What Is The Truth About Ivermectin?

I first heard about the drug Ivermectin a little over a year ago in my research and reading about Covid.

It was a story out of Australia about a doctor in that country who stated that his work indicated that a triple therapy of Ivermectin, zinc and Doxycycline were all approved, available and cost-effective therapeutics that could be used to treat Covid effectively.

This is what Dr. Thomas Borody said about the use of Ivermectin and the other drugs in August of last year.

 "We have a therapy that can fight COVID-19. The medications have been around for 50 years, they are cheap, FDA and TGA approved and have an outstanding safety profile. Why are we just waiting around for a vaccine? To save lives we should be using whatever is safe and available right now. We could lead the world in this fight.

"Australia has some of the best medical and science people in the world -indeed the Ivermectin connection was first discovered by Dr. Kylie Wagstaff's team at Monash University in April. How long do we need to wait before Australian politicians get behind Australian medical science and use 'war room' tactics with safe and approved medications.

Bear in mind that Borody is no ordinary physician and researcher. He is famous for developing the cure for peptic ulcers using a triple antibiotic therapy that is used the world over and has been estimated to save countless lives and millions of dollars in health care costs.

I filed the name Ivermectin away as I had not seen it mentioned in any reports from U.S. doctors at the time.

In my research I found that Ivermectin is a drug typically used to treat parasitic tropical infections such as river blindness. There is also an animal version that is typically prescribed for the treatment of worms in animals.

The drug has been so successful in humans that the discoverers of the drug received the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 2015. It was the first time in over six decades the award was given for the treatment of an infectious disease.

Over the succeeding months I began to see more mentions of Ivermectin being used successfully by U.S. physicians. It did not get the publicity that Hydroxychloroquine received but it was steadily  gaining adherents based on my reading and research.

Ivermectin started to get a lot of attention when Dr. Pierre Kory testified before a U.S. Senate committee last December where he made this statement.

"Mountains of data have emerged from many centers and countries around the world showing the miraculous effectiveness of ivermectin, it basically obliterates transmission of this virus. If you take it, you will not get sick."

Kory is not some doctor on the fringes of the medical community either. From 2015-2020 he was an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin and Critical Care Service Chief, Medical Director, Trauma and Life Support Center at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics, Madison, WI. Since the Covid pandemic struck he has dedicated himself to treating critically ill Covid patients in New York City, Greenville, SC and Milwaukee, WI. 

A week after Kory testified to the Senate Committee the U.S. FDA (coincidentally?)  issued a statement that people should not take Ivermectin to prevent or treat Covid. The FDA stated that some lab studies had been conducted with the drug but additional testing was necessary to determine whether it was appropriate to use against Covid.

I might note that this statement was made almost nine months ago and there is no word on that additional testing. Why?

The Covid vaccines were conceived, developed, tested and fully deployed in less time.

Ivermectin has been on pharmacy shelves for decades. Almost 4 billion doses have been administered in that time around the world. It is generally considered one of the safest drugs in use today. 

The FDA can approve a completely new and unique vaccine and attest to its safety and efficacy in "preventing" Covid in under nine months but it can't perform tests on Ivermectin in treating Covid in over nine months?

I don't know if Ivermectin is as effective as Drs. Kory, Borody and hundreds of other doctors around the world claim it is.

It just seems that we are owed some truth and honesty about it rather than dismissing it out of hand with no real effort to study it comprehensively.

If you have been paying attention there is a full-fledged effort recently underway to completely discredit and damage Ivermectin and the doctors who have spoken out in favor of its usage.

If you don't believe that, consider this tweet that was actually published by the FDA.

Apparently the FDA has forgotten that it approved the use of Ivermectin for human use back in 1996.

The CDC also recommends that all refugees from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean should take Ivermectin as presumptive therapy for intestinal parasites after they arrive in the United States.

This sounds like it would apply to all of the Afghan refugees coming into the country as well as all of the illegal immigrants flooding our Southern border right now.

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/immigrantrefugeehealth/guidelines/overseas-guidelines.html

 

Ivermectin is safe for refugees but not for anyone else?

We also had someone who claimed he was an emergency room physician in Oklahoma who said that gunshot victims could not get treated at the hospitals he served at because there were too many cases of people overdosing on Ivermectin.

