This is at best an indication of the need for better studies about the subject, but considering that Brazil's president is rabid pro-ivermectin and this was made in a medium city in a region favorable at the president, take this with a grain of salt.
I don't have a position on ivermectin, but it's pretty clear that any actual pre-treatmwent repurposing of drugs for any future pandemic should be the tip of the spear, but will be oppressed, underfunded, attacked, false-flagged, strawmanned, degraded, and doctor prescribers attacked.
This is totally, totally backwards. Even at $100,000,000 a clinical trial, funding 100 drugs with repurpose potential should have been step 1.
There were a few cases of fraud (most notably one of the biggest ivermectin studies last summer) but it’s not necessary to resort to allegations of ubiquitous fraud to conclude that the research doesn’t really support use of these drugs as effective Covid therapeutics
0: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/what-s-ivermectin
The size and location of the study suggests that reporting of COVID-19 infections was by presentation, meaning asymptomatic or minimal infections were probably not counted.
tl;dr: These results will probably not translate well to places without pervasive parasite infestation. Wearing an N95 mask has a much larger protective effect than taking ivermectin, in any case, even there.
I just don't see how parasites would explain all these results. I do see how monetary incentives would play into maligning them though.
Also, the problem with these types of studies is that bad outcomes are sometimes not published. Nobody want to write an article with the title "We used Ivermectin and we killed an additional statistical significant number of coworkers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporting_bias For a RCT it's necessary more paperwork and authorizations and ideally preregistering. So that increase the chance of that they must write the final paper.
Also, as the PG noted the "peer review" of this site is not the traditional peer review of a normal journal. For example, the title says "Observational Study of 223,128 Subjects" but later it says "a total of 159,561 subjects were included in the analysis". The main part of the difference is that they report in the title the total number of inhabitants, but for the analysis they use only the ones that have more than 18 years old. It's not a smoking gun, but at least it's a small red flag.
There’s one review, and it’s (IMO) not substantive. I would treat this as a preprint basically (not that you shouldn’t read peer reviewed studies critically either)
Can't emphasize this enough. The MMR autism fraud paper that started the anti-vaccine industry was peer reviewed in the Lancet.
It's unfortunate that the critical thinking skills needed to know good research from bad aren't drilled into us as part of the core curriculum for every high school student.
We already knew this. This doesn't apply outside areas with endemic parasites. It doesn't apply here in the US.
> How can I improve my article's SIQ™?
> Telling your friends, colleagues and advisors to review the article on Cureus
> Cureus offers a social media promotional add-on, or boost, for eligible published articles at an additional cost.
So this site is like PubMed but with payola?
But in places where they aren't available it could be interesting especially if Omicron is the dominant variant and reducing transmission isn't of much use (which Ivermectin doesn't help with).
The effect size is smaller than from wearing a good mask.
And be sure to keep in mind that the vast majority of infections occur at home where I sincerely doubt people are wearing masks.
There absolutely is such a reason: the standard for things that people are required to take should be way, way higher than the standard for things that people are merely allowed to take.
These results indicate that medical-based optional prescription and citywide covered ivermectin can have a positive impact on the healthcare system. However, the present results do not provide sufficient support for the hypothesis that ivermectin could be an alternative to COVID-19 vaccines
Nobody should take anything without discussing it with their doctor.
