New Study Results: Ivermectin Failed to Help Covid-19 Patients Avoid Hospitalization (marketwatch.com) 194
This week the New England Journal of Medicine published results from a one year, randomized, placebo-controlled study on whether Ivermectin (or the drugs metformin and fluvoxamine) helped patients when administered at the beginning of a COVID-19 infection. Here's how MarketWatch summarized the results:
Ivermectin "failed to prevent the kind of severe COVID-19 that leads to an emergency-room visit or hospitalization." "None of the medications showed any impact on the primary outcome, which included experiencing low oxygen as measured on an home oxygen monitor," said Dr. Carolyn Bramonte, principal investigator of the study and an assistant professor of internal medicine and pediatrics at the University of Minnesota Medical School. Having low blood oxygen levels, or hypoxemia, is a common reason why COVID-19 patients end up seeking care in an ER, being hospitalized, or dying....
Each of the three generic medications has been held up as a possible COVID-19 drug, particularly ivermectin, which gained a cult following over the course of the pandemic despite well-documented issues with the flawed science that in some cases fraudulently touted the drug's benefits. Yet none so far have demonstrated in robust clinical trials that they actually help treat people with COVID-19.
A long-awaited double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study conducted by Duke University School of Medicine and funded by the U.S. concluded in June that ivermectin did not improve symptom duration among COVID-19 patients with mild-to-moderate forms of the disease. The same research found that the drug did not reduce hospitalizations or death.
Ivermectin "failed to prevent the kind of severe COVID-19 that leads to an emergency-room visit or hospitalization." "None of the medications showed any impact on the primary outcome, which included experiencing low oxygen as measured on an home oxygen monitor," said Dr. Carolyn Bramonte, principal investigator of the study and an assistant professor of internal medicine and pediatrics at the University of Minnesota Medical School. Having low blood oxygen levels, or hypoxemia, is a common reason why COVID-19 patients end up seeking care in an ER, being hospitalized, or dying....
Each of the three generic medications has been held up as a possible COVID-19 drug, particularly ivermectin, which gained a cult following over the course of the pandemic despite well-documented issues with the flawed science that in some cases fraudulently touted the drug's benefits. Yet none so far have demonstrated in robust clinical trials that they actually help treat people with COVID-19.
A long-awaited double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study conducted by Duke University School of Medicine and funded by the U.S. concluded in June that ivermectin did not improve symptom duration among COVID-19 patients with mild-to-moderate forms of the disease. The same research found that the drug did not reduce hospitalizations or death.
No shit Sherlock (Score:2)
Who promoted this? please remind me.
Re:No shit Sherlock (Score:5, Insightful)
Literally everyone who watches Fox.
Re:No shit Sherlock (Score:5, Insightful)
So many were desparate to prove Fauci was the evil vampire that no one else could see, they needed a way to dispute literally everything he said.
Re: No shit Sherlock (Score:2)
Yeah it's the old "I believe the opposite of whatever you say even if you say 1+1=2" which is the dumbest instinct in politics.
I think it also largely stems from the broader publica inability to gauge expertise. Not everyone gets to do a science , maths or philosophy degree or even a basic grounding in reasoning about science and logic. As a result you get snake oil salesmen citing mangled statistics about how "a study in Israel shows ivermectin/chloroquinine/foo works", usually in complete contradiction t
Re: No shit Sherlock (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everyone gets to do a science , maths or philosophy degree or even a basic grounding in reasoning about science and logic.
Yet, the people on Slashdot, who you'd assume have some familiarity with science and maths (but not philosophy) or basic reasoning in science and logic, apparently do not use it in their lives wither.
It's almost as if they let their politics and emotions guide their conclusions instead of science.
For example, their fear of China (and Chinese people) leads a lot of nerds on Slashdot to forget that nature is the best biowarfare lab, and somehow believe that one virus research lab in all of the world has somehow managed to create/locate the exact strain that would cause a worldwide pandemic.
Even after nature managed to create the delta variant and the omicron variants nowhere near virus research labs, they still think, in all of their wisdom, that humans somehow could beat nature to the punch, especially with our extremely crude research methods.
Re: No shit Sherlock (Score:5, Insightful)
That was the lab's purpose!
So fucking what? Boeing's purpose is to create planes that don't crash, and yet they fucking crash.
Biology is fucking hard. Do you really think they'd get it so easily?
