During peak covid-19 I read a lot of ivermectin studies posted in HN. Most were just horrible, with obvious mistakes. If you pick one, I can give a try to roast it.
My personal quick rubric for determining if an ivermectin study showing improvement for cv19 outcomes is likely to be trustworthy:
Was the population being studied one where parasite infections that ivermectin can take care of are endemic?
Yes - improves outcomes in this population because many of them are likely to have parasites and killing them reduces strain on the body and frees up immune system resources to deal with covid
No - you'll find glaring flaws even in a quick once-over.
I remember a preprint. I think it was comparing the recorery rate of
a) Ivermectin in the best hospital in the capital city of one of our most poor provinces in Argentina
b) The average in the same poor province
I don't expect too many problems with parasites there. They implicitly decided that the difference was ivermectin, not that the hospital is probably x10 better than the average of the province.
Doble blind randomized controlled group or it didn't happen.
> Complete tumor regression was observed in 6/15 mice on the combination treatment, 1/20 on ivermectin alone, 1/10 on anti-PD1 antibody alone, and 0/25 on no treatment.
As I mentioned above (another comment), pharma tends to avoid developing applications for generic/cheap drugs so we may not see more research on this front. Who knows.
If there is a x5 improvement they will get a method to package both drugs together and sell them for x10 the price. You surely want a profesional mix in the high tech lab instead of a random guy mixing tubes in the back room. Another trick is to add something to the molecule like a methyl -CH3, show that the new version is 10% even better and charge x20 for it.
So my guess is that there is some problem to use this mix, but as I said I can't find any obvious error and it's really interesting. I'd love to read a better analysis from someone that is an expert in the area.
