Ivermectin Only Effective for COVID in Areas Where the Worm Strongyloides Stercoralis is Present
This has been mentioned before, but it is worth repeating with a large headline to catch the attention of the ivermectin evangelists.
After all the hype about ivermectin, it turns out that ivermectin is only an effective treatment for COVID in areas of the world where the parasitic worm Strongyloides stercoralis is present in the soil.
Strongyloides is found in the soil in certain tropical and subtropical areas, such as India, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Brazil and Chile. See this map of Strongyloides prevalence (from this paper). People catch Strongyloides by contact with the soil which contains the worm's larvae.
This meta analysis ivermectin study found that ivermectin offered NO benefit against COVID mortality in areas where Strongyloides is absent, such as Europe, Australia, Canada and the US. Ivermectin only has a beneficial effect on COVID mortality in countries where the roundworm Strongyloides stercoralis is in the soil.
It seems that if you have Strongyloides living in your body (it usually lives in the intestines), this can complicate COVID infection. Ivermectin efficiently kills this parasite, so prevents the complications, and thus reduces COVID mortality. A single oral dose of around 15 mg of ivermectin is enough to eradicate Strongyloides from the body. Ref: here.
It's actually the corticosteroids (dexamethasone) used to treat COVID that are the issue: these steroids help prevent the COVID cytokine storm that damages the lungs, but corticosteroids also weaken immunity, which can allow Strongyloides in the gut to multiply and become disseminated throughout the body.
So for any hospitalised COVID patient receiving corticosteroid treatment in countries where Strongyloides stercoralis is endemic, ivermectin is a good treatment to prevent the risk of disseminated Strongyloides. But otherwise, the statistics show ivermectin has no benefit for COVID.
So there you have it: the meta analysis showed that ivermectin has no benefit in reducing COVID mortality in countries where Strongyloides is absent.
Having said that, I know some Western long COVID patients who report benefits from taking ivermectin regularly. This benefit is not related to parasitic worms like Strongyloides, as these long COVID patients report that the benefits cease when they stop taking ivermectin (and a single 15 mg dose is enough to kill parasitic worms once and for all).
I speculate that the benefits for long COVID might derive from the fact that ivermectin boosts antibody levels by mechanism linked to T-cells.