As I understand it, the largest produce of ivermectin is... one of the largest drug companies. Which doesn't have a COVID-19 vaccine, and whose website openly states that you should not take ivermectin for COVID-19. Your theory just doesn't make any sense.

It's way too cheap, iirc Dr. Kory was estimating it would cost like $12 per person to use Ivermectin as a preventative, and this is at current prices.

Also, said company, Merck, is in the process of releasing a new drug that will cost in the thousands.

$12 per person per what unit of time? $12 gets you like three tablets. That's according to some claimed protocols enough to (probably) get you out of the hospital alive, but that's not a long-term preventative.

Meanwhile, the government pays about $20 per dose of the vaccine. The difference between $12 and $20 is not substantial.

The dose for prevention is a fraction of the dose for people already infected. Maybe per year? I don't know, I don't recall the details, but even so that's without the economies of scale that would intervene if it was a worldwide effort.

Re: vaccines, JP Morgan estimated Pfizer alone will make $100B from vaccines. I don't think manufacturing Ivermectin is complex enough that it would net ANY profit, the effort would be organized completely differently.

Lastly, I don't think this is a conspiracy, either for money or politics, going for vaccines was just the easiest sell for both people and governments, and doing anything different would have been extremely difficult (see Sweden and lockdown policies).

> Lastly, I don't think this is a conspiracy, either for money or politics, going for vaccines was just the easiest sell for both people and governments, and doing anything different would have been extremely difficult (see Sweden and lockdown policies).

This is not true. Governments were and are being hammered by their inability to manage COVID. There is a massive incentive to find a therapeutic that can treat the infected rather than just a vaccine, which is how crazes surrounding Ivermectin and other unproven therapeutics got started to begin with. Not only that, but generic therapeutics that could be easily manufactured and transported to poorer nations are clearly the best option to solve this problem. Vaccines were the hardest sell and the worst option for governments given their long developmental timeline, the FUD surrounding them, and the clear complexities surrounding distribution and scarcity.

grifters are making millions off of selling HCQ, IVM, and consultations:

https://theintercept.com/2021/09/28/covid-telehealth-hydroxy...

https://archive.md/eyopT

Took a look through through that Intercept article. It reads like any of the biased opinion based drivel passing for journalism these days. Trying to conflate politics with medicine and say Doctors who risked their careers to speak up for Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin are "extremely pro Trump". Immediate red flag.

They call out Simone Gold for posting anti-vax content on Twitter by retweeting Joe Rogan's experience that he got covid and treated it with a cocktail of drugs including Ivermectin. This first hand account of recovery was apparently not true because... Ivermectin isn't shown to be effective.

Only, politicians have insinuated themselves into medicine, so that ship has sailed. When a medical professional is both sending strong political signals and their professional opinion is strongly aligned with the party line (and also conspiracy theorists), far out of line with the vast majority of their profession, that's suspect.

Joe Rogan's treatment is a single anecdote, and invermectin was one component of a "cocktail." He recovered, yes, but there's more noise than signal and most people recover from covid without any treatment.

> The problem is that Ivermectin is off patent, so no drug company can make any money from it.

How then do you explain the numerous off-patent drugs that are currently in widespread production by the major drug companies?

Imagine that you are creating a new patented drug that you could charge a lot and the whole govts in the world needed.

Then have this other drug without patent that could do the same? or 80%?

People got enraged about the Epi-Pen patent price gouging years back imagine what would happen if some rigorous study confirm that ivermectin is as good as or better?

This is a sample on how media distorts the narrative.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHzGH3aLSgc

The problem with Ivermectin studies is that people will actually review them, so no academic can build a reputation on fraudulent data. Since there is no way to fake thousands of data point, now expensive research studies and clinical trials are getting done, all the research studies that get done will be of higher budget and subject to being called "basic science"

How about just properly reporting and studying the actual facts that some scientists will just make shit up, publication bias exists, and they can draw the wrong conclusions, like that one on Ivermectin?

P.S. I would be happy if Ivermectin turned out to work, but statistically you expect a few false positives to emerge from doctors in the field doing small studies that agree and appear to point to a cure. If Ivermectin was as effective as say, antihistamine pills, you would get a flood of agreement.

> all the research studies that get done will be low budget and subject to being called "lousy science"

This is not true. Keep an eye out for TOGETHER[1], I-TECH[2], PRINCIPLE[3] and ACTIV-6[4] results (with TOGETHER already having dropped IVM for futility)

[1] https://www.togethertrial.com/

[2] https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04920942

[3] https://www.principletrial.org/

[4] https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04885530

I'm skeptical of the "there's no money in it" angle. Ivermectin advocates seem to be suggesting that you take it as a preventative measure for covid - i.e., that the way to stop the pandemic is to have everyone take ivermectin. Each individual ivermectin tablet, at current levels of demand and quality control, costs a couple of dollars.

