Yet another hit piece with the logic "Surgisphere bad therefore ivermectin bad". Neither premise is true.
Double-quoted lines like this are quotes NOT from The Scientist article.
But
Single-quoted lines like this one are from The Scientist. The entire article is included here.
The article:
The company behind a now-discredited study on hydroxychloroquine also posted a report that has been cited by Latin American governments recommendingivermectinas a possible coronavirus treatment. Clinicians there say the effects have been extremely damaging.
The study is only discredited in the minds of its critics who were Trump partisans and got enraged when their President's favorite drug was disparaged. Read all about it here.
Medical experts in Latin America are reacting with alarm as health officials promote ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug commonly used in tropical medicine, as a coronavirus treatment despite a lack of evidence that it’s effective.
A few experts are. A lot are joyfully reporting great results. Gosh, medical experts with different opinions about something! Must be a crisis, right? /s
Just a handful of in vitro and observational studies—including a now-withdrawn preprint from scandal-hit US company Surgisphere Corporation—have examined whether ivermectin could be beneficial against infections by SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Yet in the last few weeks, government officials in Peru and several other Latin American countries have publicly endorsed the drug as a treatment for COVID-19, fueling a public rush on supplies and a surge in dangerous practices such as self-administration and the use of veterinary formulations.
The author is either woefully ignorant or deliberately misrepresenting the facts. Her article was published today (2016-06-16), six days after the important Broward County ICON study (which is interventional, not observational) reported:
Ivermectin was given to the patients with the most severe covid19 symptoms
Fatalitiies were 15.0% with ivermectin versus 25.2% without it, a 40% drop in the mortality rate
For patients with the most severe lung problems, ivermectin reduced fatalities by 41%, 38.8% vs 80.7%, a 52% lower mortality rate
With ivermectin, 20.7% more patients got off ventilators (a barely statistically insignificant result).
"The origin of its use in patients with the disease caused by the coronavirus was a report of an" in-vitro "study by a group of doctors from Australia, who clearly demonstrated in the laboratory that ivermctin was capable of" stopping "the virus replication in less than 48 hours ”, explained Redondo.
Note: NOT the Surgisphere Usefulness of Ivermectin study
Dr. Redondo highlighted the key points to be able to safely recommend, even compassionately in the crisis, the medicine and the reasons for the success they have found with ivermctin: first, the experience of having treated more than 500 patients with the disease, together with the very positive response that demonstrates its effectiveness in stopping the clinical picture and achieving its cure in a short time, thus preventing it from progressing to severe respiratory failure and death.
Another achievement in the use of ivermctin, highlighted by the doctor, is that the duration of hospitalization of patients has been reduced to half that seen with other therapeutic schemes; and finally, the reduction of the time of normalization (negativization) of the PCR Test in the cases treated with ivermctin, in relation to other drugs.
BMC has applied the medicine on 60 patients, including doctors, nurses, other hospital employees and their families. At least 50 of them experienced reduced symptoms in 48 hours. Also, 25 of them tested negative while others were yet to undergo tests.
A team of Bangladeshi doctors has claimed that their research on a combination of two widely used drugs-- Doxycycline and Ivermectin--shown astounding results in curing patients with COVID symptoms.
Dr Tarek Alam from the Bangladesh Medical College Hospital, and one of the senior members of the team, reportedly stated that a combination of the two drugs were administered to 60 patients, all of whom experienced full recoveries within four days.
The patients were stated to have been suffering from respiratory problems, as well as other symptoms of SARS-CoV-2. Dr Alam along with the team is stated to be preparing a scientific paper discussing the effectiveness of the treatment to be published for peer-review, reports Zee News.
Dr Alam has reportedly stated that antiprotozoal medicine called Ivermectin in a single dose with Doxycycline, an antibiotic, yielded the near-miraculous result in curing COVID-19 patients. He further stated that his team was prescribing the two medicines only for coronavirus patients, most of them initially reporting with respiratory problems with related complaints, later to be tested COVID-19 positive.
Ivermectin sticks to the parasite present in the body and the parasite is not able to excrete its larvae in the body, and thus is
killed by this drug.
Even in India, the drug is being used in some states on coronavirus patients and doctors are hopeful that this easily available medicine would prove an effective weapon in the fight against coronavirus.
This is too early to come to a conclusion, but to get answers on why the world is looking at this medicine with great hope, Zee Media spoke to medical experts.
Dr Aarti Lal Chandani, Principal of Kanpur Medical College, told Zee Media "Ivermectin is a drug that is part of the World Health Organization's deworming programme, and is considered safe in the WHO's Safety List. It is also used as a de-worming tablet and is used to treat coronavirus patients. Many Indian hospitals in Kerala, Uttar Pradesh's Kanpur and Delhi are also trying this medicine on COVID-19 patients."
Note: In that article, the Monash 48 hours study is credited for stimulating interest in ivermectin, along with the Bangladesh report -- NOT the Surgisphere study.
“Here in Peru, I was completely shocked when I heard that the ministry of health was releasing this guidance putting ivermectin as a medication,” says Patricia García, a global health researcher at Cayetano Heredia University in Lima and the country’s former health minister. People ran to pharmacies to look for the drug, she says, and when supplies ran out, they turned to the black market and veterinary versions. “It has been a nightmare.”
A nightmare, where is should be noted that Ms. Garcia does not cite a single detail about anything bad, aside from the black market / veterinary versions thing.
The FDA and everyone else tells you to not use the veterinary version of ivermectin -- because that's what (scientifically) conservative public health do.
There is not one example of anyone coming to harm from consuming animal ivermectin.
I've looked hard. PLEASE prove me wrong by coming up with an example.
One of the most influential studies on ivermectin’s effect in COVID-19 patients was a large observational study that used a database owned by Surgisphere, a now-discredited Illinois-based company founded by vascular surgeon Sapan Desai. That study, published on the preprint server SSRN in early April and updated a couple weeks later, reported a strong positive association between ivermectin treatment and COVID-19 patient survival, and has been cited in white papers and reports by Latin American health researchers and governments as evidence of the drug’s efficacy.
Where's the proof that "Usefulness* was influential?
Does the author cite any of those white papers? Not so far.
TLATODO Check this point after completing the article.
With ivermectin firmly entrenched in political and public minds as a weapon against the pandemic, the question of evidence is now of secondary importance for some members of the medical and scientific communities.
