Another Ivermectin Hatchet Job, This Time via WSJ

Wall Street Journal cites new study from Canada claiming to show that Ivermectin offers no benefit to Covid patients. The study is not published and ostensibly was not even reviewed by the journal.

The good news is that readers of The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) are not buying it. The comments section for the article closed quickly after it was inundated with criticism from astute readers.

The bad news is that WSJ is still dishing it out, and other drug industry-sponsored media outlets are scooping it up like a bowl of Rocky Road ice cream.

The latest study claiming to show no benefits to Covid patients who take the cheap generic drug called Ivermectin comes from Dr. Edward Mills at McMaster University in Canada, a country whose government has repeatedly threatened, harassed, and punished any doctor who attempts to treat his/her Covid patients with the Nobel Prize-winning drug.

Serious question: Would Justin Trudeau’s henchmen permit a doctor in Canada to conduct a study of Ivermectin for Covid without a foregone conclusion that it’s useless? What would happen to any doctor who concluded otherwise?

I shudder at the thought.

Mills and his team say they ran a trial with 1,358 adults who tested positive for Covid and were considered to be at risk of severe disease due to underlying conditions, including diabetes and high blood pressure. Half the patients were given Ivermectin. The other half received placebo. According to WSJ, Mill’s team found “no indication” that Ivermectin was “clinically useful” as a treatment for Covid.

The study is not yet published in any form. It does not appear, based on the WSJ’s write-up, that author Sarah Toy has seen the unpublished manuscript herself. She quotes a doctor who claims to know about the study:

“This is the first large, prospective study that should really help put to rest Ivermectin and not give any credibility to the use of it for Covid-19,” Baylor College’s National School of Tropical Medicine Dean Peter Hotez is quoted as saying.

Toy’s summary of the unpublished study that she does not appear to have read leaves all the most important questions unanswered, including:

1. How soon after illness onset was Ivermectin administered?

2. How many patients in each group progressed to severe disease?

3. How many patients in each group died?

We have seen time and again that studies claiming to show no benefit to early Covid treatment (i.e. within 48 to 72 hours of first symptoms) with Ivermectin didn’t actually treat the patients early. We have also seen impressive results from Ivermectin deliberately obscured in the write-ups of those studies.

The most recent widely publicized study of Ivermectin that claimed to show no benefit did both. It was a study from Malaysia published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) The authors quietly noted that 19 patients in the Ivermectin arm who progressed to “severe disease” received their first dose of the drug more than five days after illness onset…

…but then conveniently failed to report whether the four patients in the Ivermectin arm who required a ventilator, and the three who died, were among those 19 patients.

It also ignored the 70 percent fewer deaths for patients treated with Ivermectin relative to controls.

I sent multiple emails to lead author Steven Chee Loon Lim of that study, requesting clarification on the number of days following illness onset the patients received their first dose of Ivermectin before progressing to a ventilator and/or dying. He never responded. It appears part of “the new normal” is publishing corrupt studies designed to kill cheap generic drugs while promoting expensive new drugs and deadly vaccines, then ignoring all questions from the public about the obvious flaws in your corrupt study.

Because the drug-industry sponsored media are equally compromised, apparently scientists no longer even need to get their studies published in a medical journal first. Simply email a friendly reporter with a quick summary of the results from a study you claim to have conducted, and voila! You are published!

I reached out to Dr. Mills for a copy of his unpublished manuscript. I also asked Toy for comment on WSJ’s apparent decision to publicize, sight unseen, the results of this unpublished study.

I’ll let you know if and when I hear back from either of them.

The WSJ article is located here, behind a paywall:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ivermectin-didnt-reduce-covid-19-hospitalizations-in-largest-trial-to-date-11647601200

Update: I have heard back from Dr. Mills, the author of this study. Here is his response to my request for a copy of the manuscript. He confirms that none of his data have been peer-reviewed or published, and none are available for public inspection:

Thank you for your email. We appreciate your interest in clinical trials relevant to COVID and we hope that together, we can identify cheap and effective interventions that can safely help patients in the outpatient setting.

As you are likely aware, this is the largest placebo-controlled clinical trial for COVID. We have successfully identified 11 different interventions in the trial and identified two that are effective – fluvoxamine and peginterferon lambda. We did not find important benefits from ritonavir-lopinavir, hydroxycholoroquine, doxasozin, ivermectin (low and high dose), metformin, or placebo. We are currently evaluating fluvoxamine plus budesonide and fluoxetine plus budesonide versus matching placebos.

All manuscripts will be published in the future in peer-reviewed manuscripts and will be freely available. We cannot provide preprints of the manuscripts or respond to individual requests for data from trials until they are made public.

We are grateful for your support of the trials.

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[1] Efficacy of Ivermectin Treatment on Disease Progression Among Adults With Mild to Moderate COVID-19 and Comorbidities: The I-TECH Randomized Clinical Trial | Complementary and Alternative Medicine | JAMA Internal Medicine | JAMA Network