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The first time I heard about ivermectin was from my doctor early on in the Era of COVID-hysteria. The United States still had a functioning president, we had yet to arm the Taliban or give them lists of Americans and Afghan ‘allies’ they might want to execute, and a vaccine against the worst scourge since the Black Death was, if the experts were to be believed, years, maybe decades away.
Of course, the experts weren’t to be believed. Donald Trump’s Manhattan Project approach to getting a vaccine developed in record time bore fruit. Pfizer had the first vaccine ready to go before the 2020 election, but selflessly waited until just after the election to make the announcement. They, and the other drug companies in on Operation Warp Speed, have been playing the opening bars of Pink Floyd’s song ‘Money’ nonstop at corporate headquarters ever since. Everyone must be vaccinated, twice (plus boosters) at government (i.e. taxpayer) expense immediately and forever.
There are plenty of vaccine skeptics out there. I am not one of them. But neither am I part of the vaccine-mandate crowd, a subset of the mask-mandate crowd, who say getting vaccinated is necessary but then turn around and tell you that you’re still at risk of getting infected yourself or infecting others.
The science, no matter what the media tells you, is hazy.
But back to my doctor’s office in the winter of 2020. He showed me a few boxes of ivermectin, told me it was probably an effective therapeutic but it had some serious disadvantages, chief among them is that it was very cheap, and therefore was unsupported by Big Pharma. Consequently, the experts looked down their noses at it, so far down that the politicians, who like the contributions they get from drug companies, basically outlawed its use for COVID. If he prescribed it for COVID, he told me, he could lose his license to practice medicine.
That seems to have changed, since many people are now touting the potent therapeutic properties of ivermectin, including bad-boy podcaster extraordinaire Joe Rogan, who came down with COVID and decided to ‘throw the kitchen sink at it.’ Inside the sink was ivermectin, along with hydroxychloroquine, monoclonal antibodies (whatever they are), Z-Pak and prednisone. That started on a Sunday, when he felt shabby. By Wednesday, he reported, he ‘felt great’.
Was the recovery propter hoc, because of the ivermectin and other agents, or merely post hoc? Who knows?
But I do know this. It is utterly irresponsible for the establishment media machine to to trash ivermectin categorically. NBC, for example, in reporting Rogan’s diagnosis, screamed that he was taking the ‘widely discredited drug ivermectin’.
Discredited by whom? By St Anthony Fauci, maybe, and Big Pharma, for whom the media acts as PR flaks. But the National Institutes of Health is much more measured. One study, while noting that its clinical efficacy had not been proven, nonetheless pointed out that ‘ivermectin docking may interfere with the attachment of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spike protein to the human cell membrane’ and that ‘some studies of ivermectin have also reported potential anti-inflammatory properties, which have been postulated to be beneficial in people with COVID-19’.
Another study pointed out that ‘moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin. Using ivermectin early in the clinical course may reduce numbers progressing to severe disease. The apparent safety and low cost suggest that ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally.’
The current hostility to ivermectin is of a piece with the earlier hostility to hydroxychloroquine: it was cheap, Donald Trump took it, it must be bad. What really is bad are the proliferating health nazis who are sprouting up like mushrooms — toadstools — everywhere. In some places — Australia, for example, they come bearing the police power of the state and are harassing and incarcerating people for going about their everyday lives. It’s ridiculous. COVID, the original and all its variations thus far, is dangerous to a tiny part of the population. For most of us, it is no more (but also no less) dangerous than the flu. Sure, we should wash our hands and if you are vulnerable you should be take measures to isolate yourselves from risky situations. If I were you, I would also consider stocking up on ivermectin and the other items of Joe Rogan’s cocktail.