That's an incredibly false statement. At most, a handful of people closely following the drug (probably because of Monash 48 hours) probably had heard of it. By and large, no politician or "regular person" has heard of ivermectin, at least in the US, to this day!!! -- not unless they are subscribers of NewsMax, the only not-health-or-science-based site that covers ivermectin (and it, nothing except the Broward result).
*Bolivia
After months of lockdown, officials in the Bolivian city of Trinidad are trying a new approach to fighting the virus: an anti-parasite drug called ivermectin. An Australian study found that the drug could kill the virus in a cell culture in just 48 hours but the drug has not been tested in human trials.
Still, city officials plan to hand out 350,000 doses of the drug by going door to door, Reuters reported.
The Bolivian Ministry of Health cautioned that while the drug is considered safe in some treatments, there’s not enough evidence that it can treat the coronavirus.
“It is a product that does not have scientific validation in the treatment of the coronavirus,” Bolivian Health Minister Marcelo Navajas told reporters. “It does serve to treat parasitic diseases and other types of diseases. Therefore, we ask our medical colleagues who are going to use this product to do so with informed consent.”*
Do the same experiment with the NYTimes, and you also get exactly one hit, one posted yesterday, that has only a couple paragraphs about the drug as an aside:
As for Ms. Goodell, she dismissed questions about her Iowa caucus posts and pushed her latest theories: that Covid-19 is a Chinese bioweapon and that a drug called ivermectin that is used on animals is the panacea.
“That is vastly more critical to us right now than a Russian political campaign,” Ms. Goodell said. As her and others’ ivermectin theory gained traction online, the Food and Drug Administration warned Americans that the drug could cause “serious harm” in humans.*
The NYTimes did publish one other article about ivermectin in the last several months, about the Trinidad, Boliva distribution of 350,000 doses of ivermectin, as also reported in the WashPo article above. The NYTimes article has since been deleted. You can read the article here (and try the now-dead link) if you're interested.
With ivermectin firmly entrenched in political and public minds as a weapon against the pandemic IS ABSURDLY WRONG
But the preprint disappeared at the end of May after scientists began pointing out problems with Surgisphere’s dataset—which by that point had been used in high-profile studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and The Lancet. Both journals issued retractions earlier this month after Desai’s coauthors said they were unable to verify the validity of Surgisphere’s COVID-19 patient data. Investigations by The Scientist and The Guardian also revealed discrepancies in Surgisphere’s claims going back years, and the company’s website has now been taken offline. Desai did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Scientist.
GOING BACK YEARS is LIE, for The Scientist and The Guardian*.
Same story with TheGuardian: Search and you get TONS of links to the same post-scandal article.
Author, post pre-scandal articles from either/both sites here or admit you're a liar
See “Lancet, NEJM retract Surgisphere’s Studies of COVID-19 Patients”
Mandeep Mehra, the medical director of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Heart and Vascular Center and a coauthor on all three Surgisphere papers, tells The Scientist in a statement that he “requested the ivermectin preprint to be removed from SSRN as he felt further analysis was needed to consider additional confounding factors.”
But researchers who spoke to The Scientist say that it may be too late to walk back the regional and national policy changes that the preprint helped instigate. On May 8, Peru included ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment in official clinical guidelines. On May 12, Bolivia approved the drug’s use for COVID-19 patients who consent and later started handing out hundreds of thousands of doses to residents. By early June, at least one municipality in Brazil had endorsed the use of ivermectin as a preventive medicine for COVID-19. Many ivermectin proponents continue to cite Surgisphere’s preprint even now that it’s been taken down.
The author got something right! The ivermectin-including protocol was announced on May 8.
The author fails to mention that the protocol includes HCQ. Why would she omit that? Because this is a hit piece on ivermectin, not HCQ.
She doesn't actually say so -- but her choice of words cleverly imply that Peru adopted ivermectin because of the Surgisphere study.
FALSE AGAIN.
If you follow the link above about Peru's ivermectin decision, you'll see that they based their decision on their own study, entitled "Intervenciones farmacológicas para el tratamiento de la enfermedad por el coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19)". Search for that and you'll get this link to a PDF as your stop result. OPEN that PDF and search for "Patel" (the first author listed by the Surgisphere "Usefulness of Ivermectin") study and you get no hits. Searching for "Usefulness" also doesn't find anything. The PDF has perhaps 100 citations. Not one of them is the Usefulness of Ivermectin article that that the author holds is the source of a global zombie apocalypse (I may be exaggerating her position).
Given how thoroughly the paper cites its backing research, the omission of the Usefulness study proves that Usefulness was NOT any part of the basis for Peru's decision to use ivermectin.
Peru did NOT decide to use ivermectin because of Surgisphere
In the same paragraph, the author implies that Bolivia and a town in Brazil adopt ivermectin because of the Surgisphere article but she doesn't actually say that and she provides no proof.
In García’s opinion, “several countries are using ivermectin because of that article,” she says. “It’s very difficult to erase what has been done.”
Garcia doesn't provide any basis for her opinion. You can trust that the author would have quoted her, if she had. I think the author is unethical for letting Garcia's assertion go by unchallenged and undocumented. Where are the f-ing fact checkers at The Scientist?
Ivermectin becomes central to Latin America’s pandemic response
Ivermectin was developed by Merck in the 1970s and is widely used in tropical medicine to treat parasitic infections such as scabies and river blindness. It’s also recently been touted for use in malaria control due to its ability to kill mosquitoes that feed on the blood of people taking the drug.
Usually taken orally, ivermectin is included in the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines and is considered a very safe drug with few side effects when it’s taken properly. Veterinary versions of the drug are often used to clear various animal species of worms and other parasites.
Rumors of ivermectin’s potential as a COVID-19 treatment started circulating in WhatsApp groups around early April, according to clinicians in Peru who spoke to The Scientist. Along with unverified anecdotes of miraculous recoveries among patients taking the drug, García says, members of the public began sharing a paper published in Antiviral Research on April 3 that described how extremely high doses of ivermectin could block the coronavirus’s replication in a petri dish.
The title of the study, “The FDA-approved drug ivermectin inhibits the replication of SARS-CoV-2 in vitro,” created a lot of confusion, García says. “It sounds like the ivermectin was approved by the FDA for the treatment of COVID,” she says. “That had nothing to do with it.”
Only an idiot would think that an April 3 very preliminary research study meant the drug was approved by the FDA.
