Inaccurate Reporting on Ivermectin & Omicron.

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Kowa Company Ltd., a Japanese trading and pharmaceuticals company, announced Jan. 31 that the antiparasitic drug ivermectin showed an "antiviral effect" against the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 in “joint non-clinical research,” according to a corrected Reuters news story.

In the original version of its article, however, the news organization inaccurately reported that the drug was confirmed to be effective against the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 in advanced clinical trials with human test subjects.

"The original Reuters story misstated that ivermectin was 'effective' against Omicron in Phase III clinical trials, which are conducted in humans," a Reuters spokesperson said in a statement to FactCheck.org, echoing the correction Reuters added to its story early on Jan. 31. "We corrected this to clarify ivermectin had an 'antiviral effect' against Omicron and it was shown in joint nonclinical research. After being made aware of the error, we corrected our story immediately."

The distinction is vital because ivermectin had already been shown to have an antiviral effect in the lab in petri dishes, or "non-clinical research".  That means the Japanese findings are not surprising.  But clinical trials involving humans are still ongoing and have not answered whether the drug is effective in treating COVID-19.

More at:  This FactCheck Article 

Despite ill-informed claims to the contrary, Ivermectin has NOT been proven efficacious against COVID-19.

There is inaccuracy on both sides of the Ivermectin debate. The truth lies somewhere in between.

No, the truth is the efficacy of Ivermectin in humans has not been proven.

There is no compromise to the truth.

Has not been proven effective is not synonymous with has proven ineffective and that seems to be where the dispute lays.

The truth, also, us that it has been misrepresented by establishment media. It is a human medicine and it HAS been prescribed by doctors to treat Covid, regardless of whether is has been proven to be 100% effective.

Agreed.

Has not been proven effective =\= Has been proven ineffective

Until it has been proven effective, wisdom dictates that Ivermectin is not to be taken in a vain attempt to prevent, treat, or cure COVID.

Those doctors should have their licenses revoked for malpractice.

Ivermectin is fine. The side effects are well known, it has been used in humans before without any serious trouble to treat other problems. It is a human-tested, low-risk medicine and it would be perfectly fine to hand it out for covid if all you had was a vague correlation, as many countries have done with some apparent success. It's not like it's experimental gene therapy.

Well, I didn't know you had a medical degree. You learn something new everyday.

Exactly. That's what we should be hearing the media instead of all the lies.

Hand it out like candy for the placebo effect?

Ivermectin is an anti-parasitic used to kill worms, insects, arachnids etc. it’s not even an anti-viral medication.

Also, I recall reading that the positive effect measured in a petri dish was at a dose so highly that would be toxic/lethal to humans.

Seems to me like right wing propagandists are grasping at straws for anything they can try to use to stick it to the science educated left and nothing more.

It's proven safe and has relatively mild side effects when used in standard doses, as is typical when prescribed by a doctor.

Covid isn't the only virus that Ivermectin might possibly be effective against, chikungunya and yellow fever are others it's been studied for use on.

Let me just check my ret*d anti-science right wing manual for a response.

