On December 8th, Dr Pierre Kory gave evidence to the US Senate’s Homeland Security committee. There he pleaded with the federal government to review the evidence supporting the use of ivermectin to help people avoid COVID infection and to reduce the danger of serious illness in those who have contracted it. Ivermectin is very widely used as an anti-parasitic and has a good safety profile.
The coverage in the New York Times could not have been more dismissive. A piece published on December 7th, before the hearings carried the headline ‘Elevating Fringe Theories, Ron Johnson Questions Virus Science’. The authors wrote:
There is a prominent vaccine skeptic, an outspoken critic of masking and social distancing, and at least two doctors who have promoted the use of an anti-parasitic drug that government scientists have recommended against using to treat the coronavirus […] Two others promote the use of ivermectin, a drug often used to fight lice and pinworms, to treat coronavirus patients, despite the National Institutes of Health’s recommendation against its use outside clinical trials.
Dr Kory and the organisation he represents, the Front Line Covid-19 Clinical Care Alliance (FLCC) were not mentioned by name. Given that he was appearing to call for the National Institutes of Health to change its guidelines on ivermectin use, it is hardly surprising that he was promoting ivermectin ‘despite the National Institutes of Health’s recommendation against its use outside clinical trials.’ If the NIH was recommending its use in the pandemic, he wouldn’t have needed to make his case in the Senate.
On the day of the hearings the paper published ‘A Senate Hearing promoted unproven drugs and dubious claims about the coronavirus’. This was written by one its ‘fact-check’ reporters and this time ivermectin’s effectiveness was ‘mixed’:
Ivermectin is used to treat parasites in humans as well as to prevent heartworms in dogs; research on its effectiveness in treating the coronavirus has been mixed.
But once again neither Kory nor the organisation he represents were named. This is very strange because the FLCCC are not cranks or snake oil salesmen. They are a collection of doctors who are named authors on thousands of peer-reviewed papers. They aren’t the sort of people who usually attract the scorn of ‘fact-check’ journalists. And the FLCCC have been treating patients with COVID-19 since the Spring. Kory wasn’t advocating ivermectin use on a whim. He based his testimony on a number of trials, written up in peer-reviewed journals, that showed that the drug is remarkably effective. But he and his colleagues have also been using the drug as a treatment for their patients.
I am not a scientist, and am happy to defer to others, but one peer-reviewed paper in particular makes the dismissive attitude of the New York Times even more puzzling to me On November 17th the peer-reviewed Journal of Biomedical Research and Clinical Investigation published ‘Study of the Efficacy and Safety of Topical Ivermectin + Iota- Carrageenan in the Prophylaxis against COVID-19 in Health Personnel.’ The article set out the results of a trial in Argentina in which 788 healthcare workers were given topical ivermectin and iota-carrageenan, as well as standard PPE. Another 407 in a comparator group were given only standard PPE. The drugs were administered before exposure to the virus. After three months a total of 237 people had tested positive for COVID-19. Every single one of these people came from the comparator group. No one treated with ivermectin and iota-carrageenan had tested positive for the disease.
The authors of the paper concluded that ‘by using ivermectin in oral solution and carrageenan in nasal spray form, we are providing an inexpensive, safe and effective means to protect people from contagion and serious forms of the disease.’ This is not a call for further research. It is a clear declaration that the drugs administered work.
This was not a double-blind trial against placebo. But many drugs, including penicillin, have gone into general use long before they were tested against a placebo. If something very obviously works, there’s no need to control for the placebo effect. If a placebo could prevent 100% of those given it from getting sick with COVID-19, we wouldn’t be in this situation. Besides, the single trial that led to the widespread use of dexamethasone, ‘Dexamethasone in Hospitalized Patients with Covid-19 — Preliminary Report’ wasn’t a double blind trial against placebo either, and was hailed by the UK’s health minister as an ‘astounding breakthrough’. Dexamethasone went into immediate use throughout the NHS.
The Argentinian study is one of 15 peer-reviewed studies of ivermectin use, all of which support the view that the drug is effective, both when used prophylactically and when used as a treatment for people with the disease. So why isn’t it now being administered at scale? What more research is needed? Is it really sensible for the fact-checking reporters at the New York Times to dismiss claims about ivermectin as ‘fringe theories’ about an ‘unproven’ drug?
Ivermectin is a powerful drug, and I am sure that there are good reasons not to put it into the water supply. But, as the FLCCC and others have pointed out, it has been taken by many millions of people over many years. And it is already being used to treat COVID-19 patients, notably in Latin America. In Australia Professor Thomas Borodi, who famously pioneered a cure for peptic ulcers, is telling anyone who will listen that ivermectin is a useful therapy for people with COVID-19. Normally we pay attention to people with his kind of track record.
The New York Times published a correction to its December 9th article: ‘An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the drug ivermectin. It is used both to treat parasites in humans and to prevent heartworms in dogs.’ God knows what they’d written originally. At any rate, if I was a politician with any power whatsoever I would be inviting clinicians to meetings and referring ‘imprecisely’ to the need ‘to treat parasites in humans’ in care homes, hospitals, and, where appropriate, in the general population. If dosing people safely with ivermectin also reduces the number of cases of COVID-19, well that would be a bonus.
The Return of the Public 