The Jury is Still Out on Ivermectin

Why the new ivermectin study doesn’t tell us much about whether the drug is effective for Covid-19

Pictured: Lots of pills, probably not ivermectin. Source: Unsplash

Ah, ivermectin. Before the pandemic, if you’d asked whether I was going to be spending much of my life writing about a drug mostly used to control endemic parasitic disease in Africa, I would’ve just been very confused.

But people are still arguing about it, so here we are.

Most of the stock photo results for “arguing” are male/female couples, which is very heteronormative but a depressing insight into all of our lives. Source: Pexels

A new large, controlled, randomized ivermectin study has come out, and depending on who you ask it either means that ivermectin works perfectly or has little to no benefit at all. Given that ivermectin remains the most hotly-debated topic of the last few years (coming second only to whether Britney Spears was unfairly treated), the new randomized trial seems pretty important.

Unfortunately, in reality, this study gives us very little information about ivermectin and doesn’t answer our most important questions at all.

The Science

The study itself, called I-TECH, is quite a good piece of research — the Malaysian authors allocated 500 high-risk patients…