The dewormer is clinically ineffective, researchers from Brazil report — in terms of the risk of hospitalization and the length of a hospital stay or recovery.
A large study from Brazil has now confirmed that the drug Ivermectin definitely does not help against Covid-19. The study, published in the renowned New England Journal of Medicine, concludes that the dewormer is clinically ineffective – both in terms of risk of hospitalization and length of stay or recovery from infection.
Ivermectin, which can be used in humans against certain worms and scabies mites, has gained some popularity, most recently among those who oppose vaccination. They saw the drug as a miracle cure in the pandemic. A run on pharmacies has been reported at times in some countries. The hype was fueled by dubious websites that referred to supposedly promising results, especially from smaller studies – whose quality and overall validity, experts said, were sometimes questionable.
Doctors and patients assigned by lottery
In the now-published double-blind study, neither the physicians nor the randomly assigned patients knew who had received the anthelmintic and who had received a sham (placebo) preparation. The more than 3,500 participants had an increased risk of a serious course of Covid because of their age or previous illnesses. 679 of them received ivermectin, just as many received placebo, the remaining nearly 2,160 patients were treated differently.
“No drug effect!” Stefan Kluge, director of the Intensive Care Clinic at the University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf, tweeted, referring to the study. Infection immunologist Leif Erik Sander of the Berlin Charité also reacted to the result on Twitter: “This should be the end of the matter.”
Even in the past, meta-analyses that summarized individual studies and laboratory experiments have not come to any clear conclusions about a supposed benefit of ivermectin. The World Health Organization (WHO), the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) are still speaking out against the use of the drug in the pandemic. In the wrong dosage, the drug can be highly toxic.
In Austria, even the manufacturer MSD (Merck Sharp & Dohme) advised against taking it on its own: “There is no significant evidence for the use of ivermectin in Sars-CoV-2,” the company announced in November.
>>> Study in the “New England Journal of Medicine”
(APA/dpa)