As the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority settled several court applications on Tuesday 6 April to provide wider access to ivermectin for the treatment of Covid-19, the country’s infectious disease specialists insisted that this was not the right way to do it.
“It has also expressed concern on the sufficiency of the evidence regarding its safety and efficacy in the treatment of human beings with Covid-19 symptoms. Without the required evidence, and without an application, Sahpra cannot register ivermectin to prevent or treat Covid-19. “It cannot be left entirely to treating clinicians to decide whether medicine is safe and efficacious. This puts clinicians and the public in an invidious position. The role of a clinician treating a patient is to decide if an intervention has benefit for the individual patient, given their particular circumstances.
Ivermectin is an anti-parasitic drug. It has been registered in SA for the treatment of a skin condition and is used elsewhere to treat river blindness and other diseases caused by parasites in humans. Dasoo, the convenor of the Progressive Health Forum and convenor of the Science Reference Group for Covid-19, also supported the application not to allow wider access to ivermectin.
Dasoo argued in papers before court that the compassionate use programme developed by Sahpra for ivermectin access was not justified by the evidence before it and was irrational.Steve Swart from the ACDP said in a statement that the new court order gave doctors the freedom to prescribe ivermectin without having to apply to Sahpra to do so. Compounding pharmacists and doctors can compound ivermectin for human use.
These trials have separately shown a decrease in viral load and an improvement in markers doctors use to measure inflammation, faster times to hospital discharge and faster clinical recovery, as well as a 75% reduction in mortality rates. In the most recent review conducted by the National Essential Medicines List Therapeutic Guidelines Sub-Committee on Covid-19 , only two randomised control trials out of 171 publications could provide any analysable information on the use of ivermectin for prevention of Covid-19.
On 4 March 2021, an article was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association detailing the latest clinical trial to test whether ivermectin worked as a treatment for mild Covid-19.
You could have made a difference to many peoples lives by giving us unbiased views and reviews from thousands of doctors experiences and meta analysis, who have used Ivermectin successfully.
Your journalists really do have a problem with ivermectin don’t they?
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