Persistent Chatter About COVID and Ivermectin Doesn’t Jibe with Emerging Data

As more time and experience accumulate since the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the inevitable claims over therapies purported to be useful come and go, the idea that ivermectin could be curative has persisted on social media, in the blogosphere, and among popular podcasters. New data published by the Journal of the American Medical Association provide further evidence that there is no advantage to employing even high-dose ivermectin for patients with COVID-19, however. Researchers randomly assigned patients with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 to receive either ivermectin with a maximum targeted dose of 600 mcg/kg (n=602) or placebo (n=604) for 6 days; 84% of the participants had been vaccinated against the virus. In the end, they found the probability that giving patients ivermectin would reduce duration of symptoms by more than 1 day to be less than 0.1%, leading them to conclude that the “findings do not support the use of ivermectin among outpatients with COVID-19.”