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The Timeline of Major Battles In the Global War on Ivermectin – Part 2
In the wake of the FLCCC press conference, Senate Testimony and review paper retraction, suddenly Merck fires the first public salvo in the Disinformation war by posting brazen lies on their website.
Pierre Kory, MD, MPA
Dec 6
This is the second part of my chronology of the Disinformation war on ivermectin. Here is
the link to Part 1 . If you really want to understand all the subtleties and chicanery involved in conducting a Disinformation campaign, I suggest you read Part 1 first.
Following from all the events in December 2020 and January 2021, we continue:
FEBRUARY 4, 2021 – MERCK’S PR DEPARTMENT POSTS BRAZEN LIES ON THE COMPANY WEBSITE
The anti-ivermectin PR campaign was kicked off by Merck’s PR department when they quietly posted three brazen lies on the night of February 3rd. I already covered this action in a recent post. This ignited a media amplification of Merck’s statement, most notably by.. Reuters, posted within 6 hours of Merck’s.
The media literally started blaring unfiltered and un-fact checked Pharma lies. My confusion as to what was wrong in the world further deepened.
DISSIDENT RESPONSE
We didn’t know what to do besides attacking this action on Twitter and in interviews and podcasts (which were all on the periphery/small audiences of the independant media of the internet or on right wing-leaning outlets). Not one critical take of Merck by major media as they all assumed Merck was just trying to be helpful in their guidance. I first begin to use the phrase clown world.
FEBRUARY 2021 – RETRACTION OF THE FLCCC’S COMPREHENSIVE, NARRATIVE REVIEW PAPER BY FRONTIERS IN PHARMACOLOGY
This action is what essentially was the final confirmation that “the fix was in” against ivermectin, something we had a growing sense of, but I still had hopes was not true. I still remember the stunned silence on the Zoom meeting with the FLCCC when I informed them as to the decision by the Chief Editor of the journal. Despite passing three rounds of rigorous peer-review by three senior scientists at the FDA and NIH and an expert ICU doc, Frontiers sat on our paper for weeks while hundreds of thousands died around the world in winter 2020-21. I finally threatened that we were going to go public with an accusation of scientific misconduct. The Editor told me that he assigned an anonymous third party peer reviewer who concluded, contrary to all our peer-reviewers, that our conclusions were not supported by our data and they were going to retract the paper. We were not provided with a written peer-review, just a verbal notice of retraction. In the below post, I detailed this event as well as the similar retraction of Tess Lawrie’s paper which had also passed full peer-review at The Lancet Respiratory journal.
FEBRUARY 27, 2021 – BRITISH IVERMECTIN RECOMMENDATION DEVELOPMENT (BIRD) GROUP MAKES RECOMMENDATION FOR IVERMECTIN IN PREVENTION AND TREATMENT
Dr. Tess Lawrie, soon after completing her rapid review of ivermectin RCT’s, also started seeing immense corruptive actions, not only at the WHO but also the journals that would not publish her findings (see above post). So she decided to form an independent expert panel, inviting dozens of medical researchers and practitioners from across the world. They met in a day-long meeting where they reviewed the expert compilation of evidence for ivermectin. They near unanimously recommended ivermectin to be used in the prevention and treatment of ivermectin worldwide.
The BiRD Group initiated a massive people-powered campaign with tens of thousands of followers, dozens of affiliate organizations, and led to the creation of brand new health-focused entities such as The International Ivermectin for Covid-19 Conference, World Ivermectin Day and not least, the broad international reach of the World Council for Health.
DISINFORMATION RESPONSE
I submitted the BiRD group findings to the Chief Editor at Frontiers in Pharmacology journal in a naive attempt to defend my paper from his proposed retraction. I vainly hoped that evidence of a large, international group of truly independant experts with identical conclusions to those in my paper would sway him. He retracted it anyway. Also, although the BiRD groups efforts, like the FLCCC’s, brought a lot of knowledge of ivermectin’s efficacy to the world, no major media covered our recommendations. Their unwavering obsequiousness towards the WHO continued apace.
MARCH 2021 – HIGH-IMPACT JOURNALS BEGIN REJECTING ANY POSITIVE IVERMECTIN STUDIES SUBMITTED TO THEM
Study investigators begin emailing me with evidence of myriad rejections of their positive ivermectin trials. Detailed documentation was provided in my previous post below.
This type of Disinformation is silent so there is not much you can do about it.. except to write a Substack post with extensive documentation of how the high-impact medical journals were systematically rejecting all positive trials of ivermectin in COVID. Substack is awesome.. but it doesn’t make headlines.
