Kory testified that “IVM could reduce hospitalizations by almost 90 percent and deaths by almost 75 percent.” Kory is one of a multitude of leading front-line physicians, including McCullough, Florida’s Surgeon General Joe Ladopo, Professor Paul Marik, Dr. Joseph Varone, and mRNA vaccine inventor, Dr. Robert Malone, and many, many others, who believe that early treatment with ivermectin would have avoided 75 percent-80 percent of deaths and saved our country a trillion dollars in treasure.
“COVID resulted in ~6 million hospitalizations and 700,000+ deaths in America,” says Dr. Kory. “If HCQ and IVM had been widely used instead of systematically suppressed, we could have prevented 75 percent, or at least 500,000 deaths, and 80 percent of hospitalizations, or 4.8 million. We could have spared the states hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Ten days after the FLCCC presentation, on January 14, the NIH’s COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel changed its previously negative recommendation to doctors regarding ivermectin to “neither for nor against,” cracking open the door just a little for physicians to use IVM as a therapeutic option. That is the same neutral recommendation the NIH committee members gave for monoclonal antibody and convalescent plasma treatments. Although the hopes were that both of these latter treatments would be effective when used early, convalescent plasma, “a favorite of nearly all academic medical centers in the country, failed miserably to show efficacy in numerous clinical trials” said Dr. Kory, while monoclonal antibodies did prove effective in preventing hospitalization.
NIH’s neutral January 14, 202130 “non-recommendation,”31 issued in the face of strong evidence of ivermectin’s safety and efficacy for COVID-19, was the first obvious signal of the agency’s determination to suppress IVM. NIH claimed that there was “Insufficient evidence . . . to recommend either for or against the use of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19.”
NIH shrouded its process for reaching that non-recommendation in secrecy, refusing to disclose the panel members who took part in the ivermectin deliberations, and redacting their names from the documents that various Freedom of Information Act requests compelled the agency to produce. For a time, only Dr. Fauci, Francis Collins, and the panelists themselves knew their identities. NIH took extreme measures to keep the names secret, fighting all the way into federal court to shield the proceedings from transparency.32,33
As Collins and Dr. Fauci maneuvered to shade the process from sunlight, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in response to a separate FOIA request, disclosed the group’s nine members.34 Three members of the working group, Adaora Adimora, Roger Bedimo, and David V. Glidden, had disclosed financial relationships with Merck.
A fourth member of the NIH Guidelines Committee, Susanna Naggie, received a $155 million grant35 to conduct further studies of ivermectin following the NIH non-recommendation. NIAID’s windfall payoff to Naggie would have been unlikely to go forward if the committee voted to approve IVM.
Today, as Dr. Fauci moves the US to eliminate all use of ivermectin, other countries are using more of it.
In February 2021, the head of the Tokyo Metropolitan Medical Association held a press conference to call for adding ivermectin to its outpatient treatment protocol. Several Indian states had added ivermectin to their list of essential medicines to fight COVID-19.36 Indonesia’s government not only authorized the use of the drug but also created a website showing its real-time availability.37 After giving out 3rd booster doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, but still seeing high rates of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths, Israel started using ivermectin officially in September 2021, with the health insurance companies distributing ivermectin to high-risk citizens. El Salvador distributes IVM for free to all of its citizens.38
Nations whose residents have easy access to ivermectin invariably see immediate and dramatic declines in COVID deaths. Hospitals in Indonesia started using ivermectin on July 22, 2021. By the first week of August, cases and deaths were plummeting.39
A December 2020 study showed that African and Asian countries that widely used ivermectin to treat and prevent various parasitic diseases enjoy some of the world’s lowest-reported COVID case and mortality rates.40 After controlling for confounding factors, including the Human Development Index (HDI), the eleven African nations with membership in the African Programme for Onchocerciasis (aka “river blindness,” for which ivermectin is standard of care) APOC show 28 percent lower mortality than non-APOC African countries, and an 8 percent lower rate of COVID-19 infection.