In actually, the FDA approved ivermectin for humans, for treatment of onchocerciasis and strongyloidiasis in 2009. That's all.
The paper’s publication prompted a response from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which issued a warning on April 10 that the findings did not equate to evidence of ivermectin’s efficacy in COVID-19 patients, and noted that neither humans nor animals had received the drug in this study.
So anyone who was paying attention and thought that ivermectin was approved by the FDA for covid-19, would have been disabused of that belief within the week.
Later in April, Antiviral Research posted two letters to the editor that lay out concerns about the doses used in the study and a response from the authors, which states—with emphasis—“under no circumstances should self-medication be considered without the guidance of a qualified physician, and especially not using therapeutics designed for veterinary purposes!” By then, however, media outlets in Latin America had already circulated stories of ivermectin’s supposed promise in treating SARS-CoV-2 infection, and several hospitals in Peru began mentioning the drug in local clinical guidelines.
Why isn't the author quoting these letters, if they really exist? What do they have to do with Surgisphere? I know (because I was looking) that Usefulness of Ivermectin was getting almost no media attention. TrialSiteNews. What else?
TLATODO: Look for the Antiviral Research and other letters, get the dates down.
Meanwhile, on April 6, Mehra, Desai, and colleagues posted the preprint based on Surgisphere’s proprietary database of hospitalized COVID-19 patients. It reported a dramatic survival difference between people who were treated with ivermectin after being put on mechanical ventilators, and similarly ill patients who didn’t get the drug. Among 52 patients given ivermectin, the death rate was 7.7 percent, the authors reported. For the more than 1,900 controls, the rate was 18.6 percent.
A couple of weeks later, a second version of the preprint replaced the first. In this case-control analysis, the death rate among 704 patients treated with ivermectin was 1.4 percent, while among 704 controls, it was 8.5 percent.
Carlos Chaccour, a global health researcher at ISGlobal in Spain who studies ivermectin’s use in malaria control and is currently overseeing a clinical study of its potential to reduce COVID-19 transmission, says he had doubts about the study as soon as he read the first version of the preprint in mid-April.
There are presently over 30 ivermectin trials underway. Chaccour's is a very weak study; his N=24 (so only 12 subjects will get ivermectin) is absurdly low. Among the 24 ivermectin trials in a spreadsheet that a kind person sent me, the average N is 98.5. Despite his remarkably low N=24, Chaccour is taking 3.5 months to do his study (May 14 - August 30). Given his time frame (7 days) he should have been able to do it in a couple weeks (if recruiting was fast).
“I’ve been working with ivermectin for twelve years,” Chaccour says. “I opened [up the preprint] one morning and I was like, ‘This doesn’t make any sense . . . this massive effect.’” He and other researchers had already wondered whether ivermectin might provide some benefit against COVID-19, but hadn’t expected the drug to work as well as this study suggested.
And yet Dr. Chaccour was completely silent on the subject until he published his ivermectin hit piece on May 29, after the so-called "scandal" broke out. My response to his flawed piece.
The author is suggesting that Chaccour is a scientist -- and is not a scientist. No scientist looks at new data about a novel virus and says "doesn't make sense". It would be reasonable to say "Hmmm, I need to know more about the data source" or "This needs to be corroborated by other studies." Just "doesn't make sense" is not how scientists talk.
#Suspicions about Surgisphere’s ivermectin data emerge
By early May, the preprint’s findings were being widely shared among researchers in Chaccour’s circle. So he reached out to Joe Brew, a data scientist helping to analyze clinical results from the ISGlobal trial of ivermectin, and the two of them began looking into the findings in more detail.
The pair soon found claims in the first version of the preprint that were “apparently impossible,” Brew says. In particular, the paper referred to three patients treated with ivermectin in Africa up until March 1, while Brew and Chaccour were only aware of two reported cases on the entire continent by that time. The Scientist verified that a third case in Africa was confirmed on February 27, but the patient didn’t show any serious symptoms, according to reports at the time.
It was implausible that three patients in Africa could have been hospitalized, given ventilation, treated with ivermectin, and included in Surgisphere’s database, all before the beginning of March, Brew says. “Our naive assumption at that time was, well, this is a big database and maybe it’s due to coding issues.”
There's an embarrassingly simple explanation for this: Surgisphere gets real-time data feeds from literally hundreds of hospitals around the world. Attention, everyone! If your data differs with Surgisphere's data, especially if you show fewer cases than Surgisphere* -- it's because your data is lagging and/or incomplete.
On May 7—after Desai, Mehra, and colleagues had published their NEJM study on cardiovascular disease and heart drugs using Surgisphere’s COVID-19 database, but before the publication of the Lancet study—Chaccour and Brew reached out to Mehra and colleagues with their concerns. That same day, Mehra acknowledged the researchers’ questions about Surgisphere’s registry and directed those questions to Desai and study coauthor Amit Patel. Desai responded, but did not directly address the points the ISGlobal researchers raised, Brew says.
Hmmm. I doubt that Brew would lie. I'd love to see those emails.
Chaccour says that Mehra also told them over email that he too had doubts about the preprint’s results, on account of the surprisingly large difference in mortality rates between treated and untreated individuals. For that reason, Mehra told the researchers, the team had decided not to submit the work for publication yet.
This response contrasts with public statements made by Mehra and Patel. A tweet posted by Mehra on April 16 refers to having a paper on ivermectin in more than 700 patients “under review at a journal.” A week later, Patel responded to questions about the preprint on Twitter by saying that “many of these queries are being answered as part of the full peer review process.” Patel writes in an email to The Scientist that the team did submit the paper for peer review in a scientific journal near the beginning of April.
In the statement to The Scientist, Mehra denies that he was aware of any potential discrepancies in the Surgisphere database “until questions were raised after the publication of The Lancet study” in late May. He did not respond to requests for comment about the influence of the ivermectin study on health policy in Latin America or about why the preprint was left online until then.
By May 29, when Chaccour, Brew, and ISGlobal clinical epidemiologist Alberto García-Basteiro published their concerns in an article for ISGlobal’s website, the preprint had been downloaded more than 15,000 times and cited as support for ivermectin’s efficacy by researchers and doctors in Peru, Brazil, and Chile, among other countries.
Now that scientists and journals have raised doubts about the validity of Surgisphere’s registry, it looks as though many Latin American countries’ policies have been informed by a “mix of real data and fake data,” says Brew. “It’s just muddied the waters so much.”