You're trying to tell me that of all the thousands of wet markets in Asia
You do know other viruses have come out of other wet markets or places with lots of animals and human interactions, right?
Where did you think SARS came from? Where did you think MERS came from? Were there virus research labs there, dickhead?
Relatedly, where the fuck do you think Delta and Omicron came from? Did they also come from labs?
Why do you cunts continue to ignore that we've plenty of evidence of mutations IN THE WILD? Nature cannot come up with them fast enough. But a fucking lab with state of the art human technology - trillions of times SLOWER than NATURE - can somehow do better than nature?
The SAME FUCKING NATURE THAT GAVE US SARS AND MERS AND DELTA AND OMICRON?
Pull the other one.
Re: (Score:2)
Blame schools for not teaching us how to check and verify what is presented to us. I've actually seen teachers reprimand students for correcting their mistakes because they think it's more important that students learn to respect authority rather than find the truth.
So what do you expect?
When these people finally find out that they're being bullshitted, they're looking for a new source of information. But they have no way of checking information, so all they can do now is instead of believing whatever A tel
Re:No shit Sherlock (Score:4, Funny)
Who promoted this? please remind me.
Now, now. There are people who did their own research and found substantial evidence that ivermectin works which was completely overlooked by doctors. These folks didn't need any studies to show it works, they just did their research. Simple as that.
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Sadly their "research" went straight into the toilet, along with their intestinal linings
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We present novel results analyzing predictors of the efficacy of Covid-19 treatments. Unlike previous studies, we analyse predictors of the non-utility of claimed treatments hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, zinc, ascorbic acid, quercetin, and aqueous sodium hypochlorite, examining the predictive power of endorsements by Mr. D. Trump, a Florida-based social media influencer, Fox News, a New York-based satirical entertainment network, and Facebook, a US social engineering platform. Our study, involving over five million participants, finds that strong endorsement from one of these sources is 93% effective in predicting uptake of an ineffective treatment. More interestingly, strong endorsement from all three sources is 100% effective in predicting uptake of an ineffective treatment. We hope that these results will be of use in the future in discounting ineffective Covid-19 treatments before excessive amounts of effort are placed into applying them.
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Say, on a completely unrelated note, when did "doing your own research" become "looking for YouTube videos where some cook says what you want to hear"?
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From the very start. "Do your own research" is just shorthand for "ignore the research done by experts in that field".
Re: No shit Sherlock (Score:2)
No they just didn't find "the research" that backed up their claims and made yet another gopher shit conspiracy
Re: No shit Sherlock (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No shit Sherlock (Score:5, Insightful)
Several third world countries, where it probably helped by killing unrelated parasites that were debilitating the immune systems of the patients, making em more susceptible to the covid.
Of course, it was a waste of time to give it to people that are not in risk of parasites, and would be a good idea to give it to everyone that is.
Re: (Score:2)
It's generally intended for horses. To use for humans, you need human doses, doctors who know just how much to give, what side effects to look for, what symptoms are appropriate, etc. Anyone self medicating on it was an idiot. Any doctor prescribing this because of a rumor mill is likely guilty of malpractice. EVEN IF IT WORKS, you never take random medicines with random doses because some stupid television program said something. People have been hospitalized even for overdosing on some vitamins.
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It's not "generally intended for horses", the human medicine not only exist but it's been widely used to combat parasites in poor countries worldwide very effectively. with human dosages of course.
It's literally a nobel prize winning drug for what it is intended to do (combating parasites)
Of course, many people had to take the horse thing or massive doses instead of the TINY amount that is actually recommended because sheer dumbness is sometimes a thing.
Re:No shit Sherlock (Score:5, Insightful)
because they made Ivermectin nearly impossible to buy
Ethical doctors won't prescribe a controlled substance to humans unless it's been proven to work. Ivermectin, calibrated for humans, is a controlled substance requiring a doctor's prescription. This is because among its effects, it's a fucking neurotoxin.
So, the same inbred morons who were calling everyone else "sheep" for doing the things that medical science actually recommended... decided that when their doctor wouldn't prescribe them a neurotoxin that had no relevance to their illness and no effect as a preventative, they'd ignore their doctor and go drink Sheep Dip instead.
It has never been approved for an ingestive use without doctor's prescription. Nobody "made it impossible to buy" just because of COVID.
