Brownstone Institute
Setting the Record Straight on Ivermectin
From the Brownstone Institute
The COVID-19 pandemic brought us a panoply of lies and evidence-light declarations that were less intended to inform Americans than to consolidate power and buy time. Among these were Anthony Fauci’s famous shift from arguing against wearing masks, to recommending wearing one, and, finally, to wearing two.
Fauci also tried to convince us that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not manipulated in a lab even though his inner circle had emailed him about “unusual features” of the virus that looked “potentially engineered.” And, of course, we had “fifteen days to stop the spread,” an evergreen concept that dragged on for two years. Lest readers fault us for forgetting, there was also the “gain of function” controversy, the focused protection battle, school closures, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and vaccine misrepresentations.
These topics have received much public attention. The one pandemic topic that hasn’t, and is nonetheless important, is the maligned ivermectin. It’s time to set the record straight.
If you’ve followed the news closely over the last two years, you’ve probably heard a few things about ivermectin. First, that it’s a veterinary medicine intended for horses and cows. Second, that the FDA and other government regulatory agencies recommended against its use for COVID-19. Third, that even the inventor and manufacturer of ivermectin, Merck & Co., came out against it. Fourth, that one of the largest studies showing that ivermectin worked for COVID-19 was retracted for data fraud. And, finally, that the largest and best study of ivermectin, the TOGETHER trial, showed that ivermectin didn’t work.
Let’s consider the evidence.
Ivermectin has a distinguished history, and it may have benefits comparable to those of penicillin. The anti-parasitic’s discovery led to a Nobel Prize and subsequent billions of safe administrations around the world, even among children and pregnant women. “Ivermectin is widely available worldwide, inexpensive, and one of the safest drugs in modern medicine.”
The FDA put out a special warning against using ivermectin for COVID-19. The FDA’s warning, which included language such as, “serious harm,” “hospitalized,” “dangerous,” “very dangerous,” “seizures,” “coma and even death,” and “highly toxic,” might suggest that the FDA was warning against pills laced with poison, not a drug the FDA had already approved as safe. Why did it become dangerous when used for COVID-19? The FDA didn’t say.
Because of the FDA’s rules, if it were to make any statement on ivermectin, it was obliged to attack it. The FDA prohibits the promotion of drugs for unapproved uses. Since fighting SARS-CoV-2 was an unapproved use of ivermectin, the FDA couldn’t have advocated use without obvious hypocrisy. Ivermectin’s discoverer, Merck & Co., had multiple reasons to disparage its own drug.
Merck, too, couldn’t have legally “promoted” ivermectin for COVID-19 without a full FDA approval, something that would have taken years and many millions of dollars. Plus, Merck doesn’t make much money from cheap, generic ivermectin but was hoping to find success with its new, expensive drug, Lagevrio (molnupiravir).
A large study of ivermectin for COVID-19 by Elgazzar et al. was withdrawn over charges of plagiarism and faked data. Many media reports seem fixated on this one dubious study, but it was one of many clinical studies. After the withdrawn studies have been removed from consideration, there are 15 trials that suggest that ivermectin doesn’t work for COVID-19 and 78 that do.
The TOGETHER trial received significant positive press. The New York Times quoted two experts who had seen the results. One stated, “There’s really no sign of any benefit [from ivermectin],” while the other said, “At some point it will become a waste of resources to continue studying an unpromising approach.”
While the Elgazzar paper was quickly dismissed, the TOGETHER trial was acclaimed. It shouldn’t have been. Researchers who have analyzed it have found 31 critical problems (impossible data; extreme conflicts of interest; blinding failure), 22 serious problems (results were delayed six months; conflicting data), and 21 major problems (multiple, conflicting randomization protocols) with it.
While the popular narrative is that the TOGETHER trial showed that ivermectin didn’t work for COVID-19, the actual results belie that conclusion: ivermectin was associated with a 12 percent lower risk of death, a 23 percent lower risk of mechanical ventilation, a 17 percent lower risk of hospitalization, and a 10 percent lower risk of extended ER observation or hospitalization. We have calculated that the probability that ivermectin helped the patients in the TOGETHER trial ranged from 26 percent for the median number of days to clinical recovery to 91 percent for preventing hospitalization. The TOGETHER trial’s results should be reported accurately.
