Yes - a bunch of discredited quacks (with multiple papers now retracted for the terrible quality of their science) causing enormous headaches for every practicing doctor and nurse having to treat the unvaccinated "Facebook Researchers" who end up in the hospital trying to get their useless cocktail of meds.
I don't need to do a line-by-line rebuttal of a Covid protocol my HVAC technician wrote -- though he likely did more to help the pandemic by changing out HEPA air filters than the Front Link covid quacks did with their awful advice and martyr complex.
If someone is catastrophically and unapologetically wrong on problem 1a, you don't really need to pay attention to their solution to problem 1b.
Sometimes the timing is just great -- how about the fact that the protocol was designed by several grifters selling fraudulent "long Covid" tests and charging people thousands of dollars for tele-health visits where they then lie about lab tests and prescribe drugs that don't remotely work.
I didn't suggest anyone use IncellDX or covid long haulers.com. Just because Bruce Patterson had his name associated with the flccc doesn't prove anything about it's viability. Keep trying.
Super not helpful. Also, some of your points could be debated (fluvoxamine recently, statins in trials, vitamin C, etc). But overall the tone makes it hard to have a civil discussion.
It's my contention that it's actively harmful to truth, science, and public health when we pretend like there's value in having a "civil conversation" with bad faith actors.
There's no benefit to cosplaying as Socrates when there is no data point or research result that could change the mind of these weird conspiracy theorists. If a well-done study came out tomorrow that demonstrated Ivermectin worked to help Covid patients, it would literally be in every hospital's protocol tomorrow.
On the opposite side, these charlatans have been promoting IVM since March 2020 with absolutely no evidence of efficacy (often at the expense of convincing people to not get vaccinated). What little evidence has come out has only weakened the case for it as a treatment, and yet, they're still promoting it as fervently as ever.
If you want a long-covid treatment protocol, you should absolutely look somewhere else aside from the pages of the most stubbornly wrong people in this whole pandemic. They've shown repeatedly that they don't care about updating their priors when there's contradictory evidence. At least the HCQ dorks have mostly retired to complaining about cancel culture.
I personally formed a three person reading group with 2 friends (one chemistry PhD and one retired tech CEO that's a longevity genius) and we read a stack of these papers end to end and even attempted to fumble through a recalcution of a meta-analysis following the retraction of one paper.
Before personally taking the medicine we spent 1.5 weeks reading everything we could find. Straight from Google Scholar or pubmed. Respectfully, I disagree with you. But that's based on my own reading and I'm not an MD or medical professional.
I would say, a) it is very common in certain countries, and like hey, they awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine partially for it in 2015, but b) we have to agree to disagree here, were just too far apart on tone. But respect your point of view.
I read all that a while back. It is good and about all you can get out of it is to conclude that ivermectin needs more study. Unfortunately its off patent and won't get much $$$ thrown at it. Its getting hard to ignore the growing mass of people that have just said, hey, this is obviously safe and I'll just try it. And holy sh-t it worked! (that's my story...).
If ivermectin actually worked, pharma companies would just make a new version with a slightly different structure and patent/sell that formula instead.
Then why hasn't the same thing happened to ketamine for the treatment of depression?
Ketamine is widely available and cheap, but the FDA approved esketamine (the S enantiomer of ketamine) and gave the pharma companies a patent for the formulation so they would fund the clinical trials that are needed for it to be used as a treatment of depression.
Esketamine is much, much more expensive than ketamine, and essentially the same molecule, yet it hasn't been 'outcompeted' by ketamine (in the context of treating depression).
Because the new ivermectin (newermectin) would be specifically authorised and used to treat covid, it would have a niche advantage over ivermectin. Ivermectin would still dominate treating parasites, but there would still be good money in developing newermectin.
For instance, see Ivermectin is a specific inhibitor of importin α/β-mediated nuclear import able to inhibit replication of HIV-1 and dengue virus.
Ivermectin is a potent inhibitor of flavivirus replication specifically targeting NS3 helicase activity: new prospects for an old drug.
A screen of FDA-approved drugs for inhibitors of Zika virus infection.