Goldtent TA Paradise

IVERMECTIN : COMEDY FROM THE “COMPETITION”

1. Fullgoldcrown says:

   August 23, 2021 - 1:54 pm at 1:54 pm

   Eduardo Medina, an assistant professor from Cali, Colombia, who has been funded by three drug companies that offer COVID-19 therapeutics in competition with ivermectin, and who received personal fees from one of these,1,2 effused alarm about ivermectin in an opinion piece in the New York Times (August 21, 2021).3 Citing reports to a poison control center in Mississippi from people who took ivermectin in unspecified animal formulations, with no resulting hospitalizations among any,4 Medina characterized ivermectin as dangerous, with several potential serious side effects.

   In fact, Ivermectin, a drug of Nobel prize-honored distinction, has been used safely in 3.7 billion doses worldwide since 1987 to treat a variety of human diseases.5-7 One of the safest drugs in modern medicine, it is well tolerated even at ten times the standard dose of 200 µg/kg,8,9 including for COVID-19 treatment.1,10 Cancer patients who were administered ivermectin at five times that standard dose daily for up to 180 consecutive days had no serious adverse effects from it, even in experimental protocols with harsh additional drugs.11 Nineteen patients who either tried to commit suicide (15) or took an accidental overdose (4) of either ivermectin or the closely related avermectin at up to 1,000 times the standard dose, using veterinary forms, had little success in harming themselves.12 Only one 72-year-old male who took 440 times the standard dose died. The others, including a 61-year-old female who took 77 times the standard dose of ivermectin, survived. Twelve of these 19 patients recovered within two days with minimal supportive care.

   Medina’s New York Times piece picked up from a press release of February 4, 2021 issued by Merck, which is developing its own COVID-19 therapeutic, molnupiravir. Merck’s press release lamented “a concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies” of ivermectin.4 Merck was evidently troubled by the lack of safety data for ivermectin from Mars or Jupiter. Medina had previously mounted an equally clumsy effort to try to undermine ivermectin by conducting a clinical study in Cali, Columbia in which ivermectin doses were mistakenly switched with placebo doses for 38 patients, and in which blinding was grossly violated by use of sugar water as the placebo for many of the other patients.1,2 In his New York Times piece, Medina noted that ivermectin is not FDA approved for COVID treatment, but ivermectin is an FDA approved drug, and all but one of current COVID-19 treatment drugs are likewise not FDA approved for COVID and are used off label. More generally, 21% of all drug prescriptions in the US are off-label.13,14 It is clear that Medina and his industry sponsors are alarmed indeed as to the dangers posed by ivermectin to their billions in planned profits by ivermectin’s increasingly successful use for COVID-19 treatment worldwide.

   To consider the safety and efficacy data for ivermectin treatment of COVID-19 based upon peer-reviewed scientific publications rather than regurgitated drug company press releases, this recently published paper, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nmni.2021.100924,15 provides a concise review.

   David E. Scheim, PhD