This story went viral and was covered by hundreds of media outlets including Rachel Maddow and Rolling Stone.

The only problem was the main hospital which the doctor referenced stated that they had no cases of Ivermectin overdoses and no one was being denied care. The doctor who made the claim also had not worked at the hospital in over two months.

Source: https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/rolling-stone-horse-dewormer-hit-piece-debunked-after-hospital-says-no-ivermectin?fbclid=IwAR2I6iQ3ExaC4NBiDDk9I3uEITkc4BKiqdOnYQYrXAiBHxlDbpiiuJ3QAi8

The AP also published a story claiming that 70% of the calls to the Mississippi Poison Control hotline were from people who had ingested Ivermectin. It turns out the actual number was 2%,

For context, consider that there are over 100,000 calls each year to Poison Control centers in the United States with concerns regarding Tylenol that results in 56,000 annual ER visits and 500 deaths. When has that ever been reported in a breathless AP story?

It makes you wonder if something else is at play?

Do stories like this just get published by coincidence?

If you want an excellent read about the doctors who believe in the efficacy and safety of Ivermectin in treating Covid I highly recommend reading this article by Michael Capuzzo.

The article appeared in Mountain Home which is a magazine that Capuzzo and his wife own. Don't let the fact that this article appeared in a relatively unknown regional magazine fool you. Capuzzo is a 4-time Pulitzer prize-nominated reporter with the Philadelphia Inquirer who is a graduate of Northwestern University. The article is well-written and well researched. Warning-it is long---about 10,000 words.

Source: https://www.mountainhomemag.com/2021/05/01/356270/the-drug-that-cracked-covid

If Capuzzo and the doctors he profiles in the article are correct, why isn't Ivermectin our first line of defense against Covid?

For those who don't want to read the entire article let me provide you with a few quotes.

Dr. Paul Marik an endowed professor at the Eastern Virginia Medical School and a world-renowned clinician-researcher who is the second most published critical care doctor in history with more than 500 peer-reviewed papers. 

Marik, along with Kory, have been the leading advocates for Ivermectin use in the United States.

An over-the-counter medicine in France, Ivermectin is safer than Tylenol and “one of the safest drugs ever given to humanity,” Dr. Marik said, with “3.7 billion doses administered in forty years, that’s B for billion, and only extremely rare serious side effects.

An earlier Australian study, reported in the journal Antiviral Research, showed that Ivermectin, which blocked other RNA viruses like Dengue virus, yellow fever virus, Zika virus, West Nile virus, influenza, the Avian flu, and HIV1/AIDS in vitro, decimated the coronavirus in vitro, wiping out “essentially all viral material by 48 hours.” But more research was needed in human beings.

Marik conducted that research in university trials. No, they were not the gold standard randomized clinical trials that usually can only be done by Big Pharma because of the costs. However, the efficacy and safety of Penicillin wasn't confirmed by RCT trials either when it was introduced. Doctors just observed that it worked.

But by October Marik’s concerns were answered. The studies were well-designed university trials that showed amazing anti-COVID-19 activity at the normal doses used to treat parasites. Though small and endlessly diverse by large, Western big pharma “one-size-fits all” random control trials, the Ivermectin studies were a mosaic of hundreds of scientists and many thousands of patients in trials all over the world, all showing the same remarkable efficacy against all phases of COVID-19 no matter what dose or age or severity of the patient. “Penicillin never was randomized,” Marik says. “It just obviously worked. Ivermectin obviously works.”

Marik was astonished. “If you were to say, tell me the characteristics of a perfect drug to treat COVID-19, what would you ask for?” he said. “I think you would ask firstly for something that’s safe, that’s cheap, that’s readily available, and has anti-viral and anti-inflammatory properties. People would say, “That’s ridiculous. There could not possibly be a drug that has all of those characteristics. That’s just unreasonable. But we do have such a drug. The drug is called Ivermectin.”

If it was universally distributed at a dose that costs ten American cents in India and about the cost of a Big Mac in the United States, he said, Ivermectin would save countless lives, crush variants, eliminate the need for endless big pharma booster shots, and end the pandemic all over the world.

There were no effective, lifesaving, approved COVID-19 treatments that doctors had used to slow down or stop the coronavirus in the history of the pandemic, in any phase of the disease, except the one, corticosteroids, that Marik and company had discovered.

