Please, there are a ton of antiviral drugs without an understood mechanism. We don't even know how Acetaminophen (Tylenol) works!
> Please, there are a ton of antiviral drugs without an understood mechanism
Yes, but they have trials that stand up.
The trials for all those antiviral drugs show they work. As do with Acetaminophen.
> 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.
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/