The Results Are In: Ivermectin Is Useless for Treating COVID-19


I—and I assume, readers of this blog—have never thought of ivermectin horse paste as an effective treatment for COVID-19. That's because we are not the kind who swallow conspiracy theories that the medical establishment is somehow involved in a conspiracy to keep an effective treatment from the public. I would bet my bottom dollar that if ER physicians thought it was effective, they'd have been handing it out like candy during January. 

People who do believe such things have gone bonkers, as has been well documented in this blog. Medical professionals have received threats of deaths and physical or sexual violence over their refusal to administer a drug unapproved to treat the disease that had no known effectiveness for that purpose.

Not that facts will matter to the COVIDiots—because, y'know, the whole medical establishment is in on the conspiracy. But we now have a study just published in the New England Journal of Medicine proving that ivermectin is ineffective at preventing hospitalization/death of COVID-19 patients.

This was a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial enrolling 3,515 symptomatic, SARS-CoV-2–positive adults recruited from 12 public health clinics in Brazil. They were randomly assigned to receive ivermectin (679 patients), placebo (679), or another intervention (2157).

They compared the ivermectin and placebo groups in terms of the occurrence of a "primary outcome event," defined as a hospitalization or emergency department visit due to worsening symptoms within 28 days. Of the people who received ivermectin, 100 had such an event whereas the placebo group had 111 such events. 

That is not a statistically significant difference—i.e. you could get such a difference entirely by chance in groups of the size studied. The researchers concluded that: 

Treatment with ivermectin did not result in a lower incidence of medical admission to a hospital due to progression of Covid-19 or of prolonged emergency department observation among outpatients with an early diagnosis of Covid-19.

So there you have it.

Incidentally this is the same research COVIDiot Senator Rand Paul claimed the medical community was refusing to perform because of animus toward the former president. So much for his credibility, assuming he had any left. 

Will some reporter please ask him how he explains the existence of this study, given his previous assertions?


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