https://covid19criticalcare.com/wp-cont ... VID-19.pdf

Pre-Clinical Studies of Ivermectin’s activity against SARS-CoV-2

Since 2012, a growing number of cellular studies have demonstrated that ivermectin has anti-viral properties against an increasing number of RNA viruses, including influenza, Zika, HIV, Dengue, and most importantly, SARS-CoV-2 (Mastrangelo et al., 2012;Wagstaff et al., 2012;Tay et al., 2013;Götzet al., 2016;Varghese et al., 2016;Atkinson et al., 2018;Lv et al., 2018;King et al., 2020;Yang et al.,2020). Insights into the mechanisms of action by which ivermectin both interferes with the entrance and replication of SARS-CoV-2 within human cells are mounting. Caly et al first reported that ivermectin significantly inhibits SARS-CoV-2 replication in a cell culture model, observing the near absence of all viral material 48h after exposure to ivermectin (Caly et al., 2020b). However, some questioned whether this observation is generalizable clinically given the inability to achieve similar tissue concentrations employed in their experimental model using standard or even massive doses of ivermectin (Bray et al., 2020;Schmith et al., 2020). It should be noted that the concentrations required for effect in cell culture models bear little resemblance to human physiology given the absence of an active immune system working synergistically with a therapeutic agent such as ivermectin. Further,prolonged durations of exposure to a drug likely would require a fraction of the dosing in short term cell model exposure. Further, multiple co-existing or alternate mechanisms of action likely explain the clinical effects observed, such as the competitive binding of ivermectin with the host receptor-binding region of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, as proposed in six molecular modelling studies (Dayer, 2020;Hussien and Abdelaziz, 2020;Lehrer and Rheinstein, 2020;Maurya, 2020;Nallusamy et al., 2020;Suravajhala et al., 2020). In four of the studies, ivermectin was identified as having the highest or among the highest of binding affinities to spike protein S1 binding domains of SARS-CoV-2 among hundreds of molecules collectively examined, with ivermectin not being the particular focus of study in four of these studies (Scheim, 2020). This is the same mechanism by which viral antibodies, in particular, those generated by the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, contain the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The high binding activity of ivermectin to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein could limit binding to either theACE-2 receptor or sialic acid receptors, respectively either preventing cellular entry of the virus or preventing haemagglutination, a recently proposed pathologic mechanism in COVID-19 (Dasgupta J,2020;Dayer, 2020;Lehrer and Rheinstein, 2020;Maurya, 2020;Scheim, 2020). Ivermectin has also been shown to bind to or interfere with multiple essential structural and non-structural proteins required by the virus in order to replicate (Lehrer and Rheinstein, 2020;Sen Gupta et al., 2020). Finally,ivermectin also binds to the SARS-CoV-2 RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp), thereby inhibiting viral replication (Swargiary, 2020).

...

Pre-Clinical studies of ivermectin’s anti-inflammatory properties
Given that little viral replication occurs in the later phases of COVID-19, nor can virus be cultured,and only in a minority of autopsies can viral cytopathic changes be found (Perera et al., 2020;Polak etal., 2020;Young et al., 2020), the most likely pathophysiologic mechanism is that identified by Li et al. where they showed that the non-viable RNA fragments of SARS-CoV-2 leads to a high mortality and morbidity in COVID-19 via the provocation of an overwhelming and injurious inflammatory response (Li et al., 2013). Based on these insights and the clinical benefits of ivermectin in late phase disease to be reviewed below, it appears that the increasingly well described in vitro properties of ivermectin as an inhibitor of inflammation are far more clinically potent than previously recognized.The growing list of studies demonstrating the anti-inflammatory properties of ivermectin include its ability to; inhibit cytokine production after lipopolysaccharide exposure, downregulate transcription ofNF-kB, and limit the production of both nitric oxide and prostaglandin E2 (Zhang et al., 2008;Ci et al.,2009;Zhang et al., 2009).

...

There's more but that alone should be enough to grant emergency use for an extremely cheap drug with a long history of use in humans and a low risk side-effect profile.

Also if you are in favour of the mRNA vaccines, you really don't have a leg to stand on being against Ivermectin. The vaccines gene therapy treatments don't have any history of being used in humans, no long term studies, preliminary human trials were scrapped because the animal trials were such disastrous failures and what trials were actually done were complete and utter garbage.

What we know so far:

• A Japanese drug manufacturing company found that the antiparasitic drug Ivermectin showed an "antiviral effect" against the omicron variant in a lab setting.  This means that, in a petri dish or test-tube only, the drug neutralized some portion of a lab-cultured coronavirus sample.  Just because a drug can kill a virus in a lab dish does not make it a safe or effective treatment in humans.

• Reuters has corrected a story in which it misstated that the drug was effective in a phase 3 clinical trial with human subjects.

• Some social media users have repeated Reuters’ reporting error but have not repeated the correction.

• The health authorities in the US, UK and EU have found there is insufficient evidence for using the drug against Covid.

• Even Donald Trump -- who once pitched Ivermectin as effective -- has willingly received a coronavirus vaccine.

• There are no "clinical trials" claiming to show that Ivermectin prevented Covid deaths that do not contain either obvious signs of fabrication or errors so critical they invalidate the study.

 The Data Is Suspect 

It is important to note that scientific analysis has identified:

• No scientific basis for a potential therapeutic effect against COVID-19 from pre-clinical studies;

• No meaningful evidence for clinical activity or clinical efficacy in patients with COVID-19 disease, and;

• A concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies.

There is no reason to believe that the data available support the safety and efficacy of Ivermectin in the treatment or prevention of COVID-19.

Source:  This Merck Statement 

Very astute observations, as usual (especially that last sentence).