Everybody knows that ivermectin is horse paste/dewormer, don't they? There is probably no medical treatment from the last three years that marks out any advocate for taking it to treat COVID-19 as a crank, anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist, or other deplorable.
Just in case you have forgotten, here is the memorable US FDA tweet:
This tweet led to the de-platforming and demonetising of famous podcaster/evolutionary biologist Brett Weinstein and attempts to demonetise Joe Rogan for taking the drug.
A campaign that included social media posts and letters to the Federation of State Medical Boards and the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy followed. Memos telling doctors not to prescribe were issued, threats were made, physicians lost their jobs, and ivermectin was withdrawn from most US pharmacies. Ivermectin advocates Dr Pierre Kory and Dr Paul Marik and the organisation they founded, the FLCCC, have been hounded as quacks ever since (notably by the infamous Dr Gorski) despite their highly distinguished careers as intensivists before their advocacy.
Marik, Dr. Mary Tally Bowden and Dr. Robert Apter sued the FDA, arguing that the campaign violated the Administrative Procedure Act by interfering with their ability to practice. Last week, the court ruled in their favour, stating that the FDA is not a physician and does not have the authority to tell people what medications they can and cannot take nor dictate the permissible off-label uses of a drug to prescribing physicians. The judge's decision is consistent with a recent ruling in Malaysia that allowed doctors to prescribe the medication for COVID-19 treatment. The anticipated ruling from the US Fifth Circuit stemmed from the FDA lawyer's admission that the FDA may have overreached during the case.
A few misinformed tweets celebrating these cases have allowed the 'fact-checkers' to swing into action, debunking (correctly) the notion that these rulings show ivermectin to be 'safe and effective'. They do not, but this all rather misses the point; the FDA's campaign had the desired effect, in the prevention of physicians offering early treatment protocols to their patients, of one of the safest and most side-effect-free drugs in history, for which there was significant support from anecdotal and observational study evidence.
After a large observational study from Peru was published, ivermectin recently made the alternative news headlines. The study had been a preprint but was (un)surprisingly suppressed for two years. This study concluded:
"Reductions in excess deaths over a period of 30 days after peak deaths averaged 74% in the 10 states with the most intensive IVM use. As determined across all 25 states, these reductions in excess deaths correlated closely with the extent of IVM use (p<0.002). During four months of IVM use in 2020, before a new president of Peru restricted its use, there was a 14-fold reduction in nationwide excess deaths and then a 13-fold increase in the two months following the restriction of IVM use. Notably, these trends in nationwide excess deaths align with WHO summary data for the same period in Peru."
Observational studies are often considered less significant than double-blind, randomised controlled trials, considered the "gold standard." However, a recent report on the effectiveness of early non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) by the Royal Society gained widespread attention from the media and influential figures like Sir Jeremy Farrar despite being primarily based on observational studies. This report has been criticised (1,2,3,4).
If you can recall the early days of the pandemic, on April 16th 2020, the WHO announced that there were no effective early treatment protocols, which transformed into the advice across Western governments that you should stay at home until you turned blue when you could go to a hospital, where you had a very high chance in the early days of being killed by intubation, by staff terrified of catching the virus. You could not, in the UK, phone your GP and get either of the early treatment protocols that some private US doctors were treating vulnerable patients with (and in many other countries, too): hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin & zinc, or some ivermectin.
Anybody who has been following the early treatment protocol question will be very well versed in the allegation that Dr Anthony Fauci deliberately suppressed chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine-based protocols in order to obtain EUAs for the vaccines and remdesivir via two extremely biased trials, where only these drugs, without the full protocol, were given to already very ill patients (i.e. late, not early, in the progression of the illness), in doses at levels so toxic that patients died.
The protocol had been established by Prof Didier Raoult and the late Dr Vladimir Zelenko, and probably the best documentation of its use is Dr Brian Tyson & Dr George Fareed's book ‘Overcoming the COVID Darkness: How Two Doctors Successfully Treated 7000 Patients’ (2022). Successful treatment also forms part of John Leake & Dr Peter A McCullough's ‘The Courage To Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalisation and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex’ (Counterplay Books, 2022), and this book also covers early treatment protocol suppression as does, probably most famously, Robert F Kennedy Jr's ‘The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health’ (Skyhorse, 2021).
