The media has managed to find a number of experts willing to say that ivermectin is 'dangerous' and that the COVID vaccines are 'completely safe'.
Experts often tend to present such information with an ‘of course’ or ‘it's indisputable’ tone of voice. I think the public has a right to be suspicious of experts who won't or can't back up what they say with evidence.
How many times have you heard some government official or media expert describe ivermectin as "dangerous"? I'm guessing lots. Did they give evidence for that point of view? I'm guessing not.
Why don't we look at the evidence for whether ivermectin is safe or dangerous.
The World Health Organization has had a great global tracking system for Adverse Drug Reactions in place since 1978. The website www.vigiaccess.org lets you access that database.
Let's compare Ivermectin to a common non-prescription drug: aspirin.
Here's the Vigiaccess printout for aspirin:
A total of 185,000 adverse drug reactions have been reported for aspirin. Aspirin is considered to be a very safe medication: That's why you don't need a prescription to buy it.
Okay, now let's look at ivermectin:
Ivermectin has seen 5,769 Adverse Reactions over the course of 40 years and roughly 3,700 million doses. There's been an adverse reaction roughly once every 650,000 doses. That's a safety record few drugs can match, which is part of why ivermectin is on the WHO's list of Essential Medicines.
Do the math: 32 times as many people have had adverse reactions to aspirin compared to ivermectin. So how is ivermectin a 'dangerous' drug?
One of the ways ‘experts’ commonly lie is to present information that is incomplete or lacking in context. They are often reluctant to tell a barefaced lie. They will say things like: "Ivermectin can have serious side-effects." Technically, that is true, but this is hugely misleading statement if it isn't also admitted that these serious side-effects are extremely rare when ivermectin is taken at the recommended dosage.
I think it is useful to notice the differences in the way the media describes aspirin and ivermectin.
Aspirin is another a medicine that has been re-purposed many times. Though most of us think of aspirin as a headache remedy, aspirin is also prescribed to reduce fever, inflammation, and pain. It is used to reduce the chest pains of angina, and to reduce the risk of stroke. Many medications have multiple uses. You don't hear the fact that aspirin is a headache medication being used to argue that aspirin shouldn't be prescribed to treat angina, do you?
Aspirin has also been re-purposed for veterinary use. Vets will often prescribe aspirin as a treatment for inflammation or osteoarthritis in dogs. When was the last time you heard aspirin derided as an "anti-inflammatory for dogs." That would be the direct equivalent of the slander of describing ivermectin as a "horse de-wormer." Ivermectin developed for human use, and only later re-purposed for use with animals. Humans have received roughly 3,700 million doses of ivermectin. How is it remotely fair to pretend this is primarily a medication for horses and cows?
It is true that some people have been so desperate to protect themselves from COVID with ivermectin they have resorted to taking veterinary ivermectin, which does have risks, particularly around dosing and the secondary ingredients sometimes present. But, if that issue were presented with even a tiny bit of fairness, it would be acknowledged that those risks having nothing to do with ivermectin itself, and everything to do with Governments' attempts to prevent Canadians from obtaining a medication used as a COVID treatment in over 40 countries, including the United States.
One of the ways the media experts routinely lie is by withholding information. It is disingenuous to describe ivermectin as an "anti-parasite." Fairer would be to say that ivermectin has been used primarily as an anti-parasite. Fair would be to include the crucial information that ivermectin has been used as an broad-spectrum RNA antiviral for many years in the treatment of HIV, Dengue, and Zika viruses.
Fair would be pointing out that scientists even know what gives ivermectin its antiviral properties. Ivermectin is a protease inhibitor: it inhibits an enzyme that RNA viruses like COVID need in order to replicate. Fair would be to point out that ivermectin prevents the reproduction of the COVID virus in vitro - in the lab.
Fair would be to mention that 15 out of 15 studies of the prophylactic use of ivermectin showed improved outcomes ranging between 54% and 100%, with an average reported improvement of 85%. Fair would be to mention that 25 out of 29 trials of ivermectin as a COVID early treatment protocol showed an average improvement of 66%. By all means, experts should feel free to challenge the validity of any or all of those trials. But fairness at least requires acknowledging that clinical evidence strongly supporting ivermectin does exist.
