Ivermectin, the bridge to the COVID-19 vaccine?

It’s great that COVID vaccinations started last month in many countries, but in most developed countries the general population will only get the vaccine by Q3 or Q4 this year. In developing countries that may be in 2022 at the earliest. At the same time the virus is mutating and getting more contagious, leading governments to continue lockdowns or even tightening them. As many of you know I am a huge proponent of doing a full lockdown for a couple of weeks followed by ubiquitous testing, so that the economy can open again completely (like in China), but most Western countries don’t seem to be able to wrap their heads around this simple solution

So I started actively looking for other ways to open up the economy faster. I asked myself the question whether there are any drugs out there that can sharply reduce infection rates or that can sharply reduce symptoms or mortality. It turns out that there is a cheap, widely available drug out there without many side effects that can not only reduce getting infected by up to 90%, but that also can make symptoms much less severe if you get it, and it can reduce mortality for ICU patients by up to 50%. Its name is Ivermectin and in my opinion it is a literally a miracle drug. But governments, the WHO and the NIH are actively ignoring the results of clinical trials or just simply dismissing them.

To be honest, when I first heard about Ivermectin I was highly skeptical, just like I was with hydroxychloroquine drugs and some other therapies that were pushed early on in the epidemic. Ivermectin seemed to be highly politicized, so my assumption was that this was a typical Trump drug: something some Republicans could earn a lot of money from if they promoted it, but a drug that in reality would not work. So I dismissed it after a Senate hearing about it in December during which all Democrats walked out, and in hindsight that was a mistake.

The medical doctor that did the Senate hearing is a lung specialist and ICU doctor, Dr. Pierre Kory. Over the past days I started reading all materials that Dr. Pierre Kory has published on Ivermectin and I changed my mind 100%. My conclusion: this drug can help people to return to a normal life while waiting for the vaccine. By just taking one small dose every 2 weeks economies can open up and people can stop worrying too much about COVID-19.

Ivermectin has been around for over 40 years and is mainly used as an anti-parasitic drug. The drug has been safely used by 3.7 billion (!) people worldwide, and the discovery of the drug was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2015. It’s on the WHO list of essential medicines. So this is not a new drug or a drug that has not been tested. Side effects are limited, although there are always some, and the drug is cheap. Despite all this the NIH gave a very negative advice about using the drug in August last year, although after reviewing many more clinical trials they finally changed to a more neutral position just last week.

There have been 27 controlled clinical trials for the usage of Ivermectin to prevent or to treat COVID so far, with a total of over 6500 patients. These trials overwhelmingly show that Ivermectin simply works, but the WHO and NIH keep on trying to find reasons why these results are not good enough. Their arguments are among others that the majority of studies are observational, uncontrolled trials. This is simply false, because all the observational trials actually have control groups. They also state that the majority of studies have not been published in peer-reviewed journals. This is not only false (half of the studies have been published in peer reviewed journals) but also irrelevant because every other drug used for COVID-19 was adopted from pre-print data (for example Remdesivir, corticosteroid, or monoclonal antibodies). Finally they state that the majority of the trials were not randomized controlled trials. This again is incorrect, because 15 of the 24 controlled trials were actually randomized.

The FLCCC Alliance is the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, an organization of physicians trying to prevent of find treatments for the virus, and Dr. Pierry Kory is the president of the FLCCC. For some reason the FLCCC Alliance has been blocked in attempts to disseminate scientific information about Ivermectin on Facebook and other social media with the FLCCC’s pages repeatedly being shut down. Furthermore, after a FLCCC press conference in Houston, no major U.S. media outlets reported the FLCCC’s pleas for help from the federal government to act in order to bring this pandemic to an end. Nor did any representative from the CDC, the NIH or the World Health organization contact them. To make matters worse, Dr. Kory lost his job at the University of Wisconsin because of speaking out about his fight to find alternative solutions to the COVID crisis, and in December he lost his new job at Aurora Health after he testified before the US Senate.

What is happening here? I don’t know, but I can speculate. Maybe because of the failures with the other therapeutics the WHO and NIH have become more cautious. That’s the most likely scenario for me. However, if you are in the middle of a pandemic that is destroying economies all over the world, you have the duty to look for alternative solutions. They are simply not doing it. Maybe Big Pharma plays a role here as well? Maybe if the medecine was expensive and patented they would more readily agree to use it? Or maybe it is a typical US political partisan thing where Democrats actively boycot anything the Republicans say? I really don’t know, but I feel I need to spread the word about this because I am now convinced it can literally save people and can open up economies again.

Let me give some anecdotal evidence to show what happens when Ivermectin is distributed among the general population of a city or country. I know of course that anecdotal evidence is not scientific, but it gives you an idea of how well Ivermectin works against COVID. In Brazil some cities started distributing Ivermectin to the population in July. A month later the case count was down by 50-80% in these cities, while in similar cities nearby without the distribution program COVID cases were down by just 20-40%. Something even more impressive happened in the state of Alto Parana in Paraguay, where the governor and his brother both got COVID and quickly recovered after they were given Ivermectin. They were so impressed that they started to give everyone in the state Ivermectin. The result? Six weeks later there was no COVID case in the hospitals anymore and the governor claimed it eradicated COVID completely in the state, while in the rest of the country the numbers remained high. There are several more examples of this from among others Mexico and Bangladesh, and all these studies show that with Ivermectin you can reduce or beat COVID, at least until everybody has access to the vaccine.

If you have an hour to spare, this interview with Dr. Kory is very insightful and gives a lot more details than just this post. The presentation is meant for physicians but it’s not too hard to understand. Start at about 11:00 to see Dr. Kory’s whole presentation.

I want to spread the word about this and wake up governments and decision makers. If you know anybody in your state, province or country who has any decision making power for COVID drugs please share this post with them. Show them my background, I have a reputation to lose so I have done tons of research before even considering to write this post. I believe we need to create awareness about this miracle drug and start distributing it as soon as possible, it can literally make the difference between life and death for many people and it can help to open up economies.