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Who promoted this? please remind me.
The usual idiots that are unable to see reality.
Re:No shit Sherlock (Score:4, Informative)
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I'd rather be checking whether the usual conspiracy promoters have a curious investment in certain companies producing certain drugs that are now the miracle cure for everything, at least according to them.
No Shit Sherlock (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re:It's getting depressing... (Score:5, Insightful)
No you do have to do it because confirmation science is important too. Proving what we already know to make sure that we actually are right is important. If anything experiments and studies to reconfirm and reproduce existing findings are far too few. We should support and herald the work of scientist doing things to confirm and refine what we already know instead of assuming the past was 100% accurate and nothing has changed.
Re:It's getting depressing... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes...this is true. But there comes a point where we stop retesting the same thing over and over and over. In my world, for instance, no one is conducting tests to see if arsenic is effective at treating classic acute myeloid leukemia, because that's been proven at this point and we have other things that we know work...so you just have to STOP at some point.
Unless we have a compelling reason to believe the prior studies are flawed, and Fox critique is not valid here, we need to stop wasting time and money.
What's ridiculous is if we did show a single study that showed possible marginal benefit for ivermectin, Fox folks would claim it as gospel truth...but show them 10 studies that show strong support for anything else and they'll be there picking at data points and explaining why you can't trust THOSE data.
Re: (Score:2)
Some experiments with known outcomes are done again and again and again, precisely because of those known outcomes.
Typically, those doing them are high school students, who have to do reports on things like the double slit experiment....
So I wonder if "Ivermectin has no effect on Covid-19 outcomes" will become a high school project for future generations :)
Re: (Score:2)
You do need to test to know how much to give, when to stop, etc. Maybe a smaller dosage is effective? Maybe there's a formulation making it easier to take. Also, absolutely test the batches to make sure they're not contaminated in some way (a major use of horseshoe crabs).
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It turns out all we knew about Alzheimer for the past 15 years was wrong because of a bogus paper published in 2006. So no, everything should be doubted and nothing should be taken for granted. Clearly the medical community did not do it enough in that case. There may be others lying around.
Of course, we should no test arsenic every other day. But things change and people lie. So there is that.
Re:It's getting depressing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Everything you said is correct. But you're missing something.
After any novel disease, we have years (probably decades) of studies like these. But usually, nobody outside of a few specialists (epidemiologists, etc) would notice or care. The only reason THIS is in the news is because is country is full of very gullible people who believed professional liars about ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and other treatments. We always have a few gullible idiots who think that the gubmint is controlling our minds by flouride in the water, or other idiocies. But this time we had national politicians spouting this nonsense, states passing laws to override doctors, and massive distrust of actual evidence.
We have a national disease which is more dangerous that COVID, because the same mental illness which lets folks believe in ivermectin lets them believe far more dangerous fallacies. Studies like this will help a few of the afflicted heal, but the folks who started the disease are still in power, still being elected, still spreading the disease.
You can thank the oil industry for that disease (Score:3)
The problem with truth, if you're a dishonest grifter, is once you let a little bit of Truth in a lot of Truth floods in after it.
Re: (Score:3)
If you can get people to doubt the little stuff, you can get a fraction of them to doubt the big stuff too, like vaccines. Maybe even get them to doubt science in general. That's a win for some people, sadly.
Re: (Score:3)
If you can get people to doubt the little stuff, you can get a fraction of them to doubt the big stuff too, like vaccines.
Or electoral integrity.
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That 'national disease' is called lack of education. People aren't learning the proper reasoning skills they need to navigate life.
Re: (Score:3)
You have a population (and "you" here means "pretty much everyone") that never learned how to test information for veracity. That's neither taught nor wanted in schools. The last thing a teacher wants is to prove everything they say to their students. Not only would they never be able to complete the curriculum, they'd actually have to understand it themselves.
Re: (Score:3)
That's going a bit too far into victimhood, IMO. Sure, schools could be way better, but that doesn't absolve us of verifying information, and of trusting people who deserve trust rather than trusting people who say what we want to hear. We have agency; we cannot say "it's the schools fault, not mine!" If my community is believing lies, well, maybe I'm not engaging with my community well.
Also, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". Most teachers want to teach well, m
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"I hereby declare that giving me 200 million dollars will not make me happy."
Now, prove me wrong by testing my theory.
