Four Years Later – The Toughest COVID Pill to Swallow
Looking back over the past four years, the toughest Covid pill to swallow was watching our public health institutions abandon so much of what we knew about science and medical practice to manage the pandemic. Strategies and treatments that were proven to help people boost their immune response to viral infection and fight disease were ignored and attacked. Generic drug trials were designed to fail, and investigators reported positive results as negative findings instead. They did precisely the opposite for new antiviral drugs, using every available means to claim a benefit.
The results of multi-year studies published by Oxford University shows exactly how this worked. In March 2020, Oxford started conducting a series of Covid trials with repurposed generic drugs like ivermectin and expensive new antiviral drugs like molnupiravir. For molnupiravir, for example, investigators managed to register and randomize 25,000 patients a median of two days after symptoms—a herculean effort for any clinical trial. But for ivermectin, investigators included participants up to 14 days after onset of symptoms, when the disease would have reached a more severe stage. You may recall during this time, people with Covid symptoms were recommended to stay home and isolate for two full weeks. No treatment stood a chance of making a difference after 14 days.
Efforts to tip the scales did not stop there. For the ivermectin trial, there were reported long delays between registration and enrollment, and the ability to pick-up medication from a pharmacy was stopped, forcing patients to endure notoriously slow delivery times. They also limited the days that the trial was open. These moves were clearly intended to decrease participants’ chances of receiving early treatment with ivermectin, and thus the chance it would be found effective.
Other damaging actions also raise concerns. The study authors took a full 14 months to complete the trial, far exceeding the other arms. Then they took another 600 days before publishing. To explain this delay, they claimed they needed a one year of follow-up of the patients, something not mentioned in the original study protocol. Keep in mind the backdrop of a global public health emergency that warranted $5 trillion dollars of federal government spending.
If ivermectin had been found effective, surely there was a moral and professional obligation to alert the world, as Oxford did in June 2020 upon completion of their trial on corticosteroids. At the time, the world was only three months removed from Covid’s arrival, and in desperate search of answers.
But researchers sat on the data, waiting until this month to make it available—a full 9 months after the concocted one-year delay. It first appeared not in a high impact medical journal, but in the little-known “Journal of Infection,” the seventh ranked journal of infectious diseases.
After their attempts to delay failed, they published the findings in a lower-impact outlet. The result was not the searing headlines from the New York Times (“Ivermectin Does Not Reduce Risk of Covid Hospitalization, Large Study Finds” blared the Gray Lady on March 30, 2022) but a far more muted rollout.
Even after stacking the deck, the data from the Oxford study showed ivermectin leads to faster recovery, reduced rates of hospitalization or death and reduction of long Covid symptoms. Now that the results are out, it’s clear that in addition to rigging the trials, the investigators also put a thumb on the scale in the presentation of results, minimizing ivermectin’s perceived benefit for patients and exaggerating molnupiravir. Unfortunately, it’s too little too late for millions of people. The “war on ivermectin” is over, as I argued in my book, and the truth tellers lost.
The solution is a new framework to test repurposed drugs and model the clinical benefits and cost savings of cheaper generic treatments on an ongoing basis. An independent group accountable to Congress could conduct sustained, systematic studies of repurposed drugs to complement FDA review, clinical practice, and the role of natural immunity in health. It won’t be easy, but if physicians, healthcare leaders, and politicians unite behind this call to cation, we can push the system towards greater accountability, prevent the manipulation we’ve seen throughout the pandemic, and help more people when the next outbreak hits.
Pierre Kory, MD is President and Chief Medical Officer and Paul Marik, MD is Chief Scientific Officer at the FLCCC Alliance.