MARCH 4, 2021 – THE FIRST EXAMPLE OF THE DISINFORMATION TACTIC CALLED “THE FIX”
Recall that the definition of “The Fix” is to conduct counterfeit science and try to pass it off as legitimate research. The first of the “Big Five” counterfeit trials in high-impact medical journals was published in JAMA on March 4, 2021. This was a Disinformation play, so in this chronology, I will flip and instead provide the “dissident response” to this move.
DISSIDENT RESPONSE
100 doctors collaborated to write this open letter to JAMA demanding a retraction. JAMA rejects the letter to the editor. It was published in TrialSiteNews instead. All of academia ignores the letter.
MARCH 31, 2021 – THE WHO UPDATES THEIR TREATMENT GUIDELINE, CONTINUING TO RECOMMEND AGAINST IVERMECTIN “OUTSIDE OF A CLINICAL TRIAL.”
DISSIDENT RESPONSE
The manipulations and machinations required to whittle the evidence base down to one so small allowed the WHO committee to interpret the massive benefits as “uncertain. Those actionsare well detailed in my white paper analysis of the Guideline (of interest to medicine geeks). I also covered it even more deeply in my later Substack posts detailing all the conflicts and actions of the researchers involved. The posts detailing all of these actions can be found here (Part 1) and below (Part 2). These actions effectively constituted war crimes committed by supposed academics.
This is a slide summarizing the “whittling” of the evidence base for ivermectin:
On the same day as the WHO Guideline publication, the FLCCC sent out a press release trying to alert the world to this massive corruption of the science supporting ivermectin. Link is here and below.
Days later, we send out another press release.
DISINFORMATION RESPONSE
No major media covered our press releases. Can’t blame us for trying.
MARCH 31ST, 2021 – THE WHO IGNORES THE EVIDENCE BASE OF STUDIES SHOWING THE EFFICACY OF IVERMECTIN IN PREVENTING COVID
OK, I am still talking about the same document as above, the same global international health organization, but this is about a different aspect of their Guideline. Their blatant refusal to review the evidence base of ivermectin in preventing COVID was, in my mind, one of the most devastating in the pandemic. Here is how they did it – in the guidelines document above where they corruptly reviewed the ivermectin treatment trials data, they included this sentence at the beginning of the document. It said, very simply:
This is the current evidence base for ivermectin in prophylaxis against COVID (most of which were available at the time of the WHO review in early 2021 as most of the trials were done in 2020):
16 controlled trials, 3 RCT’s, 2 propensity score matched, including thousands of patients. Look at the consistent magnitude of reductions and the tight confidence intervals in the estimates of protection. All wickedly statistically significant. These are data from numerous centers and countries and health systems around the world. Different doses, frequencies, and durations yet all providing massive protection against disease. The more frequent dosing strategies and/or combination strategies (like Carvallo’s combining of ivermectin with nasal and oral iota-carrageenan) were near or perfectly protective against Covid. If the world only knew… the last 2 years would have been very very different. A literal global solution which could have massively decreased the harms of the pandemic . Never forget that the WHO, quietly and conveniently and corruptly, decided to ignore this large amount of evidence of efficacy with nary an outcry around the world (except for my white paper).
Obviously, this dismissal of the evidence was deemed necessary because widespread knowledge of ivermectin’s efficacy in prevention would have completely destroyed the highly profitable global vaccine campaign into which many billions of dollars and numerous Big Pharma companies were invested in. If you still think the WHO does Public Health… I got a bridge to sell you.
Full disclosure – all the studies were done in 2020 and it is my impression that with the later variants, protection slipped as evidenced by the first and increasing reports of “breakthrough” infections among folks taking ivermectin regularly (like me, although I had missed my dose a few days prior to getting Covid). Oh yeah, the media had a field day with that one:
I have no idea how much loss of protection among later variants occurred as there are no recent studies and even if there were, the abundant natural immunity would be hard to tease out.
If interested, the reason why ivermectin was felt to be so protective against contracting Covid derives not only from its multiple mechanisms which inhibit replication of the virus.. but largely from its tight conformational binding to the host receptor binding region of the spike protein, as proposed in 6 molecular modeling studies also here and here. Check out this paper from… September 2020.
The fact this body of mechanistic and clinical evidence of efficacy was suppressed literally changed history. It is also one of the main reasons why our review paper on ivermectin was retracted because we extensively reviewed the evidence in prevention. Knowledge of these trials would have massively (and correctly) increased “vaccine hesitancy,” which we know was Pharma’s Public Enemy #1.
APRIL 2021- THE BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL AND THE NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE PUBLISH NEGATIVE PROPAGANDA AGAINST IVERMECTIN
The high impact journals start publishing editorials in an attempt to dissuade doctors from believing the rapidly accumulating trials and reports demonstrating efficacy. Numerous false narratives were embedded in these “scientific” articles, which allowed the global media to churn out relentless propaganda using the same terms and concepts, repeatedly describing the trials evidence for ivermectin as “low quality”, “small”, “fraudulent”etc. The more recent one below in the NEJM relied on Andy Hill’s later, anti-ivermectin paper. Note the picture of three men smelling stinky cheese. Not subtle.
