The results of a large peer-reviewed study of the prophylactic use of ivermectin came out recently.
In the Brazilian city of Italjai, city officials offered the entire population the option to take prophylactic doses of ivermectin. The result was that 113,845 residents took modest doses of ivermectin two days per week between July and December of 2020, and 45,716 residents elected not to take ivermectin.
The group that chose to take ivermectin was older and had more comorbidities, so we should expect that that group would have had more cases, more hospitalizations, and more deaths.
That's not what happened though. There were 44% fewer infections among those given ivermectin, a 56% reduction in the hospitalization rate, and a 68% lower rate of mortality. The probability of any of those events occurring by chance was less than one in ten thousand.
If this was the only study of the prophylactic use of ivermectin, one could quibble with the results. Perhaps there was a huge placebo effect, that those who took ivermectin so believed in the drug that it mobilized their immune systems. Perhaps those who took ivermectin were more active in trying to avoid COVID infection than those who did not. But this was not the first study of the prophylactic use of ivermectin. The results of the 15 previous studies are summarized here:
Each and every one of those studies showed strongly positive results. If you go to the website itself, you can click on any of the studies listed and it will take you directly to the studies themselves. The data is uniformly positive.
Ivermectin is more effective the earlier you take it. Early treatment gives better results than late treatment. Giving ivermectin prophylactically -i.e., in advance of COVID infection - has far and away the best results.
Why is this important? It is important because it is going to be somewhere between very difficult and completely impossible to keep Omicron from blasting through each and every care home in the Province of BC in the coming weeks. These are the venues where a great many of the Province's Omicron fatalities will take place.
If BC were to give ivermectin to every resident of every care home in BC who elected to take it, we can expect it will reduce care home deaths from Omicron by two-thirds. The overcrowding of hospitals would also be reduced.
I have some sympathy for Bonnie Henry. Unlike our Prime Minister, BC's Chief Medical Officer shows something like real feelings, and evidence of a conscience.
Bonnie blurts out the truth like it was dragged from her: "We're all going to be exposed to Omicron," she admits ruefully.
Rather than trying to pretend that Omicron is overloading our hospitals with vast numbers of the unvaccinated, she has the basic decency to admit the truth that it is the very old and frail who are most at risk, even showing us BC Government data indicating that those over the age of 80 are twenty-two times as likely to end up in hospital with Omicron as a young person. I have to respect that.
There are limits to Bonnie’s honesty. She has extended the vaccine passport system till the end of June, despite knowing that a very large chunk of the unvaccinated have already survived Omicron, and Omicron survivors have a far better level of protection against COVID than even the triple-vaccinated.
I suppose she's under pressure from the BC Health Minister to pretend that vaccines are somehow slowing the spread of Omicron when clearly they are not. She must know at this point that vaccine passports, masking and keeping the bars closed will slow the spread of Omicron only marginally, if at all. Hell, even the Lancet now admits that. But she can't quite yet bring herself to let go of COVID theatre masquerading as public health interventions.
I'm pretty sure Bonnie has figured out that she made the wrong call early in the pandemic. She’s just not yet ready to admit it.
Again, I feel more sympathy than judgment.
I'm old enough to look back on my life and see times where I made a mistake, and then made that mistake many times worse by refusing to admit that I had made a mistake.
The earliest time I can remember is when I bought a used motorbike in my late teens. I knew in my heart within hours that I'd bought a complete piece of junk, but I wasted dozens of hours and hundreds of dollars before my pride permitted me to admit I'd done something stupid.
Then there were the times with a partner or a friend where I did or said something stupid. Rather than apologize quickly, more than once I doubled down, turning a minor error into a complete fiasco. So I understand fully how hard it is to admit it when you've made a mistake, especially a big one.
Early in the pandemic, when the hospital system was completely overwhelmed, and there were other people in authority saying that no early treatment for COVID was possible, how beguiling it must have been to adopt that as your own mantra, Bonnie.
By the time it became clear that early treatment was possible, hundreds of British Columbians had already died. You couldn't admit you'd made a mistake without admitting that your mistake had killed people with neglect. So you doubled down: No early treatment was possible, not even vitamins.
Small wonder you look so haunted these days.
I'll give you some talking points to make it easier. You could say this large new peer-reviewed study finally gives the incontrovertible evidence needed for prophylactic ivermectin use in BC. (No need to point out that 15 previous studies indicated the same thing months or years ago.)
You could say Omicron is very different from previous waves of Omicron and requires different strategies. (This is true!)
You could say that care home residents are at such a high-risk of dying of Omicron that it is worth them accepting whatever health risks are attached to taking ivermectin. This is also true. (Ivermectin is one of the safest drugs on the planet so the health risks of taking it at recommended doses are always vanishingly small, but there's no need to volunteer that information.)
I recognize there will be a significant political cost in admitting at this late date that ivermectin is an effective prophylactic treatment for COVID. We can guess that some of the relatives of the more than a thousand care home residents who died of COVID in BC will be very unhappy that the BC Government couldn't have taken this step in time to save their loved ones.
But those people are going to be upset with you soon in any case. The COVID pandemic is drawing to a close. Once it is over, people will want answers. We can guess there will be a Royal Commission of some sort. It will come out then that effective early treatments for COVID were available from quite early on in the pandemic, and that thousands of British Columbians died unnecessarily because the BC Ministry of Health was unwilling to admit that they held far too long to an ideological stance that no early treatment was possible. You can't escape the reckoning that's coming, Bonnie.
What you can do is minimize the number of Omicron deaths and hospitalizations in BC going forward by immediately making prophylactic ivermectin available to all the residents of every care home in BC.
It's never too late to do the right thing, Bonnie.