Coronavirus: Thread

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Sat Jan 29 20:20:41 PST 2022


"I Don't Know Of A Bigger Story In The World" Right Now Than Ivermectin: NYTimes
                              Best-Selling Author

So why are journalists not covering it?
by Nick Corbishley

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/05/i-dont-know-of-a-bigger-story-in-the-world-right-now-than-ivermectin-ny-times-best-selling-author.html
https://covid19criticalcare.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/The-Drug-that-Cracked-Covid-by-Michael-Capuzzo.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/04/science/coronavirus-ivermectin-treatment.html
https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/92323
https://www.merck.com/news/merck-statement-on-ivermectin-use-during-the-covid-19-pandemic/
https://www.infobae.com/america/mexico/2021/05/16/ivermectina-contra-covid-19-cdmx-aseguro-que-su-uso-reduce-hasta-un-76-riesgo-de-hospitalizacion/
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/voices/existing-affordable-drugs-could-rapidly-reduce-covid-19-cases-and-deaths-in-india/
https://twitter.com/jjchamie/status/1396161738198982661
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/05/india-just-became-latest-country-to-approve-use-of-ivermectin-to-treat-covid-19.html

   Michael Capuzzo, a New York Times best-selling author , has just
   published an article titled “The Drug That Cracked Covid”. The
   15-page article chronicles the gargantuan struggle being waged by
   frontline doctors on all continents to get ivermectin approved as a
   Covid-19 treatment, as well as the tireless efforts by reporters, media
   outlets and social media companies to thwart them.

   Because of ivermectin, Capuzzo says, there are “hundreds of thousands,
   actually millions, of people around the world, from Uttar Pradesh in India
   to Peru to Brazil, who are living and not dying.” Yet media outlets have
   done all they can to “debunk” the notion that ivermectin may serve as
   an effective, easily accessible and affordable treatment for Covid-19.
   They have parroted the arguments laid out by health regulators around the
   world that there just isn’t enough evidence to justify its use.

   For his part, Capuzzo, as a reporter, “saw with [his] own eyes the other
   side [of the story]” that has gone unreported, of the many patients in
   the US whose lives have been saved by ivermectin and of five of the
   doctors that have led the battle to save lives around the world, Paul
   Marik, Umberto Meduri, José Iglesias, Pierre Kory and Joe Varon. These
   are all highly decorated doctors. Through their leadership of the Front
   Line COVID-19 Critical Care (FLCCC) Alliance, they have already enhanced
   our treatment of Covid-19 by discovering and promoting the use of
   Corticoid steroids against the virus. But their calls for ivermectin to
   also be used have met with a wall of resistance from healthcare regulators
   and a wall of silence from media outlets.

   “I really wish the world could see both sides,” Capuzzo laments.

   But unfortunately most reporters are not interested in telling the other
   side of the story. Even if they were, their publishers would probably
   refuse to publish it.

   That may explain why Capuzzo, a six-time Pulitzer-nominated journalist
   best known for his New York Times-bestselling nonfiction books Close to
   Shore and Murder Room, ended up publishing his article on ivermectin
   in Mountain Home, a monthly local magazine for the of the Pennsylvania
   mountains and New York Finger Lakes region, of which Capuzzo’s wife is
   the editor.



   It’s also the reason why I decided to dedicate today’s post to
   Capuzzo’s article. Put simply, as many people as possible
   –particularly journalists — need to read his story.

   As Capuzzo himself says, “I don’t know of a bigger story in the
   world.”

Total News Blackout

   On December 8 2020, FLCCC member Dr Pierre Kory gave nine minutes of
   impassioned testimony to the US Homeland Security Committee Meeting on the
   potent anti-viral, anti-inflammatory benefits of ivermectin.

   A total of 9 million people (myself included) saw the video on YouTube
   before it was taken down by YouTube’s owner, Google. As Capuzzo
   exhaustively lays out, both traditional and social media have gone to
   extraordinary lengths to keep people in the dark about ivermectin. So
   effective has this been that even in some of the countries that have
   benefited most from its use (such as Mexico and Argentina) many people are
   completely unaware of its existence. And this is no surprise given how
   little information is actually seeping out into the public arena.

     A news blackout by the world’s leading media came down on Ivermectin
     like an iron curtain. Reporters who trumpeted the COVID-19 terror in
     India and Brazil didn’t report that Ivermectin was crushing the P-1
     variant in the Brazilian rain forest and killing COVID-19 and all
     variants in India. That Ivermectin was saving tens of thousands of lives
     in South America wasn’t news, but mocking the continent’s peasants
     for taking horse paste was. Journalists denied the world knowledge of
     the most effective life-saving therapies in the pandemic, Kory said,
     especially among the elderly, people of color, and the poor, while
     wringing their hands at the tragedy of their disparate rates of death.

