Is Ivermectin the Unsexy, Miracle Solution to the COVID-19 Pandemic?

Recent testimony by Dr. Pierre Kory during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing on "Early Outpatient Treatment: An Essential Part of a COVID-19 Solution Part II" held on December 8, 2020 provides us with an interesting narrative on how all physicians have not swallowed the "COVID-19 vaccine narrative."

  

Let's look at partial listing of Dr. Kory's qualifications:

 

Here is his testimony:

 

Here are some key quotes from his testimony starting with his introduction, noting that all bolds throughout his testimony are mine:

 

"I want to begin by thanking Senator Johnson and the Committee for this critically needed effort to bring attention to the importance and need for effective early treatment approaches to COVID-19. I am speaking today not only as an individual physician, but also on behalf of my non-profit organization, the Front-Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, made up of some of the most highly published and well-known critical care experts in the world with almost 2,000 peer-reviewed publications in the medical literature as well as over 100 years of bedside clinical experience in ICU’s around the country."

 

Here is what he has to say about the reasons why America's hospitals are overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients:

 

"Although we, like many, are extremely encouraged by the apparent successes in developing effective vaccines, we also are dismayed at the near complete absence of guidance and research on effective early, at-home, or preventative treatment options apart from vaccines, a reality we find unconscionable. Our hospitals are overflowing with over 100,000 COVID-19 patients admitted, and new record deaths are reported each passing day. It will take months for the vaccine to be distributed to the general public and further time to have sufficient impact in this crisis, so we are here to stress the need for effective early treatment. My organization of critical care specialists have spent the almost nine months tirelessly reviewing the scientific literature to gain insight into this virus and the disease process and to develop effective treatment protocols. All the while, we were working long hours in Intensive Care Units full of COVID patients."

  

Here is what the aforementioned Front-Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance has discovered as an early treatment for COVID-19:

 

"And so, it is with great pride as well as significant optimism, that I am here to report that our group, led by Professor Paul E. Marik, has developed a highly effective protocol for preventing and early treatment of COVID-19. In the last 3-4 months, emerging publications provide conclusive data on the profound efficacy of the anti-parasite, anti-viral drug, anti- inflammatory agent called ivermectin in all stages of the disease. Our protocol was created only recently, after we identified these data. Nearly all studies are demonstrating the therapeutic potency and safety of ivermectin in preventing transmission and progression of illness in nearly all who take the drug."

 

What has the Front-Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance found lacking in America's treatment response and the biggest barrier to presenting alternative treatment options for COVID-19 to the public and politicians?  Here are his comments:

 

"Before proceeding, I want to bring attention to two critical deficits in our national treatment response that has made this hearing necessary in the first place. Besides the early interest and research into hydroxychloroquine, we can find no other significant efforts to research the use of any other already existing, safe, low-cost therapeutic agents. Seemingly the only research and treatment focus that we have observed on a national scale is with novel or high-cost pharmaceutically engineered products such as remdesivir, monoclonal antibodies, tocilizumab, with all such therapies costing thousands of dollars. This is consistent with conclusions drawn by a physician consulting to Congress about Covid-19 when she concluded, “There is a pervasive problem on the Hill with how we prove the value of a low cost treatment.” Another barrier has been the censorship of all of our attempts at disseminating critical scientific information on Facebook and other social media with our pages repeatedly being blocked. Finally, we believe the lack of clinical experts on the existing task forces is further hindering progress on identifying effective therapeutics. We can identify almost no members with any similarities to the skill set, clinical knowledge base, and patient care experience to our group of expert clinicians. Existing members all seem to be either physician leaders of large health care organizations or have research backgrounds. Although many must have had some bedside experience in the care of patients in their careers, there seem to be almost none that have been at the bedside of COVID- 19 patients in any appreciable fashion during this pandemic. Expert clinician panels such as ours have large amounts of valuable insights and wisdom and we are extremely pleased to share our recent discovery of the immense potency of Ivermectin in COVID-19."

  

The Front-Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance has found that ivermectin is an excellent treatment option for COVID-19.  As background, ivermectin is a broad spectrum, FDA-approved, anti-parasitic agent that has been shown to have antiviral activity against a broad range of viruses.  Ivermectin was discovered in 1975 and is on the World Health Organization's list of Essential Medicines.  Tellingly, it is available in the United States as a generic prescription drug.  

