The Ministry of Health is reiterating today something we heard from ANSVSA last week after recommendations began to appear for the use of a medicine for animals, ivermectin, as a treatment against the Coronavirus, even preventively.
"Take medicines only on the doctor's recommendation!
Ivermectin is an antiparasitic drug used in both veterinary and human medicine.
Currently, there is no randomized trial* of ivermectin and COVID-19 published in a peer-reviewed journal that has had a clinical endpoint (symptoms, hospitalization, intubation, death) as the primary endpoint and has observed any benefit in about it.
Preclinical (animal) and clinical observational studies suggest that ivermectin may be useful in the treatment of patients with COVID-19, but these data need to be confirmed by other studies.
Taking medicines without a doctor's recommendation can be harmful to health.
A drug once administered may produce beneficial effects, may have no effect, or may produce negative effects. The best way to find out what effects a treatment really has is to evaluate it in a randomized trial. More rigorously designed randomized trials are ongoing.
* In a randomized placebo-controlled trial half of the patients followed receive the treatment we are investigating and the other half (allocation being random) receives a placebo. Neither the researchers nor the patients know what they actually received until the end of the study period (what we call 'double-blind')."
