Hi, I wrote a comment on another thread that is unnaproved for some reason, so this why I’m making a new topic 
It seems that there’s some good evidence for the use of Ivermectin for treating COVID - https://ivmmeta.com/
This is a meta-analysis of 60 Ivermectin studies - of which some are prospective and randomized, and there’s a positive trend regarding COVID outcomes, so why aren’t more people talking about it?
A lot of people are talking about and and researching ivermectin with a number of registered trials ongoing to investigate its efficacy.
The problem is that the current data on ivermectin is not very strong for reducing risk of infection, reducing symptoms, or duration of COVID-19. There are a number of pre-prints (prior to peer review), faux meta analyses (what you posted is a blog, basically), and small reports that people are rushing to publish. The positive findings are being promoted by some individuals with large platforms- see Joe Rogan, Pierre Kory, Brett Weinstein, etc. and others with non-evidence based opinions on the pandemic, e.g. the FLCCC.
Right now, we lack good data to recommend ivermectin for prophylaxis or treatment. Subsequently, its use should be relegated to clinical trials to help the medical community parse out what effect, if any, ivermectin has.
See here- https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/26/bmjebm-2021-111678 (Title for those reading elsewhere- Misleading clinical evidence and systematic reviews on ivermectin for COVID-19)
The current data has major issues limiting its applicability:
- In vitro data using a very high dose that would significantly increase the risk of side effects in humans, if even achievable at all. Note, these are mechanistic studies of how ivermectin may work which are neat and all, but shouldn’t really inform clinical decision making outside of designing trials to test how this stuff works in humans.
- Lack of true controls in many of these low-quality studies, e.g. people were taking all sorts of wild medication protocols like azithromycin, hcq, zinc, vitamin C, etc, none of which have been shown to work and complicates what role, if any, ivermectin may play. People sure do love these drug cocktails, which is ironic since the combination of these agents have more side effect risk, less safety data, and NO efficacy data when compared to the vaccine.
- Consistent terminology is not used in these studies and this produces misleading narratives. For example, mild to moderate COVID is not the same as “early COVID” and severe covid is not the same thing as “late covid”. Using these terms obscures the relationship of ivermectin timing and outcomes. Should use day of symptom onset for better data.
- The meta analyses are summarizing data where there very few events in either the control or intervention groups. For example, in one meta analysis there were two deaths rom COVID in the control group and zero in the ivermectin group in ALL THE POOLED DATA. This is meaningless.
As a final note, I find it incredibly disappointing that folks assume the medical community does not want to find additional solutions to the pandemic. We are all trying our best and working overtime, but we need to be maintain caution about unproven interventions. This is especially true when effective vaccines are available and mutations in the virus are rapidly taking place. The best bet to reduce your risk of infection, the risk of infecting others, and contributing to a virus variant that we don’t have any treatment for is to get vaccinated…not ivermectin.
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Thank you for the response, I appreciate it!