In the last few weeks, a handful of influential figures in Latin America have cautioned that the scientific evidence for ivermectin’s efficacy as a COVID-19 treatment or preventive medicine is weak or nonexistent.
The Peruvian public health researcher Elmer Huerta, a well-known health communicator in Latin America, told a Peruvian television network last month that he was surprised by the government’s stance on ivermectin and accused the ministry of health of creating anxiety and misleading people into thinking, “if I don’t have ivermectin, I’m going to die.”
A blister on a patient who had received an injection of ivermection designed for veterinary use
COURTSEY OF JUAN CELIS
But with ivermectin firmly entrenched in political and public minds as a weapon against a pandemic that has already claimed more than 70,000 lives in Latin America, the question of evidence is now of secondary importance for some members of the medical and scientific communities.
Peru’s health minister Víctor Zamora, for example, recently told a radio show in Lima that the country didn’t have time “to wait for scientific evidence.” The interview followed President Martín Vizcarra’s announcement that the government had acquired nearly 500,000 doses of ivermectin and around 350,000 doses of hydroxychloroquine for use in coronavirus patients. Zamara did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
That attitude is partly shared by Eduardo Gotuzzo, the former director of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute of Tropical Medicine and Infectious Diseases in Lima and a collaborator on the World Health Organization’s Solidarity trial, which was testing hydroxychloroquine (among other drugs) and was partially suspended after Surgisphere’s Lancet paper raised concerns about the medicine’s safety. The trial was reinstated following widespread criticism of the paper, although later studies have thrown further doubt on hydroxychloroquine’s benefit in COVID-19 patients. The FDA revoked its emergency use authorization this week.
Gotuzzo, who is also a consultant to several pharmaceutical companies and has received research funds from Merck, acknowledges that there’s no clinical evidence that ivermectin is an effective treatment. But, he tells The Scientist in Spanish, ivermectin is a very safe drug, provided it’s administered properly by a doctor. He argues that there aren’t any better options available to deal with the current emergency in Peru, which has counted nearly 7,000 confirmed deaths from COVID-19 so far.
Faced with patients in a serious condition, “what do you do?” Gotuzzo says. “Give them water?” He adds that he believes ivermectin may turn out to have a positive effect, particularly if administered to patients early in infection.
Many other members of the medical community, however, are worried by the way ivermectin is being promoted as a COVID-19 medication without sound evidence for its efficacy. Juan Celis, a specialist in infectious diseases based in Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon, tells The Scientist in Spanish that he’s witnessed firsthand the effects of the craze for the drug, or “ivermectin fever,” that took over his area in April.
Ivermectin designated for human use ran out by the middle of month, he says, so some doctors started administering veterinary versions of the drug to patients desperate for treatment. He says he’s seen people with blisters where they’ve been injected with formulations intended for animal use, and adds that some patients have shown side effects including stomach problems, tremors, and panic attacks after taking too much of the drug. Now that ivermectin is in the national guidelines, though, it’s very difficult for doctors to say no to patients who want it.
Peru’s ministry of health recently issued an announcement to warn people to take ivermectin only under the guidance of a doctor and not to use veterinary versions. But that update doesn’t address other concerns clinicians have.
It has been a nightmare.
—Patricia García, Cayetano Heredia University
Wuelton Marcelo Monteiro, the director of teaching and research at the Fundação de Medicina Tropical Doutor Heitor Vieira Dourado in Manaus, Brazil, tells The Scientist he’s worried that the hype surrounding ivermectin could lower people’s appreciation of the real risks of COVID-19.
“In addition to the unnecessary cost of using a drug without efficiency, it can generate a false sense of safety in the population,” he writes in an email to The Scientist. “In my opinion, the evidence is still low. We urgently need good [randomized controlled trials] to make the decision.”
#Obtaining and explaining new data on ivermectin
With ivermectin being so widely promoted, there’s also a risk that clinical research on the drug in Latin America will become more challenging, says García, who recently started collaborating with Chaccour and local researchers to organize a small trial to see whether ivermectin could reduce COVID-19 transmission.
“Everybody at this point wants to take it,” she says. “It’s very difficult to find somebody who could be randomized on a placebo arm. But we will try. I think that will be the only way to try to help to make better decisions.” The Peruvian ministry of health has agreed to provide support with the insurance for the trial, she adds.
Chaccour emphasizes that there are a number of aspects of ivermectin’s action in COVID-19 patients that researchers don’t yet understand. One open question, he says, is whether ivermectin might interact dangerously with other treatments being trialed in COVID-19 patients, such as Kaletra (lopinavir-ritonavir).
For now, data continue to trickle in. A few days ago, researchers in Florida posted a preprint of a study that found a positive association between the administration of ivermectin and survival in COVID-19 patients, though the authors noted the findings should “be further evaluated with randomized controlled trials.” Clinicaltrials.gov, meanwhile, lists clinical studies of the drug in Argentina, Egypt, and Iraq, among other countries.
García says she worries about how scientists will communicate any new findings on ivermectin—or other drugs being explored as COVID-19 treatments—now that government messages have created confusion and scientific scandals have damaged public trust. “At the very beginning of this epidemic, I think people were in the belief that science was going to guide treatment, was going to guide the knowledge, was going to guide everybody through the right path to cure,” she says.
“Now, with what has happened, I think people have lost faith in science,” she continues. “It’s terrible for science and it has been very, very bad for us in Latin America.”
[-] TrumpLyftAlles | 1 points | Jun 16 2020 23:00:36
Yet another hit piece with the logic "Surgisphere bad therefore ivermectin bad". Neither premise is true.
Double-quoted lines like this are quotes NOT from The Scientist article.
But
Single-quoted lines like this one are from The Scientist. The entire article is included here.
The article:
The company behind a now-discredited study on hydroxychloroquine also posted a report that has been cited by Latin American governments recommending ivermectin as a possible coronavirus treatment. Clinicians there say the effects have been extremely damaging.
The study is only discredited in the minds of its critics who were Trump partisans and got enraged when their President's favorite drug was disparaged. Read all about it here.
Medical experts in Latin America are reacting with alarm as health officials promote ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug commonly used in tropical medicine, as a coronavirus treatment despite a lack of evidence that it’s effective.