Here is a screen capture from a recent publication on the Science Direct website outlining research on Ivermectin and its impact on the SARS-CoV-2 virus:

 

Note that in a laboratory setting (in vitro), a single treatment of ivermectin resulted in a 5000-fold reduction in viruses at the 48 hour mark.

 

Now, let's look in detail at what Dr. Kory has to say about iIvermectin:

 

"Ivermectin is highly safe, widely available, and low cost. Its discovery was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine, and is already included on the WHO’s “World’s List of Essential Medicines.” We now have data from over 20 well-designed clinical studies, ten of them randomized, controlled trials, with every study consistently reporting large magnitude and statistically significant benefits in decreasing transmission rates, shortening recovery times, decreasing hospitalizations, or large reductions in deaths. This clinical data is also supported by multiple basic science, in-vitro and animal studies. Our manuscript, completed one week ago, is already out of date due to the near daily emergence of new, positive ivermectin studies. The manuscript has been posted on the medical pre-print server OSF (Open Science Foundation) and can be downloaded here https://osf.io/wx3zn/ or on our organization’s website, www.flccc.net. A more updated meta-analysis and review authored by a group of Ph.D. researchers and scientists includes all ivermectin studies as of December 4 , 2020 and can be found on the c19study.com website here: https://ivmmeta.com/

 

These data show that ivermectin is effectively a “miracle drug” against COVID-19. The magnitude of the effect is similar to its Nobel prize-worthy historical impacts against parasitic disease across many parts of the globe. It should be noted that that Merck, the pharmaceutical company whose scientists helped discover ivermectin, has from the first availability of the drug, donated hundreds of millions of doses for free to support the WHO parasite eradication programs. We believe a similar initiative is needed to eradicate the globe from the scourge of COVID-19. Our group held a press conference this past Friday, December 4th at the United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, issuing a “Call to Action.” We made a formal request to our national and global health care agencies and leaders to rapidly assess the growing scientific evidence on ivermectin and update treatment guidelines accordingly. We noted that the last treatment recommendation on ivermectin is from August 27th where on the NIH website, they recommended that ivermectin only be used in clinical trials and they based that recommendation as “expert opinion” only given the lack of clinical studies at the time. There is now a wealth of studies reporting efficacy of ivermectin. In that press conference, we called for a rapid and updated review of this evidence in the hopes a treatment recommendation could be made and thus saving many thousands of lives, quickly. The press conference was broadcast via the Associated Press and Univision to nearly every country globally. The Health Ministry of the Government of Uganda is currently reviewing our manuscript with the intent of incorporating our treatment protocol into a national treatment guideline. It is now 48 hours later and, although it has been shared widely, we have not heard from:

 

• Any national news radio, newspaper or television station.

• Any single member of any U.S health care agency.

• One notable exception is the interest shown by the Health Ministry of the

Government of Uganda as they are currently reviewing our manuscript with the intent of incorporating our treatment protocol into a national treatment guideline. We know of no similar effort by any US health care agency at this time."

 

Isn't it interesting how governments, the American mainstream media and social media has managed to totally censor the ivermectin solution to the COVID-19 pandemic?

 

Dr. Kory goes on to outline the existing studies of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19:

 

He also supplies this graphic which compares the total deaths, case incidence and case fatality rate for 8 cities in Peru which adopted mass ivermectin treatments versus Lima (in red) which did not:

 

Ivermectin treatments are quite simple; one dose per month as a preventative treatment for high risk individuals and for early outpatients, one dose on day 1 and day 3 (along with Vitamins D3 and C, melatonin, zinc and aspirin in both cases).

 

It's pretty apparent why ivermectin has not received any traction in the mainstream media as a treatment option for COVID-19.  It won't generate the type of attention-grabbing headlines that the current "sexy" vaccines have received, particularly now that governments are looking for willing subjects to be the first test subjects for vaccination.  As well, since ivermectin is now a generic drug, Big Pharma certainly will not generate the level of profits that they will gain from selling their unprecedented, incompletely researched COVID-19 vaccines than they would from the off-label use of an older and decidedly "unsexy" drug.  Another reason for the federal government's insistence on a novel solution to the COVID-19 pandemic might just be this:

...and this: