I don’t know. I presume that most hospitals have developed standard treatment protocols by now and that many doctors may be reluctant to stray from those for liability reasons until reliable studies have been done (although the risks associated with ivermectin appear to be low). It seems a bit weird for an antiparasitic to have antiviral effects, but I suppose weirder things happen in natural product pharmacology.
If the ivermectin can be administered to patients after they’ve signed waivers or something absolving the doctor/hospital of liability, I wouldn’t personally have an issue with that, but I’m not sure that allowing patients to select their own treatments against medical advice across the board is the wisest way to go.
I think what’s happening here is that people are latching onto Ivermectin as a magic bullet (as people are wont to do), but as usual TPTB are making things worse for themselves by telling people they can’t have it. “Why can’t we have it? It’s a conspiracy!”.
It seems to me that relatively few people are ever likely to want it (since it seems to be a sort of last-ditch “well, it’s probably not going to do any good, but it’s worth a try” thing). That being the case, I don’t see any harm, if someone is literally at death’s door, to give it a go … as long as they do sign a waver, are told that it’s experimental, and that it’s unlikely to actually do any good.
50 out of 51 studies show clear positive effect of ivermectin. It’s been studied better than Astra zeneca when that thing got approved (look at the study with crazy 4g paracetamol for each shot)…
But no money to be made. The evidence for vitamin D is also there and the possibility to overdose on vitamin D is so slim that it would outweigh any problems of low status even without coronavirus for mass administration. But again, too cheap and no patents…
The US government paid off opko the main producer of calcifediol so they condemn it. And Double blind studies are too expensive for any vitamin D producer, so it’s not gonna happen. Same for ivermectin. As it has no patents noone is gonna fund a proper study to Western standard. On the other hand remdesivir and other crap got approved without any data, because big money behind it.
We did this yesterday. Four grams of paracetamol (one gram per dose every 4-6 hours, four grams maximum per 24 hours) isn’t “crazy” by any stretch of the imagination. It’s the standard dose for adults and children over 12 years old.
Source: https://ivmmeta.com/
It’s crazy because medicine or vaccination should always be tested alone,
And the results are clear Astra zeneca has was more side effects than in the study, because they got suppressed.
It you design the study that way, than official recommendation should be the same. Only allowed with paracetamol.
The blue line/right-hand axis is the (cumulative) percentage of the population vaccinated.
I’ve also added “with COVID” deaths (to the same scale as cases) so that we can all see what a terrible scourge we’re facing. The auto-resized charts that pop up on google can be somewhat misleading.
I haven’t looked at this in any detail, but superficially it looks … interesting. “Statistically significant” doesn’t mean clinically significant, of course, but there are some pretty clear effects showing up there.
Let’s not pretend that saving lives factors into this ridiculous game, though. A goodly number of corpses to parade on the TV news keeps people fearful and compliant.
well they list any medication that is researched - and list them by effectiveness (and based on amount of research) in the top bar. It is pretty clear that right now Ivermectin and Vitamin D are the most effective medications according to research.
Remdesivir - the most expensive medication that even got approved - actually failed in kinda every research. Also they do explain sometimes why according to their oppionion a research failed (too low, too high dosage, or too late. In general there is quite a few things if taken early will most likely prevent a bad infection, and kinda nothing much that helps in a later stage. In a later stage you can only relieve the symptoms).
Oh and in Austria they now also found a strain that is resistant to Biontech/Pfizer/Moderna… To me it looks more and more like vaccinations will only help a short time…
Because we won’t be able to vaccinate the whole world on the same day (and again 8 weeks later). Such a thing would maybe work - or finally create the uber strain that can avoid any vaccine.
IIRC this is the currently popular explanation for the observation that dark-skinned people are more likely to die in places with little sunlight, but not in their native countries.
But, as you said, no profit in that. So not even worth trying on the offchance it might help.
This was obvious from the moment vaccines were first mooted. I remember ridiculing the idea at the time. And here we all are talking about booster shots every six months.
Thanks for that. I don’t know enough about meta-analyses to judge the details on that site (maybe @finley does?), although I was surprised by how small the sizes of many of the groups in the original studies were (e.g., a couple of dozen patients), and some of the language seemed intended to mislead (e.g., “98% of the 52 studies to date report positive effects (25 statistically significant in isolation)”, which apart from anything else doesn’t account for the bias of negative results tending not to get reported, and “The probability that an ineffective treatment generated results as positive as the 52 studies to date is estimated to be 1 in 85 trillion ( p = 0.000000000000012)”)".
There’s a review/criticism of that meta-analysis from some MD who appears to know what he’s talking about here:
Well the Problem with this analysis is, the same standards this doctor is criticizing, weren’t applied to the vaccination!!! And not even closely applied to any other measures we take like masks or lockdowns.
Or to other medicines commonly used right now.
