Why Ignoring early treatment in favour of increasingly uncertain vaccine efficacy and safety is a sunk-cost fallacy

It’s not just about ivermectin

If you only read the headlines, you’d be mistaken in thinking that ivermectin is a discredited right-wing horse deworming drug that only crazy anti-vaxxers take. This is an unfortunate and damaging mainstream lie. Lives are being lost because of this disinformation campaign, for motivations we can only guess at. However, thanks to the work of the Frontline Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance doctors, the benefits of ivermectin’s use in treating covid-19 have not been completely dismissed. Many doctors are successfully treating patients using their protocols. Yet, you wouldn’t know about it by watching the 6-o’clock news or reading any of the ‘trusted news sources.’

For example, a recent article in Vox attempts to portray itself as solid journalism, except that the author dismisses real-world evidence in favor of a science journalist’s critique of other researchers’ work, calling into question some of the key studies that have concluded in ivermectin’s favour. In response to my question about this on Twitter, Piper’s reply revealed her bias: “I didn't mention the clinical efficacy of ivermectin because the clinicians did not think there was clinical efficacy of ivermectin to report on.” Really? In just a few clicks I found quite a lot of evidence of clinical efficacy, on both social media as well as peer-reviewed research, which says otherwise. The FLCCC website has a page of testimonials from dozens of individuals, families, and doctors who have treated Covid-19 using ivermectin-based protocols. Even with YouTube’s aggressive anti-ivermectin censorship, you can easily find video testimony from doctors who have treated thousands of patients using ivermectin and researchers. If you went onto Odysee or Rumble, two platforms that are not actively censoring for ‘covid misinformation’ you would find a lot more. Are we to completely ignore these data in a pandemic?

The argument that anecdotal evidence is not the same as robust, scientific, randomized double-blind controlled trials is often put forth. This may certainly be the case, but an alternate argument that can be put forward is that while RCTs are considered the “gold standard” of research, they are not the only way of gathering clinical evidence. This is especially the case when when one is researching an already approved, repurposed drug like Ivermectin. There are observational studies, case studies, real-world evidence, narrative studies, reviews, and meta-analyses and so forth. Why these journalists are so eager to ‘debunk’ and discredit specific papers I have no answer for. I have found that the mainstream media routinely fail to mention any of this positive evidence, preferring instead to run with the fraudulent “horse-dewormer, right-wing drug” narrative. The question is why? Why are journalists, the media, and our health authorities so keen to discredit a safe and effective treatment that results in less severity, hospitalization, and death?

Given its safety record — and the fact that we are in a pandemic— what would be the harm giving Ivermectin a fairer hearing? If everything out of the ordinary that has been done during this pandemic (i.e., lockdowns, social distancing, masks, fast-tracking vaccines, etc.) has been done in the name of ‘saving lives’, wouldn’t Ivermectin be worth a try, even if it saved just a few? Instead, pharmacies in the U.S. are refusing to fill prescriptions, and the TGA in Australia has restricted doctors from prescribing it off-label for reasons that have little to do with the efficacy or the safety of the drug itself. It all makes no sense from a humanitarian point of view. Unfortunately, when one pans out and looks at the bigger picture and joins a few, easily connected dots, then a hypothesis emerges. However, it is one that I have no pleasure contemplating, and one I sincerely hope I am wrong about. (See my previous article, Merck, Ivermectin & Molnupiravir – A Tale of Two Pills for my thoughts on that.)

Suppression of therapeutics leads to vaccine hesitancy

All the vaccines currently on offer in Australia, U.K. and U.S. are still under emergency use authorization, apart from Pfizer. However, there remain important questions about this ‘rushed’ authorization that have not been adequately addressed. The subsequent FDA resignations over vaccine boosters only add to the tally of unanswered questions regarding vaccines in general. The health authorities and media will tell you these vaccines have been thoroughly vetted by authorization bodies. We are told repeatedly that these vaccines are ‘safe and effective.’ Yet, adverse reactions are downplayed by both health authorities and the media, while unvaccinated covid patients in hospital are disproportionately presented as news. Early in 2021, a private Facebook group on the topic was shut down after a few months and over 200, 000 members. Just yesterday, Project Veritas released an expose featuring a nurse ‘whistleblower’ regarding the vaccines and lack of data collection on adverse reactions.

