Evidence on the efficacy of ivermectin for COVID-19: another story of apples and oranges.

The antiparasitic ivermectin has received particular attention as a potential treatment option for COVID-19. Understandably, there is high interest in repurposing an approved inexpensive drug, readily available as an oral formulation. However, Garegnani et al 1 recently pointed out the proportion of misleading information on ivermectin for COVID-19 published in journals, on preprint servers and websites. A relevant number of systematic reviews report the use of methodological tools such as assessing bias at study level with the Cochrane Risk of Bias tool or grading the certainty of the evidence following the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) approach, thus suggesting a putative high credibility. Indeed, some published findings seem impressive. A …