The de-worming drug Ivermectin has been in the news lately. Joe Rogan says he took it and it helped cure him of Covid in three days. The Science Trusters™ on social media are irate at the idea that the vaccine is not the savior of mankind. And of course the shameless, bald-faced liars in the media are shamelessly, bald-facedly lying about Ivermectin because they’re evil people who don’t actually want Americans to be safe from Covid, they just want Americans to be stabbed repeatedly with Big Pharma’s vaccines.
Once the Ivermectin cat got out of the bag, the media kicked it into overdrive with lies and fear porn. This story spread around on social media–supposedly a bunch of idiot, redneck, Trump-loving rural Oklahomans were overdosing on Ivermectin and filling up all the hospital beds, so much so that gunshot victims couldn’t receive treatment!
An Oklahoma doctor has said overdoses of the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin, which many believe without evidence can prevent or cure Covid-19, are helping cause delays and problems for rural hospitals and ambulance services struggling to cope with the resurgent pandemic.
Ivermectin is used to kill internal and external parasites in livestock animals and, in smaller doses, in humans.
“There’s a reason you have to have a doctor to get a prescription for this stuff, because it can be dangerous,” Dr Jason McElyea told KFOR, an Oklahoma TV station.
“The [emergency rooms] are so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times getting to facilities where they can get definitive care and be treated.
Aren’t you MAD!?
Aren’t you OUTRAGED?!
JUST TAKE THE FUCKING VACCINE YOU FUCKING SCIENCE-HATING IDIOTS!!!!!!!!!!!
Well it turns out the story was a fabrication. I know, shocking–right? You can go to the Oklahoma hospital in question’s website–here–and they have the following message posted:
This doctor McElyea hasn’t worked at the hospital in question for over 2 months.
Further, “NHS Sequoyah has not treated any patients due to complications related to taking ivermectin. This includes not treating any patients for ivermectin overdose.”
Imagine that.
Golly, I wonder why lots of people don’t just mindlessly Trust The Experts™.
It’s almost as if there are a lot of doctors out there who are political hacks and not to be trusted.
If you Google Ivermectin, you will be bombarded with all sorts of negativity and fear porn:
They really, really, really don’t want you to even consider taking Ivermectin to treat Covid. Wonder why?
It’s probably because they’re just so concerned about our health and safety.
/sarc
And of course you’ve got your social media Experts and Geniuses snarking about idiots ingesting horse medicine:
Yeah, we’re so smart. We’re so sophisticated. We’re so much better than those un-vaxed idiots eating horse paste.
How Proudly Vaxed Blue Checks see themselves when they snark about Ivermectin being a horse drug:
A consensus has emerged among the Proudly Vaxed Blue Checks on social media that Ivermectin is strictly for horses and thus unsafe for human beings. As if a medicine originally intended for horses cannot possibly be safe for humans under any circumstances.
(I wonder how many of the people scoffing at Ivermectin have taken Ketamine as a recreational drug before. Probably a decent chunk of them).
But Ivermectin is absolutely safe for humans to use. In fact, it is not only safe but immensely beneficial at treating a variety of ailments and illnesses, primarily parasites.
I’m going to quote from a 2011 paper on Ivermectin by Andy Crump and Satoshi Omura (Omura later won the Nobel Prize in 2015). The article is hosted on the NIH’s website and has been cited 242 times:
Ivermectin has “had an immeasurably beneficial impact in improving the lives and welfare of billions of people throughout the world.”
But LOL HORSE DRUG.
This is really a fascinating article. It talks about how effective Ivermectin is at treating this disease in Africa known as “River Blindness”:
In the early-1970s, [River Blindness] was endemic in 34 countries: 27 in Africa; 6 in the Americas; and 1 in the Arabian Peninsula. The World Health Organization (WHO) later estimated that 17.7 million people were infected worldwide, of whom some 270,000 were blind, and another 500,000 severely visually disabled. The burden of onchocerciasis was particularly extreme in the hyper-endemic belt across sub-Saharan Africa. Communities in these areas exhibited high rates of visual disability caused by Onchocerciasis, up to 40% in some areas, which caused immeasurable negative impact on individual and community health, reducing economic capacity and productivity, and leading to the abandonment of fertile agricultural lands.19)
By 1973, Onchocerciasis had been recognised by the then head of the World Bank, Robert McNamara, as a major disease of massive health and socioeconomic importance and one in dire need of combating in West Africa, and he became the key agent for change. In 1974, following international recognition of the dramatic consequences of disabling and disfiguring Onchocerciasis in Africa, four United Nations agencies, including the World Bank, launched the Onchocerciasis Control Programme in West Africa (OCP). The programme covered 1.2 million km2 , protecting 30 million people in 11 countries from River Blindness.
