Large New Study: NEJM - Effect of Early Treatment with Ivermectin among Patients with Covid-19

weavilsatemyface · 2022-04-01T02:03:01+00:00

This is the TOGETHER trial, which is bullshit science designed to fail. If they literally designed the study to get a negative result for Ivermectin, they couldn't have done a worse job. It is a poor quality study that has been hyped through the roof. Calling it "the biggest and most well done" study is pure, 100% marketing bullshit.

Which is not surprising: one of the lead authors, Edward Mills, works for a company that specializes in helping drug manufacturers get FDA approval, Cytel. Cytel has partnered with Pfizer. I am shocked, shocked, that he found that Ivermectin had no effect. Never would have seen that coming.

The most critical flaw, and it had to be deliberate, is that they didn't exclude people from the control group if they were already using Ivermectin. This was in Brazil, where Ivermectin is a widely used over-the-counter drug. While the trial was ongoing, the Brazilian government came out with a recommendation in favour of Ivermectin, and sales increased by a factor of nine. So they compared:

treatment: Ivermectin with a known dose;
versus control: also Ivermectin, with an unknown and likely variable dose, depending on the individuals

which is statistically guaranteed to reduce the apparent effectiveness of the treatment.

But don't just believe me, read the exclusion criteria. They went to a lot of trouble to exclude people using all sorts of other medical treatments, and didn't exclude those already using Ivermectin.

Naturally they found not much difference. I say again: this had to be deliberate, because the researchers knew enough to exclude people using other drugs. This is some serious A-grade bullshit science. Scientists don't fuck up that badly unless they intended to.

Another flaw that had to be deliberate: they administered ivermectin to patients on an empty stomach, which is known to reduce the effectiveness of the drug by 80%.

Other flaws: they changed the dose of Ivermectin mid-study, and the end point of the study, halfway through the study. So that's pretty dodgy. Some of the authors are on record ahead of the study as heavy critics of Ivermectin, so the study is at high risk of bias.

Speaking of bias, the trial was funded by the Gates Foundation, which has a quarter of a billion dollars invested in Covid vaccines and stands to make huge profits from them. Are we shocked that the TOGETHER trial ended their Ivermectin trial early?

Another confounding variable (although this one was not the fault of the authors) is that the prevalence of Covid, and in particular the Gamma strain which is known to be especially hard to treat, changed during the course of the study.

Exclusion and inclusion criteria changed through the study, the randomization of patients seems wrong, patient numbers in the different arms don't add up... with this many serious problems in the study design, we cannot take the results seriously and we cannot call it "well done". It is a hit-piece disguised as science and being widely misrepresented as finding "no effect", which is false: what they found was that even with all the problems of the study, they still found a modest positive effect: 9% reduction in risk of hospitalisation and 18% reduction in mortality.

Jatz_Crackers · 2022-03-31T21:33:01+00:00

Given for 3 days? What about HQC??

This test reads like a sham study to discredit Ivermectin in the quickest way possible.

Do not take the fkn mRNA vaccine people.

StillLessons · 2022-03-31T21:47:43+00:00

Excellent post, thank you, especially given the good synopsis of the findings in your comment.

There have been multiple results in line with those of this study over the past few months.

Let's say then - for argument's sake - that Ivermectin was promising, but does not live up to the hype. This brings up various other questions. I will focus on two:

1) If not Ivermectin, then what does explain such a dramatic shift in the covid trajectory in Uttar Pradesh? That is the poster child for where Ivermectin correlated with the crushing of the epidemic curve. I would also argue that Japan's health minister made very positive remarks regarding Ivermectin and Japan was using it when their curve also went flat in the summer of 2021. What's going on there?

2) Why the intense reaction by the power complex through their media attacking Ivermectin so irrationally? Being the spouse of a physician, the story told in this NEJM article is the same story I have heard from my spouse since late 2020 - that the data is inconclusive, not showing sufficient benefit to justify the use of the drug. But that is a very different story from "It's horse de-wormer, and it will kill you!", which is the story put out in the press. What so freaked them out about a drug that - while its effectiveness is debatable in this context - has been absolutely KNOWN for decades to be unusually safe by drug standards. Nobody was going to be killed by using Ivermectin to attempt to treat covid. Why go with that attack in particular?

