“More and more Mississippians are using a horse de-wormer medication as an at-home treatment for COVID-19, and it’s causing a spike in calls to poison control.”
Mind you, this poisoning is sending more people toward the hospitals that are already at capacity in that state!
Yeah, they’re afraid of the vaccine, but they’re totally OK with filling their bodies with horse de-wormer, so they just pop down to the feed store and pick some up. Talk about thinning the herd!
I also read somewhere that Trump is now saying he was right about hydroxychloroquine, even though there are now controlled clinical trials showing that the drug not only failed to improve patient care, but actually made matters slightly worse! (One cannot fairly say that it hurt because the slightly worse rates of death, intubation and hospitalization were not statistically significant. A fair conclusion is that it did not help.)
—-
Notes:
1. This horse dewormer business started before the vaccines were available. See this report from Nevada. “Feed stores are having trouble keeping the medication in stock.”
2. There is some vague logic to the use of this dewormer (ivermectin). Ivermectin has been tested to inhibit the spread of the virus in vitro, but at a dosage many times that prescribed for humans for parasitic infections. Some studies show that ivermectin may also be effective in vivo, and there is a chance that it may someday be approved for treating viral diseases, although the evidence is still insufficient. Researchers have predicted a low likelihood of success against COVID at the current prescribed level for humans, but some evidence at least suggests that higher doses might have some value. But the effective dose may be so large that it might produce dangerous side effects.
“Pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic studies suggest that achieving the plasma concentrations necessary for the antiviral efficacy detected in vitro would require administration of doses up to 100-fold higher than those approved for use in humans”
Trials are still needed to test both the safety and efficacy of various doses. It should go without saying that you should not be stocking up on it from your feed store and taking a horse-strength dosage on your own authority.
Man, if Trump wasted his money buying real estate in MY head, you know he’s stupid. You want some? I have some mental-beachfront lots still available. Cash only; no checks, credit cards or Bitcoin; and Canadian or Australian currency is preferred.
Put up or shut up. Almost 10 months since the election and absolutely no substantiation of vote diddling. Of course for some morons Trump’s pronouncements to that effect suffice. The rest of us tend to go with facts, logic, and evidence (or lack thereof).
More and more for me, the American right reminds me of the Taliban in that their movement is a matter of a kind of religious faith: Everything the Democrats want is oppressive and everything the government does when they are in power is bad. This is not something to be argued with; it is their fundamental truth, a matter of faith, and not subject to question.
Everything that would tend to disprove this assumption is called a lie, explained away, or simply ignored. Everything that “the mainstream media” says is a lie, and the mainstream media is everything but the right-wing media, which is the source of all truth.
Many of these people will never be persuaded or convinced, and they will work to bring up their children in the same “faith”, if only by never letting any other information be available to them for as long as they can.
I have no idea how this will play out. They may fade away like other religious or quasi-religious movements, or they may dwindle down to a hard core but go on and on like the Mormons or the Christian Scientists, or they may become something like the Basques or the Palestinians – a constantly troublesome minority.
Or I may have rocks in my head. I hope that’s the case this time, at least.
There have been multiple studies showing the effectiveness of Ivermectin to prevent and help treat covid 19. Even the man who invented the RNA Vaccines stated that if the WHO had implemented the use of Ivermectin early on we would be done with this madness with in months.
Studies are a dime a dozen….peer reviewed ones are not.
I had a good cry about people buying horse dewormers at the feed store, but one should not write ivermectin off, if used properly. This is not a complete scam like hydroxychloroquine. There is potential there. As I wrote in the original post, it is very possible that this drug will be approved once all the evidence is in, as some studies suggest.
It’s good to keep an open mind.
But will it de-worm me? And do I want that, for myself or my worms?
The simple fact is that no drug which treats a disease after you catch it will ever be more potent or more cost-effective than interventions which prevent you from getting the disease in the first place.
Anyone who would take ivermectin but won’t get a vaccination or use a mask is an imbecile.
Reminds me of Granny Hillbilly and her ‘remedy tonics’. One cup of possum innards, a few spider webs, two dung beetles, a spotted owl’s feathers, and a thimbleful of white lightnin’; you’ll be all cured up from whatever ails ya.
I’m not sure this shit would be going on, at least to this extent, if Trump hadn’t weaseled his way into a power position and manipulated gullible cretins into going along with his deranged conspiracy theories & pathological paranoia. He did far more damage to this country than time has shown yet, but we’re seeing the results with things like idiots shooting up horse meds and murder being committed over masks.
