Crazy COVIDiocy: How Ivermectin Became Popular Among Qnuts

It was interesting that Qnuts, followers of Qanon, would rather take drugs that do NOT treat COVID for treating COVID, they would also build elaborate conspiracy theories to explain their anti-reality. So how did it all start? 

It all started in 2020, when the entire world is looking for SOMETHING to fight COVID. Then someone published a paper, claiming Ivermectin, an existing antiparasite drug, seems to affect RNA virus as well, and COVID virus is an RNA virus. And their study shows that it seems to work on COVID virus... in a petri dish. 

So, we should do animal testing, right? 

Wrong. The study was flawed. The concentration given was WAY TOO HIGH, far in excess of what's even achievable in a live human without it being toxic / overdose. 

Basically, the petri dishes used achieved a concentration of 2000 to 4000 ng/mL

Even at 10X the maximum dosage currently allowed, which comes out to be about 120 mg of Ivermectin for an adult human, the maximum blood concentration of that is only bout 250 ng/mL, 10% of the concentration as specified in the study. 

In other words, you have to give 100x the concentration of Ivermectin to get the same results in the petri-dish, and that's 10X too much. Ivermectin *is* deadly when overdosed. There was at least one death in New Mexico that is attributed to Ivermectin overdose. 

Here is a very relevant XKCD

XKCD: When you see a claim that a common drug or vitamin
"kills cancer cells in a petri dish," keep in mind: so does a handgun

Okay, what about such claims is 50+ studies "proving" that Ivermectin is effective? 

Still wrong. Twelve of them are not about ivermectin alone, but in combination with something else. Thus, they are NOT proof of ivermectin's effectiveness. 

Others are testing for different things, some about reducing symptoms, some are about reducing death rate, some about prevention. They are all separate data points, and some of them have outright faked data, where data are copied-and-pasted. Or sequence of numbers extremely unlikely to happen in nature... or someone who was already dead when the study allegedly took place. There's also one where there's heavy suspicion of uneven samples, where placebo group has a lot more sicker patients, while the healthier patients appeared in the ivermectin group. 

The Cochrane study, which does meta analysis of existing studies, but only of high quality studies, counted only 20 or so studies, and their conclusion was that there is no evidence to suggest that ivermectin is effective in treating COVID. 

Yet you have someone whose specialty is NOT in epidemiology or drug testing (in fact, her degree is in reproductive science) claiming that NOTHING will convince her that ivermectin does not work. It should not surprise you that Dr. Theresa "Tess" Lawrie is well known in UK for antivax nonsense and misinformation. 

Don't be a COVIDiot and believe random doctors tell you. Not all doctors believe the same thing. Some are kook-ier than others.