The World Health Organization (WHO) is not advocating the use of anti-parasitic drug Ivermectin for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19, its country representative told House lawmakers on Tuesday.
According to WHO Representative to the Philippines Rabindra Abeyasinghe, prescribing Ivermectin without statistically significant evidence of its efficacy against COVID-19 is "harmful" since it would give "false confidence" to the public.
This comes as several lawmakers, during a House health committee hearing on Tuesday, pushed for the use of the medicine for COVID-19 treatment and prevention.
"The issue with the Ivermectin is that based on initial study and the currently available data, it is not strong enough for us to advocate the use of Ivermectin for treatment of COVID or prevention of COVID", Abeyasinghe said.
"We looked closely at the European Medical Association, they concluded the same thing, we looked at the U.S. FDA (Food and Drug Administration), they concluded the same thing…What they are recommending is that we look at carefully-planned, controlled clinical trials to have proof that Ivermectin works", he added.
"That is the global evidence that we have, not only from WHO, but also from very stringent regulation authorities and medicines authority both in Europe and in North America", he further said.
The WHO official noted that an initial report, which originated from a study in Australia, was made on Ivermectin's efficacy to suppress the development of the virus that causes COVID-19.
"They use the concentration of Ivermectin that is a magnitude higher, meaning almost 1,000 times higher than what is normally used in humans", he said.
"And at this concentration in the laboratory, it showed that Ivermectin can suppress the virus replication now it had very small scale studies following this initial", he added.
But in countries where Ivermectin is recommended for human consumption, Abeyasinghe said "the results of the Ivermectin trial were statistically not significant".