Now they had discovered another treatment, even more powerful, that could save the world.

The only problem was Drs. Marik, Kory and their compatriots could not get anyone to listen.

Why is Ivermectin under such attack by the medical and pharmaceutical establishment?

It is difficult to understand using standard reasoning particularly as there apparently are no early treatments that Dr. Fauci and the medical establishment endorsed well over a year into the pandemic.

And if there is one thing that is important in treating Covid it is to get EARLY TREATMENT. Too many are told to stay home, rest and go to the ER if they have breathing issues. If you are going to the hospital under those circumstances you are already behind the curve.

On November 11, 2020, Dr. Fauci co-authored a paper for JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, “Therapy for Early COVID-19, A Critical Need,” explaining that early treatments “to prevent disease progression and longer-term complications are urgently needed.”

It might be argued that Fauci has now endorsed monoclonal antibody treatments but this curiously was only done after the FDA approval of the Pfizer vaccine a few weeks ago.

One of the international Covid doctors who supports the use of Ivermectin may have explained it better than anyone. 

The doctors promoting Ivermectin are too close to affecting the most sensitive organ on humans--the wallet.

In Argentina, Professor and doctor Hector Carvallo, whose prophylactic studies are renowned by other researchers, says all his scientific documentation for Ivermectin is quickly scrubbed from the Internet. “I am afraid,” he wrote to Marik and his colleagues, “we have affected the most sensitive organ on humans: the wallet...”

What is the truth about Ivermectin?

Is it useless as a treatment for Covid? That is why my doctor told me.

Is it dangerous? My doctor told me he would not prescribe it because if I died after using it he could get sued.

Or is it just a threat to someone's wallet? 

If Ivermectin works would there be as much demand for the vaccines? For the boosters?  

It almost assuredly would change the entire risk/benefit profile in taking the vaccine for millions of people.

It most definitely would decimate the argument for vaccine mandates.

This is the way some look at the truth about Ivermectin on Twitter.

Is it just a coincidence as well that Merck and Pfizer are both working on anti-viral drugs that are very similar to the formulation of Ivermectin but would probably cost about $3,000 per dose compared to the $2 cost for Ivermectin which is a generic medicine not under patent.

Is Ivermectin getting too close to that most sensitive of all organs?

What do we make of the fact that in Africa there is a sharp division in countries that use Ivermectin regularly to treat parasitic infections versus those that don't?

Is this just a coincidence?

What about this?

Here are the results of two states in India that implemented a mass Ivermectin home program.

Source: https://covid19criticalcare.com/ivermectin-in-covid-19/epidemiologic-analyses-on-covid19-and-ivermectin/

 

Source: https://covid19criticalcare.com/ivermectin-in-covid-19/epidemiologic-analyses-on-covid19-and-ivermectin/

And this?

This chart shows the experience in Peru which was using Ivermectin treatment aggressively until a new President came into office and put restrictions on its use.

Source: https://covid19criticalcare.com/ivermectin-in-covid-19/epidemiologic-analyses-on-covid19-and-ivermectin/

They may all be mere coincidences.

Ivermectin may have nothing to do with the results since there are a lot of factors in the rise and fall of cases and deaths with Covid.

It also might be a coincidence when we hear about the success patients have had after being treated with Ivermectin. The argument is made that they might have gotten better anyway. There are too many confounding factors to make a definitive statement. That very well could be true.

However, the same could be true of all the testimonials I am hearing these days about people who have contracted Covid after being vaccinated. How often do I hear "thankfully they were vaccinated or it would have been much worse"? How do we really know that? Who is to say they would not have a mild case or recovered without the vaccine? Millions did in the year before vaccines were available.

Like many things about Covid, I don't know.

Unfortunately, too many others think they know, when they don't, but they persist in telling us they KNOW ALL.

With Ivermectin, as with many other things involving Covid, most of us are left not knowing what to believe.

I saw a recent quote from Friedrich Von Hayek which summarizes my thoughts pretty well on Ivermectin and a lot of other things right now.

I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much undetermined and unpredictable, to a pretense of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.

                                                  -Friedrich Von Hayek, Nobel Prize lecture, 1974

May truth (whatever it may be) prevail in the end.