Ivermectin is an old anti-parasitic drug that also has some antiviral action against RNA viruses such as covid. A recent FL study showed dramatic improvements in very serious covid patients given this treatment, to the extent of halving their risk of death from 80% to 40%, often with very rapid recoveries in 1-2 days from treatment.
Good news certainly, but perhaps more interesting is a proposed theory about why this works so well, since after all antivirals like remdesivir, HCQ(?), etc are generally thought to work by stopping the virus early on to allow one’s immune system to win the race against the virus before it became too widespread. Why would this work so well on late stage cases and not on sooner ones?
Briefly, the idea is that the blood clotting issues associated with covid (and that lead to lung and kidney damage, strokes, etc) are not, or not entirely, caused by the virus attacking the ACE2 receptors on the blood vessel walls (which could trigger clotting responses due to damaging these cells by the virus and the immune attack on them), but rather from the virus accidentally trigger an inadvertent immune clotting type response in the blood. Covid can also attach to CD147 receptors, while not as well as the more commonly mentioned ACE2 ones, but these CD147s are on many blood type cells and in very high numbers so the virus could bind to these and trigger clots to form once the virus was sufficiently widespread in the blood. Ivermectin binds well to these CD147s, suggesting it could break up clots formed this way and/or prevent this blood clotting mechanism.
This theory among other things is consistent with observed blood group effects on disease severity (type O does much better, less prone to this), as well as with the long delay and then sudden worsening of disease after a week (when viral levels reach a high enough point to trigger this blood response), and of course that those with poor circulation (old, diabetics, high blood pressure, obesity) would be more prone to clot formation and hence the dangerous consequences of that.