Ivermectin shows that not all science is worth following

It&#x27;s probably not a coincidence that the same people saying &quot;Masks don&#x27;t work and the proof is I can smell my farts when I wear them&quot;, &quot;The virus is a hoax&quot;, &quot;The vaccines have a tracking chip in them&quot; are the same folks saying &quot;ivermectin prevents and cures covid&quot;.<p>I live in the Missouri Ozarks, near Branson, and I am surrounded by them. I&#x27;ve been following the use of ivermectin since around June 2020 and still have not seen any definitive proof it works better than a placebo.<p>But I did suspect there might be a run on it over a year ago so I bought an extra package of it for my two burros. Just a few days ago I had to use it. About a month ago I asked an employee at the feed store I buy it at how their stock of it was holding up. He told me &quot;We&#x27;re selling out within 24 hours of getting a shipment in.&quot;<p>It won&#x27;t matter if rigerous studies determine it doesn&#x27;t work at all, they won&#x27;t care. These are folks who are still refusing to get vaxxed, wear a mask, and social distance. They don&#x27;t care that over 670,000 of their fellow citizens have been killed by it here. They don&#x27;t believe that either. They&#x27;re &quot;Mad as hell&quot; and they&#x27;re &quot;not going to take it anymore&quot;.

Why would not some government fund the proper research into Ivermectin and Covid and be done with it. A lot of money was already thrown into the problem, throwing a bit more into a possible cheap and safe preventive treatment is a no brainer, unless I am missing something. Even this article suggests that there are some studies showing promise for Ivermectin, well, go create a big proper one and put an end to this debate. I can&#x27;t stand Ivermectin zealots and anti-Ivermectin knowitalls.

Hopefully the NIH funded ACTIV-6 Trial will provide more definitive evidence on Ivermectin, given that it is a US based study and has 15,000 participants.<p>However, I don&#x27;t know how the trial stacks up against prior work in terms of dose, and the estimated completion date is DEC 2022.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nih.gov&#x2F;research-training&#x2F;medical-research-initiatives&#x2F;activ&#x2F;covid-19-therapeutics-prioritized-testing-clinical-trials#activ6" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nih.gov&#x2F;research-training&#x2F;medical-research-initi...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;clinicaltrials.gov&#x2F;ct2&#x2F;show&#x2F;NCT04885530" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;clinicaltrials.gov&#x2F;ct2&#x2F;show&#x2F;NCT04885530</a>

The problem is that Ivermectin is off patent, so no drug company can make any money from it. Since there is no money for expensive research studies or clinical trials, all the research studies that get done will be low budget and subject to being called &quot;lousy science&quot;.<p>How about just properly reporting and studying the actual facts from one of the very large real world trials, like the one in India?

The Actually Real Scandal About Ivermectin is something like the anthropic principle but about the fact that I know that nothing positive about Ivermectin would ever be allowed on the Atlantic. Is Ivermectin at best barely above useless for covid? Maybe. Is it crucial and it&#x27;s a crime against humanity for being suppressed? Maybe, and I&#x27;m inclined to say probably because the same people who lie about everything are mighty certain that Ivermectin is something that doesn&#x27;t help covid and anyone who says otherwise is a horse paste eating moron.

Why take the biased article at its word? Luckily we have access to all of these studies and can do the research ourselves (thanks Internet!)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ivmmeta.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ivmmeta.com&#x2F;</a><p>The current count of medical studies that show Ivermectin being beneficial for treating or preventing COVID-19 is 64. Out of those 64, 44 of them are peer reviewed.<p>Or we could throw the baby out with the bathwater because this article cherry picked a few of the worst studies to shape a narrative.

Brazil received strong govt propaganda for ivermectin use. Some people even got liver problems due to Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine overdose [1].<p>Yet, the country is one of the most affected by the pandemic. It has more than 600k deaths. For comparison, India is around 6x bigger regarding population, and only had 454K deaths.<p>That&#x27;s the real-world Ivermectin study. If it worked, you can be sure that Brazil would be in a much better situation.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;g1.globo.com&#x2F;fantastico&#x2F;noticia&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;29&#x2F;apos-descobrir-problema-no-figado-por-causa-do-uso-excessivo-da-ivermectina-baiana-lamenta-bobagens-que-a-gente-faz.ghtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;g1.globo.com&#x2F;fantastico&#x2F;noticia&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;29&#x2F;apos-desc...</a> (in Portuguese)

It&#x27;s as though medical literature is going through the same process that the Internet did: built with the assumption of good behavior, and that good actors would swamp bad ones. That turns out to be untrue, and correcting it after the fact is much harder.

It&#x27;s important to remember that by and large, people decide what they support on the basis of what makes them emotionally feel better, and then find evidence for it.<p>People who castigate the medical and pharmaceutical industries for being corrupt and then wholeheartedly advocate for one treatment or another as &quot;the solution&quot; based on articles they found on the Internet from unknown sources aren&#x27;t and were never operating from a place of logic - as though nobody on the Internet was ever maliciously motivated or trying to make a buck.<p>There&#x27;s no point in a discussion based on &quot;the evidence&quot; with these individuals, except maybe to point out the cognitive dissonance at play.

As an observation not an argument, irrespective of what comes to be accepted as to the efficacy of ivermectin, there seem to be an awful lot of doctors and other professionals across the world prepared to trash their personal reputations &amp; sometimes their careers if &quot;claims about the drug are based on shoddy science—but that science is entirely unremarkable in its shoddiness.&quot; is true.