APRIL 2021 AND JULY 2021- THE FLCCC AND TESS LAWRIE’S REVIEW PAPERS GET PUBLISHED IN THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF THERAPEUTICS
The editor of the American Journal of Therapeutics, Dr. Peter Manu, had months earlier invited me to submit my paper to his journal. Regrettably, I instead chose the higher-impact journal Frontiers in Pharmacology and you know how that went. So I went back and submitted the retracted paper to the American Journal of Therapeutics. He reviewed all the peer reviewer comments of our originally accepted paper with the details of our incorporated revisions. He rapidly accepted first mine, and then later Tess’s for publication.
Within weeks, the two papers become two of the most “popular” science papers in the past decade as per Altmetric, a rating scale created in 2011 to determine “popularity,” largely based on media and social media coverage . At one point our paper was 7th of the previous 19 million papers and Tess’s paper was 4th. Here is where they stand currently amongst the last 22.5 million scientific papers published. Still remarkable.
Tess’s paper, still ranked #8 out of the previous 22.5 million publications:
The FLCCC paper, ranked #58 out of the previous 22.5 million scientific publications:
DISINFORMATION RESPONSE
Now what is interesting is that this “popularity,” when you look at the approximately 100 different news outlets that covered each of our papers, was largely negative. Again countered with the typical and predictable false narratives attacking either the quality of the evidence and/our ourselves personally (especially me and Paul).
Next, groups of Pharma-controlled researchers wrote “Letters to the Editor” that extensively critiqued our methods and conclusions. Problem: during that period, Paul and I were exhausted and demoralized by all that not only the FLCCC was enduring, but many researchers across the world as well. The systematic rejections by high-impact journals and/or their attempts at retracting our papers was relentless. As is customary, the journal Editor asked us to publish a reply to these “authors” concerns.
I refused.
However, instead of retracting our paper once again, the Editor smartly and fairly chose to publish “An Expression of Concern” in regards to our paper. Interestingly, in the letter, he actually defended us. One of the few bright spots in the war on ivermectin. Here it is:
In terms of me being too exhausted to defend my paper to the journal, it occurred to me that perhaps the WHO team was exhausted from trying to destroy the massive evidence base supporting ivermectin in treatment so they skipped on trying to spend time destroying the evidence base in prevention. But then I remembered Pharma and BMGF have hundreds of billions at their disposal. They don’t get “exhausted.” It was purely tactical. By ignoring the evidence they could call as little attention to it as possible. Mission accomplished with one little sentence buried in the WHO guideline.
MAY 8, 2021 – THE CHIEF SCIENTIST OF THE WHO, DURING INDIA’s DEVASTATING, ALBEIT BRIEF DELTA WAVE, CITES MERCK IN HER TWEET TO THE WORLD RECOMMENDING AGAINST USE OF IVERMECTIN.
This action above is so preposterously absurd, I still can’t get my head around it. The Chief Scientist of the WHO cites a fraudulent PR bulletin from Merck as she recommends against using ivermectin to treat Covid during the humanitarian crisis that arose after the emergence of the Delta variant (which, I have on good authority, was almost certainly another lab leaked virus).
DISSIDENT RESPONSE
The Indian Bar Association brings criminal charges against her, including the possibility of a death sentence.
She quickly deletes her tweet. I have to check up on how that court case is going.
SPRING 2021 – CENSORSHIP BY SOCIAL MEDIA AND MAJOR MEDIA OUTLETS RAMP UP ACROSS THE WORLD
Censorship of me and the FLCCC begins in earnest. The famous journalist Matt Taibbi interviews me on the topic of ivermectin and in the article he refers to me as “the Ghost of The Internet” because all the researchers, podcasters and journalists who interview me quickly had their videos taken down or, in some cases, got de-platformed or demonetized like in the case of the brilliant medical educator Dr. Been, who, along with John Campbell, Brett Weinstein, Steve Kirsch, Paul Marik and others, were some of the best sources of sound, accurate medical information in the pandemic. Anyway, Taibbi’s article was otherwise.. meh. Smart guy, but, like Berenson, he just doesn’t “get it.”
Social media guidelines against discussion of ivermectin are increasingly enforced, and numerous researchers and experts sharing data on Twitter start getting “killed” after being sent to “Twitmo” – FLCCC analyst and ivermectin expert Juan Chamie multiple times, Robert Malone, Steve Kirsch, Alex Berenson, Peter McCullough, Covid Crusher. Remember Covid Crusher? He was a beast early on in the pandemic, constantly posting new studies and analyses, often on ivermectin but on many other scientific aspects as well. I miss that guy and will never forget his contributions as I learned a lot from him. He was indefatigable too – posting first and often on breaking studies. I got to correspond with him once, apparently he is a bigwig in the biotech space and interacts with regulators and industry so had to remain anonymous.
