Ivermectin: From Punchline to Paragon

The “Horse Dewormer” is back in the spotlight

We will start our article with a couple of introductory quotes from a scientific journal article entitled “Ivermectin – Old Drug, New Tricks?”, published in Trends in Parasitology.

“Ivermectin (IVM) is one of the best known and most widely used anti parasitic drugs in human and veterinary medicine.”

“From a fortuitous discovery on a Japanese golf course to a Nobel Prize, the impact of IVM on human health to date has been extraordinary.”

“IVM has been shown to regulate glucose and cholesterol levels in diabetic mice, to suppress malignant cell proliferation in various cancers, to inhibit viral replication in several flaviviruses...”

Those statements came in June of 2017, over two years before the first reported cases of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 disease.  Why, then, was saying anything positive about Ivermectin such taboo after the pandemic ensued?  By the time the pandemic reared its ugly head, Ivermectin had been approved for and prescribed to humans for over thirty years.  Why was it almost exclusively referred to as “horse dewormer” among the media?  Why was the media pushing that narrative?  Do we have any reason to be $u$piciou$ of the media?

Why Discuss This Now?

Former CNN correspondent Chris Cuomo recently made waves for comments made about Ivermectin.  Before getting into his recent comments, let’s flashback to 2020 when he made this comment:

“You talk about like Cancel Culture and who to shame… Ivermectin?  A dewormer?! Really??  No. They need to be shamed.  They need to be called out and shamed.”

Now, four years later, he is singing a different tune and the internet is having some fun with it.  Here is his recent quote:

“I am going to tell you something else that is going to get you a lot of hits. I am taking a regular dose, whatever, of Ivermectin. Ivermectin was a boogeyman early on in COVID. That was wrong. We were given bad information about Ivermectin. The real question is why? Everyone is going to say Joe Rogan was right… yeah, he was right, but that's not what matters. What matters is the entire clinical community knew that Ivermectin couldn't hurt you. They knew it... I know they knew it. How do I know it? Because now I am doing nothing but talking to these clinicians who at the time were overwhelmed but they weren't saying anything, not that they were hiding anything. But it's cheap, it's not owned by anybody and it's used as an anti-microbial and an anti-viral in all these different ways and has been for a long time. My doctor was using it during COVID on her family and on her patients and it was working for them. So, they were wrong to play scared on that. Didn't know it at the time, know it now, admit it now, reporting on it now.”

Quite a reversal there, Chris.  But… We could not trust you in 2020.  Can we trust you now? Let’s see if any data supports this.

The Latest Science on Ivermectin

Who wants a little science update?!  Spoiler alert:  Ivermectin is an effective treatment for COVID-19!

Let us start with a 2024 publication (found here) entitled “The Selective Effect of Ivermectin on Different Human Coronaviruses; In-Vitro Study.”  This article explains that Coronaviruses belong to the family of Coronaviridae, which is further specified into the subfamily of Orthocoronavirinae, which includes four genera:  Alphacoronovirus, Betacoronavirus, Gammacoronavirus, and Deltacoronovirus.  This study looked at the effect of Ivermectin on common species of Alphacoronavirus and Betacoronavirus as well as the SARS-CoV-2 strain and the Omicron variant (which are both Betacoronaviruses that cause the COVID-19 disease).  The authors note that results showed no detectable effect of Ivermectin on Alphacoronavirus but showed a moderate effect on the common betacoronavirus.  At doses similar to those used in treating humans, they showed “a dramatic and significant effect” of Ivermectin on SARS-CoV-2 and the Omicron variant.

The authors also referenced another study (https://ivmmeta.com, updated May 3, 2024 at the time of this publication) that has pooled data from over 100 different independent studies that cumulatively evaluated over 200,000 patients.  One scientist referred to this ivmmeta.com as “the most impressive act of science communication I have ever seen.” There is a ton of data here, and these are some of the “highlights”:  Ivermectin reduces risk for COVID-19 with very high confidence for mortality, ventilation, ICU admission, hospitalization, progression, recovery, and viral clearance.  The ivmmeta.com site links each of the 103 studies to a discussion page which delves into the key outcomes and provides links to the full text.

If you believe in science, then you are going to be hard-pressed to argue against these results.  Ivermectin is an effective course of treatment for COVID-19.

There are negative effects, like with any medication (including the various COVID vaccines).  In addition to some studies that favor no Ivermectin treatment for COVID-19 over Ivermectin treatment, one study wants to highlight a negative effect.  Five cases of “ivermectin-induced liver injury” were documented in a 2024 scientific study of 327 individuals hospitalized with COVID-19.  Of those individuals, 38 of the patients self-medicated with ivermectin prior to hospitalization.  The five individuals with liver injury were among the 38 who self-medicated with ivermectin.  Although no direct evidence is presented, the authors presume the liver injuries to be related to the use of ivermectin via self-medication.  So… consult your physician before beginning ivermectin treatment.

