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Ivermectin Is Anti-Vaxxers’ Latest COVID Drug Of Choice. A Study Promoting It Has Suspect Data.

An influential study from Argentina has been used to argue that ivermectin prevents COVID 100% of the time — but its inconsistencies have led experts to question if it could have actually happened as advertised.

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For anti-vaccine activists, the clinical trial results couldn’t have been better. The drug ivermectin, scientists in Argentina announced last year, prevented 100% of COVID-19 infections.

That glowing finding helped spark a craze for the decades-old medication, which is normally used to delouse people and deworm livestock, and drive the perception that it is a silver bullet against the pandemic.

“If you take it, you will not get sick,” an ivermectin-boosting physician told a Senate committee in December, describing it as a “wonder drug” and citing in part the trial “from Argentina.”

But there are signs that at least some of the experiments — as written up in a paper published in November — didn’t happen as advertised. After BuzzFeed News raised questions about how the study’s data was collected and analyzed, a representative from the Journal of Biomedical Research and Clinical Investigation, which published the results, said late Monday, “We will remove the paper temporarily.” A link was removed from the table of contents — but was reinstated by Thursday. The journal’s explanation, provided after this story was published, was that the author “informed us that he has already provided the evidence of his study to the media.”

The numbers, genders, and ages of the study’s participants were inconsistent. A hospital named in the paper as taking part in the experiments said it has no record of it happening. Health officials in the province of Buenos Aires have also said that they also have no record of the study receiving local approval.

And the researcher overseeing the project, Hector Carvallo, a retired endocrinologist and professor of internal medicine at the University of Buenos Aires, has declined to widely share his data — including with one of his own collaborators, emails show.


Todo Noticias via YouTube / Via youtube.com
Hector Carvallo

In short, independent experts told BuzzFeed News, the oft-cited study has so many red flags that it is, at best, unreliable.

“There is no way in which I could see a trial that actually occurred producing a pattern like this,” said Kyle Sheldrick, a doctor in Sydney and one of the critics who brought the study’s discrepancies to light.

Carvallo, 64, said the study was real. “We would never make up a study because it’s not ethical,” he told BuzzFeed News.

In an interview, Carvallo said he supports vaccines and that he himself is immunized. “What I want for ivermectin is to be considered as another possibility among the repurposed drugs. Not the best one, not the only one, just another one,” he said from Buenos Aires province. “And not to be considered a challenge to vaccines. That would be stupid because they are different.”

But others say that at a time of a global crisis, when vaccination rates are slumping in the face of a relentless virus, Carvallo’s research is being used to give desperate people false, and potentially dangerous, hope about the miraculous properties of a drug proven only to help kill parasites.

“The thing that really worries me is it’s being explicitly used as an alternative to vaccines by some people,” Sheldrick said.


Soumyabrata Roy / NurPhoto via Getty Images

LONG READ CONTINUES HERE 

Ivermectin COVID Study Questioned Over Data Concerns (buzzfeednews.com)

Stephanie M. LeeBuzzFeed News Reporter

Ken BensingerBuzzFeed News Reporter
Last updated on September 2, 2021,