Ivermectin showed no signs of combating COVID-19 or reducing patients’ risk of hospitalization, according to results from a large clinical trial.
Between March and August 2021, 679 patients received a daily dose of ivermectin over the course of 3 days. The researchers found that ivermectin didn’t reduce the risk that people with COVID-19 would be hospitalized or go to an emergency room within 28 days after treatment.
In addition, the researchers looked at particular groups to understand if some patients benefited for some reason, such as taking ivermectin sooner after testing positive for COVID-19. But those who took the drug during the first 3 days after a positive coronavirus test ended up doing worse than those in the placebo group. The drug also didn’t help patients recover sooner.
The researchers found “no important effects” of treatment with ivermectin on the number of days people spent in the hospital, the number of days hospitalized people needed mechanical ventilation, or the risk of death, they wrote.For decades, the drug has been widely used to treat parasitic infections. At the beginning of the pandemic, researchers checked thousands of existing drugs against the coronavirus to determine if a potential treatment already existed.
to understand whether ivermectin treats COVID-19, the newspaper reported. At the end of 2020, Andrew Hill, MD, a virologist at the University of Liverpool in England, reviewed the results from 23 trials and concluded that the drug could lower the risk of death from COVID-19. He