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Do you mean Zimbabwe Dollars ?
For me, I would request USD for this experiment.
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I would request Canadian Tire dollars, just to fuck up their system.
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Unluckily, they seem to be another casualty of the pandemic, replaced by the triangle card.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:It's getting depressing... (Score:5, Funny)
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Yes, people still believe this (Score:5, Insightful)
Just search the term on any social media sites and you will find people still claiming it is effective medicine again covid, it's being suppressed by the pharma companies, it cured their symptoms, etc etc. Of course this isn't going to change those peoples opinions but it's never a bad thing to have this type of research with a true RCT to apply the gold standard even just to avoid wasting any more labor on it in the future, and it would actually be terrific if it worked but it doesn't, it's good at doing the thing we already developed it to be good at.
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Just search the term on any social media sites and you will find people still claiming it is effective medicine again covid, it cured their symptoms, etc etc.
People testimonial about their illness and their cure must be considered bullshit. Joe saying his illness has been cured thanks to its random treatment or Kelly saying she is suffering form depression because she got covid 2 years ago are two equally fishy statements. We all wanted fast answers and solutions for covid, it has been a disaster.
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Unfortunately anecdotal evidence is what counts as proof for far too many people. These are the same people who see someone get the Covid vaccine yet still get Covid, so they announce the vaccines don't work. It would fine if they kept it to themselves, but they infect family members and friends with their gormlessness.
I fear this sort of reasoning has metastasized and become part of the reward system of their social circles. It is what they use to reassure each other that they somehow have some secret know
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Just search the term on any social media sites and you will find people still claiming it is effective medicine again covid, it's being suppressed by the pharma companies, it cured their symptoms, etc etc. Of course this isn't going to change those peoples opinions but it's never a bad thing to have this type of research with a true RCT to apply the gold standard even just to avoid wasting any more labor on it in the future, and it would actually be terrific if it worked but it doesn't, it's good at doing the thing we already developed it to be good at.
This study is simply too underpowered to draw any useful statistically significant conclusions from even if Ivermectin were 100% effective at preventing hospitalization and death this study would be incapable of telling you that.
This is a common issue with the pro Ivermectin RCTs as far as I know the sample size is always around 1k which is simply way too small. Cut the 1k in half for control vs treatment and the fact only a tiny fraction progress to hospitalization and death it becomes impossible to get a
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Even with the larger sample sizes neither of those are placebo controlled, double blind, randomized control trial which even with the smaller sample size is still the best type of trial for this type of hypothesis. The first is a retrospective and the second is an observational with gigantic methodological holes, many of which are detailed lower in the thread.
With this trial in particular even with the smaller sample size the high degree of control means some effect over the status quo should have presente
Re:Yes, people still believe this (Score:5, Informative)
There are however competing studies that offer affirmative evidence of efficacy using orders of magnitude larger sample sizes.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
https://www.cureus.com/article... [cureus.com]
The correction to that last article reads: https://www.cureus.com/article... [cureus.com]
Correction
It has come to the attention of the journal that several authors failed to disclose all relevant conflicts of interest when submitting this article. As a result, Cureus is issuing the following erratum and updating the relevant conflict of interest disclosures to ensure these conflicts of interest are properly described as recommended by the ICMJ:
Lucy Kerr: Paid consultant for both Vitamedic, an ivermectin manufacturer, and Médicos Pela Vida (MPV), an organization that promotes ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19.
Flavio A. Cadegiani: Paid consultant ($1,600.00 USD) for Vitamedic, an ivermectin manufacturer. Dr. Cadegiani is a founding member of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), an organization that promotes ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19.
Pierre Kory: President and Chief Medical Officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), an organization that promotes ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19. Dr. Kory reports receiving payments from FLCCC. In February of 2022, Dr. Kory opened a private telehealth fee-based service to evaluate and treat patients with acute COVID, long haul COVID, and post-vaccination syndromes.
Jennifer A. Hibberd: Co-founder of the Canadian Covid Care Alliance and World Council for Health, both of which discourage vaccination and encourage ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19.
Juan J. Chamie-Quintero: Contributor to the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) and lists the FLCCC as his employer on his LinkedIn page.
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Same shit as homeopathy. I do pizzapathy now. If I have a headache, I just eat a pizza and 2-20 hours later my headache is gone. Evidently pizza cures headaches.
