Garth Rattray | Consider Ivermectin for COVID-19 treatment

As SARS-CoV-2 continues to ravish the planet, many await a vaccine to provide herd immunity to halt its vicious and continuous onslaught. Currently, we try to avoid COVID-19 with non-pharmaceutical strategies - physical distancing, hand and environmental hygiene and, of course, properly worn facial masks. Herd immunity by infection will not provide long-term protection and will result in unacceptable and unnecessary levels of human suffering and death.

Although vaccines promise to be effective and safe, uninformed, paranoid conspiracy theorists and mischievous anti-vax propagandists are poisoning the minds of many prospective vaccine recipients. Even if everyone accepts the vaccines, it will require several years and perhaps annual inoculations for enough of the global population to acquire sufficient immunity so that COVID-19 can be relegated to the history books.

Some pharmaceuticals and natural products have been used to treat COVID-19 at various stages but either failed completely or only showed limited success. However, an existing, safe and already widely prescribed product, Ivermectin, is showing effectiveness when used to prevent and treat COVID-19 at every stage of the disease.

Ivermectin has already been ranked right up there with penicillin and aspirin as a “wonder drug” because of its legitimate claim to having, “the greatest beneficial impact on the health and well-being of humanity”. Interestingly, all three drugs were found in nature, and all three won Nobel prizes. The incredible story of Ivermectin began in the late 1960s, when a Japanese microbiologist, Satoshi Ōmura, collected thousands of soil samples from around Japan, in his search for a new antibacterial compound.

The compound in one particular sample, taken from a golf course southwest of Tokyo, proved very effective against parasitic worms in livestock. Eventually, in 2015, Ōmura (from Japan), Campbell (from the USA) and Youyou (from China) shared the Nobel prize for physiology and medicine, “for their discoveries concerning a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasites”.

SAFE FOR HUMANS

Ivermectin is the world’s first ‘endectocide’; it remains very safe for humans, cheap, and shows no evidence of drug resistance after 30 years of use. It is used to treat river blindness, lymphatic filariasis, head lice, scabies, screwworms (in public hospitals in Jamaica), and several intestinal worms. Mosquitoes that feed on people taking Ivermectin have shorter lifespans. Tens of millions of people have benefited from Ivermectin.

Ivermectin acts by inhibiting an essential intracellular transport process through which viruses suppress our antiviral response. It has been reportedly used to treat a long list of viral infections (off-label), including chikungunya, zika, dengue, yellow fever, HIV, and recently, COVID-19. In vitro studies showed Ivermectin to be excellent at treating COVID-19 and, over time, this has translated into clinical successes that caused Ivermectin to be hailed as a “miracle drug” in the treatment of COVID-19 by authorities currently using it for that purpose.

One of the many powerful and credible proponents of Ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19 is Dr Pierre Kory, associate professor of Medicine at St Luke’s Aurora Medical Centre in Milwaukee, and president of the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance. He testified before a US Senate Committee on December 8, 2020. The hearing was on ‘Early Outpatient Treatment: An Essential Part of a COVID-19 Solution’. He remains devastated by the [unnecessary] suffering and deaths that he has witnessed and his feeling of relative helplessness. He asked the American government to “swiftly review the already expansive and still rapidly emerging medical evidence on Ivermectin”.

His evidence includes observational controlled trials (OCTs), which he equates with randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and found them to be nearly all statistically significant.

Even restricting analysis to just the 15 randomised controlled trials (totalling over 3,000 patients), the majority report a statistically significant reduction in transmission or disease progression or mortality. Further, a meta-analysis recently performed by an independent research consortium calculated the chances that Ivermectin is ineffective in COVID-19 to be one in 67 million”.

The evidence is credible and overwhelming. Numerous jurisdictions that initiated Ivermectin distribution programmes experienced significant reduction in cases and deaths that “approached pre-pandemic levels in these areas”. Space only permits for a tiny fraction of the evidence here. Much more can be found on the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance website, flccc.net and the Open Science Foundation pre-print server: https://osf.io/wx3zn/.

The data shows that Ivermectin appears to be a huge game changer in the war against COVID-19. It avoids progression to the hyper-inflammatory phase and facilitates recovery in critically ill patients. It represents a viable bridge to vaccination. Currently, we can only offer supportive treatment at home and variably effective treatment in hospitals. There is nothing to lose and a lot to gain by significantly increasing the availability of Ivermectin for the [current] off-label use in the treatment of COVID-19.

Garth A. Rattray is a medical doctor with a family practice. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and garthrattray@gmail.com.