Did she take Ivermectin & HCQ? Did she test for Vit D? Or is she unhealthy, and simply contrarian? At least she will be immune once she gets over it. I doubled my Vit D and my doc prescribed Ivermectin lest I risk getting sick. Still no vax for me (philosophical reasons).
I want to reply to this because I want you to know that I hear your views and I understand them. She is very healthy, 40 years old, good Vitamin D levels (she checked them often). She took HCQ for a while, but then stopped.
I also would hug you if I could because I've seen first-hand what's coming your way if you don't get vaccinated. This is so contagious; it's going to get to everyone. You probably won't die, but you are going to be sick in an extreme that is hard to describe. I don't want you to go through this. God bless you my friend.
Thank you for your genuine concern. I am in exceptional health metabolically & hormonally. I don’t think the CCP virus will do much harm to me, and would rather get natural immunity than risk the side effects of the mRNA vaccines. To each their own. I hope your wife gets well soon. I am surprised that the Ivermectin didn’t cut the symptoms dramatically, based on what doctors I follow have been saying.
Does the AZ vaccine not appeal either? It is made from a weakened version of a common cold virus (adenovirus) from chimpanzee which has then been modified to contain genetic material from the coronavirus itself. Thus exposing your immune system to the same viral genetic material it would see if you were infected by COVID naturally, albeit in a much weaker dose.
I'd wager the problem with ivermectin and other treatments is that Trump mentioned them. I can't stand the guy, but I also can't stand the Sith attitude that you either take a stand 100% against anything he says or 100% in favour. Unfortunately for those in the first camp, there are peer reviewed studies showing promise for some repurposed medicines. Ivermectin for example has been shown to be helpful both as a prophylactic and as a treatment (which I'll try to explain below).
Here is the highest quality meta-analysis of ivermectin for COVID treatment, fully published in a highly respected journal [1]:
"Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin. Using ivermectin early in the clinical course may reduce numbers progressing to severe disease. The apparent safety and low cost suggest that ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally."
Another paper reports a very lucky event. As COVID swept through French care homes in March 2020, an outbreak of scabies led to an entire care home being prescribed ivermectin. Almost nobody died of COVID. Here's a DeepL translation of the results, shortened for brevity:
"Sixty-nine residents and 52 staff received [ivermectin]: median resident age 90 years (84-94), 78.3% female, 98.6% at least one comorbidity at risk of severe COVID-19. 11 subjects had probable or definite COVID-19 (7/69 residents and 4/52 staff, frequency 10.1%). Among the residents, 90.9% (10/11) had minimal COVID-19, no oxygen or hospitalisation, no deaths. Among the [77 care homes with COVID outbreaks], 45 were included as controls, i.e. 3062 residents (median age 86.2 years, 77.3% women). Among them, 22.6% [95%CI 16.3-28.9] had COVID-19 vs. 1.4% [care home where ivermectin was prescribed] with an attributable mortality of 4.9% [95%CI 3.2-6.5] vs. 0% [care home where ivermectin was prescribed]."
On the balance of probability, ivermectin is effective against COVID-19 both before and during the disease. I've seen anecdotes that it helps with long COVID symptoms in some too, but not read any proper studies, so we might one day add an "after" to "before and during" too. What's more, it's almost as cheap as sugar pills, and among the safest drugs ever invented in terms of side effects (read the quote from the first paper above again). That we're not even trying this in the rich west is the crime of the century. Studies of ivermectin only began in the UK a few months ago, when we already had evidence early last year that it's potentially interesting. You've got to wonder why conversations over repurposed medication are being suppressed.
I haven't analysed ivermectin too closely, but a number of national health boards, including the USA, UK, and Brazil, have said that the evidence at this time is insufficient. I trust them more than I trust my ability to identify methodological flaws in medical studies, particularly when my judgement is clouded by wishful thinking. I must therefore politely disagree with you about the balance of probability.
However, you are correct that the second Trump touches anything, it seemingly becomes impossible to have a rational conversation about it. I can't see any reason for you to have been downvoted, for instance.
Thanks, I respect your viewpoint; indeed I can relate to it having held that view for a long time too up until a few months ago when I started to ask trusted colleagues for their thoughts and started to read beyond the headlines. I now differ from you in that I believe governments are a lot less on top of the science than we thought, and seem to misunderstand its purpose, which to me as a scientist is a very upsetting and uncomfortable position to find myself living under. This video [1] makes in my view a good attempt at trying to explain how this all got the way it did, without invoking conspiracy. Worth a watch for anyone with an open mind. Even if you disagree with its conclusions, it's good to understand the arguments of the other side, we're not all loonies.
Starts by challenging social distancing & quarantine mandates, because no one had first done a cost benefit analysis. What? Who is this guy?
