[Slashdot] - 'No Effect Whatsoever' Found for Ivermectin in Major Study

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In 1999 Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Hiltzik won a Pulitzer Prize. Now a business columnist for the Times, he writes that Ivermectin, "the latest supposed treatment for COVID-19 being touted by anti-vaccination groups, had 'no effect whatsoever' on the disease, according to a large patient study." (Alternate URL here) That's the conclusion of the Together Trial, which has subjected several purported nonvaccine treatments for COVID-19 to carefully designed clinical testing. The trial is supervised by McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, and conducted in Brazil. One of the trial's principal investigators, Edward Mills of McMaster, presented the results from the Ivermectin arms of the study at an Aug. 6 symposium sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. Among the 1,500 patients in the study, he said, Ivermectin showed "no effect whatsoever" on the trial's outcome goals — whether patients required extended observation in the emergency room or hospitalization. "In our specific trial," he said, "we do not see the treatment benefit that a lot of the advocates believe should have been" seen... The Ivermectin camp, as I reported earlier, is heavily peopled by anti-vaccination advocates and conspiracy mongers. They maintain that the truth about the drug has been suppressed by agents of the pharmaceutical industry, which ostensibly prefers to collect the more generous profits that will flow from COVID vaccines. The problem, however, is that the scientific trials cited by Ivermectin advocates have been too small or poorly documented to prove their case. One large trial from Egypt that showed the most significant therapeutic effect was withdrawn from its publishers due to accusations of plagiarism and bogus data. Nevertheless, the advocates have continued to press their case — without necessarily observing accepted standards of scientific discourse. During the symposium, Mills complained that serious researchers looking into claims for COVID treatments have faced unprecedented abuse from advocates. "I've had enough abuse and so have the other clinical trialists doing Ivermectin," he said. "Others working in this area have been threatened, their families have been threatened, they've been defamed," he said... Asked whether he expected further criticism from Ivermectin advocates, he said it was all but inevitable. "The advocacy groups have set themselves up to be able to critique any clinical trial. They've already determined that any valid, well-designed critical trial was set up to fail."

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