I will just point out that people who work with animals do in fact sometimes take medications labeled for animals because they’re often much cheaper than the same medication labeled for humans. If they pay close attention to the dosages, this *can* be a kinda reasonable thing to do, given our crappy-ass health care system and the vagaries of people’s insurance coverage.
The unreasonable thing here is not that they’re taking a medicine labeled for animals, it’s that they’re taking a medication that has exactly no effect on Covid, and never has had any good reason to think that it might, instead of getting a vaccination that has reams of data showing that it’s safe and effective.
This may be nitpicking, in which case I apologize, but it is also unreasonable for people sto take medications intended for animals unless they know what they are doing. Which most of these ivermectin users do not.
Wasn’t there a fad some years back for taking a horse tranquilizer called Ketamine? That was not a reasonable thing to do either, in my opinion, except maybe for students of pharmacology.
But yes, the dysfunctional nature of the US medical system can cause makeshift solutions to seem like the only option for some.
It’s not fair to say it has no effect. There is some preliminary evidence that shows ivermectin might someday be approved.
The problem is that while it inhibits the virus in vitro, the in vitro dosage is like 100 times the amount approved for human use as an anti-parasitic, and there are as yet no meaningful in vivo tests that would warrant approval as a COVID treatment
Having noted that, let me add the obvious. You should not do self-testing of an unapproved procedure to see if your body can withstand racehorse dosages of a drug.
Many things work in vitro that never, ever work in people…
E.g. see bleach
There is an in vitro study that shows strong anti-viral effect for Ivermectin, but that’s essentially useless. Tons of compounds have strong anti-viral effect in vitro against coronaviruses, or any other encapsulated viruses, because encapsulated viruses are quite fragile. Anything that dissolves or degrades the lipid envelope of the virus will almost certainly deactivate the virus. Bleach, soap, alcohol, most surfactants and disinfectants are highly effective against encapsulated viruses, but all at concentrations that would be extremely toxic in the blood stream.
There are a handful of very tiny studies that have shown small positive effects against Covid from normal doses of Ivermectin in humans, and several other (IMO better) studies that show no effect.
All of these studies are way too small and poorly controlled to draw any important conclusions from, other than clearly showing that Ivermectin is not some kind of miracle cure for Covid. One thing about miracle cures: they show strong effects even in small studies.
It’s perhaps not appreciated by most people just how many small, poorly-controlled studies are published in medical journals every year. Tens of thousands of seriously crappy “studies” get published worldwide, usually by some doctor with a vague idea that [medicine X] might have some efficacy against [condition Y], and when their preliminary “study” shows no result, they usually shrug and toss it aside. But if the preliminary results are at least arguably positive, they submit it for publication, because publications are good for the old resume. And who knows? Maybe there’s something there. But most of it is noise.
About the only time studies that show no result get published is if there’s active interest in a particular medicine or intervention and people are trying to replicate someone else’s interesting result. That’s the case now. We’re seeing preprints of studies of Ivermectin that are showing no effect, because Ivermectin has gotten so much attention.
So again, chances are extremely high that Ivermectin is a dry hole, and there was never any *good* reason to think that Ivermectin was going to work against Covid or any other virus.
Bingo!
Are we watching the Republican Party devolve into pure evil?
That would be a short trip.
They were already evil. What we’re seeing is the rapid decent into Idiocracy.
Can’t help but wonder–does the container for this medicine say it’s intended for horses’ asses?
Almost:
1
2
I see the labels say “Keep out of reach of children.” Because that would be nuts.
The one upside of COVID is that it has upgraded Darwin’s theory to fact
and yet they still get to inflict two senators and too many congressmen on us.
Watching Darwin’s theory play out in real time…
“It wobbles the mind”.
K. Bundy
PT Barnum underestimated the birth rate of suckers
It’s Mississippi Jake, forget about it! And yet the entire Ole Miss football team is vaccinated.
#50. Health Care · #43. Education · #49. Economy · #48. Infrastructure · #44. Opportunity ~ Hey, thought they would be last in education.
SC/WV/AZ/AL/LA/AK/NM = bottom 7 in education ~ yes Virginia, NM dead last 😮
Mississippi #49 in Overall Rankings ~ Louisiana #50