"Introduction
Ivermectin is a safe, cheap, well tolerated and widely used anti-parasitic drug that has been widely promoted and trialled as a treatment for COVID-19. There are various mechanisms by which ivermectin could have activity against SARS-CoV-2...
We aimed to determine whether ivermectin speeds recovery and reduces COVID-19 related hospital admission or death in people in the community, and in addition evaluated whether there was a longer-term effect on symptoms and function at 3, 6 and 12 months...
Trial Design
We assessed the effectiveness of ivermectin in the UK national, multi-centre, primary care, open-label, multi-arm, prospective adaptive Platform Randomised trial of Treatments in the Community for Pandemic and Epidemic Illnesses (PRINCIPLE), which opened on April 2, 2020, and closed to recruitment on July 1, 2022...
Results
... 11768 participants had been randomised of whom 2439 were allocated to ivermectin, 4359 to usual care alone, and 4970 to other treatments... At randomisation, median time from symptom onset was 5 (interquartile range 3–7) days...
Primary Outcomes
... Based on a bootstrap estimated median time to recovery of 16 days in the concurrent and eligible usual care SARS-CoV-2 positive population, the model-based estimated hazards ratio corresponds to an estimated 2·055 (0·999 to 3·06) fewer days in median time to first reported recovery for ivermectin relative to usual care...
... In the SARS-CoV-2 positive primary analysis population, there were 34/2157 (1.6%) COVID-19 related hospitalisations/deaths in the ivermectin group (33 hospitalisations, of whom 2 died, 1 death without hospitalisation), and 144/3256 (4.4%) in the usual care group (143 hospitalisations, of whom 11 died, 1 death without hospitalisation)."
© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The British Infection Association. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).