For some reason, it’s ivermectin now.
We are in the disastrous second wave of COVID-19 pandemic now, but the malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), once touted as the miracle cure, became somewhat discredited, what with the many huge clinical trials proving that those drug don’t work on COVID-19. The faithful COVIDIOTS need a backup miracle drug, and ivermectin is as good one as any.
In this regard, congratulation to the humanity for having wasted such tremendous resources during the worst pandemic in a century while trying to verify some bullshit #HCQw0rks cure made-up by a couple of incompetent crooks. The French infectious disease professor Didier Raoult must be very proud of the global damage he caused from the comfort of his own chair, in fact I should apologise to him and his IHU Marseille institute on this occasion for having wrongfully assumed French authorities together with the scientific and medical community will not tolerate his despicable trolling and fraudulent quackery during a pandemic. They did, and continue to do so. This is how f***ed-up things are, dear reader.
Against all expectations of sanity, Raoult did not resign as IHU director, he was not even demoted or found guilty of anything. No, he is still all over French TV, and he has another French professor, Christian Perronne, in tow (whom Raoult once used to ridicule as a Lyme disease quack), together they sing the HCQ gospel. Another new professorial friend of Raoult: the herd immunity fanatic Jean-François Toussaint, who claims in Frontiers (excellent choice of venue!) that COVID-19 restrictions don’t work and just cause damage. The French swamp of academic quackery and misconduct managed to survive even COVID-19. More recently, Raoult even joined forces with that ridiculous HCQ healer from New York, Vovka “Zev” Zelenko.
These and other HCQ quacks are worshipped by a closed community of #HCQw0rks loonies, all of them anti-maskers and anti-COVID-restrictions, some are antivaxxers, not unexpected. To this toxic cult, HCQ offers an elegant covidiot-proof solution to a very complex problem, why would you need to restrict your life in any way if the pandemic can be prevented by a cheap drug. The truth of deliverance is however suppressed by the heinous conspiracy of the pharma company Gilead (maker of remdesivir, a repurposed antiviral drug which proved to have no effect on the SARS-CoV2 virus despite earlier claims of success and was therefore warned against by WHO). In any case, everyone criticising HCQ must be a shill for Gilead (myself and Elisabeth Bik included, as Raoult’s human sockpuppet at IHU, Eric Chabriere, repeatedly claims). It seems, the only people still talking about remdesivir as COVID-19 drug are those of HCQw0rks community. Oh, and here is Chabriere denouncing facemasks as useless, unsurprisingly:
Despite the continuation of the HCQ religion and because even Raoult himself started to hint HCQ might not be working (anymore, since the virus mutated!), those same people are now endorsing the de-worming drug ivermectin, probably as a backup, or even better, in combination. Even the Cold Fusion loonies of Martin-Fleischmann Memorial Project advice you to take HCQ with Ivermectin, plus Vitamin D.
There is no immediate reason why it had to be ivermectin now, a drug used against worm infections and occasionally also against arthropod parasites like skin mites. But then again, there was no particular reason for the choice of chloroquine back then, except Raoult being an Africa-born tropical disease doctor and a big fan of that malaria drug.
Thing is, with ivermectin there is no single big name pushing this drug, unless Raoult want to take over. How it happened that the de-worming agent became national COVID-19 medicine in several countries in Latin America is a mystery. Sure, desperate politicians and doctors want to prescribe something, anything, preferably something affordable (there go the prohibitively expensive antibody cocktails Donald Trump and all his mates take), and HCQ’s star is sinking. Remdesivir was too expensive and doesn’t work anyway, despite all that money Gilead invested in myself, Bik and other shills. But still, why ivermectin, and not Vitamin D or lactoferrin (which are also being administered to COVID-19 patients, in various nation states)? Or another kind of malaria medicine, the artemisia plant extracts (which taste disgusting and border on being toxic), promoted by Madagascar president and sold by a German Max-Planck Institute director?
Maybe because it has to be a prescription drug to appear serious, and so far only chloroquine/HCQ and ivermectin were proposed? The corticosteroid dexamethasone (which was actually proven to work in clinical trials) has too many side effects and was hence approved by WHO only for use only in severely ill COVID-19 patients, so there is no fun in that.
