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Title: Why Has "Ivermectin" Become a Dirty Word?
Source: [None]
URL Source: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/why-has-ivermectin-become-a-dirty-7bd
Published: Jun 21, 2021
Author: Matt Taibbi
Post Date: 2021-06-21 08:56:45 by Ada
Keywords: None
Views: 83
Comments: 1

At the worst moment, Internet censorship has driven scientific debate itself underground

On December 8, 2020, when most of America was consumed with what The Guardian called Donald Trump’s “desperate, mendacious, frenzied and sometimes farcical” attempt to remain president, the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing on the “Medical Response to Covid-19.” One of the witnesses, a pulmonologist named Dr. Pierre Kory, insisted he had great news.

“We have a solution to this crisis,” he said unequivocally. “There is a drug that is proving to have a miraculous impact.”

Kory was referring to an FDA-approved medicine called ivermectin. A genuine wonder drug in other realms, ivermectin has all but eliminated parasitic diseases like river blindness and elephantiasis, helping discoverer Satoshi Omura win the Nobel Prize in 2015. As far as its uses in the pandemic went, however, research was still scant. Could it really be a magic Covid-19 bullet?

Kory had been trying to make such a case, but complained to the Senate that public efforts had been stifled, because “every time we mention ivermectin, we get put in Facebook jail.” A Catch-22 seemed to be ensnaring science. With the world desperate for news about an unprecedented disaster, Silicon Valley had essentially decided to disallow discussion of a potential solution — disallow calls for more research and more study — because not enough research and study had been done. Once, people weren’t allowed to take drugs before they got FDA approval. Now, they can’t talk about them.

“I want to try to be respectful because I think the intention is correct,” Kory told the committee. “They want to cut down on misinformation, and many doctors are claiming X, Y, and Z work in this disease. The challenge is, you’re also silencing those of us who are expert, reasoned, researched, and extremely knowledgeable.”

Eight million people watched Kory say that on the C-SPAN video of the hearing posted to YouTube, but YouTube, in what appears to be a first, removed video of the hearing, as even Senate testimony was now deemed too dangerous for public consumption. YouTube later suspended the Wisconsin Senator who’d invited Kory to the hearing, and when Kory went on podcasts to tell his story, YouTube took down those videos, too. Kory was like a ghost who floated through the Internet, leaving suspensions and blackened warning screens everywhere he went.

The December, 2020 hearing on ivermectin wasn’t Kory’s first Senatorial rodeo. In May of that same year, he’d appeared before the same committee on a different subject: the use of corticosteroids in treating Covid-19 patients.

Kory belongs to a group called the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), founded by a well-known if controversial figure, Dr. Paul Marik. The author of 4 books and 400 peer-reviewed articles, Marik is a colossal figure in Critical Care — the word “giant” came up in more than one interview for this story — yet one with a definite reputation for bucking medical convention. At the outset of the pandemic, Marik and a group of like-minded colleagues around the world got in contact to form the FLCCC, trading stories about what doctors were seeing on the ground with Covid-19 cases everywhere from Italy to New York to South America.

“It was like a command center,” Kory recalls. “And we were reading papers like you wouldn’t believe.”

One of the first questions the group tackled was the proper treatment plan for hospitalized Covid-19 patients. Marik was famous for disagreeing with conventional wisdom about treatment protocols. He waged a long campaign to argue that the widely accepted practice of “fluid-loading” or “large-volume fluid resuscitation”— pumping patients in septic shock full of fluids — is unnecessary and may even be harmful or “worsen shock.” He was far from the only critical care doctor to have such thoughts, with some even comparing the groupthink around “fluid-bolusing” to the medieval certainty about bloodletting.

Such debates are normal in medicine, where authorities may come down on one side or the other of debates for a time, but consensus isn’t Talmudic law. Doctors argue in good faith about best practices, just like journalists argue about “objectivity” or legislators argue about everything from the filibuster or public campaign financing.

With Covid-19, early consensus favored what Kory calls a “supportive care only” strategy: water, Tylenol for fever, ventilation if necessary — anything, he says, but corticosteroids. “That was the one thing they agreed on, no steroids,” he says. It’s true that the WHO initially recommended against corticosteroid therapy for coronaviruses for a variety of reasons. However, there were many doctors who were anxious to bring more weapons to the fight against Covid-19.

