The Ivermectin discussion

Utter Pradash - no actual proof of anything that would stand up anywhere - mere supposed causal anecdotal and dubious.

fact is that Ivermectin hasn't shown efficacy in any properly conducted trial with a significant number of participants

Really nothing you wrote here is a reply to anything I wrote. Despite you addressing it to my post. For example your first paragraph discusses Anti Vaxxers. Your second paragraph discussed Pro Vaxxers. Nothing I wrote to you as a reply to your post had anything whatsoever to do with Vaccination. So why you bring this up with me is seriously unclear.

Second - I am not interested at all in how long a drug has been used for X or Y. I am only interested if there is data showing that the drug is actually efficacious where it is used - or not. Referring to historical use is less than relevant even when discussing the thing it is actually being used for. But discussing it's historical use for one virus - when discussing an entirely new virus is even less relevant. Especially when the new virus is "novel". Even if a given drug shows efficacy against one virus - that is in fact zero evidence it will be efficacious against the next.

Regarding your "do you honestly think" question - I tend to tell people what I honestly think. So if I have not told you I think something - then asking me if I "honestly think it" is really nothing but straw man and putting words in my mouth. Why would you ask me if I honestly think something I patently and demonstrably never once said? Between this and your diatribe about anti and pro vaxxers I am unclear if you even read my post at all at this point.

So I will simply repeat what I did say. Again. Maybe you will read it this time: You claimed this drug "where it has been done properly shows it is the most effective method known at present." but you have shown absolutely zero evidence for that statement. You have not - I repeat - even shown evidence that you understand what it even means to have study of a drug "done properly". So it is entirely unclear what you want the WHO to "acknowledge" here - or what form you think that acknowlegement would even take were it to be made.

I see nothing to acknowledge except what I already clearly and openly acknowledged - which is that when one region deals with a pandemic significantly better than other regions - then the reasons for this are worthy of study. From the link you provided there is literally nothing else to say or acknowledge.

But this thread is not about that. This thread is solely and specifically about Ivermectin isn't it? Or did you not bother to read the thread title and topic along with not really bothering to read my post? By all means discuss isolation protocols. A great topic. But not what this thread is about except to point out that stringent identification and isolation protocols make your link - and the questions you asked about your own link - an issue regarding attempt to identify ivermectic as a useful drug in this context.

The thing is - alas - that there is currently zero evidence especially in the link you provided that I replied to - that this drug specifically has any beneficial effects for this virus. Either in prevention of catching it - treatment of those who have caught it - or prevention of the infected from transmitting it. Which I suspect is why you are doing a gish gallop of irrelevant off topic tangents.

Which is all a pity. An off patent cheap and easy to mass manufacture drug would be a wonderful thing to discover for this pandemic. I would be front of the line promoting it if there was any reason to do so.

There. Simply. Isn't.

Yet!

No.

You got it arseways.

Total whataboutery but even that doesn't stand up.

Key points for parents and caregivers:

• Effectiveness: Immune responses of children 5 through 11 years of age were comparable to those of individuals 16 through 25 years of age. In addition, the vaccine was found to be 90.7% effective in preventing COVID-19 in children 5 through 11.
• Safety: The vaccine’s safety was studied in approximately 3,100 children age 5 through 11 who received the vaccine and no serious side effects have been detected in the ongoing study.
• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices will meet next week to discuss further clinical recommendations.

and there's more

The second new article appeared in The Atlantic last week, written by James Heathers, a data scientist who has uncovered flaws in multiple studies of ivermectin. Heathers’ summary of the problems is terrific, and I highly recommend that readers check it out, but I’ll share a few tidbits here.

Heathers describes the process of digging into the details of these studies, which is difficult and thankless. He’s not paid to do this; he’s just a good scientist who cares about the integrity of the literature, and it obviously bothers him when he sees shoddy science that has passed through peer review. “We do it because we feel it should be done,” he writes.

One of his main points is that bad studies get published all the time, and they simply remain out there, because who has time to go through all of them? Most of them don’t matter, and they are quickly forgotten.

In the case of ivermectin, Heathers found flaws in study after study. More tellingly, he observed the same phenomenon that Hill, Mirchandani, and Pilkington found: the biggest benefits of ivermectin appeared in the worst studies. As Heathers explains:

“the studies we are certain are unreliable happen to be the same ones that show ivermectin as most effective.”

