Terry Blanton <hohlr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> But effectiveness is absolutely conclusive >>> >> >> No. If that were true, it would show up in the double-blind tests. >> > > Many things work in vitro but not in the body, e.g.: > That's true too. It is important. But I was talking about a clinical double-blind test with human patients. You give ivermectin to some of them, and a placebo to others. You don't know who is getting what. If ivermectin is effective, the ones who got it recover sooner, or their symptoms are markedly less severe. Several double-blind tests have been done. They have either shown no effect, or a very small effect. In no case has the effect been large enough to cause what is reported from India. So, I conclude that the Indian epidemiologists are right, and the field doctors are engaged in wishful thinking, or they are ascribing good results to the drug which are actually caused by the natural course of the epidemic. That may sound unlikely, but there are many examples of that in the history of medicine. If a drug works, that has to show up when you do enough double-blind tests, with enough people. One test might fail because the doctors doing it give the wrong dose, or they give it during the wrong phase of the disease, or for some other reason. However, there have been multiple tests of ivermectin. As far as I know, the doctors in the field in India have reported their doses, methods, and so on, and the doctors doing clinical trials know what procedures supposedly work. But they are not working.