Ivermectin worthless against COVID in largest clinical trial to date

The results of the largest clinical trial to date on the use of the antiparasitic drug ivermectin against COVID-19 were published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday.

The double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial was designed to test if ivermectin could reduce the need for hospitalization among 1,358 COVID-19 patients at high risk of severe disease. Ivermectin did not lower the risk of hospital admission or emergency department observation, according to the international team of researchers behind the trial.

The folks with TOGETHER also found that the drug failed to reduce all other secondary outcomes of COVID-19, including the time to recovery, time to viral clearance on PCR test, time spent in the hospital, the need for mechanical ventilation, the duration of mechanical ventilation, death, or the time to death. "We found no important effects of treatment with ivermectin on the secondary outcomes," the researchers wrote.

Seriously, y’all

Some smaller trials and current medical consensus agree that ivermectin has not proven effective at treating COVID-19. ivermectin is a drug used in veterinary medicine for deworming horses, cows, cats, and dogs and has become a wildly popular treatment.

Ivermectin is popular because of misinformation, Republican politics and dubious data. An early study using cells in petri dishes suggested that ivermectin has high levels of antiviral activity. The results of trials and other studies have been mixed. Many small studies have claimed that ivermectin has benefits. A few meta-analyses have provided a veneer of efficacy.

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There are fierce debates about online use of ivermectin. In December 2020, ivermectin prescriptions in the US increased by over a thousand percent. The increase was estimated to cost health insurers $129 million a year. Not everyone who wanted to take the drug was given a prescription. spikes in poisonings were caused by this and led the Food and Drug Administration to warn that you are not a horse. You are not a cow. It is seriously, y'all. Stop it.

The researchers behind the new trial are not expecting that the use of ivermectin against COVID-19 will be put to rest.

The number of events that occurred in our trial is larger than the number of events in the meta-analyses.

Trial design

The trial took place across 12 public health clinics in Brazil. 679 of them were assigned to get ivermectin and the other 679 were assigned a placebo. All of the patients were tested positive for COVID-19 on a rapid test and had symptoms within seven days. Being older than 50, having diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, or lung disease, are some of the conditions that put them at higher risk of severe COVID-19. All of the patients were monitored for 28 days, with contact on days 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 14, and 28 from the time of their randomization. The people in the ivermectin group received a dose for the first three days.

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The researchers originally planned to give patients a small dose of ivermectin. After receiving feedback from advocacy groups, they extended the experimental treatment to three days. The patients in the trial were checked to make sure they didn't have a history of using ivermectin.

The main goal of the trial was to see if ivermectin could reduce the risk of hospitalization in high-risk patients. Hospitals in Brazil had periods when they were overwhelmed with patients. The researchers counted visits to emergency departments when a patient was kept for observation for six or more hours due to worsening COVID-19 symptoms, which was considered a proxy for hospitalization if hospital capacity was not limited.

There was no difference in the number of hospitalizations or emergency department visits between the ivermectin and placebo groups. The ivermectin group had exactly 100 participants who had that outcome, while the placebo group had just over 100. When the researchers narrowed their analysis to exclude a few people who went to the hospital within 24 hours of starting the trial, the finding remained the same. The researchers didn't see any benefits from the secondary outcomes. There was no benefit in patients who started ivermectin within three days of symptoms instead of seven days.