Why did this happen with ivermectin? In retrospect, it’s not surprising: some doctors and scientists really wanted it to work, they let that bias creep into their studies. Maybe they ignored the patients who got sicker after ivermectin treatment, or maybe they made sure the sicker-looking patients got the placebo. (These would be big red flags if they happened.) Or maybe they had outside motivations–political pressure, for instance–to produce a positive study about ivermectin.

The peer-review process is supposed to catch these problems, and it’s slowly catching up now, as reflected in the new review from Hill et al. But as Heathers points out,

“Publishing science is slow; highly contagious diseases are fast.”

Meanwhile, the data pretty clearly show that ivermectin is useless against Covid-19. We desperately need effective treatments, and we should stop looking up this blind alley.

Yeah..

Japan had 0 cases yesterday or the day before..

At the end of August they said doctors could use it to treat covid if they saw fit..their wave peaked a week later and dropped precipitously..Covid disappeared within a month pretty much..

And I didn't say they halted vaccines..

Press conference where Tokyo's medical association chairman issued the directive..

That site looks nice and all but that in itself means nothing and still has heavily discredited studies listed, such as this one right at the top of the list

https://c19ivermectin.com/carvallo.html

And lists all the other studies which have found to be unreliable in other recent analysis

"One stops the disease if treated early"

I am still waiting for any studies showing such a claim is even remotely true though. Not just "coulds" and "maybes" but actual evidence this is what is what actually happens.

So far we are not getting this - and most people who I ask either cite a single study which showed benefits in a petri dish - or they cite a single country who did a lot of things at the same time - including distributing medicine packs which happened to include among other things Ivermectin - and simply declare that this is evidence.

Neither of those things are evidence for the efficacy of Ivermectin in treating or preventing Covid in Humans. So what is? Anything? Put my waiting to an end because as you say above - it would indeed be massively exciting if a drug that cheap and available were useful here. It would be exactly what the world wants and needs.

And doing none of the things that have not been shown to have any benefit costs 0C. So I am not sure a financial argument holds up there - even if it is only 6c.

But to answer your question more seriously - there is a reason why doctors ask you if you are on any "other" medication when they are about to prescribe one to you. It is because there are databases that store information on how some drugs have been found to combine badly with other drugs.

But that database is limited. It does not know every combination. Maybe drug X does not react with Y or Z individually. But if someone takes X Y and Z together suddenly there is an issue. And we might not know that yet.

So there is legitimate concern with the idea of just making some random drug widely available and heavily taken. It means there is a new drug out there "in the wild" interacting with every other drug out there. So for good reason we do not recommend people take any drug without a good basis for doing so.

So why arbitrarily take one drug which (currently) has no data supporting it's efficacy - and make it the next Banana? Why not some other drug? Why not all of them? Just throw any drug people have become interested in because of social media and stick them all "in the wild"?

The troubles do not end there. If you look at some of the drugs popular at the moment for Covid some of them could actually be positively harmful. In the concoction that Joe Rogan took for example was one drug that actively suppresses the immune system. Now in people with extreme immune reactions to Covid that is exactly what we would use such a drug for. But in most people having an entirely normal reaction to Covid - suppressing their immune system is the last thing we want to do.

So yea generally I think it is a bad idea to be simply firing drugs out there with a "it just might help you never know" kind of mentality. If a drug like Ivermectin which has shown no benefits in trials as a preventative or treatment for Covid comes along then personally I would recommend waiting until it does. And the fact is Ivermectin has shown no such benefits except in a Petri Dish. And what the people quoting that Petri Dish Study always seem to forget to mention is that the dosage required to even get that effect in the first place - is many 100s of times larger than anything available in human pill form.

I have dealt with and discussed many of the studies mentioned in that link multiple times before on this thread. I will not bore anyone with repeating myself! You can find all my posts on the thread.

If any one particular study on the link interests you and I have not covered it already let me know and I will look into it for you and tell you what I find.

Great. And if you do find any useful individual studies that actually do show positive effects here using useful methodologies rather than some of the very poor ones we have seen - please inform me of them!! I can not read everything myself. So it helps to have others who can keep me informed too.

And if I finally do find a positive study of that nature everyone on the thread can be assured I will post it instantly.

Just like Ivermectin we have little or no mention of the importance of Vitamin D in preventing Covid. Why? money? incompetence?

Very disappointing that vaccines and lockdowns are seen as the only solutions.