Although it is not approved as a drug against Covid-19, the anthelmintic ivermectin was considered a supposed silver bullet, especially among those opposed to vaccination. A large study from Brazil is now doing away with this.
A large study from Brazil has now confirmed that the drug ivermectin does not help against Covid-19. The extremely renowned Research published in the New England Journal of Medicine comes to the conclusion that the vermifuge does not reduce the risk of the need for treatment in hospital after a coronavirus infection compared to the placebo.
Ivermectin, which can be used in humans against certain roundworms and scabies mites, has gained a certain popularity, most recently among those opposed to vaccination. They saw the drug as a miracle cure in the pandemic. A run on pharmacies has been reported at times in some countries. The hype was fueled by dubious websites that referred to supposedly promising results, especially from smaller studies – the quality and general validity of which, according to experts, was sometimes questionable.
In the double-blind study that has now been published, neither the doctors nor the patients randomly assigned knew who had received the anthelmintic and who had received a dummy preparation (placebo). The more than 3500 participants had an increased risk of a severe course of Covid because of their age or previous illnesses. 679 of them received ivermectin, as many received a placebo, the remaining almost 2160 patients were treated differently.
In the study, ivermectin was clinically ineffective in terms of both risk of hospitalization and length of stay in hospital or recovery from infection. “No effect of the drug!”, Stefan Kluge, director of the clinic for intensive care at the University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf, tweeted, referring to the study.
The infection immunologist Leif Erik Sander from the Berlin Charité also reacted to the result on Twitter: “This should be the end of the matter.”
Already came in the past meta-analyseswhich summarized individual studies and laboratory experiments, did not come to any clear conclusions about an alleged benefit of ivermectin.
The World Health Organization (WHO), the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) are still speaking out against the use of the drug in the pandemic. In the wrong dosage, the drug can be highly toxic.
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In Austria, even the manufacturer MSD (Merck Sharp & Dohme) advised against taking it on your own: “There is no meaningful evidence for the use of ivermectin in Sars-CoV-2,” the company announced in November.