Sometimes the slander of ivermectin has gone beyond innuendo to outright lies.
Here's two quotes from CNN, as reported in the Washington Examiner:
“Controversial podcast host Joe Rogan, who’s railed against vaccine requirements, says he has COVID and took a drug intended for livestock,” said host Erin Burnett.
Added CNN’s Don Lemon, “The United States is now averaging 160,455 new COVID-19 cases every day, including controversial podcast host Joe Rogan saying that he tested positive for COVID and that he says he is taking several medications including a drug meant for deworming livestock.”
If CNN had even a tiny bit of respect for the truth they would have included three important facts:
1) Though Joe Rogan has railed against forcing people to get vaccinated, he himself was fully vaccinated at the time he contracted COVID.
2) Joe Rogan took human-use ivermectin as prescribed by his doctor. He did not take veterinary ivermectin, which is the clear implication in both quotes.
3) Ivermectin was designed first for human use, and only later re-purposed for use in animals.
Though aspirin and ivermectin are similar in being multi-use drugs with veterinary applications, there is one way in which it is unfair to compare aspirin and ivermectin. Even though an immense number of people has taken ivermectin over the past 40 years, that number is dwarfed by the number of people who have taken aspirin.
Azithromycin has seen usage rates more comparable to ivermectin. Azithromycin is considered to be among the safest of antibiotics available, enough so that roughly 15 million prescriptions are written for Azithromycin in the US every year. Though it's hard to get a handle on exactly how many doses of azithromycin have have been taken worldwide over the past 40 years, it's not going to be orders of magnitude greater than ivermectin use, which aspirin use could be. What does the Vigiaccess report for azithromycin look like? Let's see:
Though Azithromycin is generally considered to be a very safe drug, it has seen more than 73,000 adverse drug reactions over the years - Twelve times the number of adverse events reported for ivermectin. If Azithromycin is a very safe drug, how can ivermectin not be?
Okay, now let's use the same database to look at our 'completely safe' COVID vaccines.
Is there an existing vaccine that has seen wide enough use to be comparable to the COVID vaccines?
There is: polio vaccines. There have been roughly ten billion doses of oral polio vaccine given over the past 20 years, and probably an additional 10 billion oral or injected polio vaccines in the 22 years prior to that in the Vigiaccess database. That's more than a match for the eight billion doses of COVID vaccines given so far. Here's the Adverse Drug Reaction data for polio vaccines:
There have been more than 122,000 adverse reactions to polio vaccines over the 42 years in the database - roughly 1 dose out of a 160,000 created an adverse reaction. The norm is for children to get 4 doses of polio vaccine, which increases the risk from one in 160,000 to one in 40,000, but that’s still a small risk for lifelong protection against a disease that used to kill and maim with great regularity.
Now let's look at the COVID vaccines. Here's what Vigiaccess has to say about them:
What do we see? Well, in there first year, the COVID vaccines have seen more than 2.6 million adverse reactions. Even some of the subtotals are a little concerning: 100,000+ blood and lymphatic probems, 140,000 cardiac problems, 40,000 immune system disorders, more than a million nervous system disorders, 120,000 psychiatric disorders, 120,000 reproductive system disorders. In one year, we’ve 21 times the number of adverse reactions to the COVID vaccines as what we saw with the polio vaccines in the past four decades. That's roughly one adverse event for every 3,000 vaccinations. This means you are about 50 times as likely to have an adverse reaction to the COVID vaccines as to the polio vaccines.
With the writing now on the wall that everyone will soon need a third booster shot - if they haven’t already had one, the cumulative risk of three COVID vaccine shots rises from one in 3,000 to one in 1,000.
