There's a new peer reviewed ivermectin study out just this month that looks promising:
"...In a citywide ivermectin program with prophylactic, optional ivermectin use for COVID-19,
ivermectin was associated with significantly reduced COVID-19 infection, hospitalization, and death rates from COVID-19."
https://www.cureus.com/articles/821...3128-subjects-using-propensity-score-matching
my thoughts on this
- at this point, one study by itself means nothing
- can the deworming action of Ivermectin explain the effect? Brazil is not exactly a first-world country; they may profit from Ivermectin, but if you don't have worms, you won't
- how peer-reviewed is Cureus really?
On this last point:
The Cureus peer review philosophy is "peer review not peer reject."
Nevertheless, unlike nearly all other journals, Cureus emphasizes post publication review
[...]
John R. Adler, Jr., M.D. says:
[Founder, CEO, Editor-in-Chief of Cureus]
However, the Cureus model skirts this issue to some extent by virtue of the fact our journal is willing to publish all credible/plausible medical science that is presented in good faith, and then only AFTER publication sort out what is quality/important via our SIQ crowd sourcing tool, i.e. by design peer rejection is not a big part of our review process.
This means you can't really rely on their peer review: they say it's peer-reviewed, but it really isn't.
They'll publish anything that looks good at first glance.
You need to read the comments on the study; I did, and there are several red flags mentioned in those.
Some words on the business model of Cureus:
A typical medical journal, as would be indexed in Medline (Cureus isn't) would have a specialty, and a staff of editors and reviewers who are authorities in that field, and whose reputation rides on their journal. They'd select only papers that are good and relevant, and due to limited space in a quarterly journal, reject a lot.
Cureus has no specialty. They publish everything, and they charge most new authors a $245 "editing fee", and it's unclear what that does. They crowd-source their peer review by emailing review requests to a large number of people, expect a fast turnaround, and so these reviews vary greatly in quality. Few papers are rejected: I've seen a number that says about half, but I haven't found anyone who said they got rejected after paying the fee. Once the paper has undergone this sham review where nothing gets rejected, they publish it, and then try to sell you advertising for the paper you just published.
Cureus also has no proper "impact factor", which is a rating that shows the reputation of a journal. For an academic, a publication in a journal without an impact factor does not add to your reputation.
Unlike a traditional journal, Cureus isn't after reputation, they're after money, via publishing as many papers as cheaply as possible, because their revenue source are the authors.
Not surprisingly, retraction watch shows instances of faked peer reviews, and of brazen copy&paste plagiarism that made it through their "peer review":
Elkhouly, a medical resident at St. Francis Medical Center, in Trenton, N.J., has lost five papers from the journal Cureus over a rather curious (ahem) domestic arrangement. According to the journal, Elkhouly used his unnamed wife as a peer reviewer on the articles, [..]
The journal Cureus is retracting three articles by a mashup of authors from Pakistan and the United States for plagiarism,
Two faked reviewer accounts (co-opting the names of well known neurosurgeons) seemed to have been created by the submitting author due to their similarity in name and comments.
Other journals sometimes have retractions, too, but Cureus having to retract for these reasons shows serious problems in their review process.