Hey when you say there have been no high quality large studies perhaps you are unaware of the 63 studies, 42 of which were peer reviewed and 31 were randomized controlled trials. Please look at ivmmeta.com and let me know what you think of these are high quality large studies and if not why.
I'm just merely repeating the conclusion of linked meta-analysis that found 14 RCT studies regarding ivermectin.
As for the studies you linked to. I am no expert at doing meta-analysis but it seems to me that many RCT studies listed there are really small, at least some were done in very remote places. Most of them have single digit number of participants with adverse outcomes. I'm not sure but I think none of them showed no effect which is a bit odd. I suspect that many studies of similar size and quality done globally were exucluded from this list. There might be some general bias against publishing studies that show no effect too.
All the RCTs on this page mentioned together have the same order of magnitude of number of participants as the most recent study that showed no effect that I mentioned. I think one large study done carefully is many times more convincing than tens of very small studies done in highly loaded political climate.
This might indicate that studies on this site are to some degree cherry-picked by the authors so it's not so much meta-analysis of all RCT studies of Ivermectin, but rather meta-analysis of the Ivermectin studies someone likes.
Scotty here is the thing I can’t get over maybe you can help. IVM has ‘won the Nobel prize’. It is effective agains ~100 parasites and viruses and all kinds of baddies that plague humans (and as we have learned horses! And other mammals). I didn’t know this until the pandemic but I’ve been giving it to my dog for 10 years!
So it is VERY EFFECTIVE. That is a true statement. Is it effective against CV? I mean why wouldn’t we try it? Why would we assume something that works for so much not be? Why default to not try it? You get what I’m saying? It seems like when the world is melting down we should be trying everything. If there are 60+ studies showing it works why not do another 100? Or a thousand? It’s non toxic, incredibly cheap, easily produced .. it makes NO SENSE to me and stinks of malintent to silence and suppress it. Does that make sense?
That's because ivermectin is one of tens of thousands of substances we know are VERY EFFECTIVE for something, but we can't give them all to each patient. Even if all of them costed zero and had no side effects ever. They just wouldn't fit in the patients stomach or bloodstream at recommended dosage.
So we need to pick some substances. And it would be ideal if we picked based on something more than pure luck (hunch being correct is still just luck). So we actually need to measure how good any given substance is for covid. But it's not that easy, bacuse we don't have a good system for conducting randomized controlled trials quickly and in organized verifiable manner. So inital studies are just doctors trying something on few of their patients often without any statistical rigor. You can still publish this as a study. You just have to write some stuff down. It doesn't have to be all the stuff. You can take 'out of sight, out of mind approach' with patients that don't fit your hopes. It happenes all the time. And when you get no success there's not much for you as a doctor to publish.
Covid is hard to track because it's very survivable so most patients that you treat will survive regardless of what you are treating them with (if anything at all). So you may very easily fool yourself into thinking that you are helping.
That's why it's better to wait for large randomized medical studies done by medical researchers as impartial as possible. Because every medicine has some side effects at some dosage so the chance of getting any value out of random medicine is nearly zero and chance of inflicting harm when people will safe-medicate based on rumours is significant.
And even if it has zero side effects medicines fashionable in context of covid already have patients that they should be given to. The ones that suffer from all the things that we know those medicines are VERY EFFECTIVE for. So if you don't ramp up the production to give most likely non-effective medicine to people that most likely don't need it, you'll be stealing it from people (and horses!) that do.
You don't need 1000 studies. You need one that is large and good.
Why not take chloroquine? After all it doesn't hurt, right? Or amantidine, highly fashinable in Poland, because one doctor believes in it strongly and advocates for it loudly, although reporters found out his track record with it is not as good as he's saying. But what do they know, right? Or maybe we should inject blood plasma of covid survivors? Sounded reasonable, many doctors used it for treatment. Turned out it doesn't work. Or hydrocortisone, it's just a mild steroid that doctors use to treat severe covid with effect of at least few percent. Or budesonide, another steroid that I personally think they should be using instead because effect looks way stronger. Or why trials of Fluvoxamine are stuck? It was looking so perfect in few initial studies. It's actually my favorite potential covid miracle cure.
The fact that you know of one drug that might be doing something doesn't mean we should be trying it (except for controlled trials) because there are thousands of exactly as promising or more promising substances and we just can't try all of them haphazardly because of the suffering that would cause to patients that don't need the drug, and the patients that actually need it and won't be able to get it.
Why do you say “pure luck”? There are many doctors and studies testifying that it works. How are you reaching that conclusion? I’m not picking a random drug out of the Merck catalog here. We have doctors and patients saying it works at scale - why wouldn’t we do more to test and validate?
Because someone's opinion (and doctor is just someone unless he repeats something that he learned in school or from solid medical research) ... opinion is not knowledge and only knowledge can get us beyond pure luck. Knowledge is acquired through solid research. Which means large randomized studies with control group, blinded or double blinded.
And I'm not saying we shouldn't do more tests. We definitely should do more tests, and design them carefully, write results down diligently, and be ready to accept if they say that there's no effect because that's what most likely to happen with any substance that we test.
Please watch this video. It neatly shows why should you treat small and less rigorous studies with suspicion, even if there are many giving some results:
