Shockingly, horse dewormer does not appear to cure COVID
A new study confirms that ivermectin is not the move and that Joe Rogan is indeed an idiot.
For a while, Joe Rogan and some other prominent conservatives touted an animal anti-parasitic, ivermectin, as a cure for COVID. Thankfully, a new study has helped debunk those unsubstantiated claims has allowed us to confidently say that the thing that is supposed to make cows shit roundworms will rid us of coronavirus.
The study compared more than 1,300 people in Brazil who were infected with the Rona and who were given either ivermectin or a placebo. Long story short, there was no difference between the two groups and in fact, those who took ivermectin within three days of getting sick from COVID actually got more sick, the New York Times noted. Scientists are hoping that this study will stop doctors everywhere from prescribing the anti-parasitic to hopeful patients.
To be fair, there was some speculation early on in the pandemic that ivermectin could help cure COVID. Remember, we were all pretty desperate for any type of solution and nothing was off the table. In some lab experiments, ivermectin did seem to block COVID, but the levels of the anti-parasitic that was required to do that were far too high to be safe for human consumption.
A lot of the pro-ivermectin rhetoric is coming, quite frankly, from anti-vaxxers. Vaccines are an infinitely safer and proven way to prevent the worst outcomes of COVID. Thankfully, there are other promising treatments that do seem to be preventing people from getting hospitalized, including Pfizer's Paxlovid, but this dewormer is absolutely not one of them. “I welcome the results of the other clinical trials and will view them with an open mind, but at some point it will become a waste of resources to continue studying an unpromising approach,” Paul Sax, a Boston based infectious-disease expert, told the Times.
