I think both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin work when combined with zinc, along with either azythromycin or doxycycline. The key seems to be to get a zinc ionophore drug with zinc in the early stages or even as a prophylactic.

The hydroxychloroquine/zinc/antibiotic/ anti-inflammatory combo seems to be giving good results in West Africa and is now the protocol in Senegal (due to the influence of Pr Raoult who is highly respected there after decades of work with the region). South America appears to have gone with the ivermectin/zinc/antibiotic/anti-inflammatory combo and that works too.

Asia and Middle-East seem to be using either combo.

Pr Raoult has made the point that rich countries in the West have done poorly because they are too focused on high tech expensive solutions, whereas poorer countries have tried well-known affordable treatments with an open mind. His argument is that Western societies have become focused on technology with a slant towards electronic gadgets which become obsolete and therefore expect everything to work in this way now but chemical molecules are timeless, they don't become obsolete after a few years so they are still worth trying when looking for a solution.

This is in addition to being shackled by big pharma, and litigious cultures in the West of course.

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The Ivermectin/Doxycycline/Zinc combination has been approved in Australia for off label use. Some G.P.s are starting to use it as it gains some traction here.

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This article is about Prof. Borody encountering resistance in the Australian government to his proposed (and unproven) triple therapy (ivermectin, doxycycline + zinc).

It's a good article: well-written, informative, mostly on top of the facts. It got this wrong:

Yet, other than Borody, almost nobody in Australia is treating patients with ivermectin.

AFAIK not even Borody is treating patients with ivermectin. In a youtube video posted to the sub, Borody says something like "We aren't using the therapy yet in Australia." I don't think he has ever treated a patient with ivermectin; if he had, he would have talked about that in his videos. I doubt he has treated any covid-19 patients period -- but don't actually know.

Here is a paragraph from the article that's sadly as applicable to the US as Australia:

The two main reasons that doctors aren’t yet prescribing ivermectin and doxycycline for Covid-19 are, first, that medical litigation has created an ultra-cautious culture even when there is virtually no risk, and second, doctors are mostly imprisoned in the prevailing paradigm which holds that there is no effective treatment to cure Covid-19 and that the only way out of Australia’s pandemic penitentiary is a vaccine. That’s a message that is promoted by powerful pharmaceutical companies who hope to make a motza out of expensive patented medicine and who would make nothing from a cheap generic cure.

US MDs won't prescribe ivermectin for covid-19 in significant numbers without the FDA's approval. Doing so would put them at risk of lawsuits. Ivermectin is ridiculously safe, but few MDs know that. Also, it's not like lawsuits need much grounds:

Doctor, in addition to these well-known FDA-approved drugs, you also gave Deborah Farlingsworth ivermectin and now she's dead! Ivermectin is not approved for the treatment of covid-19! How can you prove that your irresponsible prescription of this fringe unapproved drug is not responsible for Deborah's death?"

Medical lawsuits are the nightmare of every US MD.

Another paragraph from the article that hits home:

Yet, other than Borody, almost nobody in Australia is treating patients with ivermectin. Why? At first glance, it seems inexplicable. Borody’s triple therapy combines ivermectin with a bog-standard — pardon the pun — antibiotic and zinc. The safety profile is so well-known that there is virtually no risk. There are already 33 clinical trials running around the world. The results so far are uniformly positive. Borody is running a randomised, controlled, double-blind trial in the US, which, as soon as it achieves statistical significance, will provide the gold-standard of evidence that the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration and the US Food and Drug Administration require to sign off on the triple therapy as an approved Covid-19 treatment. But all that takes time.

But all that takes time -- 16 months in the case of Borody's trial, which will be the first (I believe, haven't checked ClinicalTrials) to test his triple therapy. His trial's ClinicalTrials entry has its preliminary completion date as August 2022, final completion date January 2023. Someone said that the time between those two dates is when peer review is done.

So let's say everything goes well, and Borody's trial is published in a peer-reviewed journal in January 2023 or soon thereafter. If the results are outstanding, then perhaps the FDA will approve ivermectin for the treatment of covid-19. Someone suggested that Borody's trial will be more persuasive to the FDA than other trials, because Borody's is being conducted in the US. The FDA doesn't give much credence to trials done outside the US.

So let's say the FDA approved ivermectin for covid-19 in March 2023.

Will covid-19 still be a problem in the US in March 2023? Depends on when the vaccines are released and how well the work.

This all makes me increasingly convinced that ivermectin will never be used in the US against covid-19, by more than a handful of MDs.

However, if Borody's trial (and the rest of the evidence) gets ivermectin approved by the FDA in 2023 -- then presumably MDs will feel comfortable prescribing ivermectin for covid-24. The chances of ivermectin working against a new strain of coronavirus is probably higher than the chances of vaccines developed for covid-19.

My final cynical observation:

When there were only a dozen or so clinical trials testing ivermectin on ClinicalTrials, I lamented that few of them were looking at ivermectin stand-alone. Nearly all of them were testing "ivermectin + something". Why? I wondered. Someone responded that ivermectin is off-patent but that doesn't prevent someone from patenting "ivermectin + something". This is a racket in the pharmaceutical industry: as a patent lapses, get a new patent on the same key drug but with a slightly different formulation, and market the hell out of the new version.

I know nothing about patent law -- but ivermectin + docycycline has been used in Bangladesh, evaluated in three studies done there. Might be hard to patent in the US, because of that? I don't really know. Throw in zinc, though, and you have a unique formula!"

Borody's trial is looking at 300 patients at a cost of $3500/patient. That works out to just over a million dollars. The trial is being done by a business. They must hope to recoup that investment. I'll won't be terribly surprised if after it gets FDA approval, we start seeing ads selling BorodyMectin^tm.

In his youtube videos, he really does sound like someone selling a product. IMO. Anyone else have an opinion?

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