     Three days after Kory’s testimony, an Associated Press “fact-check
     reporter” interviewed Kory “for twenty minutes in which I recounted
     all of the existing trials evidence (over fifteen randomized and
     multiple observational trials) all showing dramatic benefits of
     Ivermectin,” he said. Then she wrote: “AP’S ASSESSMENT: False.
     There’s no evidence Ivermectin has been proven a safe or effective
     treatment against COVID-19.” Like many critics, she didn’t explore
     the Ivermectin data or evidence in any detail, but merely dismissed its
     “insufficient evidence,” quoting instead the lack of a
     recommendation by the NIH or WHO. To describe the real evidence in any
     detail would put the AP and public health agencies in the difficult
     position of explaining how the lives of thousands of poor people in
     developing countries don’t count in these matters.

     Not just in media but in social media, Ivermectin has inspired a strange
     new form of Western and pharmaceutical imperialism. On January 12, 2021,
     the Brazilian Ministry of Health tweeted to its 1.2 million followers
     not to wait with COVID-19 until it’s too late but “go to a Health
     Unit and request early treatment,” only to have Twitter take down the
     official public health pronouncement of the sovereign fifth largest
     nation in the world for “spreading misleading and potentially harmful
     information.” (Early treatment is code for Ivermectin.) On January 31,
     the Slovak Ministry of Health announced its decision on Facebook to
     allow use of Ivermectin, causing Facebook to take down that post and
     removed the entire page it was on, the Ivermectin for MDs Team, with
     10,200 members from more than 100 countries.

     In Argentina, Professor and doctor Hector Carvallo, whose prophylactic
     studies are renowned by other researchers, says all his scientific
     documentation for Ivermectin is quickly scrubbed from the Internet. “I
     am afraid,” he wrote to Marik and his colleagues, “we have affected
     the most sensitive organ on humans: the wallet…” As Kory’s
     testimony was climbing toward nine million views, YouTube, owned by
     Google, erased his official Senate testimony, saying it endangered the
     community. Kory’s biggest voice was silenced.

“The Most Powerful Entity on Earth”

   Malcom X once called the media “the most powerful entity on the
   earth.” They have, he said, “the power to make the innocent guilty and
   to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the
   minds of masses”. Today, that power is now infused with the power of the
   world’s biggest tech and social media companies. Together social and
   traditional media have the power to make a medicine that has saved
   possibly millions of lives during the current pandemic disappear from the
   conversation. When it is covered, it’s almost always in a negative
   light. Some media organizations, including the NY Times, have even
   prefaced mention of the word “ivermectin” — a medicine that has done
   so much good over its 40-year lifespan that its creators were awarded the
   Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2015 — with the word “controversial.”

   Undeterred, many front-line doctors have tried to persuade their
   respective health regulators of the unparalleled efficacy and safety of
   ivermectin as a covid treatment. They include Dr. Tess Lawrie, a prominent
   independent medical researcher who, as Capuzzo reports, evaluates the
   safety and efficacy of drugs for the WHO and the National Health Service
   to set international clinical practice guidelines:

     “[She] read all twenty-seven of the Ivermectin studies Kory cited. The
     resulting evidence is consistent and unequivocal,” she announced, and
     sent a rapid meta-analysis, an epidemiolocal statistical multi-study
     review considered the highest form of medical evidence, to the director
     of the NHS, members of parliament, and a video to Prime Minister Boris
     Johnson with “the good news… that we now have solid evidence of an
     effective treatment for COVID-19…” and Ivermectin should immediately
     “be adopted globally and systematically for the prevention and
     treatment of COVID-19.”

     Ignored by British leaders and media, Lawrie convened the day-long
     streaming BIRD conference—British Ivermectin Recommendation
     Development—with more than sixty researchers and doctors from the
     U.S., Canada, Mexico, England, Ireland, Belgium, Argentina, South
     Africa, Botswana, Nigeria, Australia, and Japan. They evaluated the drug
     using the full “evidence-to-decision framework” that is “the gold
     standard tool for developing clinical practice guidelines” used by the
     WHO, and reached the conclusion that Ivermectin should blanket the
     world.

     “Most of all you can trust me because I am also a medical doctor,
     first and foremost,” Lawrie told the prime minster, “with a moral
     duty to help people, to do no harm, and to save lives. Please may we
     start saving lives now.” She heard nothing back.

