Ivermectin Probably Doesn’t Work As A Treatment For Covid-19

Another well-conducted, large trial has failed to find a benefit for ivermectin in treating coronavirus infections

Pictured: Probably not ivermectin, but a damn good photo. Photo by Christina Victoria Craft on Unsplash

Note: I have never been funded or paid by a pharmaceutical company, and all of my funding comes from the Australian state and federal governments. On a personal level, I truly hope ivermectin does work for Covid-19, because it’s a cheap, low-risk, easily available medication, but we have to base our beliefs on data rather than hope. You can read more about the story of ivermectin for Covid-19 and my work here.

Note 2: Since originally publishing this story, another two large randomized trials have been published also failing to find a benefit for ivermectin in the treatment of COVID-19. While these were not as strong as ACTIV-6 methodologically, they strengthen the argument that there is unlikely to be a meaningful clinical benefit from ivermectin to treat COVID-19.

Ivermectin truly is the subject that never dies. Depending on which corner of the internet you reside in, the medication is either a useful anti-parasitic drug that sadly has not shown much benefit for treating Covid-19, or the subject of a bizarre worldwide cover-up by eeeevil pharmaceutical companies for inexplicable and confusing reasons.

Nearly a year on from the first retraction of a dodgy ivermectin trial, we are finally seeing results for some of the biggest and best research come out. We’ve now got nearly a dozen decently sized and reasonably well-conducted randomized trials of ivermectin for the treatment of Covid-19, leaving us with a potentially modest benefit for the drug but still a lot of questions.

Super-dog here is wondering whether the remaining plausible benefit from ivermectin after aggregating all gold-standard RCTs is sufficient to justify, from a Bayesian perspective, the ongoing randomization of patients in existing clinical research into the drug. In the Language of Dog, that translates to “Woof” Photo by Camylla Battani on Unsplash

Into this morass of evidence, a new large randomized trial has just been published on the preprint server Medrxiv which brings us quite close to an answer to the ivermectin question. It seems less and less likely that ivermectin has any benefit in the treatment of Covid-19 after all.

The Study