It might be useful to put these numbers into the context of vaccines that are familiar to people. Here are the Adverse Drug Reaction totals for five common vaccines at reported on Vigiaccess:
mumps vaccine: 716 adverse events
diphtheria vaccine: 1,882 adverse events
rubella vaccine: 2,624 adverse events
measles vaccine: 5,838 adverse events
tetanus vaccine: 15,147 adverse events
The total for five common childhood vaccines: 26,207 adverse events. The COVID vaccines in one year have created 100 times as many adverse events as these five common vaccines have over the course of decades of use.
Adverse reactions to the COVID vaccines are still very small in relation to the huge number of vaccine doses, occurring in only .03 percent of vaccinations. But that is only part of the story. The polio vaccine was a sterilizing vaccine: if you took it you were pretty much guaranteed you would neither get nor spread polio. COVID vaccines clearly don't prevent breakthrough cases of COVID. They also don't prevent you from passing COVID on to other people.
Polio vaccines retain their effectiveness for many years. COVID vaccines start to wane in efficacy in a matter of months, necessitating repeated booster shots.
The polio vaccines went through many years of trials and a careful vetting process before they were approved. The COVID vaccines were released under emergency authorizations, based on very limited trial data. At this point, we can safely say that if the polio vaccines had any long-term negative side effects, we'd have discovered them long ago. It's still too early to say with any certainty that the COVID vaccines do not have serious long term side-effects.
It must be said that pretending that COVID vaccines are a vaccine like any other is looking more and more dishonest.
Here is the trade-off with four doses of polio vaccine: A one in 40,000 chance of an adverse vaccine reaction buys you lifelong protection from a disease that would kill 2 to 5 percent of children and 15 to 30 percent of adults.
Here is the trade-off with three doses of COVID vaccine: A one in a thousand chance of an adverse vaccine reaction buys you temporary and partial protection from a disease that kills .002% of 10-year-olds, .01% of 25-year-olds, 1.4% of 65-year-olds, and 15% of 85-year-olds.
The risk/benefit ratio for COVID vaccines is very different from most vaccines. The risk of full COVID vaccination is 40 times the risk of full polio vaccination. The benefit of COVID vaccination is hugely dependent on age and co-morbidity status. If you over 75 or have serious co-morbidities, the risks of vaccination are dwarfed by the benefits. If you’re healthy and under 40, your risk/benefit ratio is much less clear. For healthy children, the risks of vaccination are arguably bigger than the benefits of vaccination.
My intent is not to talk anyone out of being vaccinated. My concern is there has been a very clear violation of the medical principle of informed consent here.
A great many people now are being pressured to get vaccinated if they are unvaccinated, or to get booster shots if they have been vaccinated. Has anyone in the government or the media bothered to mention to you that these temporary, leaky COVID vaccines are an order of magnitude more dangerous than traditional vaccines? Have they admitted directly that these vaccines are so new and untested that we are still in the process of determining what the long-term side-effects are?
Informed consent requires that you be given full disclosure of the risks of vaccination, so you can realistically weigh the trade-off in risks between getting vaccinated and remaining unvaccinated. So far, most Canadians haven’t had that.
Here's the ultimate irony of our Brave New World: Ivermectin, which carries a risk of an adverse event of 1/650,000, is considered too dangerous a drug for Canada to even conduct a clinical trial of that drug. COVID vaccines, with the risk of an adverse event of 1/3,000 - twenty times higher than than the risk of ivermectin - are considered so safe that public health officials feel justified in trying to force these vaccines on medical personnel.
PS: Another sure sign that Canada’s mainstream media has morphed from government watchdog to government lapdog can be seen in the stories the media decide NOT to cover. We are constantly harangued that the only way to stop COVID deaths is for absolutely everyone to get vaccinated. Right now in wealthy Canada with an 80% vaccination rate, an average of 20 people a day are dying of COVID. In impoverished Bangladesh with only a 35% vaccination rate, only 3 people a day are dying of COVID. If vaccinations are our one and only hope for salvation, how do we explain that?
PPS: an American version of this post is on my personal website at newsnongrata.com
maybe someone wants to sell more vaccine jabs...