This medic has made a highly impassioned plea at a US senate hearing for his working groups data to be examined here - he certainly sounds sincere, and as he said, his working group has collectively authored over 2000 peer reviewed and published studies in their careers to date, so they do have both reputations and experience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq8S...P34PLyWa2iSR1c
The document he is referring to (I think) is presented here and contains an overview of key findings of a number of studies including RCTs)
https://osf.io/wx3zn/
The referenced studies have issues - many are pre-print but they are (mostly) randomised controlled trials of a reasonable size. At the very least this looks like it warrants a definitive international RCT, and let us hope that a major journal expedites peer review of the paper his group has authored. The problem here is that as Ivermectin is a generic, no large pharmaceutical company will fund it or push for it (the opposite is much more likely). As such, any such drive will have to be put in place by medics themselves and/or driven by media and press coverage - unless perhaps a very large generic company might be prepared to get behind this, if one of a big enough size exists? The UK does not even have an EUA in place so any move towards larger trials would have to be led from the top downwards e.g. EMEA, the WHO or regulatory authorities who are not unduly influenced by big Pharma. Even research centres are particularly sensitive to influence as in normal times it is Pharma who funds their research, but in these exceptional times I would hope this is not the case.
I am most concerned that there is no Plan B - if the vaccine runs into major issues, or the virus evolves away from the vaccine i.e no longer provokes sterilising antibodies, we will have problems for some years and even IF the vaccine companies were able to manufacture the quantities needed in the timescales needed (it will be at least 2022/2023 before current demand is met), we will all be back to square one whilst they address the problems.
There look to be some promising treatments for the most severe hospitalised patients but as of now there is nothing for GPs / primary care to give to patients to help them unless cases are so severe they require hospitalisation. As the threat and impacts of long covid become increasingly apparent this is critically important for health and economies to get on top of, and novel and expensive therapies will not be affordable or producible at sufficient scale, even in the richest countries e.g.monoclonal antibodies, vaccines and remdesivir (which I would argue has minimal benefit and high toxicity). For these reasons alone it has to be worth some time, money and effort to determine if these findings and data on ivermectin for the prophylaxis and post exposure prophylaxis stand the test of larger scale international study/ studies.
At best, it could help to bridge the gap between widespread vaccine availability for entire populations and save lives and reduce the numbers with long covid, at worst it could act as insurance in the event of a significant vaccine escape, or some other major issue emerging with the vaccines e.g. ADE or other longer term side effects - the occurrence of any of these would set the world back at least a year if not longer in its road to economic recovery.