Marik and the FLCCC were in the latter camp. They developed a protocol for Covid-19 patients called Math+ that included vitamin C, the blood thinner heparin, and the steroid methylprednisone. A few doctors in the U.S. tried out Math+ early on, but official bodies remained against it, and some doctors found, and still find, the claims about the vitamin C treatments in particular either dubious or harmless but unlikely to be effective (one I emailed about Math+ sent back an “eye- roll” emoji). Incidentally: while the FLCCC doctors have good reputations, their ideas have also met with plenty of pushback. MedPage described Kory and Marik as having a “knack for making headlines,” in a piece full of doctor quotes exuding clearly mixed enthusiasm for their “maverick” colleagues.

That didn’t make them wrong about steroids, however. Kory in his May 6 testimony reported that FLCCC doctors, in analyzing the use of steroids in treating other diseases like SARS, found that “contrary to the WHO recommendations… corticosteroids were life-saving in those prior pandemics when given to anyone beyond mild illness.”

Within months, researchers at Oxford released the results of a large- scale, randomized, controlled study called the “RECOVERY trial,” which found that steroids were highly effective for patients with severe and critical Covid-19. By September, the WHO issued a new guidance with a “strong” recommendation for steroid use for such patients.

“We were criticized,” Kory says now. “But it became the standard of care.”

Meanwhile, doctors all over the globe launched studies into a huge range of Covid-19 treatment possibilities, from the protease inhibitors used to treat HIV to the ace inhibitors used to treat high blood pressure to interferons to zinc and vitamin D and dozens of other candidates. Ivermectin was just one the many. It generated a little buzz within the medical community when an April, 2020 study in Antiviral Research found it inhibited SARS CoV-2 from multiplying under a microscope.

Other studies were less flattering, though, with one insisting humans would need to massively overdose in order to get even a theoretical benefit. As of last summer, the official take on ivermectin was unequivocal. The FDA on August 26th of 2020, acting out of concern that people might self-medicate using anti-parasitic drugs intended for their pets, issued a stern ruling.

“The FDA is concerned about the health of consumers who may self- medicate by taking ivermectin products intended for animals,” they wrote. “People should never take animal drugs.” A day later, on August 27th, the National Institutes of Health issued a guideline that “recommends against the use of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID- 19, except in a clinical trial (AIII).”

For most of last year, ivermectin was not on the radar of the FLCCC doctors. One by one, however, studies boosting ivermectin kept coming to their attention. These trials were going on in Egypt, Bangladesh, Brazil, Spain, India, Peru, Paraguay, and other countries, and many claimed dramatic results.

They were small studies, but this was and is by no means a fringe or dismissed topic, with upwards of 220 papers published in just two years. Some were genuinely thought-provoking, like for instance one hypothesizing that the reason African countries have a lower incidence of Covid-19 is because so many Africans are already taking ivermectin. Absolutely none of this was hardcore proof, but there was reason to keep researching.

A consultant to the WHO, Dr. Andrew Hill of the University of Liverpool, presented an analysis of these ivermectin studies that came to a lot of the same conclusions as the FLCCC, in perhaps less excitable tones. Ivermectin was an alluring possibility, Hill said, because a course of treatment in third world countries costs just $1-$2, and though the available studies were nearly all small — between 100 and 500 subjects — there were some very attractive results. Overall, though, there wasn’t enough data to make a WHO recommendation.

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#1. To: Ada (#0)

The worst that could happen is that you'd be de-wormed.........

"The government ruling us draws its authority not from the principles of the Declaration of Independence, or even from the delegate powers listed in the U.S. Constitution, but rather from the war to re-conquer the independent South. That conflict, usually referred to by the artfully misleading title “Civil War,” established the fact that the government in Washington is willing to kill Americans in whatever quantity it deems necessary in order to enforce its edicts, and then sanctify the slaughter in the name of some suitably “progressive” social objective.

Rube Goldberg  posted on  2021-06-21   20:39:58 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


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