Anyway, I think I will keep this chapter relatively short, despite the fact that propaganda and censorship was essentially the core of the whole war on ivermectin and the whole reason why most people in most societies around the world went completely mad. Covid was a war of information and the two sides (the disinformationsists vs. the “dissidents” like me (who they call “misinformationists”) were nowhere near a match in resources). To wit, we now know that:
The three Federal Health Agencies paid media outlets $1 billion dollars to promote the safety and efficacy of the vaccines, the Trusted News Initiative made a global compact amongst the world largest media organizations to censor medical “misinformation” (truth actually), and now we have evidence emerging that the White House was regularly directing social media companies to censor individuals whose “science” was inconvenient to their interests. We also recently discovered that a single massive PR firm worked simultaneously for Moderna, Pfizer, and the CDC. Ultimately, all I have to say about this chapter (and it is not really a chapter or event) is that it literally spanned the entire pandemic and is only getting worse, like with Clownifornia’s recent bill threatening doctors for sharing an opinion contrary to some supposed “scientific consensus.”
A brief and highly incomplete summary of actions taken against the FLCCC are here:
JUNE 2021 – ANOTHER FRAUDULENT META-ANALYSIS OF THE IVERMECTIN EVIDENCE BASE IS PUBLISHED
The WHO published the first fraudulent meta-analysis. A few months later, here comes another one in one of the highest impact infectious disease journals.
Roman et al. Clinical Infectious Disease, March 2022
In this meta-analysis they found a 63% reduction in mortality that just misses statistical significance (on purpose). Please take a moment and ponder the implications of a 63% reduction in mortality with a low-cost, safe medicine. Anyway, “very low quality of evidence” is mentioned at every turn.
Edmund Fordham, Tess Lawrie, and Andy Bryant write an even more scathing critique, written as a letter to the Editor of the journal demanding a retraction. Again ignored by the world. I will again include it in its entirety, and in its brilliance, so I ask that you read it, it is not very long. The fraud they point out is so brazen in that it points out that the authors of this review literally inverted the results of positive study findings to argue against ivermectin. Insane:
Matthew Crawford, the brilliant polymath, educator, writer, statistician, data-analyst, mathematician, and author of the Substack Rounding the Earth, wrote an even more scathing critique here, with the great line, “this stands out as the single sloppiest paper I have ever encountered published in a medical journal or junior high newspaper.”
Yet, Roman et al was cited heavily in all subsequent ivermectin reviews and editorials. Good times.
JULY 2021 – ANDY HILL PUBLISHES THE RESULTS OF HIS META-ANALYSIS OF 24 IVERMECTIN RCT’s
Ok, pay attention. we are now in July of 2021. The next 4 or 5 major Disinformation tactics will occur in this month. I believe they were all deployed for one reason. Andy Hill’s paper. Check it out.
Andy Hill, after finishing his Unitaid contract on April 1, 2021, gets a grant from the amazing Rainwater Foundation to complete his own meta-analysis of all the RCT’s that he had compiled while working for Unitaid. His paper led to very, very different conclusions from the WHO and Roman et al above.
These were his findings.. at the time. From the original abstract conclusion in July 2021:
This meta-analysis investigated ivermectin in 24 randomized clinical trials (3328 patients)
Ivermectin was associated with reduced inflammatory markers (C-Reactive Protein, d-dimer and ferritin)
Ivermectin was associated with faster viral clearance by PCR.
Viral clearance was treatment dose- and duration-dependent.
In moderate/severe infection there was a 56% reduction in mortality , p=0.004
Ivermectin led to faster clinical recovery and reduced hospitalization.
Although his paper got some attention, it was not really moving the needle. But it was enough to really spook Pharma/BMGF. Read on as to what happened next as a result of Hill’s paper.
JULY 2021 – MAJOR IVERMECTIN RCT IS “DISCOVERED” TO BE FABRICATED
In the wake of the publication of Hill’s paper, the war on ivermectin was at a critical, if not the most critical juncture to date. Pharma was actually in trouble here. In one of the most highly regarded infectious disease journals in the world, a massively positive meta-analysis supporting ivermectin’s efficacy was published. Based on 24 RCT’s (what drug in history ever had 24 RCT’s conducted before being adopted?). Answer: none. Heck, in cases where a drug doesn’t work, they stop doing RCT’s way before 24).
So, what would you do in this situation if you were Big Pharma? Remember that your entire business model is founded upon the need to destroy evidence of efficacy of repurposed drugs in order to protect the market for pricey patented options.