Based on the clinical evidence from the 93 trials that ivermectin reduced mortality by an average of 51 percent, and on the estimated infection fatality rate of COVID-19, about 400 infected Americans aged 60-69 would need to be treated with ivermectin to statistically prevent one death in that group. The total cost of the ivermectin to prevent that one death: $40,000. (Based on the GoodRx website, a generic prescription for ivermectin is priced at approximately $40. Roughly 2.5 prescriptions would be needed per person to receive the average dose of 150 mg per patient.)
How much is your life worth? We’re betting it’s worth far more than $40,000.
When the next pandemic strikes, by necessity we’ll rely on older drugs because newer ones require years of development. Ivermectin is a repurposed drug that helps, and could have helped so much more. It deserves recognition, not disparagement. What we really need, however, is a way to inoculate ourselves against the lies and misrepresentations of powerful public figures, organizations, and drug companies. Sadly, there are no such vaccines for that contagion.
Authors
From the Brownstone Institute
Information disorder is a term coined in 2017 in a report titled “Information Disorder Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policymaking” that was drafted for the Council of Europe. (Derakhshan & Hossein, 2017). Information disorder refers to the sharing or developing of false information, categorized as misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. Of interest, the original 2016 election of President Trump triggered the commission of this report.
From the report:
This concept has been further developed by think tanks, academics, NGOs, governments, and others now invested in the vast fact-checking and industrial-censorship complex. We have all become well-versed in these concepts over the past few years.
A 2020 peer-reviewed study took this concept further and made information disorder into a mental health condition.
Abstract:
Many of us may be unknowingly suffering from information disorder syndrome. It is more prevalent due to the digitized world where the information flows to every individual’s phone, tablet and computer in no time. Information disorder syndrome is the sharing or developing of false information with or without the intent of harming and they are categorized as misinformation, disinformation and malinformation.
The severity of the syndrome is categorized into three grades. Grade 1 is a milder form in which the individual shares false information without the intent of harming others. Grade 2 is a moderate form in which the individual develops and shares false information with the intent of making money and political gain, but not with the intent of harming people. Grade 3 is a severe form in which the individual develops and shares false information with the intent of harming others.
The management of this disorder requires the management of false information, which is rumor surveillance, targeted messaging and community engagement.
Repeated sufferers at the Grade 1 level, all sufferers from Grade 2 and 3 levels need psycho-social counseling and sometimes require strong regulations and enforcement to control such information disorder.
The most critical intervention is to be mindful of the fact that not all posts in social media and news are real, and need to be interpreted carefully.
From this paper, the idea of “information disorder syndrome” quickly jumped into the lexicon of both the censorship-industrial complex and the mental health industry. It is important to note that the terms syndrome, disease, and mental disorders are often used interchangeably. In this case, it has been determined by organizations such as First Draft and the Aspen Institute that the way to cure this syndrome is to stop the flow of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation online.
Is it just a matter of time before the American Psychiatric Association puts this new “syndrome” into the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)?
Is this a possibility?
The American Psychological Association is at least considering how to fit “information disorder” or even “information disorder syndrome” into their modalities. The APA has developed a consensus statement report on fighting health misinformation, which we taxpayers paid for. The CDC paid the APA $2 million for this project.
Next up will be the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) developing a funding program to research how to cure or manage this new mental health disorder; considered a new syndrome because of the pernicious tendrils of the internet.
As information disorder syndrome is not a formally recognized mental health condition yet, so far, specific NIMH funding has been absent. However, suppose information disorder syndrome continues to evolve by the medical establishment into a mental health condition. In that case, it is conceivable that NIMH could support studies in the future, particularly for the “sufferers from grade 2 and 3 levels who need psycho-social counseling and sometimes require strong regulations and enforcement to control such information disorder.”
This is yet another example of how the government can and has previously exerted control over individuals. What happens when the APA stigmatizes people who have contrarian views or lifestyles or posts mis, dis or mal-information repeatedly online? The APA has a long history of discriminating and labeling categories of people who differ from the norm, such as when being gay became a mental health disorder in the 1950s.
