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I know in my heart of hearts that responding to this nonsense is a waste of time, but in the odd event someone reasonable runs across this gish-gallop, I refuse to leave it sitting unchallenged. To start, sure, ivermectin is safe at proper dosing, yes hundreds of millions of people take it for parasites every year, yes there was an early in-vitro study showing it fucked with viral replication in a petri dish. Cool. This is true of a ton of compounds that do absolutely nothing for you once they're in an actual bloodstream instead of a lab dish, because the concentration needed to see that effect in-vitro was way higher than what you can safely hit in a human's body. For example, one of those compounds is bleach, but if you take enough to hit the concentrations for it to do what you what it to do in your body, you will have much bigger problems than the COVID you were trying to kill. Further, "nobody ever looked into it" is just not true. TOGETHER and ACTIV-6 were specifically designed, peer-reviewed RCTs with thousands of participants, published in NEJM/JAMA, built for the exact purpose of answering "does this actually work?" They looked. The answer was no. "A couple big studies got waved off as inconclusive" is just an incorrect read, full stop. The studies were done and the evidence was in, and it was not the answer. The "100+ studies, many positive" thing is doing a lot of heavy lifting too: that number gets real big real fast once you stop separating "huge well-controlled RCT" from "12 people in a non-randomized trial somebody ran out of a spare room." Lumping those together and calling it "the science" is exactly the kind of cherry-picking everyone (correctly) clowns on anti-vax studies for doing. And the FDA/CDC "didn't look at the data" thing is also just bullshit. They reviewed it as the RCTs rolled in, which is why the guidance moved from "not recommended outside trials" to "no benefit shown:" that is literally the science working exactly as it should be. Now, to be clear: people getting publicly dog-walked in the press for even mentioning it? Yeah that part was genuinely shitty and probably made some people dig in out of spite instead of curiosity, which I get. However no amount of that being a fair accusation does a damn thing to make it so the amount of IVM OR bleach required to pull this off in the way anti-vaxxers wish doesn't render you stone fucking dead. It's not like the same damn pharma industry couldn't have gotten just as rich selling IVM, or whatever, cure to the literal entire goddamn world to cure the plague that was skull-fucking every nation on the planet, and to pretend otherwise, that an ineffective medicine was chosen instead is pure, unadulterated nonsense. If it worked, every pharma company would've spun up production of it immediately, and the companies that already made it would've seen the value fly through the goddamn roof. New billionaires minted overnight. It didn't, they weren't, because it didn't work. |
I-Tech was a good RCT and showed 75% lower mortality in severe patients, p=0.02. Only 490 people though. Clearly this deserved replicating with more people. The fact that it wasn’t is a problem.
The FDA on their website stated they did not look at the data. The statement was eventually taken down, they have never said they looked at it. The CDC looked at 6 studies and didn’t write a report.
When I mentioned method of action, I’m not talking about petri dishes.
An anecdote related to bleach, but peroxide was also mentioned. Another overlooked treatment was artemisinin, which contains an endoperoxide group that could get into cells and kill covid virus.