Basically, ivermectin is the stand-in for, or rather the second coming of HCQ, and it seems the same kind of travesty is unfolding. Hopefully on a smaller scale though, because vaccines are being rolled out already, and if those indeed work at least half-way as announced, we might have the real herd immunity.
But here is Raoult’s IHU preparing to switch to ivermectin. His human sockpuppet Chabriere announced the Season 2 of the IHU shitshow for 2021 on Twitter:
Lice? They might have an infestation there at IHU. Maybe it is the pubic lice epidemic in Raoult’s sycophant circles which made Chabriere hint at some preliminary results with ivermectin on Twitter:
And look, here they are, the promised results. Not only did ivermectin help Chabriere and his IHU friends conquer the pubic lice problem, look, it works against viruses also:
Better brace yourself for Raoult and IHU touting ivermectin in 2021. But who started that ivermectine against COVID-19 joke originally? Well, it might have been that mega-fraudster Sapan Desai, who teamed up with the Harvard Medical School Harvard professor Mandeep Mehra and Amit Patel of University of Utah, to claim in a (now retracted) paper in The Lancet that HCQ was killing COVID-19 patients. The dataset of thousands of hospitals used there belonged to Desai’s (now dissolved) company Surgisphere, and it was completely made-up or rather assembled Frankenstein-style from unrelated and stolen datasets.
Now, Desai and Patel did this to provide a magic COVID-19 drug of their own, in a (now deleted) preprint from April 2020. That drug was ivermectin.
That preprint was written by Desai and Patel on 6 April, literally just a couple of days after a paper in an Elsevier journal, from the lab of the Monash University scientist Kylie Wagstaff was published. Caly et al Antiviral Research 2020 was an in vitro study (everything can inhibit the virus proliferation in a dish, including microwaving it, why is this never proposed…), but together with the fraudulent Surgisphere claims, the ivermectin bomb detonated in April 2020.
In this regard, you will recognise the main argument:
“Professor David Jans, Dr Wagstaff’s co-author, says the existing data for ivermectin is much better than that for approved COVID-19 drug Remdesivir. He believes his ivermectin work is attracting criticism because “Big Pharma hates the idea of a cheap drug that might work”. […] “Maybe it is time for the world to start trying to save lives rather than continuing to exploit the situation as an ‘opportunity’.””
Thing is, the world was so busy with HCQ in the following months that nobody of Raoult’s calibre took charge in promoting ivermectin. And yet, it became a popular COVID-19 drug anyway, a therapeutic staple in Latin America and elsewhere. I searched for some sufficiently influential studies in this regard, and there is really not much. Thanks to the tweets by Julien Potet, I collected some preprints:
First, a preprint from USA by Mr and Mrs Rajter of Broward Health Medical Center in Florida. It later appeared in the CHEST Journal, issued by the American College of Chest Physicians.
Cepelowicz Rajter et al Use of Ivermectin Is Associated With Lower Mortality in Hospitalized Patients With Coronavirus Disease 2019- The ICON Study, CHEST Journal (2020) DOI: 10.1016/j.chest.2020.10.009 Preprint on medRxiv: doi: 10.1101/2020.06.06.20124461
It was a retrospective study, likely prompted by Wagstaff and Desai claims. The authors went through files of already treated patients from March and May 2020:
“Two hundred eighty patients, 173 treated with ivermectin and 107 without ivermectin, were reviewed. Most patients in both groups also received hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, or both. Univariate analysis showed lower mortality in the ivermectin group…“
The authors however found no difference in the durations of hospital stay, which is strange and rather indicating that ivermectin simply has no effect at all. I personally find this section bizarre:
“We also did not confirm a higher risk of mortality in Black patients in comparison with White patients after controlling for age. Prior reports showed lower survival rates among Black and Hispanic patients10; however, Price et al11 also found no racial differences in mortality. In our hospital population, White patients were significantly older, which is reflective of our catchment area and may be responsible for the discrepancy.”
You see, there is a theory that Black (and LatinX) people are susceptible to COVID-19 due to their alleged genetic inferiority. Luckily this study did not confirm this prejudice, but maybe the authors should have wondered if the Black mortality in USA happens due to the capitalism and racism-driven lack of access to health care. Once you go by hospital records, you analysis is kind of biased toward those who did get access to health care.