This lasted for decades, and the APA endorsed many medical treatments such as surgical interventions, including castrations, vasectomies, hysterectomies, and lobotomies, drug therapies (including aversion therapy, which included inducing nausea, vomiting, or paralysis when exposed to same-sex erotic images or thoughts) and even chemical castration, sexual depressants and stimulants, LSD, estrogen and testosterone and also electroconvulsive therapy—which involved administering electric shocks to patients.
Taking this back to the topic at hand, making information disorder a syndrome affecting the individual allows the state through the medical and insurance industries to step in and force the individual to conform to societal norms. As shown in the example above, this is within the realm of possibilities.
Is this a future that is going to happen? Who knows, but it could. And we have to be prepared for this future manifesting in various planning stages. This is why terms such as “information disorder” and “information disorder syndrome” are being propagated throughout new media and must be rejected at all levels.
”Free speech is the most pragmatic tool we have for ascertaining truth. Only by examining all sides of an issue can the truth be chiseled out like a statue out of marble. But the underlying reality is that there can be many truths; we each have our own experiences, values, mores, and life. That is the beauty and wonder of being an individual. There can be no free speech without free and open access to ideas, knowledge, truths, and untruths. Without free speech, we are little more than slaves.
We must defend all speech—whether untrue, hateful, or intolerable, as that is the only way to protect our rights and abilities to understand the world. As soon as free speech is restricted, that restriction will be used to sway public opinion. As soon as one person can be defined as a heretic for uttering words, then soon everyone opposing the “officially approved” side of an issue will be labeled as a heretic. The next logical step will be for the state to define acts of heresy as criminal offenses. As soon as governments and those in power can sway public opinion by restricting free speech, democracy and even our republic of United States will be lost.”
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
Part of the sweep of government in the first days of the Trump administration has been a freeze on communications. The explosion has hit the whole of public health bureaucracies, which Trump personally blames in part for the meltdown of his previous term of president in his last year. The pause in operations is designed to figure out exactly what is going on.
It is certainly not the case that Donald Trump wants you to die, contrary to Paul Krugman’s claim. No longer writing at the New York Times, he reserved his rather extreme view for his Substack account.
Recall that Krugman was 100 percent for lockdowns and all the rest including the fake science behind vaccine mandates. While most of the world was in cages, he was proclaiming the dawn of the great reset. With that reversed, he has reverted to form.
What actually seems to be dying the death is the public health bureaucracy.
As the Wall Street Journal explained in their story headlined “Swaths of U.S. Government Grind to a Halt After Trump Shock Therapy:” “While glitches aren’t uncommon during the early days of presidential transitions, some longtime federal employees said the chaos seemed more extreme this week due in part to wide-spanning differences between the agendas of the previous administration and the new one. The stalled initiatives extended far beyond Trump’s cancellation of federal DEI programs.”
I seriously doubt that public opinion registers much concern.
Let’s take a look at the actions of these agencies in the pre-inauguration days before the freeze.
The Department of Health and Human Services announced on January 17, three days before the inauguration, a jaw-dropping $590 million grant to Moderna, a driving force behind global vaccination with mRNA shots during Covid. The announcement of this grant changed the fortunes of the company’s stock price, which had been in a two-year slide.
The timing alone cries out for explanation. Was this to dump largess on the deep-state partner before Trump could stop it? Or was it tacitly approved by the incoming administration in order to keep Trump’s fingerprints from it? We’ll know based on whether this goes ahead. It will certainly be a test of the agency’s future under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., provided he is confirmed by the Senate.
For now, it has all the earmarks of an old regime grabbing whatever it can on the way out.
Over at the CDC, which exists as part of a suite of agencies under the control of HHS, we have one last communication dating also from January 17. It was to announce the “first-ever National One Health Framework to Address Zoonotic Diseases and Advance Public Health Preparedness in the United States.”
David Bell at Brownstone has been writing about this for longer than a year. As he describes it:
“Those pushing it envision a world in which any lifeform is considered intrinsically equal worth to others. If you must choose between your daughter and a rat, the choice should weigh the probability of survival of each, or may do the least harm to other lifeforms after being saved. Within this ‘equitable’ worldview, humans become a pollutant. Ever-growing human populations have driven other species to extinction through environmental change, from the megafauna of ancient Australasia to the plummeting insect populations of modern Europe. Humans become a plague upon the earth, and their restriction, impoverishment, and death may therefore be justified for a greater good.”
