Dr. Pierre Kory on health: what the evidence says · JRE #1671
SUBJECT: HEALTH
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
In fact, we have now double-blind randomized control trials showing that the time to viral clearance is greatly shortened with ivermectin.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Some small early trials, including a 2021 double-blind, placebo-controlled pilot RCT (Chaccour et al., n=24), reported a shorter time to viral clearance with ivermectin, but these studies were small, methodologically limited, and not adequately powered to establish efficacy. The largest and most rigorous trial to date, the TOGETHER trial (Reis et al., NEJM 2022), a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled adaptive platform trial of 1,358 outpatients in Brazil, found no significant benefit of ivermectin on its primary clinical outcome (hospitalization or emergency observation for COVID-19 worsening: relative risk 0.90, 95% credible interval 0.70-1.16) and no significant effect on secondary outcomes. A 2022 Cochrane systematic review of 11 RCTs (3,409 participants), which graded evidence certainty using GRADE, found the effect of ivermectin on viral clearance in outpatients with mild COVID-19 was uncertain, with low- to very-low-certainty evidence not supporting a meaningful clinical effect. As of the most recent Cochrane update, the overall body of RCT evidence does not support ivermectin as an effective COVID-19 treatment, and it is not recommended by major health authorities for that purpose. Kory's claim overstates the strength and consistency of the trial evidence, citing early small studies while omitting larger, higher-quality trials that found no meaningful clinical benefit.