But as we know with HCQ, retrospective studies may be popular, but they are not really reliable, too often driven by bias and the desire to prove yourself right. An important clinical trial (registered as NCT04381884) was done in Argentina and published as preprint in November:
Krolewiecki et al Antiviral Effect of High-Dose Ivermectin in Adults with COVID-19: A Pilot Randomised, Controlled, Open Label, Multicentre Trial. SSRN, Elsevier (2020) doi: or 10.2139/ssrn.3714649
The difference between the outcomes of control and ivermectin arms seems to be not really there, at least not for objective clinical outcomes like recovery times or survival:
“The trial run between May 18 and September 29, 2020 with 45 randomized patients (30 in the IVM group and 15 controls). There was no difference in viral load reduction between groups but a significant difference in reduction was found in patients with higher median plasma IVM levels (72% IQR 59 – 77) versus untreated controls (42% IQR 31 – 73) (p=0·004). […] Adverse events were reported in 5 (33%) patients in the controls and 13 (43%) in the IVM treated group...”
The authors had to check ivermectin absorption in blood plasma to try to find some correlation to something positive-sounding, if not viral clearance than at least some viral load reduction. But then again, original medical indication for ivermectin is not about it entering the bloodstream, the drug’s targets are intestinal worms and skin parasites like Chabriere’s private lice. If there is too much of ivermectin in your blood, you will get side effects, and once you overdose so much that it crosses blood-brain barrier, you will die. Maybe this is why the lead author Alejandro Krolewiecki was quoted in a Nature article from October:
“It is a bit reckless for someone to say, from the studies we have completed, that we should prescribe this drug..”
That same article quotes another ivermectin researcher, Carlos Chaccour from Venezuela, now in Barcelona, Spain, and described as “critical of ivermectin’s use in Latin America“:
“Chaccour declined to tell Nature whether the results look promising, but he’s encouraged that trials are yielding data, even if slowly. “That’s what we asked for from the beginning,” he says. “There should be some guidance before making public-policy decisions.”
A week ago, on 7 December, Chaccour published his study as preprint. He and his colleagues also found no difference in coronavirus-positive patients (viral clearance).
Chaccour et al, The effect of early treatment with ivermectin on viral load, symptoms and humoral response in patients with mild COVID-19: a pilot, double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trial, Research Square (2020) doi: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-116547/v1
Like Krolewiecki’s team, they searched for clues nevertheless:
“Although there was a consistent overlap in interquartile ranges and full ranges at all points, the median viral load for both genes was lower at days 4 and 7 post treatment in the ivermectin group…”
It is not really that much to go on. Actually, the outcome of a clinical study from Bangladesh which motivated the Chaccour team was also not that convincing:
Ahmed et al A five day course of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19 may reduce the duration of illness IJID (2020) DOI: 10.1016/j.ijid.2020.11.191
That is officially even a peer reviewed paper! Although careful with peer reviewed, that same International Journal of Infectious Diseases (with very few editorial board members but an massive stream of publications, $1750 a pop) previously published an very, shall we say, flawed HCQ study from the Henry Ford clinic, Arshad et al 2020. So the Bangladeshi ivermectin clinical trial claimed:
“Clinical symptoms of fever, cough and sore throat were comparable among the three treatment arms. Virological clearance was earlier in the 5-day ivermectin treatment arm versus the placebo group (9.7 days vs. 12.7 days; P = 0.02); but not with the ivermectin + doxycycline arm (11.5 days; P = 0.27).“
The paper does not say what standard care included (which is not a minor issue, as you will see below). And it also contradicts these outstanding doxycycline claims from Iraq. The success of 200µg/kg ivermectin was determined by a somewhat obscure and undefined attribution of patients to “severe” and “critical” COVID-19 groups:
Hashim et al, Controlled randomized clinical trial on using Ivermectin with Doxycycline for treating COVID-19 patients in Baghdad, Iraq, medRxiv (2020) doi: 10.1101/2020.10.26.20219345
“Ivermectin with doxycycline reduced the time to recovery and the percentage of patients who progress to more advanced stage of disease; in addition, Ivermectin with doxycycline reduced mortality rate in severe patients from 22.72% to 0%; however, 18.2% of critically ill patients died with Ivermectin and doxycycline therapy.“
Ah, doxycycline, I know someone who proposed this antibiotic as a senolytics cure for COVID-19: Michael Lisanti, anti-aging researcher and Photoshop enthusiast. Unsurprisingly, also Raoult’s Marseille crew suggested doxycycline as a COVID-19 medicine (Gendrot et al 2020), of course in combination with chloroquine (it was in April, before Raoult completely switched to HCQ).
