The ivermectin paradox

 

After being forced to recant his claim that the earth moves around the sun, Galileo was supposed to have muttered: “And yet it move”. It was not until 1992 that John Paul II finally admitted, on behalf of the Catholic Church, that Galileo had been right about heliocentrism, some 380 years after the 1610 publication of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius.

 

Given the recalcitrant and dogmatic neo-religion of Scientism that has established itself during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, one wonders when such a concession will be made regarding the drug ivermectin, which has been maligned by the establishment as snake oil, a conspiracy, and a mere horse dewormer. Because, despite the vituperative denials of the Scientism acolytes, research increasingly suggest that, to paraphrase what Galileo said of the earth, “and yet it works”.

 

Ivermectin, discovered in 1975, won its discoverers a Nobel Prize in 2015. It has been used in humans since 1987, and billions of doses have been prescribed to hundreds of millions of people worldwide for various parasitic diseases. It is on the WHO List of Essential Medicines and is extremely safe. It has been studied for its wide-ranging antiviral effects.  It is also generic and very cheap. And this drug, with its glowing CV, has received nothing but negative press from the establishment for its potential as a COVID-19 prophylaxis and treatment.

 

Yet evidence slowly accumulates on ivermectin’s efficacy. In early 2020, an Australian group found that ivermectin could inhibit the replication of the SARS-CoV-2 virus by 5,000 folds in cell models. A 2021 meta-analysis of 15 clinical trials by UK scientists concluded that “large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin.” Similarly, a 2021 meta-analysis by US scientists of 18 randomised controlled treatment trials of ivermectin saw significant reductions in COVID-19 mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance. This evidence was still significant after one of the studies it included was withdrawn.

 

In 2022, a study out of Miami compared ivermectin with the new antiviral drug remdesivir, the first COVID-19 treatment approved by the US FDA. The study, which included more than 40,000 patients, concluded that ivermectin was superior to remdesivir, with patients taking ivermectin having a 70% lower mortality rate than those who took remdesivir. This despite remdesivir costing approximately US$2,300 per course, compared to less than US$2 for a course of ivermectin.  

 

Another 2022 study examined the results of a city-wide ivermectin prevention program in Itajaí in southern Brazil. The comprehensive study included 159,561 of the city’s 223,128 citizens – an amazing feat in itself. Of these, 113,845 used ivermectin regularly and 45,716 did not.  Over a 6-month period in 2020, the infection rate of the ivermectin group was 44% lower than the non-user group (3.7% vs. 6.6%).

 

Choosing 3,034 patients who manifested COVID-19 from each of the treatment groups to match them for features such as age, sex, and comorbidities, a statistical process known as propensity score-matching, those who took ivermectin was found to have a 68% reduction in mortality (0.8% vs. 2.6%) and a 56% reduction in hospitalization rate (44 vs. 99 hospitalizations). Furthermore, for those who took ivermectin, the drug only needed to be taken on two consecutive days every 15 days, at the lowest effective dose (hence extremely safe) of 0.2 mg/kg/day.

 

The viciousness with which the establishment has treated ivermectin and those who wish to study and use this drug, rated as safer than aspirin by the WHO, is the exact opposite of the ease with which they approved vaccines and drugs that have far less evidence of safety and efficacy. These are the same establishment who flip-flopped and flopped again on masks, whose predictions and models are almost uniformly inaccurate, who receive vast amounts of money from big pharma, which are making record profits, and whose silver bullet, the vaccines, are proving to be much less effective than promised. A recent Israeli study show that even four shots of the Pfizer vaccine does not offer protection against Omicron.

 

Furthermore, when even relatively cheap vaccines are unaffordable to the third world, how do you expect them to afford a drug like remdesivir, which costs more per course than people in those countries earn in a year? But a drug as safe and cheap as ivermectin is actively discouraged.

 

Given the growing mountain of evidence of ivermectin’s efficacy, one can only conclude that this paradoxical behaviour on the part of the establishment reflects the age-old and callous adage, follow the money. Needless deaths notwithstanding, the fear is that, when ivermectin is finally given its due, the edifice of the scientific discipline will be too derelict to restore. But if that happens, the acolytes of Scientism will only have themselves to blame.