Anyone who expresses concerns or questions the vaccine rollout is hushed, shamed, and discredited, no matter what their credentials. This does not enhance confidence in our health authorities and media, and in fact does the opposite. If you are confident in your position, then you should welcome questions and should be doing everything to gather outcome data to support your position. Health authorities and politicians ought to be aiming for ultra-transparency if they want to reduce ‘vaccine hesitancy’. However, it does not appear that the authorities —particularly in the America— are doing that. They are relying on VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System) data, which is a self-report system that is both time-consuming and cumbersome. That vaccine adverse events are under-reported by as much as 99% has been touted and disputed by some, yet the noticeable increase in reports since the vaccine rollout has also been dismissed or downplayed as ‘misinformation’, which serves to raise suspicions even further. Dr Robert Malone (one of the original researchers and inventors of mRNA technology) notes that if the health authorities really wanted to reduce vaccine hesitancy, they should be actively following up and collecting data on these novel vaccines, not relying on a self-reporting system which the CDC seems to have no interest in doing. This, understandably, makes people more nervous and only fuels conspiratorial theoretical musings. In Australia, the TGA releases a periodic vaccine safety report which goes some way towards transparency, but then again, the data is limited, and it is sometimes a few weeks out of date.

The fact is the long-term data is just not there. Not one of the vaccine manufacturers can promise the long-term safety of any of the covid-19 vaccines. In fact, according to leaked documentary evidence of an example contract that Pfizer has put forth, governments have essentially purchased these vaccines on an ‘as is’ basis. If these documents are correct, Pfizer has stipulated that they do not know whether the vaccines are safe outside of the clinical trials, and the contract quite specifically states that the purchase agreement is non-refundable, regardless of whether the vaccines are proven to cause harm, lose their efficacy, if another better treatment is found, or for any other reason in the future. If the government and our health authorities are so confident that these vaccines are both safe and effective despite their provisional/emergency use authorization status, then they should be transparent in their presentation of the risks and benefits, and they certainly should not be mandating them. Instead, we have been forced into vaccine apartheid where those who follow the ‘health advice’ and get vaccinated are allowed certain ‘freedoms,’ and the unvaccinated are to be treated like second-class citizens.

There is evidence that the vaccine efficacy wanes after a few months. Reports out of Israel have shown that the current crop of vaccines is waning in efficacy and are not as effective against the Delta variant. Concerningly, reports of double vaccinated patients making up 60% of covid-19 hospital admissions have surfaced and are causing alarm. Reports from the CDC state that double-vaccinated individuals are still vulnerable to both catching and spreading the Delta variant. The FDA has released a statement urging caution, and has said that it cannot approve boosters for healthy, under 65-year-olds based on current data. Yet, the Victorian Premier has just casually mentioned that we may need booster shots well into 2022. No one is expecting the vaccines to be perfect, but they are not as effective as we were led to believe. Given the change in data, shouldn’t that warrant a policy change? It seems not. So much for ‘following the science’.

All this talk of vaccine mandates, waning efficacy, and adverse events is going to make people nervous and hesitant, as it probably should. The Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has managed to beat covid back with the multi-pronged approach of early treatment AND vaccines ever since they introduced take-home treatment packs for anyone who tested positive. These packs included ivermectin. Cases have reduced from a high of almost 400,000 cases in May to just under 30, 000 in the last few weeks. Yet in Australia, the health authorities and politicians, supported by the media, refuse to do anything other than push vaccines as our only pathway to ‘normality’. The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) has even banned GP’s from prescribing ivermectin, for dubious reasons including the concern that people may choose to take ivermectin “rather than getting vaccinated.” God forbid that an individual might want to make that choice. There are so many issues with the TGA’s stance on Ivermectin that I don’t have room to list them here, however, none of the reasons listed have anything to do with Ivermectin’s safety or efficacy. (Update: Dr John Campbell does a better job of this than I could in this video summing up the TGA’s ‘reasons’ for restricting GP’s from prescribing ivermectin, here.) And given the demonstrated success of Ivermectin in treating and preventing covid, shouldn’t a democratic government be open to offering the people the choice of either a vaccine or early treatment, or both?

Now, more than ever, it is important to allow debate and information to flow. Journalists, in my opinion, are missing the call to action to make some sense out of the mess by allowing those tenants of good journalistic practice to fall by the wayside. Balance, fairness, accuracy, impartiality, honesty, and accountability. These are the ethical principles of journalistic practice that seem to be all but forgotten these days. Despite Joe Biden’s warning about a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,’ it seems that truth is also a casualty in this pandemic.

It’s not just about Ivermectin and whether it works to reduce symptoms of covid-19 or not. It is about the right to informed consent, the right to bodily sovereignty and the right to decide what is best for yourself, your family, and your body. As much as we may want them to be, the vaccines are not the only solution to ending this pandemic (If so, why are both Merck and Pfizer busily both working on anti-covid pills?).

Mandating vaccines, forcing businesses to close are just making things worse and do not make sense when the latest reports are taken into account. Early treatment for all confirmed cases of Covid-19 is critical to slowing the spread and reducing mortality. Countries like India, Peru, and Mexico are leading the way in this realization. It is time for Australia and the U.S. to wake up too.