Truth and doubt in a time of pandemic

In the pandemic, I find it hard to decide who I can trust about questions such as vaccine effectiveness, lockdown effectiveness, ivermectin effectiveness and so on.

Authorities such as the Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization haven’t always told the truth, or at least not the whole truth.  But this doesn’t mean the critics of the CDC and WHO are necessarily reliable.   When doctors disagree, how can I, a layman, decide?

That’s why I’m impressed with this interview of Eric Osgood, a physician, by David Fuller, a co-founder of a podcast called Rebel Wisdom, even though I don’t usually spend time watching long videos on computer screens.

Fuller is more interested in getting the facts right, and Ogood more interested in what is best for his patients, than about defending one side or another.

Osgood recommends vaccination to most of his patients, but also prescribes ivermectin.  He gets flak from the right-wing anti-vax fanatics, who tell him he is a tool of the establishment, and the left-wing anti-ivermectin zealots, who say he is helping the anti-vaxxers.  

 He used to be a member of the Frontline Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, which is the chief promoter of ivermectin, but now has reservations about Dr. Pierre Kory’s recommendation to double the dose against the Delta variant, which he doesn’t think has any empirical basis.

I think Dr. Kory has followed a common path by those who question an ideological orthodoxy. A dissenter is cast out by those he had been accustomed to thinking of as his friends.  His dissent is welcomed by those of the opposing ideological orthodoxy.  Gradually, the opposing orthodoxy comes to seem more and more reasonable.

One interesting fact that I hadn’t known is that Dr. Kory himself and his daughter caught Covid-19.  Dr. Kory is not explicitly anti-vaccination, but he didn’t get vaccinated himself. 

His infection was a mild case, so maybe ivermectin did some good.  Dr. Osgood’s view is that ivermectin is harmless, cheap and of some benefit, and just possibly the wonder drug that Dr. Kory thinks it might be, so there is no reason not to use.

For what it’s worth, that’s what I now think, too.  I was much more of an ivermectin enthusiast when I first heard about it than I am now.  I still oppose the campaign to prevent it being prescribed or discussed.

Ivermectin study retracted

A report of a clinical study on the benefits of ivermectin as an anti-Covid treatment has been withdrawn.

 

The resport reportedly gave results that were mathematically impossible and differed from the raw data.

 

The retraction does not, in itself, discredit ivermectin as a possible treatment.  There are other studies that support the benefits of invermectin. 

 

But the fact that the Frontline Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) and the British Invermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD) Group cited it is not a good look.

 

My own opinion remains the same.  I believe the sale of drugs should be regulated.  I don’t think somebody should be able to sell Dr. Quack’s Covid Cure over-the-counter.  But prescribing approved drugs for non-approved purposes is a legal and common practice.

 

Ivermectin is a drug that has long been approved for treatment of parasitic disease and seems to hold promise for treatment of virus disease.  It has been proven safe, and is cheap because no longer protected by patents. 

 

There is no reason physicians should not prescribe ivermectin if in their judgment there is a benefit, especially when vaccines are not available or have failed.  Studies of invermectin should continue, and discussion of ivermectin should not be suppressed.

 

LINKS

 

Why Was a Major Study on Invermectin for COVID-19 Just Retracted? by Jack Lawrence for GRFTR.

 

Huge study supporting ivermectin as Covid treatment withdraw over ethical concerns by Melissa Davey for The Guardian.

 

Joint Statement of the FLCCC Alliance and British Ivermectin Research Development Group on Retraction of Early Research on Invermectin.

 

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

The pushback against ivermectin for covid

Ivermectin is a well-known anti-parasite drug, cheap to make and proven to be safe, that a lot of physicians think is effective against Covid-19.

Several states in India tried it out.  New Covid-19 cases dropped dramatically.

Ivermectin results in three Indian states, vs. one where it was banned

The reaction of India’s public health agency?  Astonishingly, following the guidance of the World Health Organization, they dropped invermectin from a list of recommended treatments.

Physicians in India are still free to prescribe invermectin, but the only treatments with the official seal of approval are the expensive vaccines made by major drug companies, all still in short supply in India. 

I don’t see how this decision benefits anyone except the drug companies themselves.

Nick Corbishley, posting on the Naked Capitalism blog, tells the story:

India’s Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) has executed a policy reversal that could have massive implications for the battle against covid-19, not only in India but around the world. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives, are at providing stake.

Providing no explanation whatsoever, the DGHS has overhauled its COVID-19 treatment guidelines and removed almost all of the repurposed medicines it had previously recommended for treating asymptomatic and mild cases.