So, how do you destroy an entire evidence base? Well, you “create doubt where there is none,” a technique invented and practiced for 50 years by Big Tobacco. They had to figure out a way to “disappear” or “delegitimize” Andy Hill’s paper. Directly retracting the paper via influencing the journals editor (like they did with our paper) was not likely an option given Andy’s career and prior position as head of the Unitaid team, plus he was long-time colleagues with some of the journal’s editors.
Another approach would be:
Fabricate evidence that the largest and most impressive RCT included in his study was… fraudulent.
Engage groups of researchers to question the integrity of other trials in the evidence base
Build a propaganda campaign through the media that most of the evidence base supporting ivermectin is “fraudulent” or at a minimum, “not to be trusted.”
Focus on Andy Hill, the first author of the study. Get him to self-retract his paper and re-do his analysis by throwing out all the studies whose integrity has been questioned, and then re-publish it as a “negative” study.
And that is exactly what they did. The most nefarious and most impactful Disinformation action by Big Pharma in the war.
And here is how they did it:
They picked one of the largest and most impressive RCT’s, whose Principal Investigator was Ahmed ElGazzar of Benha University in Egypt (a country well known for producing fabricated trials). They came up with a cockamamie story as to why it was fraudulent, using some “plucky” medical student named Jack Lawrence. He was supposedly given an assignment “by one of his Professors” to investigate these trials.
“One of his Professors.” Where have we heard that before? Oh yeah, that is what Andrew Hill told me when I asked him how he started researching ivermectin, he said he was told to do so “by one of his Professors.” Based on the investigative work by Phil Harper, it is clear that Professor turned out to be Prof. Andrew Owen of his University of Liverpool. Andrew Owen’s conflicts:
Owen studied molnupiravir for Merck, a direct competitor to ivermectin
Owen received research funding from ViiV Healthcare, Merck, Janssen, Boehringer Ingelheim, GlaxoSmithKline, Abbott Laboratories, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Tibotec, Roche Pharmaceuticals and Bristol-Myers Squibb.
Owen received consultancy fees from Gilead (another drug whose market ivermectin would decimate).
Owen is the Project Lead of the Center for Excellence in Long-Acting Therapeutics Program (CELT) at The University of Liverpool. CELT received $40 million from UNITAID on January 12, 2021 (the importance of this financial influence simply cannot be overstated, so I won’t. Just let it sink in for a moment). Further:
CELT studies ways to use lipid nano-particles in pharmaceuticals, which is a foundational technology of the COVID mRNA vaccines.
The UNITAID grant was shared with a spinoff start-up company in which Andrew Owen was the top shareholder.
So, which Professor told Jack Lawrence to go find ivermectin fraud? Unfortunately, we have not been able to confidently identify him or her, but we do know of two possible candidates at his University… both with funding from Unitaid. This is getting tiresome.
Anyway, medical student Lawrence gets an assignment to look at the ivermectin trials “from his Professor,” and in the most improbable fashion, he claims to have gotten access to ElGazzar’s original trial data by “guessing” the password (1234). The supposed source data that Lawrence shared with the world was riddled with errors, inconsistencies, and strong suggestive evidence of the fabrication of data. Lawrence then presented his analysis to the pre-print server editor where the paper was posted and the editors of the pre-print server retracted it prior to the authors being able to defend themselves. I have gone into this story before, detailing how Professor ElGazzar told me that that data was not his trial data, but when I asked him to share the “real” data, he did not. The Guardian “broke” the story with this article.
Take from this what you will but my “hypothesis” is that Big Pharma/BMGF got to ElGazzar and he allowed himself to become a sacrificial lamb to support this “fraudulent studies” narrative as he and his University were awfully quiet in defending themselves. This silence allowed a new narrative to be born, painting the positive ivermectin trials as fraudulent, thus injecting doubt as to the quality and conclusions of all the positive trials – particularly the non-Pharma paid investigators from all the “black and brown” countries.
This move served two purposes. First was to get everyone to doubt the positive trials, but second, in physicians minds across the world, it elevated the importance of research from Pharma controlled advanced health economies where massively funded trials conducted by “experts” could never produce a fraudulent trial. It is very hard to write that without laughing (or crying).
But it worked. Doubt was injected into doctors across the world who hadn’t been able to make sense of all the “conflicting” data and opinions that were inexplicably popular on “social media” but not so much in the medical journals and from the agencies.
Now they could reconcile these two discordant opinions- the evidence supporting ivermectin was apparently all fraudulent and not to be trusted except by unserious, poorly educated social media zealots (like myself). Everyone must wait for the “larger”, “high quality” trials to be conducted. Mission accomplished. A massive PR campaign was unleashed. Dozens of headlines and articles all written and shaped to argue that the trials were fraudulent. See below.
Notice how much “big media” carried this narrative – BBC, Forbes, Washington Post, Business Insider, British Medical Journal etc. They did this repeatedly over months.. and still do it. Repeating a lie a 1000 times and it becomes truth. One of the core principles of PR.
Also note how the medical student then began working in concert with other anti-ivermectin social media warriors, err, “experts,” who were attacking ivermectin data while presenting themselves as “expert epidemiologists and researchers.” They were nothing of the sort, but you know, don’t let facts get in the way.
This group consisted of a guy who calls himself “Health Nerd” on Twitter, named Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, “data analyst” Nick Brown, a nobody who does imaging research named Kyle Shedrick, and, lo and behold, they not only provide numerous quotes to major media over many months on this issue, they also start writing papers and articles with, get this.. the already deeply compromised Andrew Hill. Never forget these people’s names. GMK as he is referred to is my “favorite.” If you look at his social media proclamations from the beginning of the pandemic, he was “pro-lockdown, pro-mask, pro-vaccine, and… anti-ivermectin.” Quite a scientific consistency (and accuracy.. not). I won’t say which one yet but some of these characters are getting sued by the FLCCC for defamation. Should be fun. Check out this propaganda piece masquerading as a statistical analysis by the Health Nerd.
Now check out my analysis of the TOGETHER trial, where GMK’s subtitle above more appropriately fits.
Once they “broke” the ElGazzar trial, these guys then started to attack other ivermectin trials for what could be argued as fair concerns over the conduct of a study, albeit they of course overemphasized them and unsurprisingly led them to conclude they were “fraudulent” or “likely fraudulent.” Even more fascinating is that, not one of them critiqued any of the Big Five high-impact journal ivermectin trials nor the corrupt Pfizer vaccine trials. They instead seemed to spend all their time on just attacking research on repurposed drugs rather than on Pharma frauds like the vaccine, Paxlovid, or the most brazen, Molnupiravir and Remdesivir. Hmm. Makes you wonder. Check out the authors of this paper – quite the cast of characters, especially Thorland. Good ‘ole captured Andy Hill right there at the back.
The paper rightly attacks the Molnupiravir trial, err, I mean fraud. This paper may be the only one they are associated with that I agree with. But you just have to remember that.. Molnupiravir is the direct competitor of Pfizer’s Paxlovid. And guys like Thorlund, the lead author, was a major player in the TOGETHER trial fraud and is also a Vice President of the contract research organization Cytel which does a lot of work for Pfizer. Probably just a coincidence really.
This group has repeatedly cited this BuzzFeed hit piece on my friend and ivermectin researcher Hector Carvallo, where they literally write that Hector never conducted his trial. They disregarded Hector’s documentation of the trial approval and conduct and published it anyway. Brazen lies. Nick Brown cites that hit piece in his writings on ivermectin. Isn’t it curious that the most impressive RCT in treatment and the most impressive trial in prevention were both targeted with fraud claims?
All I am saying is that this cast of characters, working around the clock, helped by major media outlets, pushed the “fraudulent studies” narrative the most.
However, what is really funny (nothing is funny) about their concerted attempts to “take down” ivermectin is that the expert team at c19early.com decided they would humor all these attacks and so they removed all of the studies that GMK, Brown, Shedrick et al “had concerns with” from their summary analyses. Guess what happened? The signal of benefit… got stronger. Clown world:
Also note that GMK got this paper published in the BMJ.
All I am saying is that, either this guy blindly hates ivermectin and obsesses over trying to destroy it, or he has an absurdly ignorant and distorted understanding of evidence based medicine, or he is being paid by Pharma, or he is absolutely correct on ivermectin and the rest of the world are dummies. You decide. I am going with the first 3.
My favorite line from the original article in the Guardian which broke the ElGazzar story was this one, showing how well trained “medical student” Lawrence is in the darks arts of public relations campaigns:
“Lawrence said what started out as a simple university assignment had led to a comprehensive investigation into an apparent scientific fraud at a time when “there is a whole ivermectin hype … dominated by a mix of right-wing figures, anti-vaxxers and outright conspiracists.”
You’ve been well taught there Jack. Great quote.
Phil Harper, journalist and writer of the brilliant Substack “The Digger,” got Andy Hill to meet him for a coffee interview and asked him “why, given your decades of research and expertise and colleagues and publications are you partnering with unpublished bloggers and social media naysayers?” I think he asked the question differently but you get it. Great question Phil. Now I am hearing of some evidence that Andy Hill literally used his Rainwater grant money to pay GMK and Shedrick. Unreal.