Emergency Use Authorization

The following is from the United States Food and Drug Administration:

“An Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) is a mechanism to facilitate the availability and use of medical countermeasures, including vaccines, during public health emergencies, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. Under an EUA, FDA may allow the use of unapproved medical products, or unapproved uses of approved medical products in an emergency to diagnose, treat, or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions when certain statutory criteria have been met, including that there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives.”

We can see now that there were a lot of people who grew wealthy from a successful vaccine.  They had huge motivation to ensure there were no adequate, approved, and available alternatives to the vaccine.  Ivermectin was already approved and available.  If Ivermectin was shown to be adequate, then it was a threat to the unprecedented profits of the pharmaceutical manufacturers that managed to get their brand of COVID-19 vaccine approved under the Emergency Use Authorization. 

But how could they control the narrative?  How could they keep Americans from finding out that Ivermectin was an adequate treatment?  Well, fortunately for the wealthy, the deceitful media is for sale.  Check out this montage for a quick refresher of just a few of the many programs they sponsored.

Global billionaires managed to increase their collective wealth by 27.5% during the first four months of the pandemic, according to the World Economic Forum, gaining about $2 trillion collectively.  By the end of 2021, the billionaires of the world collectively owned 3.5% of global household wealth, up from 2% at the start of the pandemic.  CNBC’s Jim Cramer noted in 2020 that “this is the first recession where big business… is coming through virtually unscathed”.  Big companies and wealthy individuals were growing their wealth during the pandemic. And so was Anthony Fauci. While politicians and leaders transferred the tax money of the common American to these beneficiaries, the compliant media terrified the plebeians and forced them to lock themselves in their homes.

Even when the leaders from the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned the White House to slow the rollout of boosters, the Biden administration proceeded with the booster push.  The advice from the leaders was to limit the booster rollout to older individuals, allowing for the collection of more data for younger age groups.  But push the Biden administration did, despite the advice of the leaders of the FDA and CDC.  Hmm.  It is almost as if they wanted to squeeze all they could out of that Emergency Use Authorization.

Earned Trust

In light of the realization that we were lied to about alternatives to the vaccine that we were heavily pressured to take and many were somewhat brainwashed into believing was the only means for shepherding humanity through the global crisis, where should we stand when it comes to trusting our leadership and the behemoth companies that make up the pharmaceutical industry?

Does your trust in “Big Pharma” rise or fall when you read the Telegraph’s May 4, 2024 headline that “Pharmaceutical giants knowingly sold HIV-infected treatment to NHS”? 1,250 people in the UK contracted HIV and 5,000 contracted Hep-C due to a pharmaceutical company’s mistakes. Internal documents showed that the company knew of the risk of transmission, but sold the treatment anyway.

Does your trust in Pfizer rise or fall when you read the Reuters May 9, 2024, headline that “Pfizer agrees to settle over 10,000 Zantac lawsuits, Bloomberg News reports”?  Pfizer, one of the companies famous for developing a COVID vaccine, and three other companies [GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Sanofi, and Boehringer Ingelheim] are dealing with thousands of lawsuits related to claims that the discontinued heartburn drug caused cancer.  This stemmed from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration pulling the drug after the discovery of a cancer-causing substance in samples of Zantac.

But Pfizer is surely an otherwise upstanding company, right?  Wrong.  In 2009, Pfizer paid $2.3 Billion in a “the largest health care fraud settlement in the history of the Department of Justice”.  They pled guilty to a felony violation for misbranding a drug with the intent to defraud or mislead.  They paid a criminal fine of ~$1.2 Billion, “the largest criminal fine ever imposed in the United States for any matter.”  Well those were the largest settlements/fines until… 2012 when GSK pled guilty and agreed to “pay $3 Billion to resolve fraud allegations and failure to report safety data.”

And then there is the opioid crisis, which exists largely because of the greed of pharmaceutical companies.  In 2021, Johnson & Johnson and three other companies agreed to a $26 Billion settlement to resolve thousands of lawsuits related to the opioid crisis.  The drugs manufactured by these companies led to over half a million overdose deaths from 2009 to 2019 — and those numbers continue to rise.  Also in 2021, a jury found CVS, Walmart, and Walgreens guilty of contributing to opioid overdoses and deaths. Pharmaceutical companies are making tens of billions of dollars from opioid sales, but also are making billions more with drugs to treat side effects of, overdoses of, and addiction to opioids.  Addiction is profitable.