A few experts are. A lot are joyfully reporting great results. Gosh, medical experts with different opinions about something! Must be a crisis, right? /s
Just a handful of in vitro and observational studies—including a now-withdrawn preprint from scandal-hit US company Surgisphere Corporation—have examined whether ivermectin could be beneficial against infections by SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Yet in the last few weeks, government officials in Peru and several other Latin American countries have publicly endorsed the drug as a treatment for COVID-19, fueling a public rush on supplies and a surge in dangerous practices such as self-administration and the use of veterinary formulations.
The author is either woefully ignorant or deliberately misrepresenting the facts. Her article was published today (2016-06-16), six days after the important Broward County ICON study (which is interventional, not observational) reported:
There's also the 2020-05-12 Dominican Republic report.
"The origin of its use in patients with the disease caused by the coronavirus was a report of an" in-vitro "study by a group of doctors from Australia, who clearly demonstrated in the laboratory that ivermctin was capable of" stopping "the virus replication in less than 48 hours ”, explained Redondo.
Note: NOT the Surgisphere Usefulness of Ivermectin study
Dr. Redondo highlighted the key points to be able to safely recommend, even compassionately in the crisis, the medicine and the reasons for the success they have found with ivermctin: first, the experience of having treated more than 500 patients with the disease, together with the very positive response that demonstrates its effectiveness in stopping the clinical picture and achieving its cure in a short time, thus preventing it from progressing to severe respiratory failure and death.
Another achievement in the use of ivermctin, highlighted by the doctor, is that the duration of hospitalization of patients has been reduced to half that seen with other therapeutic schemes; and finally, the reduction of the time of normalization (negativization) of the PCR Test in the cases treated with ivermctin, in relation to other drugs.
Then there's the 2020-05-06 result from Banglesh:
BMC has applied the medicine on 60 patients, including doctors, nurses, other hospital employees and their families. At least 50 of them experienced reduced symptoms in 48 hours. Also, 25 of them tested negative while others were yet to undergo tests.
In India, in this 2020-05-27 report (recaps Bangladesh in more detail):
A team of Bangladeshi doctors has claimed that their research on a combination of two widely used drugs-- Doxycycline and Ivermectin--shown astounding results in curing patients with COVID symptoms.
Dr Tarek Alam from the Bangladesh Medical College Hospital, and one of the senior members of the team, reportedly stated that a combination of the two drugs were administered to 60 patients, all of whom experienced full recoveries within four days.
The patients were stated to have been suffering from respiratory problems, as well as other symptoms of SARS-CoV-2. Dr Alam along with the team is stated to be preparing a scientific paper discussing the effectiveness of the treatment to be published for peer-review, reports Zee News.
Dr Alam has reportedly stated that antiprotozoal medicine called Ivermectin in a single dose with Doxycycline, an antibiotic, yielded the near-miraculous result in curing COVID-19 patients. He further stated that his team was prescribing the two medicines only for coronavirus patients, most of them initially reporting with respiratory problems with related complaints, later to be tested COVID-19 positive.
Ivermectin sticks to the parasite present in the body and the parasite is not able to excrete its larvae in the body, and thus is killed by this drug.
Even in India, the drug is being used in some states on coronavirus patients and doctors are hopeful that this easily available medicine would prove an effective weapon in the fight against coronavirus.
This is too early to come to a conclusion, but to get answers on why the world is looking at this medicine with great hope, Zee Media spoke to medical experts.
Dr Aarti Lal Chandani, Principal of Kanpur Medical College, told Zee Media "Ivermectin is a drug that is part of the World Health Organization's deworming programme, and is considered safe in the WHO's Safety List. It is also used as a de-worming tablet and is used to treat coronavirus patients. Many Indian hospitals in Kerala, Uttar Pradesh's Kanpur and Delhi are also trying this medicine on COVID-19 patients."
Note: In that article, the Monash 48 hours study is credited for stimulating interest in ivermectin, along with the Bangladesh report -- NOT the Surgisphere study.
“Here in Peru, I was completely shocked when I heard that the ministry of health was releasing this guidance putting ivermectin as a medication,” says Patricia García, a global health researcher at Cayetano Heredia University in Lima and the country’s former health minister. People ran to pharmacies to look for the drug, she says, and when supplies ran out, they turned to the black market and veterinary versions. “It has been a nightmare.”
A nightmare, where is should be noted that Ms. Garcia does not cite a single detail about anything bad, aside from the black market / veterinary versions thing.
The FDA and everyone else tells you to not use the veterinary version of ivermectin -- because that's what (scientifically) conservative public health do.
There is not one example of anyone coming to harm from consuming animal ivermectin.
I've looked hard. PLEASE prove me wrong by coming up with an example.
However, here are 16 Amazon reviewers who ate it without a problem.
There's also this guy who self-dosed the horse-paste version of ivermectin to treat his scabies.
If you search /r/scabies you'll find about a dozen people who have ingested animal ivermectin. There's another handful at /r/rosacea.
The most negative comment about the drug, among all the Amazon reviews? "Yuck." Despite the apple flavor! It's kind of oily/slimy.
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[-] TrumpLyftAlles | 1 points | Jun 16 2020 23:01:09
One of the most influential studies on ivermectin’s effect in COVID-19 patients was a large observational study that used a database owned by Surgisphere, a now-discredited Illinois-based company founded by vascular surgeon Sapan Desai. That study, published on the preprint server SSRN in early April and updated a couple weeks later, reported a strong positive association between ivermectin treatment and COVID-19 patient survival, and has been cited in white papers and reports by Latin American health researchers and governments as evidence of the drug’s efficacy.
Where's the proof that "Usefulness* was influential?
Does the author cite any of those white papers? Not so far.
TLATODO Check this point after completing the article.
With ivermectin firmly entrenched in political and public minds as a weapon against the pandemic, the question of evidence is now of secondary importance for some members of the medical and scientific communities.
That's an incredibly false statement. At most, a handful of people closely following the drug (probably because of Monash 48 hours) probably had heard of it. By and large, no politician or "regular person" has heard of ivermectin, at least in the US, to this day!!! -- not unless they are subscribers of NewsMax, the only not-health-or-science-based site that covers ivermectin (and it, nothing except the Broward result).
For example, search the Washington Post's website for ivermectin articles posted after 2020-01-01 and you get exactly one hit, one that's skeptical about the drug:
Trump is not the only leader pushing unproven coronavirus remedies
*Bolivia After months of lockdown, officials in the Bolivian city of Trinidad are trying a new approach to fighting the virus: an anti-parasite drug called ivermectin. An Australian study found that the drug could kill the virus in a cell culture in just 48 hours but the drug has not been tested in human trials.
