More Long Overdue Science
Hundreds of thousands of American deaths could have been prevented...
Imagine you are in charge of the US Center for Disease Control in the Spring of 2020. A brand new disease pandemic is spreading rapidly across the entire globe.
What are your priorities?
If it was me, knowing that vaccines are a minimum of several months away, I’d be exploring as many early treatment options as possible in the interim.
I would pay particular attention to existing drugs with known antiviral properties. Existing medications already have full safety profiles so there’s no waiting if I find a treatment that even modestly reduces the risk of dying of this new disease.
I’d keep my ear to the ground. Anytime a doctor claimed success with one or other medication or treatment protocol, I’d initiate a research study to see if they were on to something. I’d also keep a close eye on what other countries were doing. Speed, flexibility and a willingness to try new things would be far more important than seeking perfection in a rapidly spreading pandemic.
In stark contrast, I find it utterly astounding how few scientific studies of were initiated in North America during the COVID pandemic. For a public health community that made a big song and dance about “following the science,” remarkably little science was done.
When other countries did such research the CDC would routinely dismiss or ignore it. Only American research was considered trustworthy. Too bad America did almost none - except for expensive new pharmaceuticals, of course.
Even worse, the CDC and the FDA actively discouraged the use of ivermectin and HCQ. The reason for this is clear. The COVID vaccines could only be given their Emergency Use Authorization if no other treatment for COVID was available. To protect their friends in Big Pharma, the CDC worked tirelessly to make sure no early treatments were found. (Very expensive and very toxic Remdesivir was actively promoted, mind you, because public health officials knew it was too ineffective as a COVID treatment to put their precious EUA at risk!)
Recently we’ve gotten three important research results that we could and should have had three years ago if the CDC had actually done some science rather than just talking about it.
Last Fall, I reported on a peer-reviewed Brazilian study of the prophylactic use of ivermectin. In a huge trial involving 88,000 subjects, the death rate in the group that did not take ivermectin was 12 times higher than in the group that did take ivermectin. “Regular use of Ivermectin as a Prophylaxis for COVID-19 led up to a 92% reduction in COVID-19 mortality in a dose-dependent manner.” America could and should have conducted a similar study in the summer of 2020.
In February, I reported on an Italian study which showed that Vitamin D supplementation reduced the the odds of hospitalized COVID patients needing to go into intensive care by 72%, and reduced their risk of dying by 51%.
That study also could and should have been completed in the summer of 2020. How many hospitalized COVID patients died unnecessarily because the CDC never did that research? (I mean where was the downside of doing such research, given that the ‘side-effects’ of vitamin D supplementation are hugely positive for a whole slew of medical conditions!)
Now a new peer-reviewed study in the Journal Cureus examines ivermectin use in Peru in mid-2020. Peru was a fascinating case study in that there was a window between May and November 2020 when ivermectin became freely available in some of Peru’s 25 States and not in others. Then, in November, a new President came in who banned all ivermectin use.
The study had a number of important findings. Reductions in the number of deaths in the ten States that had the highest use of ivermectin averaged 74%. The reduction in deaths across Peru’s 25 States was strongly correlated with the level of ivermectin use. “During four months of IVM use in 2020, before a new president of Peru restricted its use, there was a 14-fold reduction in nationwide excess deaths and then a 13-fold increase in the two months following the restriction of IVM use.”
Dr. Pierre Kory and others were using ivermectin with great success in the United States in the Spring of 2020. The CDC could easily have implemented large-scale studies of ivermectin as an early COVID treatment shortly thereafter. By the summer of 2020, they would have had interim results promising enough to warrant the widespread use of ivermectin.
Between Vitamin D, prophylactic ivermectin use, and the widespread use of ivermectin as an early treatment protocol, it should have been possible to reduce the overall mortality rate from COVID by 80% or more, starting in the summer of 2020. Roughly 800,000 Americans and 40,000 Canadians died because of the CDC’s failure to do science.
Do you know someone who died of COVID? There’s a very good chance that person would still be alive if only the CDC had done some actual science on Vitamin D and ivermectin. Think about that.
Last month we saw the FDA disingenuously claiming claiming they never prevented doctors from prescribing ivermectin. (Yes, they may have slandered it as ‘horse medicine’ and pressured pharmacies, hospitals and professional associations to effectively block access to the drug, but the FDA did not directly prevent doctors from prescribing it.)
The CDC now finds itself between a rock and a hard place. It can’t acknowledge that ivermectin is effective either as a prophylactic, or as an early treatment, without acknowledging that the CDC’s past negligence has likely resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
Instead the CDC continues to ignore the growing wealth of scientific evidence supporting the use of ivermectin. They’d rather see thousands more Americans continue to die unnecessarily into the foreseeable future as new COVID variants spread, than to acknowledge the massive death toll caused by the CDC’s past negligence: a truly breathtaking level of moral bankruptcy.
Nail on the head again, Bruce.
I hadn't heard of the situation in Peru -- that's a lot of blood on the hands of the ideologues.