Compare that with the vaccine, which costs governments a couple tens of dollars, but people get at most four shots per year.

I agree that there isn't money in licensing the ivermectin patent, but there is absolutely a lot of money to be made in manufacturing ivermectin itself, convincing people to take preventative ivermectin, and meeting worldwide demand. And every single pharmaceutical company can play that game - not just a couple of very rich ones in rich countries with research labs capable of making their own covid vaccine. Frankly, it should be a little bit surprising that not even one of them has tried this strategy.

The lousy studies aren't lousy because of the constraints of an insufficient budget. They're based on fraudulent/fabricated data.

As far as the "real world trial" of India, the peak of their delta wave roughly coinciding with an updated treatment guideline including ivermectin is hardly strong evidence.

A) Correlation isn't causation.

B) An updated treatment guideline doesn't indicate people were actually taking ivermectin.

C) Using it as a treatment (i.e. after a case occurs) can't possibly be responsible for preventing cases. There was some buzz about it being offered as a prophylactic, but it never panned out.

D) The peak of the wave coinciding with the update necessitates that the reproduction rate was dropping before the update

Further, just look at Peru for a clear demonstration that it isn't the miracle some would like to believe it is.

And why is Covid not really a thing in subsaharan Africa where everyone takes ivermectin anyway, because it’s a marvelous antiparasitic drug.

You’d think the poorest parts of Africa with the worst medical systems in the world would be hit harder, but they’re not. And it’s probably not genetic since the African diaspora is hit hard by covid.

There's a whole lot of other possible confounding hypotheses here: more frequent outdoor activity, increased ventilation in buildings, increased sunlight, lower population density, lower spread from international travelers, less robust reporting, the "worst medical systems in the world" resulting in a smaller relative fraction of the population at high risk of covid surviving everything else, less cultural offense at being told to wear a mask, etc.

Everyone takes it, routinely? Or gets prescribed it easily in the case of certain symptoms?

My surface-level, limited perception in a couple countries I have friends/family in (Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria) is that there's little to no testing, but also not apparently a hospital emergency. Then again, these same people also seem to go to their local hospital for what is understood as typhoid and malaria every year or two at least. As a born and raised North American I get told by them that's normal.

> And why is Covid not really a thing in subsaharan Africa

I follow news out of South Africa. COVID really is a thing there. It is a big deal there. There have been curfews. (1)

> where everyone takes ivermectin anyway,

No; they don't all take ivermectin every day at breakfast.

> You’d think the poorest parts of Africa with the worst medical systems in the world would be hit harder, but they’re not.

You would think that, yes. it's actually interesting: when the pandemic dawned in early 2020, the medical systems of US and UK were thought best prepared to deal with it (2). That clearly has not been the reality since then. (3)

Why is that? One theory is that recent experience with disease control matters. UK and US were complacent about controlling a virulent pandemic. Whereas asian counties with good economies and recent experience with SARS did very well at doing it again. (4)

African countries did .. not as bad as you might assume, given "the worst medical systems in the world", maybe because of a population the skews younger than the west, and maybe because of experience with various diseases from HIV+TB (In South Africa and other countries) to Ebola (in Central Africa)

1) https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/south-africas-president...

2) https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/11/countries-preparednes...

3) https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/all-bets-are-measu...

4) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/027507402094370...

> And why is Covid not really a thing in subsaharan Africa where everyone takes ivermectin anyway,

False premise. Africa as a whole trended a lot like Europe and North America until late 2020, but the late 2020 to 2021 reopening explosion that the latter two places had was replaced with a slower gradual growth with a later and lower peak in Africa, which has been fairly hard hit compared to the rest of the world outside Europe and North America.

Low population density, a largely outdoor existence, and a very low rate of testing and reporting.

> Low population density, a largely outdoor existence,

I'm not sure that I buy that; cities in Africa have large dense slums, where it's going to be hard to distance. And crowded transport to/from work.

https://www.kulturevulturez.com/story-south-africa-slums-gan...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibera

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_taxi

Higher Vitamin D levels due to more exposure to sunshine is a possible explanation.

Seems like governments should be funding proper studies, as they might benefit from a low cost treatment option.

that makes the assumption that there's incentive for the people running the government to do so. there's been a lot of information that's come to light, some of which some consider to be common knowledge, which indicates that there may be more incentive for our lawmakers not to do so