The drug Ivermectin does not help against Covid-19. This is shown by a study from Brazil published in the specialist magazine "New England Journal of Medicine". The worming agent, for example, reduces the risk of the necessary treatment in the hospital after a coronavirus infection compared to the placebo, the authors write.
Ivermectin gained a certain popularity, which can be used in humans against certain nematodes and scabies mites, most recently especially in people who doubt or deny the effect and safety of corona vaccinations. They saw the drug as a miracle cure in the pandemic. In some countries, a run on pharmacies has been reported at times. The hype was reinforced by dubious websites, which referred to supposedly promising results, especially of smaller studies, whose quality and general significance is partly questionable, according to experts.
In the now published double-blind study, neither doctors nor the patients assigned by lot knew who had received the worm remedy and who had received a dummy preparation, i.e. a placebo. The more than 3500 participants had an increased risk of a severe course of covid because of their age or due to previous illnesses. of these, 679 received ivermectin, as many received a dummy preparation, the remaining almost 2160 patients were treated differently.
Ivermectin can be highly toxic
In the study, ivermectin was found to be clinically ineffective – both in terms of the risk of hospitalization and the length of a hospital stay or recovery after infection. "No effect of the drug!" tweeted Stefan Kluge, the director of the Clinic for Intensive Care Medicine at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. The infection immunologist Leif Erik Sander from the Berlin Charité also reacted to the result on Twitter: "This topic should be ticked off."
Already in the past, a meta-analysis that summarized individual investigations and laboratory experiments had not found a clear result about an alleged benefit of ivermectin. To this day, the World Health Organization, the Robert Koch Institute and the European Medicines Agency are against using the drug in the pandemic. With the wrong dosage, the remedy can be highly toxic.
In Austria, even the manufacturer Merck Sharp & Dohme advised against an emphatic intake: "There is no meaningful evidence for the use of Ivermectin at SARS-COV-2", the company had already announced in November 2021.
