bohumm
Posts: 5705
Joined: 10/28/2007
From: Altadena, CA
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quote:
ORIGINAL: jbusse
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ORIGINAL: DavidAOlson
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ORIGINAL: jbusse
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ORIGINAL: Burns
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/08/go-moderna-calls-3rd-shot-vaccine-protect-new-strains/
More shots, more profits. Yeah!.................. More suckers.
As the saying goes, never let a good crisis go to waste:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/21/business/covid-vaccine-billionaires/index.html
Although I don’t doubt the efficacy of the covid vaccines, extremely safe, re-purposed drugs (e.g., ivermectin) could have put us on a better path far sooner for a fraction of the cost. To me, the failure to seriously consider these inexpensive alternatives paints a very poor picture of the way high-level healthcare decisions are made in the U.S. If you think I’m talking nonsense, check out the data:
https://ivmmeta.com/
You're clearly not familiar with the research because there was a massive effort to screen already existing drugs to see if any had an effect. One even got approval (Remdesivir), despite a weak effect.
You'll note the site's work hasn't been submitted to a reputable journal. But that's because it wouldn't pass peer review. It's faux science, dressed up with enough numbers to fake out people who don't do science.
For example, the site undercuts itself: it responds to the critique by an "internet personality" by avoiding the critique. For example, the critique noted the site didn't contact the authors in cited papers (essential in a meta-analysis), and the site never responds to that issue. Instead it just throws dirt in the air by saying that the "internet personality" admits he didn't contact all the authors, either. But that's not a requirement of the critique; the site admitted they didn't even do the basics right.
Another issue is that ivermectin was only effective against the virus in a cell culture. When scientists attempted to replicate the effect in human cells, it failed. Skipping over a lot of biochemical details... but for example https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.17.444467v2 ; even when they increased the concentration to ridiculous levels, it still failed.
The site attempts to minimize that issue, but mostly waves it off in a way that shows it's not doing science. The reason why actual scientific results are strong is because they connect everything. Pre-clinical: show the drug works in various cell cultures, explain the biochemical mechanisms, show it works in test organisms. Then comes clinical testing to show it actually works in practice.
The pandemic effort to repurpose drugs was a magnet for fraud. I suspect that's because if a drug showed any potential in the initial screening, someone could generate a fraudulent study showing "it worked" and get lots of attention. It was a long-shot gamble with fame if the drug actually worked. Unfortunately in a pandemic, people desperate for anything would glom onto the hope provided by those fraudsters.
I wouldn't have bothered responding except for the subsequent mic drop comment, as if the narrow critique above somehow invalidates the results of 61 treatment/control group studies included in the website's analysis.
To say that ivermectin is only effective against the virus in a cell culture is simply not true. The basis for the results reported on the ivermectin website is 23,285 actual patients across 61 treatment/control group studies. So, as far as you're concerned, throw out a meta-analysis of these 61 studies because the site didn't contact the authors of the 61 studies? OK, but out of curiosity, what's the point of contacting these authors? For many types of analyses, I wouldn't need to contact the authors of a paper in order to incorporate its findings. And how is it that failing to contact the authors invalidates the meta analysis?
Regardless, looked at in isolation, most of the individual studies on its effectiveness show statistically significant results in favor of ivermectin (with the usual caveats, i.e., best when taken within 5 days of the onset of symptoms in combo with vitamin D for example). The website reports a near-comprehensive list of those involving actual patients, including 107 on covid/ivermectin among which 71 are peer reviewed. You want to throw out those results too? You can't possibly invalidate any meaningful number of those studies, so in essence you simply refuse to believe their findings. Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but don't act like it's more than that. The 61 treatment/control group studies represent the work of 586 researchers.
Focusing on the paper you cite, it only uses "human airway-deprived cell models" to show that ivermectin doesn't work. What is more convincing, the response of a cell model or the response of 23,285 actual human beings?
A significant percentage of the world uses ivermectin for covid, with some estimates >20%. You're suggesting that the countries that use it widely are a victim of fraud. Maybe their health authorities are smarter than you think.
Meanwhile, it's not surprising that the approved Remdesivir drug costs $3,000 per patient. That's the point. Suppress cheap alternatives.
Without getting into the dubious effectiveness of ivermectin in as an effective therapeutic treatment for COVID, you would always prefer to prevent infection in the first place than to hope to be one of the isolated cases that MAY respond to some of these therapeutics. In football terms, if you want to stop the run game, you'd rather have a stout front seven than a bunch of DBs who MIGHT be able to catch the runner after he breaks though the line.
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