The fact that is it’s effective at early stages does not make it useless. It could be taken prophylacticaly if you know you’re going to be in a high risk situation like a roommate tests positive.
...or you can get vaccinated first? Or actually quarantine (alone)? And I do hope you were lucky enough to stockpile it beforehand, because you'd better not be going out too often with such a test result....
It could have some covid uses, sure. But it can't change the game. Hence my label of "useless" in overall pandemic management (much like contact tracing). I admit that "almost useless" or "only useful in very niche situations" is more accurate. But it is useless 99.9% of the time.
Although the CDC has decided to stop counting them, breakthrough infections and even death are common among the vaccinated. There's not going to be a point where we don't need to worry about treatment unless the virus is going to go away like the Spanish flu once enough people are immune.
> And I do hope you were lucky enough to stockpile it beforehand, because you'd better not be going out too often with such a test result....
It's pretty clear from this that you have never looked into how ivermectin was used in certain Indian states or in Chiapas, where local officials readied pre-made kits which could be distributed to high risk people and those who tested positive. This would be easy enough to do in the US if we could shift the thinking on Covid away from "you have to wait until you're gasping for breath at the hospital to start any treatment other than acetaminophen."
Do you feel similarly about lockdowns being "useless" given their demonstrated inability to fully eliminate spread of the virus, and the lack of any large RCTs in support of them? I mean, I see all the same arguments made in their favor: "you have to do them early enough, you have to pair them with such-and-such other NPIs, etc"
Talking about a prophylactic use case might have made sense a year ago but makes zero sense today, when more than 50% of the adult population is vaccinated and 70-80% of many states are vaccinated while most are fully reopened without capacity limits or mask mandates.
What are we doing here? Is this really the hill they want to die on?
