As many OpEdNews readers know, Ivermectin is an inexpensive, widely-used, WHO-approved medication that is highly effective in treating heartworm and other parasitic diseases in animals and river blindness and a variety of parasitic diseases in humans.
Early in the Covid pandemic, in-vitro studies found that Ivermectin dramatically inhibited the reproduction of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in cell cultures, although at concentrations far higher than accepted human dosage. Despite that caveat, Ivermectin, usually along with other medications, was used to treat or try to prevent Covid in many locations worldwide. Multiple studies were carried out, many producing positive results. However, meta-analyses that took into account the quality and reliability of published studies tended to find few or no benefits.
In parallel with those ambiguous or contradictory research findings, a widely disseminated and in some groups deeply believed narrative emerged that the WHO, the FDA, the CDC and government experts, especially Anthony Fauci, were suppressing Ivermectin and other effective but relatively inexpensive medications in order to funnel money and profits to the major pharmaceutical companies developing Covid vaccines. Versions of this appeared frequently on OpEdNews and throughout the social media, and continue to circulate, often characterizing Fauci as a depraved mass murderer and calling for him to be tried and punished for crimes against humanity.
In what continues to be an intensely polarized discussion, I have no illusions that some new facts will change anyone's mind. However, for those who may still be interested, I'll summarize the recently published results of ACTIV-6, a large, carefully designed, double-blind, placebo-controlled study carried out in 93 sites in 28 US states and published in the prestigious, peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association. Anyone can access the full article here.
The researchers hail from Duke University, the University of Minnesota, Vanderbilt University, Temple University, Cornell, The University of Miami, the University of Missouri, Johns Hopkins, the University of Pittsburg, the University of Colorado, and other leading research institutions. The study involved 1519 outpatients ages 30 or older with two or more symptoms of active Covid infection for no more than 7 days plus a positive test for Covid. The patients were randomly and blindly assigned to receive Ivermectin at a dose of 400 micrograms per kilogram of body weight for three days, or placebo presented in an identical format for the same length of time.
The primary treatment goal measured was time to sustained recovery, indicated by three consecutive days without symptoms. Several secondary outcomes were also assessed, including the rate of hospitalization or death within 28 days.
The results did show a difference between the treatment and the placebo group - those receiving Ivermectin recovered on average in 12 days versus 13 days for the placebo group - but, despite the large number of participants, that difference was not statistically significant..
The proportion of patients being hospitalized or dying was the same for the two groups; 1.2%. The one death was in the Ivermectin group. Folding in the risk of requiring a visit to urgent care or an emergency-room raised the risk to 3.9%, again identical for the two groups.
I'll quote the authors' summary:
Among outpatients with mild to moderate COVID-19, treatment with ivermectin, 400 ÃŽ ¼g/kg, daily for 3 days, compared with placebo, did not significantly improve time to recovery in this large trial that enrolled more than 1500 participants in the US. A lack of treatment effect was also seen for secondary clinical outcomes including hospitalization, death, or acute care visits. These findings do not support the use of ivermectin in patients with mild to moderate COVID-19.
The most important implication of this research is that claims that Ivermectin is some kind of highly effective treatment for Covid - something that could have saved hundreds of thousands or millions of lives or could have dramatically slowed or ended the pandemic - are totally and completely unsupported. If Ivermectin had even a modest impact on Covid, that would have shown up as a marked and statistically significant difference on several of the outcomes of this large and rigorous trial.
Commenting in Medscape Psychiatry, Yale University physician F. Perry Wilson makes the same point: "It's not to say that there isn't a chance that this drug has some off-target effects on Covid that we haven't adequately measured, but studies like ACTIV-6 effectively rule out the idea that it's a miracle cure."
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