If you don't have a proven, understood mechanism (which ivermectin doesn't for a virus like Covid) then you have to rely on trials, and those just don't stand up.
> If you haven’t had to mess with drug discovery for a living, it’s understandable that you hear that Some Person Somewhere was very sick, took New Therapy X, and suddenly got better, and then assume that there it is, the cure has been found. But that’s not how it works. Real results stand up when you run larger, better-controlled trials, but most early results don’t turn out to be all that real.
> If you don't have a proven, understood mechanism (which ivermectin doesn't for a virus like Covid) then you have to rely on trials, and those just don't stand up.
Please, there are a ton of antiviral drugs without an understood mechanism. We don't even know how Acetaminophen (Tylenol) works!
> > If you don't have a proven, understood mechanism (which ivermectin doesn't for a virus like Covid) then you have to rely on trials, and those just don't stand up.
> Please, there are a ton of antiviral drugs without an understood mechanism
Right, but trials are all that matter - there's a huuuuuuge list of drugs where we "know the mechanism" and it turns out that they still don't actually work despite that.
> What happens to confidence in public health and USG if ivermectin turns out to be safe and effective for COVID, and the genetic vaccines turn out to have signficant safety issues? This looks like a very plausible scenario from where I sit.
Mr. Malone is a very eminent scientist who has one serious problem in this particular case: he really doesn't like big pharma earning billions over what he considers to be his invention.
uhm he doesn't have problems with the system or the concrete tech used by Moderna and AZ, only with the dubious testing of these vaccines
his research becomes more important if these sort of vaccines become a silver bullet for medicine and basically end the modern flu and entire families of coronavirus; he could be looking at a Nobel prize
If you don't have a proven, understood mechanism (which ivermectin doesn't for a virus like Covid) then you have to rely on trials, and those just don't stand up.
Quoting Derek Lowe on this:
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/07/iv...
> If you haven’t had to mess with drug discovery for a living, it’s understandable that you hear that Some Person Somewhere was very sick, took New Therapy X, and suddenly got better, and then assume that there it is, the cure has been found. But that’s not how it works. Real results stand up when you run larger, better-controlled trials, but most early results don’t turn out to be all that real.
Cue the Green Jellybean XKCD: https://xkcd.com/882/