COVID and “the crime of the century”

In this eye-opening video, Dr. Brett Weinstein, a biologist, interviews Dr. Pierre Kory, a physician, about the pandemic, the care of Covid-19 patients and the amazing recent of Ivermectin, for his Dark Horse podcast.

Ivermectin has been shown to be effective in both preventing and treating Covid-19, and also in treating the inflammation caused by the immune system’s response to the virus. 

It is cheap to make, and not restricted by anybody’s patent.  It has been in use for more than 30 years as a treatment for bacterial parasites, and is proven safe—unlike the new vaccines, whose long-term effects are unknown. 

Yet its use is being suppressed here in the United States.  Physicians are discouraged from even talking about it, and the record of Kory’s testimony before Congress was banned from YouTube. 

There is a race on to immunize the world’s population before the coronavirus mutates into a form that can resist both vaccines and Ivermectin.

There aren’t enough available vaccines to immunize the world’s population within the next year or two.  Preventing the use of Ivermectin could cost hundreds of thousands of lives, maybe millions.  Many lives have already been needlessly lost.

That’s why Weinstein calls suppression of ivermectin “the crime of the century.”

Kory is a member of the FLCCC—the Front-Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance.  This is a group of physicians who joined together to do what the Centers for Disease Control and National Institutes of Health should have been doing, which was to investigate ways to better treat the virus.

The video runs for two and a half hours, which is a long time to watch something on a computer screen.  Unfortunately, no transcript is available, so I’ll hit highlights.

The first five minutes of the video is just a countdown, and can be skipped.  During the next 25 to 30 minutes, Weinstein and Kory discuss the nature of medical evidence and the changing role of the physician.

The old-time general practitioner was limited in what he could do, Kory said, but he was expected to rely on his experience and powers of observation to figure out what was best for his patients.  The whole tendency of modern medicine is to reduce the physician to the role of a technician, who applies one of an array of approved techniques depending on circumstances.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration engages in rigorous clinical trials to establish that new drugs are (1) harmless and (2) effective.  But once a drug has FDA approval, as ivermectin does, physicians are free to use their own judgment in using it to treat other conditions than the ones it has been approved for.

Some drugs, Kory said, work every time, or almost every time.  No clinical trials are necessary (although there have been non-FDA-approved clinical trials of Ivermectin).  The drugs obviously work.  Penicillin worked every time.  So does ivermectin.

The next 10 minutes are devoted to the back story of ivermectin.  It is derived from a bacterium discovered in the soil of a golf course in Honshu, Japan, by Prof. Satoshi Omura of the Kitasano Institute in 1975.  He and Prof. William Campbell used the bacterium to develop veterinary drugs, and then a treatment for river blindness and other tropical diseases caused by bacterial parasites.

Starting in 1988, Merck & Co. provided financial support administer ivermectin free of charge in Africa.  An estimated 570 million doses were administered, and two important tropical diseases were eliminated. 

The development of invermectin is regarded as one of the great medical accomplishments of the 20th century.  Omura and Campbell were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for 2015.  ivermectin is included in the World Health Organization’s official List of Essential Medicines.

The part from about 55 minutes to 1 hour 20 minutes is a review of the evidence for ivermectin’s effectiveness.  If that’s the only thing you are interested in, you can skip the rest of the video.  Or you can skip the video and just read the linked articles.

The rest is discussion of the big picture.  Weinstein wondered whether the heads of the major pharmaceutical companies can be so sociopathic that they are willing to possibly millions of people to die just to increase their profits.

Kory thought that maybe people that evil do exist, but a more charitable explanation is that the drug executives are so committed to getting everybody vaccinated that they refuse to consider any alternative. 

He is in favor of vaccinating as many people as possible.  He would be vaccinated himself if there were no alternatives to vaccination. 

He hopes that as many people as possible get vaccinated, and as many people as possible take ivermectin, and that their numbers, plus the number of people who have had the virus and recovered, are enough to give herd immunity to the general public.

The two men talked about the inconsistencies of government policy about the pandemic. 