DISSIDENT RESPONSE
Since ElGazzar went quiet and did not defend himself, we were forced to declare it fraudulent and we (FLCCC and Tess Lawrie) revised our review papers accordingly, removing his study from our analyses. Fun fact: it did not change our conclusions.
JULY 2021 – DR. ANDREW HILL RETRACTS HIS META-ANALYSIS SHOWING DRAMATIC BENEFITS OF IVERMECTIN, RE-ANALYZES AND PUBLISHES A NEW “NEGATIVE” CONCLUSION
Andrew Hill did not do what the FLCCC and Tess Lawrie’s team did. Unsurprisingly, instead of simply removing ElGazzar’s trial from his meta-analysis, recalculating the benefits measured and then republishing it, he chose to do something completely different (like out of the Monty Python movie).
He instead self-retracted his own paper entirely, removed ElGazzar from his analysis and then employed a completely new approach to analyzing the evidence base compared to the accepted, standard approach he had employed in his first, immensely positive version.
Shocker: his “revised” version led to an opposite conclusion from his original one.
Original abstract conclusion findings again: ,
This meta-analysis investigated ivermectin in 24 randomized clinical trials (3328 patients)
Ivermectin was associated with reduced inflammatory markers (C-Reactive Protein, d-dimer and ferritin)
Ivermectin was associated with faster viral clearance by PCR.
Viral clearance was treatment dose- and duration-dependent.
In moderate/severe infection there was a 56% reduction in mortality , p=0.004
Ivermectin led to faster clinical recovery and reduced hospitalization.
Ok. make sure you are sitting down, but after the ELGazzar “scandal,” not only did he retract the above paper to “revise” it, but what he republished came with a shiny, sparkly new title:
Check out the new, revised conclusions of the abstract. My how they differ:
This meta-analysis investigated ivermectin in 23 randomized clinical trials (3349 patients)
The primary meta-analysis was carried out by excluding studies at a high risk of bias.
Ivermectin did not show a statistically significant effect on survival (risk ratio [RR], 0.90; 95% CI, 0.57 to 1.42; P = .66)
Ivermectin did not show a statistically significant effect on hospitalizations (RR, 0.63; 95% CI, 0.36 to 1.11; P = .11).
Ivermectin displayed a borderline significant effect on duration of hospitalization in comparison with standard of care (mean difference, –1.14 days; 95% CI, –2.27 to –0.00; P = .05).
There was no significant effect of ivermectin on time to clinical recovery (mean difference, –0.57 days; 95% CI, –1.31 to 0.17; P = .13)
There was no significant effect on binary clinical recovery (RR, 1.19; 95% CI, 0.94 to 1.50; P = .15).
Currently, the World Health Organization recommends the use of ivermectin only inside clinical trials. A network of large clinical trials is in progress to validate the results seen to date.
Oh Andy. How did he pull the above off? Well, he brazenly removed all the supposedly “high-risk of bias” studies (not standard) and then he went further and invented novel, never-before-described grading categories such as “studies that are potentially fraudulent” and “studies that have some concerns.” I challenge anyone to find a generally accepted, validated definition of a study that is “potentially fraudulent” or “has some concerns.” Using these categories, he then whittled the evidence base down to just 4 RCT’s. This allowed him to proudly report to his masters that “there was no statistically significant reduction in mortality.” They must have been so pleased. Murderers.
The best way to demonstrate visually what he did above is found in the aforementioned, ridiculous NEJM editorial, written to magnify his “new” findings” to the world. Notice the derogatory graphic trying to symbolize ivermectin as “stinky cheese” in NEJM:
Now, check out the below graph from the editorial above, visually detailing how Andy “disappeared” the statistical significance supporting ivermectins efficacy to save lives.
What is really hilarious is that the highest-impact medical journal in the world had zero qualms about inserting Andy’s completely invented grading categories. The below reads like the work of a 5 year-old trying to “prove something.”
Again, the above graph was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. My god.
JULY 2021- THE FLCCC AND THE BRITISH IVERMECTIN RECOMMENDATION DEVELOPMENT GROUP (BIRD) WRITE TO OXFORD’s “PRINCIPLE” IVERMECTIN TRIAL INVESTIGATORS
We wrote a letter to the UK’s PRINCIPLE ivermectin trial which tried to call them out for continuing a placebo controlled trial despite Hill’s, Tess’s, the FLCCC’s and others meta-analyses repeatedly finding that ivermectin was life saving. No response obviously. Letter is here and below.
Then in December, after the PRINCIPLE trial announces that they have to pause the trial due to lack of supply of ivermectin, BiRD writes to them again:
Fun fact: Epoch Time contacts the supplier of ivermectin to the PRINCIPLE trial, and, shocker.. they state they have no supply issues and have plenty of ivermectin.