Now, the standard care at that Iraqi study consisted of Vitamin C (1000mg twice/ day), Zinc (75-125 mg/day), Vitamin (D3 5000IU/day), Azithromycin (250mg/day for 5 days), plus – Acetaminophen 500mg and Dexamethazone 6 mg/day if needed. That does not at all sound like standard care, but at least there is no HCQ involved. Different with this clinical trial from their neighbours in Iran, published as preprint:
Niaee et al Ivermectin as an adjunct treatment for hospitalized adult COVID-19 patients: A randomized multi-center clinical trial Research Square (2020) DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-109670/v1
“The results of preclinical consequences in Table 3 indicate a reduction in mortality rate in patients receiving ivermectin treatment to 0, 10, 0 and 3.3% for arms 1- 4 respectively, compared to the standard and placebo plus standard arms which was 16.7% and 20% respectively. Moreover, the decrease in hospitalization and low O2 saturating terms was significant in ivermectin treated 1-4 arms compared to the two untreated controls (P=0.006 and P=0.025 respectively). The lowest mortality rate (0%), hospitalization duration (5days), and duration of low O2 saturatin [sic!] (2days) was observed arm 3 with single dose of 400mcg/kg ivermectin.“
Finally we have that elusive reduction in mortality again! And a decrease in hospitalisation! Yet it is worth noting what the common regimen was though, which was administered only to the two control groups but not to the four ivermectin groups:
“common regimen based on Iran health ministry (Hydroxychloroquine 200mg/kg twice per day)“
Unless it’s a typo, the hapless patients received at least 14 GRAMM HCQ a day. The actual Iranian guidelines however speak of 2x 200mg HCQ per day or so, which is presumably what the authors meant to apply and hopefully also did. 14 grams would be definitely deadly. But still, the lucky ones in the treatment arms got a pill or two of ivermectin instead of HCQ.
That is very reminiscent of that preprint from Bangladeshi and Chinese researchers, posted already in June:
Chowdhury et al A comparative study on Ivermectin- Doxycycline and Hydroxychloroquine-Azithromycin therapy on COVID19 patients Research Gate (2020) DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.22193.81767/3
“Patients were divided randomly into two groups: Ivermectin 200µgm/kg single dose + Doxycycline 100mg BID for 10days in group A, and Hydroxychloroquine 400mg 1st day, then200mg BID for 9days + Azithromycin 500mg daily for 5 days in group B. […] All subjects in the Ivermectin-Doxycycline group (group A) reached a negative PCR for SARS-CoV-2, at a mean of 8.93days, and all reached symptomatic recovery, at a mean of 5.93days, with 55.10% symptom-free by the 5th day. In the Hydroxychloroquine-Azithromcyin [sic!] group (group B), 96.36% reached a negative PCR at a mean of 6.99days and were symptoms-free at 9.33days. Group A patients had symptoms that could have been caused by the medication in 31.67% of patients, including lethargy in 14(23.3%), nausea in 11(18.3%), and occasional vertigo in 7(11.66%) of patients. In Group B, 46.43% had symptoms that could have been caused by the medication, including 13(23.21%) mild blurring of vision and headache; 22(39.2%) increased lethargy and dizziness, 10(17.85%) occasional palpitation, and 9(16.07%) nausea and vomiting“
At best, this is not a study on what helps against COVID-19, but which drug combo is more toxic: ivermectin + doxycycline vs HCQ + azithromycin. What the scientific value of all that is, is beyond my understanding, but it was sure fun for all involved, except probably the patients, but as always, there are many more where those came from.
