This is an interesting twist in the theraputics war. Everybody knows about Ivermectin; its been around forever and has a remarkable safety record. Unfortunately it has been denigrated at least as much as hydroxychloroqine to the point that most people don’t know what to believe. Ivermectin was originally produced by Merck, but has been off patent for a long time. Now Merck has produced a new antiviral pill, Molnupiravir, that has done quite well in initial clinical trials. Of course this is ONE clinical trial, performed by Merck. There hasn’t been much interest by Big Pharma on doing clinical trials on Ivermectin, possibly for a number of reasons, but the one that stands out is that it’s cheap and the patents have long ago expired. No Billions to be made there.
Most of the epidemiological work on Ivermectin has been done in the third world or by enterprising groups of physicians (FLCCC comes to mind, but there are others as well). Also, a very good peer reviewed meta-analysis has been published in the “American Journal of Theraputics” Molnupiravir claims about a 50% success rate at keeping people out of the hospital, with perhaps an impact on disease severity if a person is hospitalized (I’m inferring this based on Merck’s report that nobody in the treatment group died whereas a few people in the control group died). Interestingly, this trial was stopped early on ethical grounds; a placebo treated control group was considered unethical because additional untreated subjects would certainly die in the control group. For Ivermectin, it’s difficult to put a success rate on the same endpoint because there have been lots of studies, of varying quality, done with results that vary a lot. Ivermectin is around 62 odd percent effective with the same endpoint. Some studies show Ivermectin to be effective even with very sick patients but there be methodological issues with these (non-randomization, non-comprability of groups, etc.) and I would not be comparing apples to apples by assessing efficacy with Molnupiravir. NN a interesting part of this antiviral war is the fact that Ivermectin is a drug Merak invented that is off patent and sold as a Generic available in third world countries for pennies a pill and Mclinupravir cost $100 a pill. This newly release study was very enlightening to me. I read it as i took my twice weekly dose of ivermectin. Let me quote for the study:
“As most but not all double blind studies, and meta-analyses, have shown benefits of ivermectin in COVID19 including 56% mortality reduction [11], and given the complimentary pharmacokinetics and
pharmacodynamics of the drugs, direct head -to -head comparison of molnupiravir and ivermectin, in blinded randomized clinical trials are needed.
or cytokine release. 1. Painter WP, Holman W, Bush JA, Almazedi F, Malik H, Eraut
This is a short read. In the study are boxexs that show detailed comparisons of the two medicines….