Okay, maybe it didn't prevent COVID deaths (Score:5, Funny)
But I bet you *ALL* of those individuals died worm-free!
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Those are definitely worms and not, as people familiar with the matter say, the lining of the stomach that they've destroyed. Something which also provides protection to their body.
Metformin??? (Score:2)
Metformin??? Really???? It's a f***ing diabetes drug. Why the hell would it work against COVID?
[Disclaimer, I'm on Metformin for my type 2 and still got COVID]
Re:Metformin??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would an anti parasite drug be effective against a virus? People would eat dog shit if it made Fauci wrong. Meanwhile he's worked for the government and the Reagan administration. He really pulled that 50 year long con of making conservatives wear thin paper masks.
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No reason to expect it a priori, but if ivermectin actually had worked, it would not have been the weirdest thing in biology.
Put a molecule into an entire body with trillions of receptor molecules and the biggest surprise would be if it did only one thing.
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Well, they already drank piss so...
I'm kinda sure by now that there's a bunch of conspiracy nutters meeting every month or so, getting drunk and coming up with more and more harebrained ideas what they could peddle as the next miracle cure to see just how stupid and gullible people really are and at what point even they go "c'moooooon".
No "c'moooooon" so far, though.
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Ivermectin is used to treat parasites that cause river blindness, and most commonly in livestock (horses), and fluvoxamine is an antidepressant/anti-anxiety medication. Why any of these would have an effect on an RNA virus when even anti-retroviral drugs failed to have an appreciable effect is beyond me. I guess being a QAnon follower somehow grants you expert knowledge in highly advanced organic chemistry and you're just not able to dumb it down enough for the rest of us.
That said, since diabetes is a risk
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Ivermectin is used to treat parasites that cause river blindness, and most commonly in livestock (horses), and fluvoxamine is an antidepressant/anti-anxiety medication. Why any of these would have an effect on an RNA virus when even anti-retroviral drugs failed to have an appreciable effect is beyond me.
To be fair, Ivermectin actually does have antiviral properties. It's not just an antiparasite drug. (In fact, many anti-parasite and antiviral drugs also are somewhat effective against viruses).
Unfortunately, it's not a terribly effective antiviral-- not effective enough to be recommended for any diseases. And, although it did show effectiveness against the COVID-19 virus in in-vitro studies... only at concentrations too high to be tolerated by humans.
So it was a long shot as a therapy against COVID-19 i
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Previous studies have shown that metformin has actions against proteins involved in translation.[8, 9] In addition, metformin is under investigation as an antiviral agent [10, 11] and has shown in vitro activity against SARS-CoV-2 and other RNA viruses[12, 15].
The entire study was to test drugs that has shown some minor effect against SARS-CoV-2 in other studies. This study showed none of them were effective.
bleach and light (Score:2)
Did they test light inside the body ? I'm not sure, but I've heard it is the best most effective medicine ever created of all time.
Patriots, send me money, only I can stop the deep state from suppressing this vital health information.
Nonsense! (Score:4, Funny)
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Hang on now, this isn't nuclear combat toe to toe.
Drinking bleach ... (Score:2)
The morgue? That's completely different.
So how much time and money was wasted (Score:3)
The entire point of this ivermectin bullshit was to downplay the risks involved in getting the virus in the hopes that the economy would keep going long enough to get Donald Trump back in the White House. You'll notice if you were paying attention that outside of a few nut jobs and scammers and Joe Rogan (there I go repeating myself) it got dropped once the election was decided.
This whole separate world being created for Republican voters and the American right wing is both destructive and bizarre. It needs to stop.
Non-denial denial (Score:5, Interesting)
This is where Joe Rogan claims "I'm an idiot, nobody should listen to me" as he promotes horrible misinformation to his idiot viewership and he makes hundreds of millions of dollars. He's the same as Tucker Carlson, "I didn't say that, I just asked a question."
Whatever the platform, all celebrities need to be held responsible for the content they create.
Re:Non-denial denial (Score:4, Insightful)
the thing with Rogan is that he is too lazy to take time to really study the facts and understand things. He knows his audience will go along and the excuse "I'm an idiot" is his get out of jail card. Rogan is a selfish egomaniac. He'd rather go to the gym, smoke weed, booze up and eat cereal. Those are the facts.
