GEORGE NEWS - With the controversy about the use of Ivermectin against Covid-19 still raging, two recent scientific reviews have concluded that it is not effective in treating Covid-19, or in keeping you out of hospital, or as a prophylactic treatment.
Results of the reviews of trials done on the use of Ivermectin on Covid-19 patients were published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) by Chilean and Argentinian scientists in April.
The three scientists say that clinical evidence and systematic reviews on the use of Ivermectin for treating Covid-19 are misleading.
George Herald last week quoted Dr Rust Theron, an internal specialist at Mediclinic Durbanville, regarding a new meta-analysis published in the American Journal of Therapeutics that concludes that Ivermectin does have the ability to suppress virus multiplication in Covid-19 patients. The study Theron referred to found shorter periods of illness and lower mortality rates.
But according to the Argentinian scientists, the trials done to date had "serious limitations" in their methods, resulting in "very low certainty of the evidence". Among others, they say that the Ivermectin dose needed to achieve an effective plasma concentration to target the coronavirus would be too high - much higher than the maximum dosage approved by the FDA.
This, they believe, might have been part of the reasons why the World Health Organisation (WHO) excluded Ivermectin from its Solidarity Trial for repurposed drugs for Covid-19.
A second group of scientists from the US, Peru and Brazil also concluded after doing a systematic review of trials with Ivermectin that the drug did not reduce mortality, length of stay in hospital or viral clearance, measured against control groups in Covid-19 patients with mostly mild disease. Their article was published by Oxford University Press for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
'Delta variant easier to neutralise'
According to the head of the South African Medical Research Council (MRC), Prof Glenda Gray, all studies show that the Covid-19 vaccines are effective against the coronavirus and in vitro experiments demonstrated that the Delta variant is much easier to neutralise than the Beta. "That's good news for all the vaccines. All the vaccines will do better against the Delta variant," she said on an interview on the radio station RSG.
She further said after a single jab of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, there were persistent immune responses through at least eight months.
In vitro testing of the efficacy of the vaccines will be ongoing as the virus mutates.
Gray said if it should happen that someone receives a different vaccine for their follow-up vaccination than their first one, it would not be negative, but would in fact provide a wider immune response.
Times of Israel reported that Israel's health ministry released data on Monday 5 July showing that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine "appears to largely prevent hospitalisation and serious cases, but is significantly less effective against preventing the spread of the Delta variant of the coronavirus".
In May, the vaccine was 98,2% effective in preventing serious symptoms and hospitalisation, and in June it was 93%. The vaccine's effectiveness in preventing symptomatic Covid-19 has dropped by some 30% to 64%, given the spread of the Delta variant. The Delta variant is thought to be responsible for 90% of new cases in Israel over the past two weeks, reported Times of Israel.
Lambda variant shows vaccine breakthrough
The WHO has listed Lambda, first detected in December 2020 in Peru, as the latest 'variant of interest' (considered to be a potential emerging risk to global public health). According to the preprint of a study by a group of Chilean scientists, this variant has been reported in more than 20 countries as of June 2021. Their study looked at the infectivity and immune escape of Lambda and their results indicate increased infectivity and immune escape from neutralising antibodies elicited by the CoronaVac vaccine.
They stress that the data reinforces the idea that ongoing genomic surveillance and immunology studies are necessary to determine the impact of mutations in immune escape and vaccine breakthrough.
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