Ivermectin Doesn’t Work For COVID-19
The end to a long and complicated story
Declaration: I have never received funding from any pharmaceutical company. All of my funding comes from the Australian state and federal government, largely through grants (although I do sometimes apply for grants from other charitable foundations). I have always publicly noted that it would be brilliant if ivermectin worked, as it’s a very safe and cheap medication, but have tried to follow the data for this important question.
If you’re not already familiar with it, ivermectin is a wonderfully effective anti-parasitic medication that people thought might work against COVID-19. It’s very safe when given in the low doses needed to treat parasites, and extremely cheap, making people quite excited about its potential as a COVID-19 treatment. I’ve been writing about ivermectin for COVID-19 since July 2021, when myself and a group of colleagues discovered that a large portion of the research underlying the drug had almost certainly been fabricated.
At that point, in 2021, we were looking at a small pool of research, and so one or two big studies being problematic completely changed the picture. When several Iranian, Egyptian, and South American papers turned out to be seriously dodgy, it entirely shifted the story of ivermectin from a pill that might work quite well to…