"Nick Hudson on PANDA:
Panda started off as a conversation, really. A group of four friends, professionals – an economist, a doctor, a lawyer and a little actuary. What we shared was an observation that the data and the facts – the reality – of Coronavirus was far away from what the media and public health institutions were presenting to the world. We saw in that problem the seeds of a great tragedy."
That was the session opener for the conference, setting the stage. The conference itself (linked from the channel page) has presentations from scientists backing up the claims he makes there.
The first lecture in the session for example is from Dr Clare Craig, an epidemiologist, discussing how the virus actually spreads, and presents evidence for the remark you highlighted about social distancing and quarantine [1].
As I said in other comments here, rejecting arguments based on (lack of) credentials is not constructive. I encourage everyone to open their mind and engage with what people have to say. You can always disagree with them and you're then at least more familiar with the arguments of the other side. I am always trying to find a way to justify the behaviour of governments with regards to COVID-19 - it would sure as heck make my life easier right now to fall in line - and I do this by reading and hearing the arguments in favour of restrictions and mandates from all corners.
Well, apparently you won't read this but thanks nonetheless for engaging with the arguments from the supposed "other side" further than most people do. I still respectfully disagree, and hope you find time to reexamine the claims being made here and elsewhere. Rejecting claims out of hand is not the way we get out of this mess.
You may be referring to Elgazzar et al. as discussed here [1]. That was not a meta-analysis, it was just a single study; the paper I linked was a meta-analysis of many such studies. The withdrawn paper was included in the paper I linked above, but it's been shown that removing its results from the meta-analysis does not change the conclusion (i.e. that ivermectin is likely an effective treatment and prophylactic against COVID-19). Instead it just changes the efficacy and error bars slightly. See e.g. this interview with evidence based medicine researcher Tess Lawrie [2] - they actually recompute the values during the interview using the software used in the study.
For the record, it's worth pointing out that the reasons for withdrawal are disputed by the authors. I have not looked closely at the arguments for and against so can't comment.
The trouble with arguments like that are that they rely entirely on faith in the person stating them.
As with all science, it's not the volume of studies one way or the other, it's the quality. Consensus on a topic only comes over time, especially for contentious issues with public interest. The good thing about science is that it more or less always converges on the truth over time, but some are not willing to wait and make snap decisions on policy without stating that it's not backed by scientific consensus.
It's entirely unconstructive to make comments like yours without sharing your sources. As I said above, there is this toxic attitude exhibited by many where there is an assumption that those who disagree with you are idiots and you need not waste time explaining your arguments. This gets us nowhere. For what it's worth, take a look at the results discussed here [1] which show that those refusing vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 are both the least and most academically qualified. Not everyone on that "side" is an idiot, and you may not have read everything they have (and nor might they have read everything you have).
All of those are literally one google search away so I don't think providing them inline is all that necessary. People interested in them can find them with no trouble and others won't read them even if provided.
Thanks for the links, I will take a proper look later. However, I have to repeat my point about scientific convergence because your links, in contrast to what you said earlier, demonstrates it is yet to happen. Popp et al. acknowledges the presence of the meta-analysis I linked above, and that it has a different conclusion to itself. It acknowledges that the approaches were broadly different, and that the criteria for inclusion of various studies in the meta-analyses were different. Future papers are going to have to continue to refine and agree on biases in individual studies that rule them in or out of subsequent meta-analysis.
Or, to put it more succinctly, science has not yet converged.
Yet, COVID is killing people, so we can't wait for science to converge before doing something about it. It therefore makes most sense to use educated guesses and conduct evidence based medicine with appropriate weighing of risks versus rewards. What ivermectin has going for it is that it is an extremely safe drug with a long history of use as an antiviral. Repurposing existing drugs is also far easier (and quicker) to get approval for than new vaccines. Even if the papers you linked are eventually proved right, and ivermectin is not beneficial, the evidence from ivermectin's use over 40 years suggests that it does very little harm - deaths caused by ivermectin intervention are essentially in the noise. What's more, it's out of patent so we're not paying $20-40 a pop like we are with the vaccines. It's got so much going for it that any level headed risk versus reward calculation should include it in the arsenal to fight against COVID.
Hey when you say there have been no high quality large studies perhaps you are unaware of the 63 studies, 42 of which were peer reviewed and 31 were randomized controlled trials. Please look at ivmmeta.com and let me know what you think of these are high quality large studies and if not why.
I'm just merely repeating the conclusion of linked meta-analysis that found 14 RCT studies regarding ivermectin.
As for the studies you linked to. I am no expert at doing meta-analysis but it seems to me that many RCT studies listed there are really small, at least some were done in very remote places. Most of them have single digit number of participants with adverse outcomes. I'm not sure but I think none of them showed no effect which is a bit odd. I suspect that many studies of similar size and quality done globally were exucluded from this list. There might be some general bias against publishing studies that show no effect too.
