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The Ivermectin Muddle

A number of stories on ivermectin, both for and against, have turned out to be false or at least unverifiable.  An Oklahoma hospital wasn't flooded with any patients with complications from ivermectin, Mississippi's poison control center was not inundated with calls from people who'd overdosed on ivermectin, and the "spike" in calls to Kentucky's poison control center consisted of 13 calls. Yes, the first retraction begins, "One Oklahoma hospital denies..." but it can't be that hard for professional journalists to identify which rural hospital had multiple shooting victims AND an ER full of ivermectin overdoses. Even in Indianapolis, multiple shooting victims make the news. It's tempting to blame the gullibility on people who've never set foot in flyover country (except for Chicago), but Kentucky's governor is going on about the "horse dewormer craze" and the Oklahoma TV station that ran the horse-meds-at-the-OK-Corral story still has it up without a retraction. BTW, none of these stories has been marked as misinformation on Twitter. 

As James Randi said, academics and reporters are gullible.

On the other side, we have an ivermectin study whose author has not provided his data upon request from a couple of other scientists. Apparently, it's standard practice for scientists to share data, so this makes the study suspect. We also have other studies being retracted or not published. I have no idea whether the journals doing this are acting appropriately or not. Studies get retracted all the time and much of what's published in journals is false according to a former editor of a medical journal. 

I'm not a medical professional, I don't have any inside information on this research, and I have only a layman's knowledge of viruses. People I'd normally look to for expertise have not, to the best of my knowledge, expressed an opinion on ivermectin. A few people who would be talking up ivermectin if they believed it worked--Sen. Rand Paul (an MD) and Eric Weinstein (brother of Bret Weinstein, who has looked into ivermectin and thinks it works) have said they don't know what to make of it. I don't know what to make of it, either. 

The clinical experience people have described seems promising, but I've seen promising results and enthusiasm before among some very smart people for things that didn't work out:

  • Safe starches. They're still starches and they can still raise your blood sugar and make you store fat.
  • Chronic keto. Not good for your gut bacteria.

In my lifetime, we've had smart, well-intentioned people tell us to take aspirin to prevent heart disease (doesn't work; it can make your stomach bleed); put babies to sleep on their bellies (causes SIDS); and give out supplemental estrogen like candy (harms generally outweigh benefits). I've lived through moral panics, too, which we're in now: we had the Satanic panic in the 80s and the recovered memories sham in the 90s, now debunked, but the recovered memories sham put innocent people in prison. UFOs were a thing, too. In 1980, the CBS affiliate in Denver produced and aired a program called Strange Harvest that blamed cattle mutilations on aliens--the outer space kind, not aliens coming up from Mexico who might have wanted to scare off ranchers and be left alone. Smart people can sincerely believe things that turn out to be absurd.

In ten years, we'll probably know whether ivermectin is a wonder drug for COVID or a placebo.

What I'm doing is using redundancy in case any one tactic doesn't work. 

  • Normalize vitamin D (supplement and test)
  • Eat specially made yogurt and prebiotic fibers
  • Avoid high blood sugar
  • Avoid weight gain--limit carbs, weigh myself daily
  • Avoid indoor crowds, even if people are vaccinated or tested (vaccinated people can spread COVID)
  • Stay off of ships and other petri dishes (which I do anyway)
  • Stay home and rest if I get sick
  • If a doctor prescribed ivermectin, I would take it at the recommended dose
  • Request monoclonal antibodies for a bad case (even though I don't have high risk factors)


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