     Ivermectin’s benefits were also corroborated by Dr. Andrew Hill, a
     renowned University of Liverpool pharmacologist and independent medical
     researcher, and the senior World Health Organization/UNITAID
     investigator of potential treatments for COVID-19. Hill’s team of
     twenty-three researchers in twenty-three countries had reported that,
     after nine months of looking for a COVID-19 treatment and finding
     nothing but failures like Remdesivir— “we kissed a lot of
     frogs”— Ivermectin was the only thing that worked against COVID-19,
     and its safety and efficacy were astonishing—“blindingly
     positive,” Hill said, and “transformative.” Ivermectin, the WHO
     researcher concluded, reduced COVID-19 mortality by 81 percent.

Why All the Foot Dragging?

   Yet most health regulators and governments continue to drag their feet.
   More evidence is needed, they say. All the while, doctors in most
   countries around the world have no early outpatient medicines to draw upon
   in their struggle against the worst pandemic in century. Drawing on his
   own experience, Capuzzo describes the absence of treatments for COVID-19
   as a global crisis:

     When my daughter Grace, a vice president at a New York advertising
     agency, came down with COVID-19 recently, she was quarantined in a
     “COVID hotel” in Times Square with homeless people and quarantining
     travelers. The locks on her room door were removed. Nurses prowled the
     halls to keep her in her room and wake her up every night to check her
     vitals—not to treat her, because there is no approved treatment for
     COVID-19; only, if her oxygen plummeted, to move her to the hospital,
     where there is only a single eective approved treatment for COVID-19,
     steroids that may keep the lungs from failing.

   There are three possible explanations for health regulators’ refusal to
   allow the use of a highly promising, well-tolerated off-label medicine
   such as ivermectin:

     * 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 early-stage treatment 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.

     * If approved as a covid-19 treatment, ivermectin could even threaten
       the emergency use authorisation granted to covid-19 vaccines. One of
       the basic conditions for the emergency use authorisation 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 authorisation.

   This may explain why affordable, readily available and minimally toxic
   drugs are not repurposed for use against Covid despite the growing
   mountains of evidence supporting their efficacy.

   Ivermectin has already been approved as a covid-19 treatment in more than
   20 countries. They include Mexico where the mayor of Mexico City, Claudia
   Scheinbaum, recently said that the medicine had reduced hospitalisations
   by as much as 76%. As of last week, 135,000 of the city’s residents had
   been treated with the medicine. The government of India — the world’s
   second most populous country and one of the world’s biggest
   manufacturers of medicines — has also recommended the use of ivermectin
   as an early outpatient treatment against covid-19, in direct contravention
   of WHO’s own advice.

   Dr Vikas P. Sukhatme, the dean of Emory School of Medicine, recently wrote
   in a column for the Times of India that deploying drugs such as
   ivermectin and fluvoxamine in India is likely to “rapidly reduce the
   number of COVID-19 patients, reduce the number requiring hospitalization,
   supplemental oxygen and intensive care and improve outcomes in
   hospitalized patients.”

   Four weeks after the government included ivermectin and budesonide among
   its early treatment guidelines, the country has recorded its lowest case
   count in 40 days.



   In many of India’s regions the case numbers are plunging in almost
   vertical fashion. In the capital Delhi, as in Mexico City,
   hospitalisations have plummeted. In the space of 10 days ICU
   occupancy fell from 99% to 70%. Deaths are also falling. The test
   positivity ratio slumped from 35% to 5% in just one month.

   One of the outliers of this trend is the state of Tamil Nadu, where cases
   are still rising steeply. This may have something to do with the fact that
   the state’s newly elected governor, MK Stalin, decided to exclude
   ivermectin from the region’s treatment protocol in favor of Remdesivir.
   The result? Soaring cases. Late last week, Stalin reversed course once
   again and readopted ivermectin.

   For the moment deaths in India remain extremely high. And there are
   concerns that the numbers are being under-reported. Yet they may also
   begin to fall in the coming days. In all of the countries that have used
   ivermectin widely, fatalities are the last thing to fall, after case
   numbers and hospitalizations. Of course, there’s no way of definitively
   proving that these rapid falloffs are due to the use of ivermectin.
   Correlation, even as consistent as this, is not causation. Other factors
   such as strict lockdowns and travel restrictions no doubt also play a
   part.
   But a clear pattern across nations and territories has formed that
   strongly supports ivermectin’s purported efficacy. And that efficacy has
   been amply demonstrated in three meta-analyses.

   India’s decision to adopt ivermectin, including as a prophylaxis in some
   states, is already a potential game-changer. As I wrote three weeks ago,
   if case numbers, hospitalizations and fatalities fall in India as
   precipitously as they have in other countries that have adopted
   ivermectin, it could even become a watershed moment. But for that to
   happen, the news must reach enough eyes and ears. And for that to happen,
   reporters must, as Capuzzo says, begin to do their job and report both
   sides of this vital story.


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