A COVID-19 political remedy to worry about

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Previously, I discuss how retracted scientific papers had a powerful impact on shaping public policy and opinion.

Unreliable and inconsistent findings in a scientific paper leads it to be removed or retracted from publishing academic journals.

I then discuss the scientific truth behind the use of Ivermectin to treat COVID-19 disease.

Here I explore political, individual, and scientific lessons from the Ivermectin craze that can help us combat a future pandemic.

A lesson for the government

Despite no evidence, many Latin governments included Ivermectin in COVID-19 treatment guidelines in early May 2020. Contributing to this hype, many religious and indigenous groups promoted the spread of misinformation, referring to Ivermectin as “salvation”.

This has led to self-medication, illegal Ivermectin trafficking, runs on livestock suppliers, and increased COVID-19 death toll.

Sadly, this has happened despite warnings from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO/WHO), Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) against using Ivermectin for COVID-19 outside of clinical trials.

Even political figures jumped on this wagon and preached Ivermectin as COVID-19 protection more than social distance, masks, and vaccinations.

An example is that of the Brazilian government, where contrarian president Jair Bolsonaro repeatedly promoted unproven COVID-19 treatments.

Disconnection between evidence-based medicine and latin governments

The Brazilian federal government launched an early COVID-19 treatment campaign distributing a cocktail of unproven drugs, or “covid kit”. Ivermectin was included.

 The Ministry of Health and many other “doctors” endorsed these combinations despite having absolutely no scientific evidence that they worked.

Clearly, it was not the public health they had in mind but likely their political position.

Providing a false sense of relief to the public kills two birds with one stone. It allows politicians to escape their responsibility while making the public feel protected.

There is a clear disconnection between evidence-based medicine and public government health policies, particularly in Latin America.  

A viewpoint article published in The Lancet Regional Health Americas journal by Drs. Leonardo Furlan and Bruno Caramelli provides advice on actions to take.

The authors mention the need to maintain/implement truly effective protective measures and abolish “unscientific, distracting, and potentially harmful interventions”.

They also mention how Latin governments desperately need to:

1. expand and strengthen evidence-based medicine teaching for health professionals
2. ensure all clinicians adhere to peer-reviewed scientific studies or evidence-based practice
3. fund and promote educational interventions to better their citizens’ understanding to make rational and informed health choices

A lesson for each of us  

However, like a virus, the misinformation about using Ivermectin to treat COVID-19 has spread globally.

In the US, the “Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care (FLCCC) Alliance”, a“medical” organization created in 2020, preached Ivermectin as an early COVID-19 treatment with no scientific basis.

As waves of infections rise, pro-Ivermectin organizations continue to market Ivermectin as a false panacea in several countries. This has been exacerbated by influencers that have also promoted using Ivermectin for COVID-19.

Unfortunately, these acclamations affect the thing that matters most: patient health.

The science is clear as water, however. Ivermectin does not prevent nor diminish COVID-19, and instead, it may worsen its condition.

We make the smart choices

Doctors and government officials may have advised using Ivermectin due to a lack of evidence for or against its use. However, now there is no such excuse. There is evidence, and it is publicly accessible.

Let us do some simple arithmetic and insert ourselves into this equation.

As obtained from Our World in Data, 6.72 million people worldwide have died due to COVID-19. Now imagine 5% of this population did not follow any proven safety protocol. Rather, they took an acclaimed COVID-19 drug , like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, as their government and “doctor” suggested. In this case, it is clear from peer-reviewed scientific studies these drugs did nothing to improve the hypotheitocal health of 336,000 people.

Their fate may have ended like the conservative radio host who recommended taking Ivermectin and died of covid-19.

That is a lot of hypothetical deaths that could have been prevented by following proper scientific guidance (See Figure 1).

In the end, we need to dig for the scientific truth and not be sheep led by scientific misinformation.

Our health is our responsibility, even if it means making time to search peer-reviewed papers and asses the data and scientific conclusion accepted by experts in the field.

A lesson for the scientific community

Lastly, I believe the freely accessible subgroup meta-analysis paper published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases by Andrew Hill and colleagues on February 2022 does an excellent job providing the take-home message for the scientific community to address future potential bias and medical fraud.

The authors found that the significance of Ivermectin treatment was solely dependent on largely poor-quality studies ( including some of the retracted articles as previously discussed.

The authors suggest:

1. rigorous quality assessments
2. sharing of patient-level data (one of the main problems found in the studies done with the Surgisphere clinical data)
3. efforts to avoid publication bias for registered studies for accurate clinical treatment conclusions

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