They have been investigating all sorts of protease inhibitors since the start--which is why HIV drugs and antivirals have/are being tested. Early on they thought a "japanese tamiflu" like product could help but I'm unclear where that research went. Right now only remdesivir is approved--and even its benefits are not massive.
Early on before approval remdesivir was "not recommended" by the WHO and FDA--not as part of any conspiracy but because the data was not in. FDA approved and WHO still did not as far as I can tell. Remdesivir was a repurposed Ebola drug--just as many other candidates being tested were originally being used for HIV/Hep C. When they find something that looks good in a test tube--they test it regardless of its original use.
Ivermectin works against COVID in computer models and a
test tube. Which is why researchers even bothered investigating it--they thought of it--not the current advocates of it. Going from computer model / test tube to mouse to human--many drugs are abandoned along the way as they just don't translate--its not a conspiracy -- just the way it is. The extreme example is you can use pure alcohol to kill E coli or staph on a slide but there is no way to effectively get the alcohol in the blood to target only the E coli. It will affect more and you'd be dead before you could get the level needed to kill bacteria. It doesn't appear that ivermectin is hitting critical levels in humans to be effective. One of the articles you referenced even mentioned the need to improve delivery. The linked article talks about the poor oral availability of ivermectin and points to this paper on potential ways to improve.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7539925/We hypothesize that micro- and nanotechnology-based systems for the pulmonary delivery of ivermectin may offer opportunities for accelerating the clinical re-purposing of this “enigmatic drug” in the context of SARS-CoV-2 infection, as recent advances in pharmaceutical technology and nanomaterials can be applied to the treatment of pulmonary infections [[24], [25], [26],[36], [37], [38], [39], [40]]. Despite the challenges faced in developing these drug delivery carriers, and uncertainty with regard to the efficacy of ivermectin, it indeed presents promising potential. In an optimistic scenario, new drug dosage forms may not only contribute to mitigate SARS-CoV-2 infection, but also be effective against other emerging viral diseases.
No one is saying it works now, today as is for CoV-2.
Then you can look to human studies and the data are lacking, so they continue look for other options and in this case create a new one. Again, the old cheap steroid dexamethasone is a game changer which is why they use it. Its the same process for everything--there is no widespread cabal.
And the zerohedge guy can't even keep his story straight. He was saying Ivermectin didn't show value because it needed to be tested as a prophylactic. Then he says this is just the same thing but somehow will be able to pass trials. They are not recommending you use this as a prophylactic--this is a short-term regimen of daily pills that can fight the virus early
after diagnosis (like Tamilfu). They simply need to see the outcome of the trials. The conspiracy clan never self corrects but is just prepping to say that if the new drug works--its the same thing as ivermectin, chemical structure and clinical trials be damned. This is also dangerous setting up a false equivalence to further even more deranged and misinformed thinking down the road.
