This is a special post for quick takes by ChristianKl. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Let me startoff that from my perspective there's a lot of uncertainty about the effectiveness of ivermectin.
At the moment it seems that it's plausible that ivermectin is for many viruses the equivalent of penecilin for bacteria.
Should this turn out to be true, it seems pretty clear evidence against the low-hanging-fruid thesis of why innvoation declined. If we weren't able to detect that an existing drug that we used 4 billion times is the equivalent to penecilin, our ability to pick the low hanging fruid is clearly very low.
What is your strongest evidence for ivermectin being useful against covid?
I did not pay much attention to this, but asked my friends who did, and they said something like all studies in favor of ivermectin were seriously flawed. Things like "one group using nothing, the other group using ivermectin + some X, and getting better results", where we already have a reason to suspect that X alone does the whole effect. (Which to me sounds like exactly the kind of experiement one would set up if they already expected ivermectin to be useless, but wanted to prove that it was useful.)
In other words, is there actually any reason to care about ivermectin other than the fact that someone else has already privileged this hypothesis?
In the thread it seems consensus that the pro-Ivermectin meta-analyses is of higher quality. On the other hand the contra-Ivermectin studies is seen as borderline... (read more)