The hydroxychloroquine-based protocols, suppressed early, largely rest on anecdotal evidence rather than large observational studies or RCTs. Reliance on such evidence, however, is not the case with ivermectin, another off-label drug that has allegedly been suppressed by profit-seeking Big Pharma in an urge to maintain the EUA status of the vaccines and remdesevir and also to obtain EUAs for the antivirals paxlovid and molnupiravir. Such malfeasance is, very much, the topic of Dr Pierre Kory's and Jenna McCarthy's recently published book, 'The War on Ivermectin' (Skyhorse, 2023). With apologies to McCarthy, the book's voice very much belongs to Kory, and for brevity, I'll refer to Kory alone from now on.
The first section of the book establishes Kory's bona fides as a highly experienced pulmonologist and intensivist and those of his illustrious colleague, intensivist Prof Paul E Marik, with whom he would go on to form the FLCCC (the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance). Before COVID-19, Kory's work had included offering expert witness testimony for the trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd.
At the beginning of the pandemic, patients were being admitted to the ICU, and like any good doctor, Kory was keen to find an effective means of treating them. At first, steroid-based treatments were attempted, which developed into the MATH protocol, combining Methylprednisone, Ascorbic Acid, Thiamine and Heparin. The protocol was adopted at several other hospitals.
The book's second section begins with an admission that Kory was taken in by the trials that purportedly showed that hydroxychloroquine was ineffective. Other researchers were testing already approved drugs, and Marik became very interested in some published preliminary successes with the antiparasitic drug ivermectin. Trials indicated that the number needed to treat (NNT), a measure of a therapeutic's potency, could be as low as two (for every two severely ill patients treated with ivermectin, one who would otherwise have died would be safe). This treatment looked like the COVID-19 Holy Grail and something that might end the pandemic. Exciting data was arriving from Peru from Dr Juan Chamie, also the lead author of the suppressed study mentioned at the beginning of this article. Unfortunately, a change in government in Peru would later disband this program. Observational studies were further indicating that ivermectin may be effective as a prophylactic.
Thus began experimentation by Kory and Marik (and others) to find the optimal treatment regime for ivermectin. Kory published a preprint and was invited by Senator Ron Johnson to join several other scientists for various Zoom meetings alongside Dr Peter McCullough, Dr Harvey Risch, Dr J Bhattacharya (of Great Barrington Declaration fame,) Dr Brian Tyson and Dr George Fareed., culminating with his famous Senate testimony on ivermectin (where he overreached a little on prophylaxis and transmission). The video of this event and Kory's testimony has, predictably, been removed from YouTube, but Rumble has it.
Evidence continues to build, and at the time Kory wrote his book, 95 studies from 1023 scientists, including 134,554 patients from 27 countries, showed ivermectin's efficacy. Seventy-eight of those trials have been published in peer-reviewed medical journals.1 Chapter 19 of the book collects together all this evidence. These are staggering numbers. Whilst treatment with ivermectin has been suppressed in highly vaccinated Western countries, this is not the case worldwide.
The positive anecdotal stories, observational studies and a few RCTs that came in early were not to the liking of Big Pharma or Fauci. The story here is reasonably well-known, and the allegation is that Merck's off-label drug, on which there was no chance of making any profit, had to be suppressed in order to obtain emergency use authorisations for the use of monoclonal antibodies and antivirals, including paxlovid and molnupiravir.
Paxlovid has since been widely used, though it is falling out of favour now. It has significant toxicity, contraindications and a vast list of common drugs it may interact with. Molnupiravir has been proven to be neither very safe nor effective, and the manner in which it was approved has been the subject of several articles (1,2,3,4,5,6,7) in the British Medical Journal. By contrast, ivermectin is one of the safest drugs in the world, so much so that its discoverers won a Nobel Prize.
We're getting ahead of ourselves, though. In order to establish the use of these repurposed drugs, ivermectin had to be shown to be neither safe nor effective. Kory became suspicious when he received mysterious last-minute notifications that already peer-reviewed papers were being pulled from publication (including one of his own) on suspiciously spurious grounds. Much of this is detailed in the book.
