Evidence on the efficacy of ivermectin for COVID-19: another story of apples and oranges

The antiparasitic ivermectin has received particular attention as a potential treatment option for COVID-19. Understandably, there is high interest in repurposing an approved inexpensive drug, readily available as an oral formulation. However, Garegnani et al1 recently pointed out the proportion of misleading information on ivermectin for COVID-19 published in journals, on preprint servers and websites. A relevant number of systematic reviews report the use of methodological tools such as assessing bias at study level with the Cochrane Risk of Bias tool or grading the certainty of the evidence following the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) approach, thus suggesting a putative high credibility. Indeed, some published findings seem impressive. A recent meta-analysis by Bryant et al found that ivermectin reduces the risk of death by an average of 62% (RR 0.38, 95% CI 0.19 to 0.73) compared with no ivermectin in hospitalised patients.2 In...
Source: Evidence-Based Medicine - Category: Internal Medicine Authors: Tags: Open access, COVID-19 Letters Source Type: research