For over a decade, OCP operations were exclusively based on the spraying of insecticides by helicopters and aircraft over the breeding sites of vector blackflies in order to kill their larvae. Following the registration of ivermectin (produced under the brand name Mectizan®) for human use in 1987, in a hitherto unprecedented move and with unheralded commitment, Mectizan® was donated by the manufacturing company, Merck & Co. Inc., to treat onchocerciasis in all endemic countries for as long as it was needed. The resultant drug donation programme was the first, largest, longest running and most successful of all—and proved a model for all others that have followed. Ivermectin began to be distributed in 1988, with operations being organized through the independent Mectizan Donation Program (MDP) established and funded by Merck.
Thereafter, OCP control operations changed from exclusive vector control to larviciding combined with ivermectin treatment or, in some areas, to ivermectin treatment alone. Ivermectin swiftly became the drug of choice for the treatment of Onchocerciasis due to its unique and potent microfilaricidal effects, the absence of severe side effects and its excellent safety. It is now the sole tool being used in disease elimination campaigns in the 16 other African countries where the disease exists. A single annual dose of 150 µg/kg of ivermectin, given orally, can reduce the level of skin microfilariae to zero and, by interfering with worm embryogenesis, can delay the build-up of new microfilariae for a period of up to two years. OCP was closed in December 2002 after virtually stopping disease transmission in all target nations except Sierra Leone where operations were hampered by civil war.
After being approved for human use in 1987, Ivermectin essentially wiped out River Blindness. It’s a miracle, really. Ivermectin is also highly effective at combating Elephantiasis.
The CDC also recommends Ivermectin to treat parasites in US-bound refugees. In 2015, Satoshi Omura and William Campbell (Campbell was a friend of Omura’s who worked at Merck) won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and/or Medicine for pioneering the use of Ivermectin to treat roundworm parasites.
So by now it’s beyond debate that Ivermectin is absolutely safe for human use.
But does it cure Covid? Well, Joe Rogan used it as part of his cocktail of medicines and drugs to treat his Covid. I wrote about that yesterday. You can’t definitively say it was Ivermectin that cured his Covid, because he used a bunch of other medicines and treatments as well.
So anyone who’s familiar with Joe Rogan and his advocacy for Ivermectin knows that he’s not saying Ivermectin alone cures Covid. The idea that “Ivermectin cures Covid!” is a straw man.
However, Bret Weinstein points out in this video that it’s possible that the reason Africa has such low rates of Covid is because of the widespread usage of Ivermectin there:
You can see the difference in Covid deaths in Africa in countries with widespread usage of Ivermectin vs. those countries that don’t have widespread use of Ivermectin:
The study cited in the image above comes from Japan, and it concluded that “in areas where Ivermectin is distributed to and used by the entire population, it leads to a significant reduction in mortality.”
However, this study hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet. It does demonstrate what appears to be pretty strong correlation, but that does not always equal causation.
This study from Bangladesh, recently conducted and published on NIH’s website, found that a 5-day course of ivermectin reduced the duration of Covid-19:
So there is at least some promising scientific data out there about Ivermectin’s effectiveness in combating Covid. It’s not a proven fact, but there is at least some science behind it. This site tracks all of the studies.
This didn’t just come from nowhere.
The point is, people should be happy about this. If people are truly looking to beat Covid by any means possible, then all this Ivermectin data should be celebrated. Instead, it is viciously derided and jeered by the people who claim to care very, very much about overcoming this viral pandemic–and who claim to Love Science.
It’s just odd that so many people out there want the vaccine, and only the vaccine, to combat Covid. They flip out when anyone dares suggest there’s another way to beat this thing.