https://trialsitenews.com/ivermectin-could-turn-covid-19-around-we-need-to-find-out-if-it-works/"Nothing To Offer The Infected
With no approved early treatment, symptomatic patients are told to hydrate, take palliatives and quarantine. That works mostly for young, healthy bodies that spend lots of time in the sun. But a week into the infection, too many other patients show up in Dr. Charles Thompson’s emergency room in Columbia, S.C. These include patients with low Vitamin D levels – even young ones — or pre-existing conditions like diabetes, hypertension or cardiovascular disease. “They are clutching at their chest, gasping for breath and begging you to save them,” Thompson, a pulmonologist, told me. “I’m sick of watching people die this way. It’s a travesty.”
Why? Because it’s unnecessary. Since late February,
Thompson has treated perhaps a thousand outpatients with hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, zinc and supplements, to which, in May, he added ivermectin. Just one of his patients has been hospitalized — for COVID-related diarrhea. A voracious reader of the medical literature, Thompson is in awe of the “elegant” way that ivermectin functions, working, he and others have learned, both in early and later COVID stages.
While the virus is multiplying in early infection, ivermectin is believed to inhibit a key receptor that opens the door for viral proteins to enter the nucleus of cells and replicate. Later on, the drug may inhibit the virus from adhering to CD147 receptors on red blood cells and forming clumps, the process that can lead to dangerous clots and stroke. Thompson is among a dozen practitioners I have spoken with who believe that hydroxychloroquine has been maligned and miscast – it is effective and safe, they hold. Many see ivermectin as an unheralded up-and-comer. Yandy Palenzuela-Rodriguez, 31, is a physician assistant in internal medicine who worked with Dr. Rajter at Broward Health Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale, Fl., when COVID emerged.
“Early on, we saw less of his patients went to ICU and RCU” — intensive and respiratory care units, he said. “More of his patients went home quicker.” As with too many front-line health workers, Palenzuela-Rodriguez, 31, got COVID in July. That’s when his pulse oxygen level plummeted, and he interrupted Rajter’s dinner with a call for help. He took ivermectin and experienced what his own patients had. “The big kick I felt in terms of improvement was after the ivermectin,” he said.
Works In Late Disease
Significantly, Rajter and Palenzuela-Rodriguez were seeing ivermectin work in hospitalized patients already ravaged by the virus. Imagine the suffering and money that could be saved if such a drug was used early, as it was for
a woman in Chicago who awoke on day 4 of COVID symptoms feeling “like there was an elephant on my chest.” The inhaler and anticoagulant from an ER visit weren’t helping, she told me, and she struggled to breathe. She started ivermectin.
“Literally eight hours later, by that night, I was breathing normal. I’m not exaggerating,” said the woman, who works in pharmaceuticals and asked that her name not be used.
“It was a life-saving treatment for me.” “You can avoid the entire cascade of inflammatory changes,” Rajter told me. “They don’t even get admitted to the hospital.” Some, but not enough, U.S. doctors are quietly using ivermectin for COVID, often combining it with hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin and zinc.
“When someone’s sick, there’s more likely a synergy between these agents,” said Dr. Steven Phillips of Wilton, Ct. Some patients got better on antibiotics alone, Phillips said, while others told him ivermectin was a “game changer.”
“Obviously, more studies need to be done,” said Dr. Richard Horowitz of Hyde Park, N.Y., who has treated about 30 COVID patients. “But patients are responding well to the drug in my practice, and it has been safe and well tolerated.” Pre-COVID, Lyme disease specialists like Phillips and Horowitz knew both ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for their roles in treating the effects of tick-borne illness. But few doctors in the U.S. have such experience or willingness to treat. Which is why a report on NPR’s WHYY on the excitement about ivermectin was headlined: “So why hasn’t anyone heard of it?”
Ivermectin’s Downside: It’s Cheap
“Its major ‘disadvantage’ is its low cost and general availability,” Dr. Jose Natalio Redondo, a hospital executive in the Dominican Republic, told me. “There is no major revenue for those large pharmaceutical industries to invest in new research and production of this drug.” Poorer countries, without the resources or self-importance of the U.S., are trying the drug, with success reported, for example, in Iraq, where a small study found “significantly lower” length of hospital stay in ivermectin patients. In Brazil, some municipalities have distributed “COVID kits” with hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, and the minister of health has authorized its use. Patients are also taking the drug in Peru, Bolivia and India, where the state of Uttar Pradash has sanctioned use for treatment and prevention.
Its profit picture aside, ivermectin’s similarities to hydroxychloroquine, as safe old drugs with antiviral potential, are also working against it. After President Trump endorsed HCQ for COVID, the drug was caught up in a political, media-fueled firestorm that hammered away at findings of failure and ignored promising reports. Although many studies were riddled with flaws – using the drug too late, as in a Veterans Affairs study, and drawing on unverifiable data that forced a Lancet retraction – its image of failure lingers.
This may explain why the Rajters’ observational study, written with four colleagues, was rejected by two journals. A third journal put it through three peer reviews, all of them positive, but then sought a fourth reviewer, who asked for changes. It has been resubmitted. Dr. Peter Hibberd, an emergency room physician in Florida, said: “The bottom line is patients were getting phenomenal results yet no one would accept his publication.”"
