,196 participants, one-third of whom received ivermectin. (Both trials are evaluating several repurposed drugs as possible COVID-19 treatments.) Within the next few weeks, the Minnesota institution is expected to share the first findings from the ivermectin part of its trial, nearly two years after the first preprint examining ivermectin’s viability was published.