Still, city officials plan to hand out 350,000 doses of the drug by going door to door, Reuters reported.
The Bolivian Ministry of Health cautioned that while the drug is considered safe in some treatments, there’s not enough evidence that it can treat the coronavirus.
“It is a product that does not have scientific validation in the treatment of the coronavirus,” Bolivian Health Minister Marcelo Navajas told reporters. “It does serve to treat parasitic diseases and other types of diseases. Therefore, we ask our medical colleagues who are going to use this product to do so with informed consent.”*
Do the same experiment with the NYTimes, and you also get exactly one hit, one posted yesterday, that has only a couple paragraphs about the drug as an aside:
A Conspiracy Made in America May Have Been Spread by Russia
As for Ms. Goodell, she dismissed questions about her Iowa caucus posts and pushed her latest theories: that Covid-19 is a Chinese bioweapon and that a drug called ivermectin that is used on animals is the panacea.
“That is vastly more critical to us right now than a Russian political campaign,” Ms. Goodell said. As her and others’ ivermectin theory gained traction online, the Food and Drug Administration warned Americans that the drug could cause “serious harm” in humans.*
The NYTimes did publish one other article about ivermectin in the last several months, about the Trinidad, Boliva distribution of 350,000 doses of ivermectin, as also reported in the WashPo article above. The NYTimes article has since been deleted. You can read the article here (and try the now-dead link) if you're interested.
With ivermectin firmly entrenched in political and public minds as a weapon against the pandemic IS ABSURDLY WRONG
But the preprint disappeared at the end of May after scientists began pointing out problems with Surgisphere’s dataset—which by that point had been used in high-profile studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and The Lancet. Both journals issued retractions earlier this month after Desai’s coauthors said they were unable to verify the validity of Surgisphere’s COVID-19 patient data. Investigations by The Scientist and The Guardian also revealed discrepancies in Surgisphere’s claims going back years, and the company’s website has now been taken offline. Desai did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Scientist.
GOING BACK YEARS is LIE, for The Scientist and The Guardian*.
Surgisphere was founded in 2008.
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[-] TrumpLyftAlles | 1 points | Jun 16 2020 23:01:16
If you search the-scientist.com for "Surgisphere" articles dated from 2008-01-01 to 2020-01-01, you will get pages of hits, ALL of which are either (1) links to the handful of articles The Scientist has published since the "scandal" broke out, with bogus dates for Google (oh no, fake data from The Scientist!), or (2) articles that don't mention Surgishere.
Same story with TheGuardian: Search and you get TONS of links to the same post-scandal article.
Author, post pre-scandal articles from either/both sites here or admit you're a liar
See “Lancet, NEJM retract Surgisphere’s Studies of COVID-19 Patients” Mandeep Mehra, the medical director of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Heart and Vascular Center and a coauthor on all three Surgisphere papers, tells The Scientist in a statement that he “requested the ivermectin preprint to be removed from SSRN as he felt further analysis was needed to consider additional confounding factors.”
But researchers who spoke to The Scientist say that it may be too late to walk back the regional and national policy changes that the preprint helped instigate. On May 8, Peru included ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment in official clinical guidelines. On May 12, Bolivia approved the drug’s use for COVID-19 patients who consent and later started handing out hundreds of thousands of doses to residents. By early June, at least one municipality in Brazil had endorsed the use of ivermectin as a preventive medicine for COVID-19. Many ivermectin proponents continue to cite Surgisphere’s preprint even now that it’s been taken down.
The author got something right! The ivermectin-including protocol was announced on May 8.
The author fails to mention that the protocol includes HCQ. Why would she omit that? Because this is a hit piece on ivermectin, not HCQ.
She doesn't actually say so -- but her choice of words cleverly imply that Peru adopted ivermectin because of the Surgisphere study.
FALSE AGAIN.
If you follow the link above about Peru's ivermectin decision, you'll see that they based their decision on their own study, entitled "Intervenciones farmacológicas para el tratamiento de la enfermedad por el coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19)". Search for that and you'll get this link to a PDF as your stop result. OPEN that PDF and search for "Patel" (the first author listed by the Surgisphere "Usefulness of Ivermectin") study and you get no hits. Searching for "Usefulness" also doesn't find anything. The PDF has perhaps 100 citations. Not one of them is the Usefulness of Ivermectin article that that the author holds is the source of a global zombie apocalypse (I may be exaggerating her position).
Given how thoroughly the paper cites its backing research, the omission of the Usefulness study proves that Usefulness was NOT any part of the basis for Peru's decision to use ivermectin.
Peru did NOT decide to use ivermectin because of Surgisphere
In the same paragraph, the author implies that Bolivia and a town in Brazil adopt ivermectin because of the Surgisphere article but she doesn't actually say that and she provides no proof.
In García’s opinion, “several countries are using ivermectin because of that article,” she says. “It’s very difficult to erase what has been done.”
Garcia doesn't provide any basis for her opinion. You can trust that the author would have quoted her, if she had. I think the author is unethical for letting Garcia's assertion go by unchallenged and undocumented. Where are the f-ing fact checkers at The Scientist?
Ivermectin becomes central to Latin America’s pandemic response
Ivermectin was developed by Merck in the 1970s and is widely used in tropical medicine to treat parasitic infections such as scabies and river blindness. It’s also recently been touted for use in malaria control due to its ability to kill mosquitoes that feed on the blood of people taking the drug.
Usually taken orally, ivermectin is included in the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines and is considered a very safe drug with few side effects when it’s taken properly. Veterinary versions of the drug are often used to clear various animal species of worms and other parasites.
Rumors of ivermectin’s potential as a COVID-19 treatment started circulating in WhatsApp groups around early April, according to clinicians in Peru who spoke to The Scientist. Along with unverified anecdotes of miraculous recoveries among patients taking the drug, García says, members of the public began sharing a paper published in Antiviral Research on April 3 that described how extremely high doses of ivermectin could block the coronavirus’s replication in a petri dish.
The title of the study, “The FDA-approved drug ivermectin inhibits the replication of SARS-CoV-2 in vitro,” created a lot of confusion, García says. “It sounds like the ivermectin was approved by the FDA for the treatment of COVID,” she says. “That had nothing to do with it.”