There are many more examples of “Big Pharma” profiting while the general public suffers.  This is nothing new.  We have seen this for decades.  Pharmaceutical companies have not earned our trust.  They are fraudulent (and routinely plead guilty of being frauds).  They profit from the death and suffering of the public.  They fail to deliver products that help our health without harming us.  So, why were pharmaceutical companies placed on a pedestal during the pandemic?  One theory, as previously suggested, is that “Big Pharma” bought the support of the corporate media during launch of the vaccines (a suggestion supported by the many sponsorships of news/media programs).  Where do you stand today?  How much do you really trust “Big Pharma”?

“Big Pharma” also works in concert with the government, who helps craft and control the narrative surrounding the virus and the vaccine.  As a reminder, in a recent article, we detailed the Biden administrations coercion of tech companies to censor of voices of experts who disagreed with the administration’s response to COVID-19, and we shared evidence that the virus emerged from a NIH/Fauci-funded program at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — although (outside of Forbes) the deceitful news media continues to disregard that evidence.  That evidence would be too inconvenient to the profits enjoyed by the ultra wealthy (and by Fauci himself, who more than doubled his personal wealth in the first two years of the pandemic).

Did Fauci Fail Us?

Speaking of earning trust and of Fauci, he recently provided the commencement speech at Columbia University Medical School on May 15, 2024. He said the following:

“What troubles me greatly is that differences of opinions or ideology have in certain circumstances been reflected by egregious distortions of reality. Sadly elements of our society are driven by a cacophony of falsehoods, lies, and conspiracy theories that get repeated often enough that, after a while, they stand largely unchallenged, ominously leading to an insidious acceptance of what I call a normalization of untruths. We see this happen on a daily basis, propagated through a range of information platforms, social media, and enterprises who pass themselves off as news media organizations… This issue is very relevant to to you and me since our professions in science and medicine, and, hence, our very identity, is anchored in data, evidence, and critical thinking, and we, as much or more than anyone else need to back on these distortions of truth and reality.”

When he speaks of lies and information platforms, is it possible that Dr. Fauci is referring to himself and the deceitful media that propagated the message that convinced most of the world that Ivermectin was not a viable treatment of COVID-19? No, of course not. But there are indeed differences of opinions and ideologies, and they certainly have been reflected by egregious distortions of reality. And it is worth considering that Dr. Fauci has been the dominant voice behind that distortion.

He told us that six feet of social distancing and masking would keep us safe. And that falsehood went largely unchallenged. We now know that the CDC recommended 10-feet of social distancing, but an appointee in the Trump administration deemed that distance “inoperable,” according to a report from Forbes — Former National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins recently confirmed that the U.S. government established 6-foot social distancing guidelines without any scientific evidence to back that guidance. We also know that the people tended not to maintain adequate social distance when wearing masks, which had the opposite effect of what was intended. Masking also promoted social anxiety disorders, which led to suffering among otherwise healthy, low-risk individuals well beyond the pandemic. Fauci normalized these and other “untruths” and it was relevant to us all.

Now we understand that it was an egregious distortion of truth and reality when he warned us about Ivermectin, saying, “Don’t do it; there’s no evidence whatsoever that it works.“ The reality was that he failed to do the work to determine whether it worked. We know now the truth that Ivermectin could have saved lives. Fauci failed us. And he failed the millions who died.

Can We Meet in the Middle?

If we are to seek common ground among the various political and cultural perspectives, it seems that most people want the citizens of the world to stop suffering from the insidious viruses that lead to the COVID-19 disease.  We want the deaths to cease.  We want the hospitalizations to end.  We want the illnesses to vanish.  It should not matter how we get there.  We just want it to stop.

The people of our nation were polarized during the pandemic.  We were polarized because of the messages to which we chose to listen and we chose to believe.  We need to leave that polarization behind now that we have more data — data that is real, not just the mockery of a deceitful media.  We were told to “trust the science” during the pandemic, but now we understand that the truth of the science was being withheld.  According to c19ivm.org, 61% of 219,798 patients in multiple studies with COVID-19 showed improvement from Ivermectin treatments.  That is statistically significant, and it is statistically better than the 58% overall “vaccine effectiveness” for those receiving an updated vaccine as reported by the U.S. Center for Disease Control for the COVID-19 vaccines.  Can we accept this current (2024) data?

Can we agree that pharmaceutical companies deliver helpful medicines and that they also make mistakes?  Can we agree that profits are a driver for pharmaceutical companies?  Can we agree that multiple guilty pleas for fraud should evoke at least some doubt about the integrity of these companies?