They include the antibiotic doxycycline, hydroxychloroquine zinc, ivermectin and even multivitamins. The only medicines that are still recommended for early treatment are cold medicines, antipyretics such as paracetamol and inhaled budesonide.

“No other covid-specific medication [is] required,” say the new guidelines, which also discourage practitioners from prescribing unnecessary tests such as CT scans.  [snip]

The decision to remove ivermectin, multivitamins and zinc from the treatment guidelines is hard to comprehend given the current state of play in India — unless one assumes foul play.

After suffering one of the worst covid-19 outbreaks since the pandemic began, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, India is not just flattening the curve, it is crushing it.

And the widespread use of ivermectin, a potent anti-viral and anti-inflammatory with an excellent safety profile, appears to have played an instrumental role.  [snip]

Other countries in the region have already taken notice. Indonesia just approved the use of ivermectin in Kudus, a local contagion hotspot.

This is the last thing the World Health Organization (WHO) and the pharmaceutical companies whose interests it broadly represents want.

As such, it was no surprise that WHO was delighted with the DGHS’ policy reversal. “Evidence based guidelines from @mohfw DGHS – simple, rational and clear guidance for physicians,” tweeted WHO’s chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan, of Indian descent. “Should be translated and disseminated in all Indian languages.”  [snip]

It’s worth noting that while India’s DGHS has dumped most cheap off-patent treatment options against Covid, including even multivitamins, more expensive patented medicines continue to get the green light.

They include Gilead’s prohibitively expensive antiviral Remdesivir, which DGHS continues to recommend for “select moderate/ severe hospitalized COVID-19 patients,” even though “it is only an experimental drug with potential to harm.” It has also authoriszed the use of the anti-inflammatory medicine tocilizumab, which costs hundreds of dollars a dose.

Source: Naked Capitalism.

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.

Ivermectin, an ignored Covid miracle drug

Invermectin is an anti-viral, anti-inflammatory drug that is cheap, effective against COVID-19 and already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

It has been approved for use in 20 countries, including India, Brazil and Mexico.

Yet the World Health Organization and U.S. Food and Drug Administration do not recommend it.  Many American physicians refuse to prescribe it, including some cases in which patients are dying.

News about it has been suppressed.  Even announcements by health ministries of Brazil and Slovakia have been canceled by social media, as has a YouTube video of testimony of Dr. Pierre Kory, a leading Ivermectin expert, before a congressional committee.

I learned about Ivermectin’s through a link on the Naked Capitalism web log to an article by a journalist named Michael Capuzzo.

I’m not a physician or medical expert, but the evidence presented by Capuzzo in his article, by Dr. Kory in his testimony, and by a team of physicians in a peer-reviewed article is so strong I can’t see how it can be refuted.

Why the opposition to use of this drug?   Nick Corbishley, writing for Naked Capitalism, suggested three possible reasons.

# As a generic, ivermectin is cheap and widely available, which means there would be a lot less money to be made by Big Pharma if it became the go-to medicine against covid.

# Other pharmaceutical companies are developing their own novel treatments for Covid-19 which would have to compete directly with ivermectin. They include ivermectin’s original manufacturer, Merck, which has an antiviral compound, molnupiravir, in Phase 3 clinical trials for COVID-19.  That might explain the company’s recent statement claiming that there is “no scientific basis whatsoever for a potential therapeutic effect of ivermectin against COVID-19.”  The company also flagged up “a concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies.”  Despite its obvious conflict of interest, Merck’s objections were recently cited by WHO in a statement aimed at browbeating India’s government into withdrawing its approval of ivermectin.

# If approved as a covid-19 treatment, ivermectin could even threaten the emergency use authorization granted to covid-19 vaccines. One of the basic conditions for the emergency use authorization granted to the vaccines currently being used against covid is that there are no alternative treatments available for the disease. As such, if ivermectin or some other promising medicine such as fluvoxamine were approved as an effective early treatment for Covid-19, the vaccines could be stripped of authorization.

Source: naked capitalism

I can think of an additional reason: the tribal nature of politics these days.  President Donald Trump criticized the WHO and CDC and speculated about unconventional therapies for COVID-19.  So anybody who is skeptical about WHO and CDC recommendations supposedly is an ignoramus who doesn’t “believe the science.”

LINKS

‘I Don’t Know of a Bigger Story in the World’ Right Now Than Ivermectin by Nick Corbishley for Naked Capitalism.

The Drug That Cracked Covid by Michael Capuzzo for Mountain Home.  It’s a real commentary on things that this article was published in a obscure regional magazine rather than the New York Times or The Atlantic.

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

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.  These guys are heroes.

Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know by Scott Alexander Suskind for Astral Codex Ten.  [Added 11/17/2021].  Rebuttal to the pro-ivermectin argument.