Kory includes a chapter on the notorious story of Dr Tess Lawrie and Dr Andrew Hill. If you've followed the story of ivermectin, you will be very familiar with this story; if not, here is Lawrie telling the story herself (on Odysee, not YouTube, naturally):
Kory lays out a general strategy of blocking the publication of favourable results in scientific journals, selectively publishing negative results and the planting ghostwritten articles. In addition, getting as many of the already published studies and metastudies retracted as possible was necessary, thereby creating doubt. This disreputable strategy has been very successful, and the reasons for retraction make quite some reading: plagiarism, data manipulation, lack of peer review, poor study design, conflict of interest, duplicate publication, data falsification, multiple errors, publication bias, irregularities in the peer review process, inappropriate statistical analysis, undeclared conflicts of interest, and failure to disclose funding. I'll leave it to the reader to judge how spurious some of these reasons might be. It would be fair to say that Kory is not impressed.
According to Kory, the second attack vector was the manufacture of counterfeit science by commissioning trials with flawed methodologies biased toward predetermined results or "designing trials to fail". He claims that a combination of the following list of misdemeanours is to be found in the ‘Big Six’ trials: Lopez-Medina, I-Tech, TOGETHER, COVID-OUT, ACTIV-6 (400), and ACTIV-6 (600):
"Not excluding subjects taking ivermectin from the control/placebo groups and/or giving the placebo group ivermectin."
Enrolling people who are at very low risk of serious illness.
Administering the lowest dose possible.
Administering ivermectin on an empty stomach (which is not recommended).
Underdosing obese patients.
Withholding trial data for long periods.
"Enrolling patients many days into the disease, after their trajectory was already set."
Changing the rules in the middle of the game (e.g. changing the endpoint).
Refusing to share patient or source data.
In disputing the effectiveness of ivermectin, two of the ‘big six’ trials, in particular, stand out: the NIH trial and the TOGETHER trial. These trials were and still are cited more than others in the media to disparage anybody advocating for the drug. With the NIH trial, Kory argues that it was poorly designed and biased: too small, underdosed, not blinded, and the endpoint was changed from 28 to 14 days (this was also done in the one trial that led to the approval of remdesivir)2. With the TOGETHER trial, he argues that it was again poorly designed: improper data analysis, underdosed, not blinded, and there were financial conflicts of interest with the lead investigator.3
I lack the knowledge and skills to judge with certainty which side is correct on all the claims and counterclaims here. In terms of the sheer bulk of evidence, there are vastly more RCTs, observational studies, and meta-analyses alleging that ivermectin is effective than the few alleging it isn't. That decides nothing; science is not decided by consensus, but my gut feeling favours ivermectin after reading the book.
Putting that question aside, I despair at the cosy relationship between public health authorities, regulators, the WHO and Big Pharma. If you've read any of these books, you will be familiar with the many and various dirty tricks pulled by Big Pharma, the deep corruption, the bribery and the revolving doors between companies and regulatory bodies: Ben Goldacre's 'Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients'; Gerald Posner's 'Pharma - Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America'; or Billy Kenber's 'Sick Money: The Truth About the Global Pharmaceutical Industry'.
You would have to be exceptionally naive to think that patient safety is the number one priority where billions of dollars are at stake. As Kory puts it:
"In a review paper published in JAMA, researchers found that of the twenty-six Pharma companies they included in their analysis, 85 per cent had paid financial penalties for illegal activities totalling 33 billion dollars in the years from 2003 to 2016. If you taxed yourself to come up with a list of one hundred illegal, immoral, or just plain shameful things drug companies might do to make a buck, I'd bet my last dime they've done every single one. And keep in mind, these are just the crimes they've been caught doing and convicted for. What do you suppose the odds are that this is the full criminal list?"
Moving on from the medical information, the third section of the book talks about politics, censorship and personal attacks. Following Kory's Senate testimony, he lost his ICU job. He is relatively sanguine about this, as it allowed him to focus his energies on the FLCCC and set up a private practice. The nefarious behaviour of the Trusted News Initiative and the Stanford Internet Observatory are covered, as well as how this resulted in the removal of his videos from YouTube, being banned from Twitter, and attempted demonetisation. In all this, he is in the company of many other dissident medics and scientists, who are mentioned and will now be familiar names to many.