Only an idiot would think that an April 3 very preliminary research study meant the drug was approved by the FDA.
In actually, the FDA approved ivermectin for humans, for treatment of onchocerciasis and strongyloidiasis in 2009. That's all.
The paper’s publication prompted a response from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which issued a warning on April 10 that the findings did not equate to evidence of ivermectin’s efficacy in COVID-19 patients, and noted that neither humans nor animals had received the drug in this study.
So anyone who was paying attention and thought that ivermectin was approved by the FDA for covid-19, would have been disabused of that belief within the week.
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[-] TrumpLyftAlles | 1 points | Jun 16 2020 23:01:37
Later in April, Antiviral Research posted two letters to the editor that lay out concerns about the doses used in the study and a response from the authors, which states—with emphasis—“under no circumstances should self-medication be considered without the guidance of a qualified physician, and especially not using therapeutics designed for veterinary purposes!” By then, however, media outlets in Latin America had already circulated stories of ivermectin’s supposed promise in treating SARS-CoV-2 infection, and several hospitals in Peru began mentioning the drug in local clinical guidelines.
Why isn't the author quoting these letters, if they really exist? What do they have to do with Surgisphere? I know (because I was looking) that Usefulness of Ivermectin was getting almost no media attention. TrialSiteNews. What else?
TLATODO: Look for the Antiviral Research and other letters, get the dates down.
Meanwhile, on April 6, Mehra, Desai, and colleagues posted the preprint based on Surgisphere’s proprietary database of hospitalized COVID-19 patients. It reported a dramatic survival difference between people who were treated with ivermectin after being put on mechanical ventilators, and similarly ill patients who didn’t get the drug. Among 52 patients given ivermectin, the death rate was 7.7 percent, the authors reported. For the more than 1,900 controls, the rate was 18.6 percent.
A couple of weeks later, a second version of the preprint replaced the first. In this case-control analysis, the death rate among 704 patients treated with ivermectin was 1.4 percent, while among 704 controls, it was 8.5 percent.
Carlos Chaccour, a global health researcher at ISGlobal in Spain who studies ivermectin’s use in malaria control and is currently overseeing a clinical study of its potential to reduce COVID-19 transmission, says he had doubts about the study as soon as he read the first version of the preprint in mid-April.
There are presently over 30 ivermectin trials underway. Chaccour's is a very weak study; his N=24 (so only 12 subjects will get ivermectin) is absurdly low. Among the 24 ivermectin trials in a spreadsheet that a kind person sent me, the average N is 98.5. Despite his remarkably low N=24, Chaccour is taking 3.5 months to do his study (May 14 - August 30). Given his time frame (7 days) he should have been able to do it in a couple weeks (if recruiting was fast).
“I’ve been working with ivermectin for twelve years,” Chaccour says. “I opened [up the preprint] one morning and I was like, ‘This doesn’t make any sense . . . this massive effect.’” He and other researchers had already wondered whether ivermectin might provide some benefit against COVID-19, but hadn’t expected the drug to work as well as this study suggested.
And yet Dr. Chaccour was completely silent on the subject until he published his ivermectin hit piece on May 29, after the so-called "scandal" broke out. My response to his flawed piece.
The author is suggesting that Chaccour is a scientist -- and is not a scientist. No scientist looks at new data about a novel virus and says "doesn't make sense". It would be reasonable to say "Hmmm, I need to know more about the data source" or "This needs to be corroborated by other studies." Just "doesn't make sense" is not how scientists talk.
#Suspicions about Surgisphere’s ivermectin data emerge
By early May, the preprint’s findings were being widely shared among researchers in Chaccour’s circle. So he reached out to Joe Brew, a data scientist helping to analyze clinical results from the ISGlobal trial of ivermectin, and the two of them began looking into the findings in more detail.
The pair soon found claims in the first version of the preprint that were “apparently impossible,” Brew says. In particular, the paper referred to three patients treated with ivermectin in Africa up until March 1, while Brew and Chaccour were only aware of two reported cases on the entire continent by that time. The Scientist verified that a third case in Africa was confirmed on February 27, but the patient didn’t show any serious symptoms, according to reports at the time.
It was implausible that three patients in Africa could have been hospitalized, given ventilation, treated with ivermectin, and included in Surgisphere’s database, all before the beginning of March, Brew says. “Our naive assumption at that time was, well, this is a big database and maybe it’s due to coding issues.”
There's an embarrassingly simple explanation for this: Surgisphere gets real-time data feeds from literally hundreds of hospitals around the world. Attention, everyone! If your data differs with Surgisphere's data, especially if you show fewer cases than Surgisphere* -- it's because your data is lagging and/or incomplete.
On May 7—after Desai, Mehra, and colleagues had published their NEJM study on cardiovascular disease and heart drugs using Surgisphere’s COVID-19 database, but before the publication of the Lancet study—Chaccour and Brew reached out to Mehra and colleagues with their concerns. That same day, Mehra acknowledged the researchers’ questions about Surgisphere’s registry and directed those questions to Desai and study coauthor Amit Patel. Desai responded, but did not directly address the points the ISGlobal researchers raised, Brew says.
Hmmm. I doubt that Brew would lie. I'd love to see those emails.
Chaccour says that Mehra also told them over email that he too had doubts about the preprint’s results, on account of the surprisingly large difference in mortality rates between treated and untreated individuals. For that reason, Mehra told the researchers, the team had decided not to submit the work for publication yet.
This response contrasts with public statements made by Mehra and Patel. A tweet posted by Mehra on April 16 refers to having a paper on ivermectin in more than 700 patients “under review at a journal.” A week later, Patel responded to questions about the preprint on Twitter by saying that “many of these queries are being answered as part of the full peer review process.” Patel writes in an email to The Scientist that the team did submit the paper for peer review in a scientific journal near the beginning of April.
In the statement to The Scientist, Mehra denies that he was aware of any potential discrepancies in the Surgisphere database “until questions were raised after the publication of The Lancet study” in late May. He did not respond to requests for comment about the influence of the ivermectin study on health policy in Latin America or about why the preprint was left online until then.
By May 29, when Chaccour, Brew, and ISGlobal clinical epidemiologist Alberto García-Basteiro published their concerns in an article for ISGlobal’s website, the preprint had been downloaded more than 15,000 times and cited as support for ivermectin’s efficacy by researchers and doctors in Peru, Brazil, and Chile, among other countries.
