July 24, 2021
When leftists shun ivermectin, they show how scientifically illiterate they are
By
James V. DeLong
Saturday, July 24 is
World Ivermectin Day, as "people of the world will come together to celebrate ivermectin for a day focused on unity, love, and gratitude for this precious gift from Mother Earth."
I will be with them. Being of venerable age, I am at risk for COVID, so I follow the debates over the vaccines and treatments, such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, with intense interest.
My conclusion, on which I am willing to bet my life, is that taking ivermectin is a superior alternative to vaccination, both for prevention and, should it come to it, treatment. I am convinced by the careful scientific work of the
FLCCC, the
BIRD group,
and independent researcher Andrew Hill and reinforced by the refusal of the government health agencies to respond in any coherent fashion.
A priori, one would not expect issues of drug safety and efficacy to be a political hot potato, but one would be wrong. The Progressive wokesters, and especially their Deep State and Big Tech minions, are all in on the propositions that the vaccines are wonder drugs and ivermectin is worthless. These positions are maintained by a refusal on the part of the health agencies to examine the evidence and by intense censorship by Big Tech.
The latest stroke in this conflict came from the lefty Guardian, which reported "
Huge study supporting Ivermectin as Covid treatment withdrawn over ethical concerns." The article identified a number of data problems with a particular study from Egypt, which, if true, would be serious, and the pre-print service that had published the paper withdrew it. The author protested that he had been blindsided without a chance to defend his work, and the matter is now being explored.
Many media outlets echoed the Guardian, characterizing the problems of the Egyptian study as eliminating the most important randomized control trial (RCT) and thus knocking out a crucial pillar of support for ivermectin. No other kind of evidence is regarded as relevant.
Supporters of ivermectin downplay the concerns, because re-running the crucial meta-analyses (linked above) supporting ivermectin without the Egyptian data does not change the favorable result. Multiple RCTs remain, along with significant observational and epidemiological studies, so the loss of the Egyptian data (even if the criticisms ultimately stand) means little.
Behind this specific dispute is a larger, important, and subtle conflict over the nature of evidence in medical research.
Everyone agrees that RCTs represent a high standard. In an RCT, patients are divided into two groups. One gets the drug under investigation; the other gets a placebo. The study is double-blind in that neither patient nor doctor knows who is getting which, so expectations cannot influence the outcome. If the results for the groups are significantly different, one can be confident that the drug is beneficial. And if side-effects in the treated group are rare, one can also be confident of safety.
But total reliance on RCTs runs into immediate problems. They are expensive, so their number is inherently limited. In particular, no private company will fund one for any off-patent drug, which is why Big Pharma is opposed to research on ivermectin. No one owns it. Performing research on off-patent drugs should be a major task of government health agencies, but these appear to be under the thumb of Big Pharma and not interested.