And yes his claim about unpublished studies is correct.
The problem again is. A proper double blind studie of appropriate size costs 300-400k Euros. No-one will fund that right now from governments in the west because of big pharma payrolls, it will take too long except if the budget is increased to say 2-3 Mio Euro, and we do use other stuff with much less evidence.
I’m just saying, Astra zeneca, sputnik and sinovac got approved with worse data (though from single source)
As long as politicians aren’t instantly putting the money down to make a proper double blind study for invermectin and vitamin D in dosage shown most effective on this metastudy, not allowing it means their agenda is in interest of big pharma and not healthy people… So for vitamin D it needs to be calcifediol in high dosage like 100.000 iu at positive PCR test with symptoms, but not yet hospital depending. Or 40.000 iu single starting dose then 4000 iu or so per day for prevention with standard vitamin d3 because of prize and convenience. And with ivermectin well look it up…
Not really misleading. It’s a fair description of the results - 98% positive, of which several should be ignored as possibly due to chance. Statistical significance (p<0.05) is not a magical threshold that tells you whether a result is “real” or not; it’s a rule-of-thumb, a convention, nothing more. If p is 0.01 your experiment is definitely statistically-significant, according to the rules of the game, but there’s still a 1% chance that your result is a fluke.
They clarify ‘in isolation’ for two reasons.
If you have (say) 25 results that individually reach the p<0.05 threshold for statistical significance, then it is highly likely that one of them is a mirage. It’s up to the reader to decide if that’s of any practical importance.
There are two ways of doing a metastudy: one is to simply count how many experiments produced an interesting result, and the other is to attempt to aggregate all of the subjects into (effectively) one huge experiment; you then have to recompute ‘p’. The reason they’ve selected the former method is the problem described in the critique: heterogeneity. You can’t aggregate experiments that are measuring different things.
>> It would have been far more preferable to analyze all outcomes from all studies separately, and to use risk difference (instead of relative risk) to statistically account for studies that produced nonsignificant results (versus ignoring the studies entirely).
This is definitely a valid criticism.
Every meta-analysis is vulnerable to publication bias. That is, researchers and editors are much more likely to publish positive or significant results than non-significant ones.
Again true, but this becomes somewhat less important if you can see very large effects for your intervention. “Large” is subjective, of course.
Another significant issue with using this data is that many of the studies are not publicly available to review, and of those that are, very few of them have been peer-reviewed.
COVID has produced a tsunami of preprints, and the unfortunate reality is that many of them are trash. But that’s the nature of a crisis. And in any case we’re not really discussing something complicated here: you give the patient a pill and see if he gets better (compared to the expected ‘reversion to the mean’). That’s all we care about. To that extent, we’re not really doing “science” here. We don’t care about robustly measuring the size of the effect; nor are we overly interested in looking at all the possible outcomes of Ivermectin administration because that has already been done as part of the drug’s approval trials. All we want to know is: if we give this pill to people who are in deep trouble, is it going to help at least some of the time? If we can see enough results that point in that direction, it’s worth giving it a go.
Indeed. So the question arises, why the hell isn’t it ongoing right now this minute, considering the no-expense-spared attitude to date? It’s not as if there’d be a shortage of volunteers.
Exactly. Nobody said, oooh, well, more research is needed before we decide if masks are useful or not. It was a case of “put your masks on or you’ll be fined”. And in fact that was not an unreasonable position to take at the time. If something seems like it might help, with no obvious downsides, it’s logical to just give it a try. Of course, if it subsequently turns out that it wasn’t helpful, then you can discard it. No harm done.
This is just folks pilling their favourite 'random drug of choice ’ as a cure all.
Hence Topofan with his Sperm Oil and Cake with his Dewormer.
It’s true that off label drug prescription isnt a big deal, but the likelihood of any therapeutic effect is low. They shouldn’t give people false hope like that.
Nobody is suggesting this (unlike, say, the proponents of magic vaccines ). It’s quite obvious that it could be, at best, an adjunct to other therapies.
We’re merely lamenting the fact that nobody really knows whether it works or not - or if it does, how well it works and under what circumstances - because nobody wants to put up a bit of cash to find out.
Unscientific rubbish like used to hearing from you…
If you click on vdmeta.com you will see that this website is doing this for each and every medicine. Same criteria for all. And using this criteria the results are dead clear. Just maybe not for you…
The above criticism on the design is valid, however should be applied to all measures. This isn’t done at all. As soon as it’s expensive it doesn’t seem to apply any more. Astra zeneca being so cheap actually looking a bit like a mistake in the context of other medicines and vaccines…
Thanks. I hope it turns out we don’t need to get boosters to avoid serious complications. I’d rather get a mild illness than get a booster every six months/year.
). It’s quite obvious that it could be, at best, an adjunct to other therapies.