I get why so many americans look up to him. Rogan has "FU money" and they think listening to him makes them the same as joe. Sadly they're getting played, but as long as rogan keeps saying what they're thinking, they'll keep listening.
Re: Non-denial denial (Score:2)
I had not even heard of Rogan until this brouhaha started. I do now listen to him based on his guest of the day. He's entertainment, like The Simpsons.
Especially if you play him at 2x speed.
Re: (Score:2)
He was actually pretty good on NewsRadio [imdb.com] - although in retrospect he basically played himself.
I am a little irritated that he more or less weaponized the statement "I'm just asking a question". There are circumstances where doing so makes perfect sense.
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He'd rather go to the gym
Not even that. He takes steroids.
Stupid people... (Score:2)
...do stupid things.
Every credible study/report I've read acknowledge the effects of ivermectin in fighting something like covid all generally concluded that the amounts required to provide any benefit would be LETHAL to humans.
It's seems so odd to me how all the trump loving conspiracy spreading willfully ignorant dumbasses liked to skip over that part and refused to believe it even as they died.................. fucking morons, the whole lot of em.
The Economist had an article trying to resolve... (Score:3, Interesting)
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Indeed. Details matter and circumstances matter very much. Morons routinely do not undertsand that though and generalize in invalid ways.
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This experiment merely replicates the existing US data, albeit double blind, controlled. The question is why so many other studies showed that Ivermectin had promise, only to have the more careful studies in the West show nothing.
If Ivermectin were 100% effective at preventing hospitalization and death would this study be able to detect a statistically significant benefit?
What about the other "careful studies in the west"? Can you cite ANY such studies with this capability?
It's possible those studies were conducted poorly, and certainly they were not double-blind. But there is another possibility.
Anything is possible. The question is what is the evidence?
As Trump pointed out, Clorox would also kill COVID. Unfortunately he was too intellectually lazy and stupid to realize that just because something kills an infection doesn't make it medicine.
I suspect too many are caught up in the Trump, anti-vaxx, horses, right wing bullshit / political ideology to reason rationally about Ivermectin.
100% success against the COVID virus (Score:2)
Insufficient sample size (Score:2, Insightful)
Ivermectin trial had 808 people in total split between control and treatment arms. This is really the only information you need to predict the outcome of this study.
~5 people were hospitalized or died in TOTAL in each arm. These results are noise incapable of detecting ANY statistically relevant signal whatsoever.
For example stipulate for the sake of argument Ivermectin has 100% efficacy in terms of preventing death and so the deaths column in the Ivermectin arm read 0. (0 vs. 2 control). This result is
Re: Insufficient sample size (Score:2)
It looks like the Duke study had more participants and more hospitalizations/deaths (10 for IVM and 9 for control groups).
Re:Preprint: prophylactic Ivermectin reduces death (Score:5, Insightful)
Given how Bolsenaro has politicized Ivermectin, nothing coming out of Brazil is trustworthy.
Re:Preprint: prophylactic Ivermectin reduces death (Score:5, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Steven Todd Kirsch is an American entrepreneur. He has started several companies and was one of two people who independently invented the optical mouse. Kirsch has been both a philanthropic supporter of medical research, and a promoter of misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.
Re:Preprint: prophylactic Ivermectin reduces death (Score:5, Insightful)
"Preprint" typically means it hasn't passed peer review. Did either of those studies/analyses pass peer review?
You're wrong (Re:Preprint: Ivermectin blah blah) (Score:5, Informative)
And needless to say, it turns out most of the people in the study didn't actually take the Ivermectin like the experimenters hoped. (So you can call it "150 thousand subjects" all you want -- but only 8,312 actually took the fourth and fifth dose...) But it gets even worse. An infectious disease reporter for The Guardian posted on Twitter that "There may have been a large proportion of people in the control group taking ivermectin, and a similar proportion in the intervention group NOT taking ivermectin [twitter.com]."
Meanwhile, your "meta-analysis" wasn't by, say, an actual medical researcher, but an entirely unqualified math professor [wikipedia.org]. In short, by someone who didn't know what he was talking about -- and didn't even do any research, but just reinterpreted existing results.
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Could we repeat the study in a country where we may be reasonably certain that the difference in deaths isn't an artefact created by killing parasites in a patient and thus relieving their immune system to deal with the virus instead of the parasite-induced problems?
Because that's what ivermectin can actually do, and do really well: Kill parasites.