I would hypothesize that the first question may be places using Ivermectin acting as a proxy for places that were willing to treat covid early in any way whatsoever. In other words, the benefit coming from Uttar Pradesh, Japan, and other places with success treating covid isn't specifically about Ivermectin, but is rather a result of these locations addressing the virus in its early days with a variety of treatments. Any treatment is better than none. The US and other places fighting so hard against Ivermectin aren't fighting just Ivermectin; they are fighting the concept of treating covid at all in its early phases. That policy has been insane from a medical science point of view since day one.

The second question follows on this nicely, because it demonstrates that the priority for the US and other treatment-averse locations has never been about stopping covid; it is about developing popular acceptance of the premise that "the way to treat viral disease is vaccination, and only vaccination." In other words, every viral disease from here on in will create the need for a vaccine for that disease, and any treatment that interferes with the uptake of that new vaccine will be crushed in order to protect the expected vaccine profits.

The alliance between the WEF/Davos and the medical industrial complex is completely out of control at this point, to the extreme danger of the world's population. This message must be spread as well as we know how to anyone we can get to listen to us. It's a hard fight, but the stakes are as large as any of us will see in our lifetimes.

SoCo · 2022-03-31T18:06:51+00:00

Since there isn't a science or health sub yet and conspiracy is likely to be interested, I figured I'd post it here.

tl;dr: This study was the biggest and most well done one yet. It found that it's safe, but didn't show a statistically significant benefit.

We can only learn science from well done studies, not popularity contests of public medication advocates and pharmaceutical funded corporate media outlets.

The study, as best as I can tell:

This is the largest study so far, with 679 non-placebo patients qualified in the results (and a matching 679 qualifying placebo patients).
This study is double-blind placebo, done in Brazil between March 23, 2021, and August 6, 2021 at 12 participating clinical sites, during a public Covid spike that had medical access limited.
Participants at least 18 years old, with at least one risk factor and who have shown Covid-like symptoms for 7 days or less were included.
Ivermectin at a dose of 400 μg per kilogram was given once a day for 3 days and compared to placebo.
Participants were monitored for 28 days and had some nice tracking. PCR testing for viral clearance at day 3 and day 7 after starting treatment. Bad Covid events that happened within the first 24 hours were not included.
Ivermectin was compared to placebo, as a control, but also to all patients during the period not included in the trial, regardless of treatment type.

Key take away, as best I can tell:

This treatment is safe with no indication of adverse reactions
This treatment did ever so slightly better than all treatments combined, and a little better than the placebo baseline, by a multitude of specific comparisons. It did not do worse.
It appears that the benefit of treatment in this way was not statistically significant. The study established a target threshold to be significant using standard practices and the treatment failed to meet that threshold in any of the comparisons.

Criticisms of the study:

This one was done extremely well and was quite large.

The only criticism I have, is related to comparing the treatment regimen to other purported anti-rivals, who are FDA approved for Covid treatment.

Various formally approved antivirals vary, but they generally have a strict strict requirement of starting treatment within 3-5 days of symptoms to be effective at all. This trial included those within 7 days, but talked of a randomization periods, which made in unclear if their treatment started quickly.
The study designers had no clue and started with a 1 day dose of ivermectin consistent with the treatment of parasitic diseases. Feedback forced them to start over with a 3 day dose that was "relatively high." As far as I can tell, that is just the high end of a standard dose.
600 or 1200 μg/kg for 5 consecutive days would be more ideal, like this proposed study, which was canceled due to too big of drop in Covid rates at the time to meet the study needs. Yet, you'd expect some statistical impact, even if low-balling the dosage, with this big of study.

Canbot · 2022-04-01T02:59:37+00:00

Save this. When the evidence that ivermectin works finally comes out this will be scrubbed from the internet.

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