Nice moderate discussion of why it is so difficult to gte hard evidence for/against ivermectin
You can show that drownings increase after ice cream consumption but it’s not because a belly full of ice cream cramps your muscles. It’s because both events are more common in summer.
Oxford is loathe to predict when they will have their results, but after badgering head investigator Christopher Butler, he guessed it might be in the first quarter of next year. The NIH apparently won’t have anything to say till 2023.
That seems absurd, given the epidemic of people taking the drug in the hope it will work.
Carlos Chaccour, an infectious disease specialist at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health who works on Ivermectin for malaria control and has tested it in a small trial for COVID, helped clarify the situation for me. “The evidence so far doesn’t point to a large effect, if any at all. To detect a small effect you need a much larger sample size – hence it will take a long time.”
Comment from me:
Chaccour was highly enthusiastic about ivermectin, originally, from other early evidence. He was one of the early proponents. He became a less strong advocate after more evidence, but still hopes there will be some effect.