All the RCTs on this page mentioned together have the same order of magnitude of number of participants as the most recent study that showed no effect that I mentioned. I think one large study done carefully is many times more convincing than tens of very small studies done in highly loaded political climate.
This might indicate that studies on this site are to some degree cherry-picked by the authors so it's not so much meta-analysis of all RCT studies of Ivermectin, but rather meta-analysis of the Ivermectin studies someone likes.
Scotty here is the thing I can’t get over maybe you can help. IVM has ‘won the Nobel prize’. It is effective agains ~100 parasites and viruses and all kinds of baddies that plague humans (and as we have learned horses! And other mammals). I didn’t know this until the pandemic but I’ve been giving it to my dog for 10 years!
So it is VERY EFFECTIVE. That is a true statement. Is it effective against CV? I mean why wouldn’t we try it? Why would we assume something that works for so much not be? Why default to not try it? You get what I’m saying? It seems like when the world is melting down we should be trying everything. If there are 60+ studies showing it works why not do another 100? Or a thousand? It’s non toxic, incredibly cheap, easily produced .. it makes NO SENSE to me and stinks of malintent to silence and suppress it. Does that make sense?
That's because ivermectin is one of tens of thousands of substances we know are VERY EFFECTIVE for something, but we can't give them all to each patient. Even if all of them costed zero and had no side effects ever. They just wouldn't fit in the patients stomach or bloodstream at recommended dosage.
So we need to pick some substances. And it would be ideal if we picked based on something more than pure luck (hunch being correct is still just luck). So we actually need to measure how good any given substance is for covid. But it's not that easy, bacuse we don't have a good system for conducting randomized controlled trials quickly and in organized verifiable manner. So inital studies are just doctors trying something on few of their patients often without any statistical rigor. You can still publish this as a study. You just have to write some stuff down. It doesn't have to be all the stuff. You can take 'out of sight, out of mind approach' with patients that don't fit your hopes. It happenes all the time. And when you get no success there's not much for you as a doctor to publish.
Covid is hard to track because it's very survivable so most patients that you treat will survive regardless of what you are treating them with (if anything at all). So you may very easily fool yourself into thinking that you are helping.
That's why it's better to wait for large randomized medical studies done by medical researchers as impartial as possible. Because every medicine has some side effects at some dosage so the chance of getting any value out of random medicine is nearly zero and chance of inflicting harm when people will safe-medicate based on rumours is significant.
And even if it has zero side effects medicines fashionable in context of covid already have patients that they should be given to. The ones that suffer from all the things that we know those medicines are VERY EFFECTIVE for. So if you don't ramp up the production to give most likely non-effective medicine to people that most likely don't need it, you'll be stealing it from people (and horses!) that do.
You don't need 1000 studies. You need one that is large and good.
Why not take chloroquine? After all it doesn't hurt, right? Or amantidine, highly fashinable in Poland, because one doctor believes in it strongly and advocates for it loudly, although reporters found out his track record with it is not as good as he's saying. But what do they know, right? Or maybe we should inject blood plasma of covid survivors? Sounded reasonable, many doctors used it for treatment. Turned out it doesn't work. Or hydrocortisone, it's just a mild steroid that doctors use to treat severe covid with effect of at least few percent. Or budesonide, another steroid that I personally think they should be using instead because effect looks way stronger. Or why trials of Fluvoxamine are stuck? It was looking so perfect in few initial studies. It's actually my favorite potential covid miracle cure.
The fact that you know of one drug that might be doing something doesn't mean we should be trying it (except for controlled trials) because there are thousands of exactly as promising or more promising substances and we just can't try all of them haphazardly because of the suffering that would cause to patients that don't need the drug, and the patients that actually need it and won't be able to get it.
Why do you say “pure luck”? There are many doctors and studies testifying that it works. How are you reaching that conclusion? I’m not picking a random drug out of the Merck catalog here. We have doctors and patients saying it works at scale - why wouldn’t we do more to test and validate?
Because someone's opinion (and doctor is just someone unless he repeats something that he learned in school or from solid medical research) ... opinion is not knowledge and only knowledge can get us beyond pure luck. Knowledge is acquired through solid research. Which means large randomized studies with control group, blinded or double blinded.
And I'm not saying we shouldn't do more tests. We definitely should do more tests, and design them carefully, write results down diligently, and be ready to accept if they say that there's no effect because that's what most likely to happen with any substance that we test.
Please watch this video. It neatly shows why should you treat small and less rigorous studies with suspicion, even if there are many giving some results:
In a few months, based on progress in peer reviews, this sounds promising. As of now, not worth the risk in my eyes for a theoretical drop in spread. I lost considerable faith in trending “hot” studies in 2020 that were rushed, not peer reviewed, or heavily altered after publication. Everyone is in such a (manufactured) hurry to get this vaccine… it’s such an obvious psyop.