Re:New England Journal Of Medicine (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow.. Just.. Wow...
Could you write more please? Every sentence you write will make most of us feel more and more superior.
I'm sure at one point we'll just explode!
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This person's UID is a healthy reminder that Slashdot has always had in its population some idiots.
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No one was telling people they will be destroyed, or their families. They were told that without the vaccine they had a higher probability of complications including death. All of which is true. A few organizations did force people to get the vaccine or leave, but then they were in charge of keeping their organization working and upping the proportion of their people ill with long Covid or death.
The vaccines certainly did keep people out of the hospitals, we have the data to prove that.
The problem with peop
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A few organizations did force people to get the vaccine or leave, but then they were in charge of keeping their organization working and upping the proportion of their people ill with long Covid or death.
The cherry on top of that was the conservative “at will” employment states could fire someone for refusing a vaccine. They didn’t count on that biting them in the ass. Of course DeSantis had to quickly pass a law to prevent employers from doing that. Party of small government indeed.
Re:Well what do you know? (Score:5, Informative)
18 months ago even the manufacturer of ivermectin said it was useless against Covid. https://www.merck.com/news/mer... [merck.com]
Anything to pwn those libs right?
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Was that after a double-blind placebo controlled trial?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ask them not me. Maybe because it’s an anti parasite and not anti viral?
Re:Well what do you know? (Score:4, Funny)
18 months ago even the manufacturer of ivermectin said it was useless against Covid. https://www.merck.com/news/mer... [merck.com]
Anything to pwn those libs right?
Yabut my wife's sister's husband's cousin's friend's mechanic's plumber's brother-in-law's dog walker said ivermectin helped her sister's friend's baby-sitter's mother's psychic so who am I supposed to believe?
Re:Well what do you know? (Score:4, Informative)
1. Climate deniers use this to cast doubt on climate change studies all the time. what if this is wrong? what if that is wrong? But multiply that by 10,000 times, over and over. But the questions aren't actually meant to push the science forward. They're simply meant to cast doubt on something you don't like and exhaust the researchers who try to answer them. Then you spam the researchers with data requests in a transparent bad-faith effort to troll them and consume their time and energy. When the researchers finally call you out on your BS and stop responding, you simply claim victory that you're being suppressed by "big science" or "lame stream media" or whatever current right wing meme you're using.
2. You constantly run headlines that read "OH MY GOD IVERMECTIN (some people think) ABSOLUTEY CURES COVID AND LIBERALISM"
3. OH MY GOD VACCINES CAN CAUSE DEATH while pointedly ignoring the "at a 0.0026% rate".
Now, you might point out that the left has it's own blind spots when it comes to science. This is quite true. But it's quite valid to point out that right-wing ivermectinistas are drooling idiots who place more faith in Tucker, Jones and Rogan than the actual scientists with actual degrees and actual knowledge doing actual research.
Re:Well what do you know? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, 2 years later we continue to release more data which backs up the early data which showed, even then, that this stuff didn't work.
Turns out those "self appointed betters" were, in fact, better at "science" than the folks who insisted they KNEW ivermectin was working. Turns out only one group was right, and it wasn't the bleach and dewormer crowd.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, 2 years later we continue to release more data which backs up the early data which showed, even then, that this stuff didn't work
You missed what should have been the second part of that sentence
...and showed that other early studies which showed that the stuff did work were flawed.
Re: (Score:2)
And a very closely related point is that shouting "science!" at that person asking the question calling him an idiot without having data in one direction or the other to back up your position is the intellectual equivalent of downing bleach
In the absence of evidence one way or the other the expectation should be a therapy will not be effective, and yes, that is science. Society would be far worse off should the medical field decide to default to the assumption everything works until proven otherwise.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
That's correct and also context-free. The context is that the distinction between openness to success and promoting success got lost on everyone who should have acted like they knew better.
Fortunately evidence-free promotion only works on people who don't know better.
Re: (Score:2)
Right but some things are just too random. Some politician or celebrity saying something is not the same as providing a reasonable motivation to check something out in case it might work.
Case in point, one twenty something minor celebrity said she was eating little bits of dirt for health reasons, because she hear about it from her taxi driver... Sometimes kooks are just kooks.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Unsurprising (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, nobody scienced their way into taking horse paste, and this won't science them out of it...