@muddyriver Lots of bad and fraudulent data. The whole story is a pretty sad tale of grifters, fraudsters, cranks, ignorance, and people who should know better producing false hope.

Developing antivirals is very difficult, and almost all candidates fail. Taking a random drug, that pops up in a crappy in vitro drug library screening assay when used at massive equivalent doses, and claiming it's a "miracle drug" that should be rushed into front line medical intervention is pretty dreadful behaviour from anyone, especially from physicians.

There are known mechanisms by which many types of drugs give false or unusable positive results in in vitro assays. In the case of ivermectin, it's probably because it's lipophilic and accumulates in cell membranes, which disrupts them and damages/kills the cells. That would give the impression that it is stopping virus replication, because it is killing the cells they replicate in. I may well be wrong about that, but there's been similar observations with a lot of other repurposed drug candidates for covid.

There's a lot of people who know fuck all about drug discovery and development who have been very noisy about pumping ivermectin, and they should've stuck to what they know.

Should it turn out to have some use, then that would be great. That is established through vigorous experimentation and clinical research, not from internet dick measuring and grifting.

The Silver Fern

Tim