Also, just so you know, as per the c19early.com’s sleuthing, the PRINCIPLE trial’s ivermectin arm enrolled over 8,000 patients (8,000!) from June to December 2021 and then they paused it due to the invented “supply issues.” Then they paused enrollment again without explanation. Then they limited enrollment to only between Sunday and Thursday (injecting delays to treatment). Enrollment ended by July 8, 2022. It is now 6 months later and they still have not posted or published results. Curious no? Again, from the c19early.com group where they compare the two trials conducted by Oxford’s Chris Butler. Note that one of his studies was of a Big Pharma drug and one of a generic drug. He chose very different designs to study each. Like, very different. Curious no? Check it out, again from c19early.com.
From c19early.com group: “It is unclear why results were not released December 2021, why a reported supply issue was contradicted by the manufacturer, why the trial continued, and why results have still not been released [youtube.com].”
JULY 2021 – THE FIRST FRAUDULENT META-ANALYSIS IS PUBLISHED IN THE TOP META-ANALYSIS JOURNAL IN THE WORLD – THE COCHRANE LIBRARY
Popp et al. Cochrane Library, July 2021:
Here is the conclusion of the esteemed (yeah right) Cochrane Library’s review:
“Based on the current very low‐ to low‐certainty evidence, we are uncertain about the efficacy and safety of ivermectin used to treat or prevent COVID‐19. The completed studies are small and few are considered high quality.”
Now, I am not making this up, but here are the findings of the paper:
An estimated reduction in mortality of 67% for outpatients and 40% for inpatients. However, they made sure to include so few studies that these estimates did not reach statistical significance. How did they exclude so many studies and how did they choose which studies to include?
Ask Alexandros Marinos, the evidence-based medicine ivermectin fraud detective. It is not good. Also remember that Cochrane Library is (was) literally considered the gold standard for these kind of reviews prior to the pandemic:
Note that Gates starting funding Cochrane in 2016. Not long after this, Cochrane’s most anti-Pharma Founder and Board Member, Dr. Peter Gotzsche, was fired from the Board. Cochrane tried to smear him with “hit jobs” in their media statements and in this article about his firing/resignation that appeared in the Lancet:
Gøtzsche thinks that the (Cochrane) collaboration is becoming increasingly centralized and commercialized, that the executive team has authoritarian tendencies, and that certain policies are not fit for purpose.
“1 year ago, I pointed out to a meeting of the governing board that it was totally unacceptable that up to half of the authors on a Cochrane paper can have direct financial conflicts of interest with those companies whose products they are reviewing”, he told The Lancet. “I wrote a new draft of the policy, but absolutely no meaningful action has been taken”.
In 2013, Gøtzsche published “Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare”. He is a long-standing critic of the pharmaceutical industry. He believes that Cochrane is vulnerable to pressure from the industry, and that his dismissal was partly driven by a desire to silence him. Cochrane denies this:
A statement on Cochrane’s website declares: “This Board decision is not about freedom of speech. It is not about scientific debate. It is not about tolerance of dissent. It is not about someone being unable to criticize a Cochrane Review.”
Now, here is the scathing, erudite critique of the Cochrane meta-analysis from Edmund Fordham, Tess Lawrie, and Katherine MacGilchrist that they posted to a pre-print server for the world to read and that the world ignored. Insane. Love the title though:
Now, what is interesting is that Popp et al actually tried to defend themselves against Edmund and Tess’s critique with this insulting editorial published by, yep, you guessed it, the BMJ. The journal is literally called “BMJ Evidence Based Medicine.”
Edmund writes:
This was a “hit piece” by Popp et al. in BMJ trying to smear us with an “apples and oranges” comparison to which we succeeded in getting a rapid response published here which is corrupted in the concluding paragraph (there is no DOI reference for Rapid Responses and you just do a cut and paste of running text, but they are scrutinized editorially). The manuscript for the Rapid Response as originally submitted is here https://osf.io/nqxdk/
Click here for Part 3 where I begin with the malevolence of the horse dewormer campaign and end up with the most recent Disinformation attack – that of the brazen manipulation and publication of NIH’s ACTIV-6 trial.
I just want to say thanks to all my subscribers, especially the paid ones! Your support is greatly appreciated as it allows me to devote what is often large amounts of time I spend researching and writing my posts, so again, thanks.
P.S. I opened a tele-health clinic providing care not only in the prevention and treatment of acute COVID, but with a specialized focus on the study and treatment of both Long-Haul and Post-Vaccination injury syndromes. If anyone needs our help, feel free to visit our website at www.drpierrekory.com.
P.P.S. I am writing a book about what I have personally witnessed and learned during Pharma’s historic Disinformation war on ivermectin. Pre-order here for:
#Pierre Kory #Global War #Ivermectin – Part 2 #FLCCC #Senate Testimony #paper retraction #Merck #Disinformation war