Similar case in Egypt, where HCQ is also quasi standard of care, thank you Professor Raoult. Here the preprint from November:
Elgazzar et al Efficacy and Safety of Ivermectin for Treatment and prophylaxis of COVID-19 Pandemic Research Square (2020) doi: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-100956/v1
“Addition of Ivermectin to standard care is very effective drug for treatment of COVID-19 patients with significant reduction in mortality compared to Hydroxychloroquine plus standard treatment only“
Basically, like the others, these Egyptian doctors compared ivermectin to HCQ:
“600 subjects; 400 symptomatic confirmed COVID-19 patients and 200 health care and household contacts distributed over 6 groups; Group I: 100 patients with Mild/Moderate COVID-19 infection received a 4-days course of Ivermectin plus standard of care; Group II: 100 patients with mild/moderate COVID-19 infection received hydroxyxholorquine [sic!] plus standard of care; Group III: 100 patients with severe COVID-19 infection received Ivermectin plus standard of care; Group IV: 100 patients with Severe COVID-19 infection received hydroxyxholorquine [sic!] plus standard of care.“
The standard of care was the best ever though:
“Egyptian protocol of COVID-19 treatment (Azithromycin 500mg OD/5days, Paracetamol 500mg PRN, vitamin C 1gm OD, Zinc 50 mg OD, Lactoferrin 100mg sachets BID & Acetylcystein 200mg t.d.s & prophylactic or therapeutic anticoagulation if D-dimer > 1000), (MOH version 30 May 2020)“
Yes, it also includes Lactoferrin (probably shipped in from Italy)!
And of course, just like HCQ, ivermectin not only cures COVID-19, it also prevents it! Look at this preprint from India from November:
Behera et al Role of ivermectin in the prevention of COVID-19 infection among healthcare workers in India: A matched case-control study medRxiv (2020) doi: 10.1101/2020.10.29.20222661
A stunning “73% reduction of COVID-19 infection among healthcare workers” in India! There was no control arm, the study’s authors just pulled it out from somewhere (“existing line list“) and called it “matched case-control pair“. Whoever those elusive controls were, the treatment arm had both HCQ and ivermectin, and sometimes also Vitamin C!
“Exposure was defined as the prophylaxis viz., ivermectin and or/ (HCQ) and or/ vitamin C and or/ other interventions taken for the prevention of COVID-19. [Healthcare workers] of AIIMS Bhubaneswar were advised for HCQ prophylaxis as per ICMR guidelines from 11th April 2020 in addition to the appropriate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) depending on the place they were posted.9 However, the uptake was not encouraging on account of known side-effect. Further, on 17th September 2020, a decision to provide all [Healthcare workers] with ivermectin for prophylactic use was announced, based on a consensus statement that was released.”
In Modi’s India, people are first forced en masse to take an alleged COVID-19 drug, then a study proving the drug’s efficiency is retrospectively supplied by some loyal scientists. That was how HCQ worked in India since the beginning of the pandemic, and this is how ivermectin works now. Death cult is what fascism is all about.
In USA, a Zelenko-clone doctor named Pierre Kory became a celebrity and even testified to the US Senate last week, urging to save lives with the “miracle drug” ivermectin. Kory is “President of the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC),” which is, at least to me, reminiscent of the “America’s Frontline Doctors” freak circus which had been pushing HCQ not so long ago. Kory, according to his Senate testimony, expects to be awarded a Nobel Prize for saving the world from COVID-19 and has everything sorted: the prophylaxis and the treatment protocol, which includes next to ivermectin also Vitamin C, Vitamin D, Quercetin, Melatonin and, Zelenko will be pleased, Zinc. Expect Kory any moment to publish his own life-saving clinical studies with ivermectin, just like Zelenko did with HCQ. Probably also in one of Raoult’s own Elsevier journals.
Back to Raoult’s France. As Alexander Samuel informed me, the French company MedinCell announced already in April, as reaction to Wagstaff’s in vitro study, to develop an intravenous formulation of ivermectin as COVID-19 therapy. Let’s hope MedinCell and Raoult’s IHU won’t team up for the next string of human experiments.
Update 12.04.2021
For completeness of records, I should mention this hilariously short-lived Frontiers one-paragraph paper by Kory et al, which saw the light of the day on 13.01.2021, and went extinct on 1.03.2021:
Pierre Kory, G U. Meduri, Jose Iglesias, Joseph Varon, Keith Berkowitz, Howard Kornfeld, Eivind Vinjevoll, Scott Mitchell, Fred Wagshul and Paul E. Marik Review of the Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy of Ivermectin in the Prophylaxis and Treatment of COVID-19 Front. Pharmacol. doi: 10.3389/fphar.2021.643369
The paper was ERASED by Frontiers, not just retracted. It is gone completely. The only trace of its past existence is a silly Frontiers editorial, posted only after journalists started asking. The whole idea of permanency attached to a DOI does not apply to troll publishers, so here is a WayBack Machine archived record. And here is a screenshot:
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