Linus Pauling spent his last years of research aggressively pushing for a theory of vitamin C and vitamin supplements being cures for all ailments. James Watson has repeatedly doubled down on racial genetics claims in his old age. Both of these men are Nobel laureates, that doesn’t make them wrong about their work in the face of data that says otherwise.
Ivermectin is used to treat parasites, not viruses - to my knowledge it has never be approved to treat viruses. So any positive results are surprising to be honest. A few publications may have shown sars-cov2 infection is inhibited by ivermectin in cell culture, but that is really meaningless when you consider all the cell types and interactions between them in the body. Hydroxychloriquine is the same way. It took and is taking a lot of time and money and research to debunk those claims that were pushed by conservative politicians. A main early proponent of ivermectin was a Republican US senator, and a lot of the press we see around it is coming from right-wing media sources. Take that as you will.
I’m editing this post to tone it down a bit (comparing to antibiotics to treat flu was probably not fair) because reading some of the studies there is mixed evidence in clinical trials applying ivermectin. Some show things, some don’t. There are questions of which studies are better but honestly I just don’t know if they were big enough. That said if ivermectin is effective it is really as a drug within a larger cocktail to pre-empt the onset of symptoms and is not for severe cases that have already landed in the hospital. So unless you test positive asymptomatically, and testing seems less available in the global south, it’s a moot point.
It’s unfortunate and probably counterproductive that Omura is being censored, but in this crisis I can see some justification. There are treatments that are much better and are more convincingly backed up by published clinical data. And vaccines on top of that, which anti-vaxxers are attacking with ivermectin and HCQ. The proven drugs are a lot more expensive but all the more reason to fight for public control and profit removal for these therapies.
But we also need all the help we can get as supplies are also short. That said, promoting drugs that are safe but have mixed clinical proof of efficacy, regardless of cost, is concerning in that it might divert people from higher confidence treatments. Without more data and not anecdotal praise for a drug with no mechanistic understanding for viral treatment and a ton of political baggage, it’s a bit irresponsible to promote it as the ideal fix. At least publicly where there is no scientific peer review beforehand.
Take that as you will.
conservative grift vs progressive grift
promoting drugs that are safe but have mixed clinical proof of efficacy, regardless of cost, is concerning
"regardless of cost" bruh do you know how Big Pharma has gotten so fat? its precisely because cheap drugs cost so little that they need to push new (expensive) products that are possibly not that different than the old generic
I’m not getting into the grift point, capitalism is grift and at a point that distinction becomes meaningless.
As for cost, That’s a separate problem entirely and goes beyond that too. They make more expensive drugs but they also don’t put money into hard to make drugs for Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s and then they also don’t make drugs for poor people diseases like malaria. It’s all fucked.
That said, you don’t cure cancer with Benadryl even if someone showed you can kill HeLa cells in a dish with it Moreover, the expensive drugs currently used against covid aren’t just generics plus aspirin, they’re cutting edge medications resulting from a ton of research and a lot of mass scale production troubleshooting. If you really want to solve the problem of fat pharma, stop funding and start investing, taking public stakes in exchange for research and infrastructure grants. That builds oversight and more democratic control. Easier said than done but again you won’t be advancing medicine without making new, expensive innovations.
The point here is that discussion is being shut down. And the people who are doing so aren't even scientists.
How are scientists supposed to arrive at a conclusion when they can't even talk out the possibilities?
Well for one, people are talking about it search ivermectin on Twitter. But secondly this is the same logic people use to continue advocating for intelligent design or that vaccines cause autism or whether climate change is real.
Nothing is stopping researchers from organizing a collaboration or meeting to discuss this amongst experts and then presenting their findings. That’s common and works fine virtually as well. There are values to open access and live public discussion but when it’s a very niche and complicated issue it allows charlatans to step in with their own aims and persuade the uninformed.
I have alwas wanted a plausable mechanism of action to be established for this.
Some drugs have cross effects but from what I can see this is not the type of drug that likely would.
Well, we'll never know, will we? Censorship is being placed on anyone who tries a novel solution.
I mean no. Anyone can just publish some resarch. This guy did. It's all been.
They could just be like, we observed this effect and it has a reasonable chance of having antiviral processes.
Instead it is just mixed data. Given the situation. Mixed data would tend to indicate the effect is an artifact of loose testing and futher bette rtests would see the effexts disappear
ok so I've heard about ivermectin before but never looked it up
from 2011: Ivermectin, ‘Wonder drug’ from Japan: the human use perspective, by Satoshi Omura
I've used ivermectin/Ivomec plenty, it's the most commonly used veterinary antiparasite medication in the USA and is widely used as a human antihelminthic in the global south
it literally often does cure brain worms if they're platyhelminths
Do you think we should be allowed to discuss its use against Covid? Why or why not?
I am not a virologist, however I had never known ivermectin to be used on viral diseases until these claims so I am inherently somewhat skeptical: in my previous understanding ivermectin kills certain multicellular invertebrates and nothing else.
That's not the question; the question is should we be allowed to discuss its use against covid? Why or why not?
Viable as a treatment or not is something for the research to decide.
However, we should be using this to radicalize conservatives. The whole idea of "they're censoring a treatment because it's cheaper" is free real estate when forming leftist solidarity. Even if it isn't true this time it has been in the past and will most likely occur again in a capitalist society. We don't even have to say we think it's an actual cure. Simply stating that their concern is legitimate given the profits over people narrative that capitalism perpetuates is enough to plant a seed in their mind that this isn't a "libs silencing my freedom" thing. This is an inherent evil of capitalism.
Maybe we could make a few accounts and "gettr done" as they say.
free real estate when forming leftist solidarity
Not really, this isn't "real capitalism" to these morons
Me: Yo lets use this to educate these people on what real capitalism is.
You: No, we can't educate them on real capitalism because they didn't already start off with knowing it's shit.
No this is a bad idea. The people who started the "ivermectin can cure Covid" conspiracy are the neo apartheid ghouls in Afriforum South Africa. They had rightfully lost multiple court cases trying to approve this drug (a horse de wormer) for treatment of Covid patients in South Africa. You're falling for their propaganda if you do this.
Who gives a shit who started it?
Does that erase the materialist conditions that lead to people turning a pandemic into a grift? No.
And I'm not talking about supporting the drug as a cure I'm talking about talking to the people who feel ignored by a media that to them and to us clearly focuses on profits first. If you don't see how this could be a first step in being radicalized then maybe you just came out of the womb knowing the establishment is bad; but some people need a little help working through it.