Can we agree that Ivermectin and other medications should have been on the table during the pandemic if they were shown to be effective?  Since they were shown to be effective and since they had been considered as a viable treatment, then perhaps the Ivermectin option would have taken the benefit of the Emergency Use Authorization away from the vaccine manufacturers and, thus, they would have been required to go through more rigorous trials that would have provided a more complete understanding of the risks that the vaccines pose to our health. How open are you to these possibilities?

Is it possible that the powers that be, the powers that are profiting from the death and suffering of the people, do not want an informed public?  Is it possible that they prefer a compliant public that will blindly take the medications that they put on the market?

At the time of the COVID vaccine rollout, the cases could be made that either they were the best thing for society or that there was simply not enough data to trust them.  Now we have the luxury of more data and a more complete perspective of what was happening in the world.  We understand that perhaps the vaccines were not the only course of action.  We understand more about who was profiting from the massive loss of lives.  How closed off should we be to the information in front of us?  How skeptical should we be about Ivermectin?  How skeptical should we be of the vaccines?

Bringing It On Home

The President and Vice President of the United States of America told us that we had to take an experimental vaccine.  They mandated it for government employees and contractors.  The deceitful media told us that Ivermectin was not a credible treatment for COVID-19.  They paraded a certain friendly health expert out to tell us we needed to trust the science.  They all misled us.  For years.

Chris Cuomo, you admitted you were wrong.  Good for you.  That takes some courage.  But Chris, should we overlook your mockery of the people who talked about Ivermectin?  You did shame the people who were wary of an unproven vaccine. You were not the only one.  You and your colleagues used the phrase “a pandemic of the unvaccinated”.  You referred to a viable COVID-19 treatment as “horse dewormer”. Your kind censored and ridiculed voices of truth and reason.  You were a pawn and you sold your soul to Big Pharma.  Shame on you, sir.

There have been well over 700 million confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide since the start of the pandemic.  Over 7 million people worldwide died from COVID-19.  Ivermectin could have saved at least some of those lives.  How many?  We will never know, for sure.  Studies of hundreds of thousands of patients show it was effective in 61% of those who were treated with Ivermectin.  Applying that effectiveness rate to the death rate, it is perhaps reasonable to estimate that Ivermectin could have saved over 4 million lives. 

Ivermectin is a cheap drug that would not have made anyone wealthy.  Perhaps it could have helped millions, if not for its affordability.

Lest We Forget - Some Final Thoughts

Today is Memorial Day 2024. Americans owe so much to those who sacrificed everything to ensure that we can live free. Soldiers, their spouses, their children, their parents, and all of their loved ones have paid such an enormous price. For me. For you. For our children. Today, however, we take too much for granted. Meanwhile, our freedom is constantly under attack.

In preparation for this writing, a passage by the great Thomas Sowell from his book Barbarians Inside the Gates came to mind. Professor Sowell described a Memorial Day visit to a national cemetery and his reflection on the sacrifices that he/we benefit from every day. He noted the years of birth and death on some of the gravestones and reflected on just how young these soldiers were when they made the ultimate sacrifice. For us. He pondered the question: “What is the point of being a superpower if we are not going to take on world responsibilities?”. His assessment: “The point of being a superpower is so that no one will attack you and require the sacrifice of more and more young Americans like those buried in this cemetery.”

The political and cultural strife of modern day tends to be a lot of noise, noise that drowns out what we all need to reflect upon on Memorial Day and, honestly, a lot more frequently. When our freedom is under attack, whether that attack comes from a perceived authoritarian on the right or on the left, we should all take note. We should speak out or, at least, make sure someone is speaking out for us.

Freedom of speech was so important to our founding fathers that they enshrined it in the FIRST Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Yet we take it for granted. A free press is protected by the First Amendment. Yet we are complicit in the abuse of the free press. How much blood was shed to give us these freedoms? How outraged should we be when these freedoms are abused to 1) convince people that a viable medical treatment is dangerous or harmful, 2) promote measures that benefit the wealthy and harm the general public, and 3) cost potentially millions of lives? Medical professionals and experts were censored and silenced by the U.S. government, medical options were taken away from us through lies and deception, and the world’s citizens paid the price.

So, this Memorial Day, in addition to the soldiers and families to whom we owe so much, we encourage you to reflect on the unwilling sacrifice made by over 7 million global citizens — the victims of COVID-19 and corporate greed, whose lives could have been spared by an inexpensive and available medication. How many were sacrificed to funnel American taxpayer dollars to the corporate elite? How many should still be here today?

With love and respect, enjoy time with your family today.