Reduce deaths by 70%!

ITAJAI, Brazil (PNN) - January 9, 2022 - Is your Minister of Health interested in saving lives, stopping infections, or reducing the burden on hospitals? Did he or she ban ivermectin or study it?

A study in a small Brazilian town suggests that half of all hospitalization of COVID cases and 70% of COVID deaths could be avoided at a cost of 10 cents a week.

A whole town in Brazil of 220,000 people was invited to take part in an ivermectin study. In Itajaí 159,000 people said “Yes” to taking part in a study of a bizarrely low dose of an infrequent form of ivermectin to see if it prevented people from catching COVID. They were asked to take the 0.2mg/kg/day dose two days in a row but only once every two weeks. Since the half-life of ivermectin in humans is only 12–36 hours, those taking it in the study were effectively left unprotected at least half the time. Our livers convert ivermectin into chemical bits and pieces that have half-lives of three days, so those downstream metabolites, if they matter, might kick around a bit longer. More bizarrely, participants were asked not to take ivermectin if they got ill. This study appears to be purely about prevention. Despite all this, it still worked.

Compared to all the other towns in the Santa Catarina State of Brazil, Itajaí has the lowest mortality rate, far below even the second lowest.

The iMask prevention plan by the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance suggests using the 0.2mg/dose twice a week long term. Those ICU doctors recommend you double the dose if you think you’ve been exposed for real.

113,000 people took ivermectin this way, and 45,000 didn’t. The infection rate in the ivermectin users was 3.7%, which was quite a lot lower than the non-users, of which 6.6% got infected. Imagine if they’d taken ivermectin two times a week instead? The rates of infection in the ivermectin group might have been much lower.

The regular use of ivermectin (albeit very low and infrequent) still saved a lot of lives. The death rate in the ivermectin group was 0.8% compared to 2.6% of the non-users. They controlled for age, sex and co-morbidities.

It wasn’t a randomized study, but most of the biases should underestimate the benefits. Not only was the dose lower than recommended, but the people who signed up to try ivermectin were slightly older and at higher risk. People also weren’t supervised and so if they forgot to take their dose no one was there to remind them. The reductions in everything could only get better with a more serious approach.

An important conservative bias was present. Major risk factors for severe COVID-19 and mortality due to COVID-19, including aging, diabetes and hypertension, were more present among ivermectin users, which may have underestimated the benefits measured Ivermectin was demonstrated to be particularly effective in subjects above 49 years old in terms of reduction of absolute risk, which corresponds to the group at the highest risk for COVID-19. This allows the understanding that prophylactic use of ivermectin can be particularly impactful in older subjects. In addition, ivermectin seemed to reduce the exceeding risk of hypertension, T2D, and other diseases.

All subjects were recommended not to use ivermectin, nitazoxanide, hydroxychloroquine, spironolactone, or any other drug claimed to be effective against COVID-19.