Now that scientists and journals have raised doubts about the validity of Surgisphere’s registry, it looks as though many Latin American countries’ policies have been informed by a “mix of real data and fake data,” says Brew. “It’s just muddied the waters so much.”
#The consequences of ivermectin’s popularity
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[-] TrumpLyftAlles | 1 points | Jun 16 2020 23:01:44
In the last few weeks, a handful of influential figures in Latin America have cautioned that the scientific evidence for ivermectin’s efficacy as a COVID-19 treatment or preventive medicine is weak or nonexistent.
The Peruvian public health researcher Elmer Huerta, a well-known health communicator in Latin America, told a Peruvian television network last month that he was surprised by the government’s stance on ivermectin and accused the ministry of health of creating anxiety and misleading people into thinking, “if I don’t have ivermectin, I’m going to die.”
A blister on a patient who had received an injection of ivermection designed for veterinary use COURTSEY OF JUAN CELIS But with ivermectin firmly entrenched in political and public minds as a weapon against a pandemic that has already claimed more than 70,000 lives in Latin America, the question of evidence is now of secondary importance for some members of the medical and scientific communities.
Peru’s health minister Víctor Zamora, for example, recently told a radio show in Lima that the country didn’t have time “to wait for scientific evidence.” The interview followed President Martín Vizcarra’s announcement that the government had acquired nearly 500,000 doses of ivermectin and around 350,000 doses of hydroxychloroquine for use in coronavirus patients. Zamara did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
That attitude is partly shared by Eduardo Gotuzzo, the former director of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute of Tropical Medicine and Infectious Diseases in Lima and a collaborator on the World Health Organization’s Solidarity trial, which was testing hydroxychloroquine (among other drugs) and was partially suspended after Surgisphere’s Lancet paper raised concerns about the medicine’s safety. The trial was reinstated following widespread criticism of the paper, although later studies have thrown further doubt on hydroxychloroquine’s benefit in COVID-19 patients. The FDA revoked its emergency use authorization this week.
Gotuzzo, who is also a consultant to several pharmaceutical companies and has received research funds from Merck, acknowledges that there’s no clinical evidence that ivermectin is an effective treatment. But, he tells The Scientist in Spanish, ivermectin is a very safe drug, provided it’s administered properly by a doctor. He argues that there aren’t any better options available to deal with the current emergency in Peru, which has counted nearly 7,000 confirmed deaths from COVID-19 so far.
Faced with patients in a serious condition, “what do you do?” Gotuzzo says. “Give them water?” He adds that he believes ivermectin may turn out to have a positive effect, particularly if administered to patients early in infection.
Many other members of the medical community, however, are worried by the way ivermectin is being promoted as a COVID-19 medication without sound evidence for its efficacy. Juan Celis, a specialist in infectious diseases based in Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon, tells The Scientist in Spanish that he’s witnessed firsthand the effects of the craze for the drug, or “ivermectin fever,” that took over his area in April.
Ivermectin designated for human use ran out by the middle of month, he says, so some doctors started administering veterinary versions of the drug to patients desperate for treatment. He says he’s seen people with blisters where they’ve been injected with formulations intended for animal use, and adds that some patients have shown side effects including stomach problems, tremors, and panic attacks after taking too much of the drug. Now that ivermectin is in the national guidelines, though, it’s very difficult for doctors to say no to patients who want it.
Peru’s ministry of health recently issued an announcement to warn people to take ivermectin only under the guidance of a doctor and not to use veterinary versions. But that update doesn’t address other concerns clinicians have.
It has been a nightmare.
—Patricia García, Cayetano Heredia University Wuelton Marcelo Monteiro, the director of teaching and research at the Fundação de Medicina Tropical Doutor Heitor Vieira Dourado in Manaus, Brazil, tells The Scientist he’s worried that the hype surrounding ivermectin could lower people’s appreciation of the real risks of COVID-19.
“In addition to the unnecessary cost of using a drug without efficiency, it can generate a false sense of safety in the population,” he writes in an email to The Scientist. “In my opinion, the evidence is still low. We urgently need good [randomized controlled trials] to make the decision.”
#Obtaining and explaining new data on ivermectin
With ivermectin being so widely promoted, there’s also a risk that clinical research on the drug in Latin America will become more challenging, says García, who recently started collaborating with Chaccour and local researchers to organize a small trial to see whether ivermectin could reduce COVID-19 transmission.
“Everybody at this point wants to take it,” she says. “It’s very difficult to find somebody who could be randomized on a placebo arm. But we will try. I think that will be the only way to try to help to make better decisions.” The Peruvian ministry of health has agreed to provide support with the insurance for the trial, she adds.
Chaccour emphasizes that there are a number of aspects of ivermectin’s action in COVID-19 patients that researchers don’t yet understand. One open question, he says, is whether ivermectin might interact dangerously with other treatments being trialed in COVID-19 patients, such as Kaletra (lopinavir-ritonavir).
For now, data continue to trickle in. A few days ago, researchers in Florida posted a preprint of a study that found a positive association between the administration of ivermectin and survival in COVID-19 patients, though the authors noted the findings should “be further evaluated with randomized controlled trials.” Clinicaltrials.gov, meanwhile, lists clinical studies of the drug in Argentina, Egypt, and Iraq, among other countries.
García says she worries about how scientists will communicate any new findings on ivermectin—or other drugs being explored as COVID-19 treatments—now that government messages have created confusion and scientific scandals have damaged public trust. “At the very beginning of this epidemic, I think people were in the belief that science was going to guide treatment, was going to guide the knowledge, was going to guide everybody through the right path to cure,” she says.
“Now, with what has happened, I think people have lost faith in science,” she continues. “It’s terrible for science and it has been very, very bad for us in Latin America.”
To be continued.
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[-] LinkifyBot | 2 points | Jun 16 2020 23:02:01
I found links in your comment that were not hyperlinked:
I did the honors for you.
^delete ^| ^information ^| ^<3
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[-] nilaul | 2 points | Jun 17 2020 01:18:15
God forbid that there is a dead cheap and effective drug that can potentially undermine bill gates vaccines and in big pharma drugs.
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[-] TrumpLyftAlles | 1 points | Jun 17 2020 01:37:07
There does seem to be a succession of hit pieces on ivermectin. I'm trying not to be too cynical, though.
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