The connection here to Fauci et al, and their view concerning spillover diseases from animals to humans – a major reason why they were so insistent on the zoonotic origins of Covid – is rather obvious.
In the middle of the worst part of US lockdowns, Fauci and his co-author David Morens wrote an article for Cell in which they explain that the real problem with life on earth began 12,000 years ago when “human hunter-gatherers settled into villages to domesticate animals and cultivate crops. These beginnings of domestication were the earliest steps in man’s systematic, widespread manipulation of nature.”
It’s always with the same theme. If there were fewer of us, had we never had much contact with each other, if we never dared to cultivate crops, domestic animals, store water, and move around, we could have been spared all diseases.
The real problem is what we call civilization itself, which is why the article ends with an assault on “overcrowding in dwellings and places of human congregation (sports venues, bars, restaurants, beaches, airports), as well as human geographic movement,” all of which “catalyzes disease spread.”
The only solution, in this view, is “rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.”
One Health, as newly embraced by the CDC, amounts to a radical transformation of the basis of social order itself, under the guidance of god-like scientists who alone know how to structure the best life for all living things, even if that comes at the expense of human flourishing.
David Bell describes this creepy strain of belief as a “cult” but it might also be described as an ideology very different from the dominant ones in the 20th century. Socialism might have proven unworkable but at least it aspired to the improvement of human life. Capitalist ideology was the same. This is something different, with more in common with the far-flung imaginings of Rousseau or the Prophet Mani who shared in common the belief that all attempts to create what we call civilization are inherently corrupting of our perfect state of nature.
This was part of the underlying philosophical infrastructure of lockdowns and vaccine mandates, not merely a public health establishment doing crazy things that happened to be captured by high-powered industrial interests. There was a dreamy and ultimately ghastly utopianism backing all of these actions, stemming from hot-house salons of government-funded science cabals where they not only refuse to speak to normal people; they have nothing but disdain for the aspirations of the common folk and their attachments to property, family, and tradition (which includes, for example, home remedies on dealing with infectious disease).
How it came to be that our main engines of public health came to be captured in whole by such a crazed ideology would require a deep and expansive investigation. Certainly, it happened gradually and largely out of the public eye, so much so that even our best investigative writers are still trying to wrap their brains around it all. Whatever this ideology is, it captured nearly the entire planet Earth in the years 2020-2023 or thereabouts and resulted in a health crisis without precedent in modern times.
Part of the result of that grand experiment was the unseating of a variety of populist leaders in the US, UK, and Brazil. This seems to have set in motion what Walter Kirn has called “a coup against a coup,” as the astonishing avalanche of executive orders reveals. The flurry of news – including a full reaffirmation of free speech, a purge of all DEI edicts, a deletion of previous dictates on Central Bank Digital Currencies, and a full hiring freeze in the federal government – has been so massive that the pundit class has been left gasping to stay on top of it all.
As for NIH, Jay Bhattacharya has been tagged to head the agency. As he awaits Senate confirmation, the acting head is Dr. Matthew Memoli, an award-winning vaccinologist who has worked at NIH for 16 years. In defiance of the regime, he argued in 2021 that “with existing vaccines, blanket vaccination of people at low risk of severe illness could hamper the development of more-robust immunity gained across a population from infection.”
Our own Fellow Bret Swanson took note of this one dissident within the Fauci ranks and celebrated his resolve to speak truth to power, in a complete takedown of evil four years ago. The doctor came under fire for daring to disagree.
Now Dr. Memoli heads the agency he defied. He remains in that position until the man once called a “fringe epidemiologist” by the previous head of NIH takes full control. This is as close to revolution and counterrevolution as you will find in a democratic society.
Something big and potentially wonderful is happening in the realm of public health, which was deployed for egregious purposes only a few years ago. It is a turning point of some sort, and one can hope that the results are consistent with the health, well-being, and freedom of everyone.
For now, there doesn’t seem to be too much in the way of public panic about the big freeze at HHS-related agencies, much less the removal of Anthony Fauci’s expensive security detail.
Author
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