The general public has been put on a war footing.  If you didn’t support the war effort by wearing a mask, keeping your social distance, observing lockdowns and getting vaccinated, you were shamed.

But the big drug companies were allowed to continue business as usual.  They were allowed to use the benefits of publicly-funded research to create drugs on which they enjoyed a patent monopolies and pull in enormous profits.

Because of the emergency, government regulators waived the normal process so that useful drugs could be approved quickly.

But ivermectin is shunned because there have been no FDA-approved clinical trials for its use as a COVID-19 preventive or treatment.  And there are no plans to conduct such trials.

Kory said it would be interesting to do clinical trials that compared invermectin not just to placebos, but to the vaccines now in use.  We’d see the vaccines in a new light, he thought.

Weinstein noted that, in the past, when the official line turns out to be completely wrong (as with claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, for example), the people who were wrong continued to be respected authorities, and those who were right continued to be regarded as crackpots.

He said that the case for invermectin is so strong that this probably won’t happen to Kory and the other FLCCC members.

###

I myself am struck by the climate of fear that causes social media companies and news organizations to make some topics off limits for discussion.

They are more afraid that the public may come to believe something that isn’t true than that some important truth may be overlooked.

I’m also struck by how suddenly things that have been unacceptable can come to be accepted, and vice versa. 

It seems almost like living in a Communist country in the old days.  (Please notice I said “seems almost like,” not “is the same as.”)

The argument that the virus originated from a laboratory accident in China was once banned, but now is coming to be accepted. 

I think this is partly because of the polarization of American politics.  President Trump said the virus originated in China, so Team Red players defended the theory and Team Blue players forbid it.

Likewise, Trump was critical of Anthony Fauci, the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, so Team Red favors ivermectin and Team Blue is skeptical.

I suspect the Biden administration now thinks it is more important to discredit China that to discredit Trump, so the lab leak hypothesis is now acceptable.

I myself don’t have a firm opinion on where and how the disease originated. 

I think the lab leak hypothesis is plausible.  I don’t think it is a justification for escalating the cold war with China.

I do think it is a good reason for banning “gain of function” virus research, in which viruses are deliberately made more deadly in order to study them better.

I also think it is a good reason for establishing international standards and inspections for research laboratories that work with deadly infectious diseases. 

Another thing that strikes me is how leaders of nations of the Global South have made evidence-based decisions and acted quickly to protect their people. 

American government officials and corporate executives are failing because of political agendas and economic interests.

LINKS

FLCCC: Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance web site.  All the data about the effectivness of invermectin can be found here.

The Drug That Cracked Covid by Michael Capuzzo for Mountain Home.  A more readable account of the evidence.

Testimony of Pierre Kory, M.D., on Dec. 8, 2020, before the Homeland Security Committee on early treatment of COVID-19.  A briefer account of the evidence. 

Review of the Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy of Ivermectin in the Prophylaxis and Treatment of COVID-19 by Drs. Paul Marik, Pierre Kory, Joseph Varon, Gianfranco Umberto Meduri, Jose Iglesias and five others for the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance.

Global trends in clinical studies of ivermectin for COVID-19 by Morimasa Yagisawa, Patrick J. Foster, Hideaki Hanaki and Satoshi Omura for the Japanese Journal of Antibiotics.  [Added 6/6/2021]  A peer-reviewed article in a respected scientific journal.

Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know by Scott Alexander Suskind for Astral Codex Ten.  [Added 11/17/2021]. The case for ivermectin skepticism.

How We’re Making Sure Covid Goes Chronic by Ian Welsh.

The Lab Leak Hypothesis

The Lab Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover Covid-19’s Origins by Katherine Evan for Vanity Fair.  A long article, with a lot of new information.

If the Wuhan lab leak hyposthesis is true, expect a political earthquake by Thomas Frank for The Guardian.

The FBI’s Strange Anthrax Investigation Sheds Light on COVID’s Lab-Leak Theory and Fauci’s Emails by Glenn Greenwald.

The Fall of Saint Anthony Fauci by Michael Brendan Dougherty for National Review.

Tags: Coronavirus, Coronavirus Vaccine, COVID-19, FLCCC, Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, Ivermectin