Ivermectin does not reduce the risk of hospitalization for COVID-19

The results of a major clinical trial with COVID-19 infected people warned that the antiparasitic drug ivermectin did not show any signs of relief from the coronavirus disease.

The authors of the scientific study published their research in The New England Journal of Medicine and explained that they compared more than 1,300 people who contracted the coronavirus in Brazil and their response to treatment with ivermectin or placebo. And they concluded that the use of this drug to treat COVID-19 should be ruled out.

“There's really no sign of benefit,” said Dr. David Boulware, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota. “Now that the details and data are available, it is to be expected that most doctors will abandon ivermectin and opt for other therapies,” said Dr. Boulware, of this drug that gained popularity as an alternative treatment for covid-19 despite the lack of solid research to support it.

Ivermectin has been used for decades to treat parasitic infections. And at the beginning of the pandemic, when researchers were testing thousands of old drugs against covid-19, laboratory experiments with cells suggested that ivermectin could block the coronavirus and some doctors started prescribing ivermectin for covid-19, despite the warning from regulators of drugs such as the FDA in the US that was not approved for that use.

However, there are still more ongoing trials on ivermectin, with thousands of volunteers, who have not yet shared their results. The US National Center for the Advancement of Translational Sciences (NCATS) has been conducting a trial of ivermectin and several other drugs for covid patients for more than a year, but has not yet released its final report.

Dr. Boulware doubted that the additional trials would come to a different conclusion, since the study done in Brazil was very comprehensive and carefully designed. “You rarely expect to find anything different,” he said.

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