One of the most compelling chapters can be found near the end of the book. The North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), with a population of over 231 million people, achieved "a feat I consider to be one of the greatest public health achievements in history". Beginning in August 2020, after seeing positive results from an experiment in Agra, a government team tested heavily, contact traced, and distributed ivermectin medicine kits to contacts and patients for prophylaxis and treatment.
Cases remained low until the Delta variant surge in April 2021, which brought a massive influx of migrant workers to UP. Despite a high infection rate, UP's death rate remained among the lowest. Case counts rapidly declined within weeks. However, media reports suppressed the role of ivermectin in UP's success and instead credited their testing and vaccination programs. The WHO also deliberately neglected to mention ivermectin in reports praising UP's response.
In September 2021, a news report showed that 67 of UP's 75 districts had not reported a new COVID case in 24 hours, and 33 districts had no active cases. Despite 226,000 tests, only 11 new cases were found, a positivity rate of 0.004%. Yet, UP's success received little global attention. A 132-page report on UP's response also failed to give ivermectin proper credit.
Due to suppression by Indian and Western media and public health organisations keen to promote vaccine use, ivermectin's efficacy remained buried, and UP's achievement went largely unrecognised. Most have never heard about it. Similar results have been reported from smaller populations in Peru (as mentioned), Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and the Philippines. You didn't hear that on the BBC, did you?
Kory is angry. Properly pissed off. When you read about UP, it is easy to see why. He believes hundreds of thousands of people in the US and millions worldwide have lost their lives due to the malfeasance of Big Pharma and the corruption of the WHO, public health authorities and governments. I think he has a case.
Reading the book makes me angry, too. I am angry with myself for believing the lies for so long and getting injected with useless, unnecessary and harmful vaccines. Angry with my government and our public health officials. I am angry that if I wanted to take ivermectin, I would have to get it from a questionable overseas supplier. Would I take it knowing what I do now? Yes, absolutely, because the chances of it harming me are infinitesimally small, and I am sufficiently persuaded from the book that there is a reasonable possibility of it helping. The cost-benefit analysis is clear.
Despite the details in the book triggering me, I enjoyed reading it and learned much. That said, it is not the best-written book on the pandemic I have read. There are plenty of references, but not an abundance; when challenging the mono-narrative, an excess does not harm your case. Also, if you watch the videos above, you will be struck by Kory's somewhat pugilistic style. This anger comes across quite strongly in the book, too. There is, justifiably, an element of 'wronged man'; I understand that this is a deliberate authorial decision between Kory and his co-writer, Jenna McCarthy, but it didn't always hit the right note for me. These are relatively minor quibbles. After reading this book, would I trust Kory with my healthcare? Absolutely.
At the end of the day, we must remember that so many high-profile hands-on physicians advocated for this treatment (and other protocols) for their patients without any clear significant financial benefits and at great risk to their credibility and career prospects. Any reasonable person must surely ask 'why?' if there is nothing to see here. The devastating effect it has had on so many careers and personal lives is covered in the book's last few chapters.
When those in charge still cannot acknowledge that ivermectin is safe, and may indeed have some efficacy as a treatment for COVID-19, then it is hard to argue that this is a cock up. The best that can perhaps be said is that public health authorities were so convinced that vaccines were the solution and that this solution could only work if everybody were vaccinated that they suppressed any consideration of early treatment protocols. There have been a few mealy-mouthed partial admissions that this was the case. Utilitarianism wins out over deontology, evidencing the tyranny of our increasingly authoritarian technocracies.
It can never now be decided precisely to what degree ivermectin was effective against the earlier strains. That is undoubtedly how governments, public health authorities, national and global, and Big Pharma will want to leave it (and how they want to bury it). If ivermectin and other early treatment protocols were proven effective, then it is hard to avoid the conclusion that a crime against humanity has indeed been committed.
This data is drawn from this site: COVID-19 early treatment: real-time analysis of 3,293 studies. The front page shows comparative data (look at the eye-watering cost of Fauci’s baby, remdesevir (a.k.a. ‘run-death-is-near’). Specific data on ivermectin can be found via the left-hand menu.
A detailed analysis of the flaws of the NIH trial:
A staggering amount of research on the TOGETHER trial:
Very detailed - great overview!