On April 20, 2021, India’s medical societies added ivermectin to the national protocol. According to Indian and international news, an aggressive campaign by the government of the Indian state of New Delhi, where COVID was raging, showed stunning success. The Desert Review reported that in April 2021, New Delhi was experiencing a COVID epidemic crisis. The state government obliterated 97 percent of Delhi cases by distributing ivermectin.41 “IVM Crushed COVID in New Delhi,” wrote Dr. Justus R. Hope, M.D.42 Following IVM’s introduction, according to TrialSite News, cases dropped dramatically. “At the national level, the massive surge that overtook the country at the beginning of April slowed exponentially after the new COVID-19 protocol was introduced, which includes the use of ivermectin and budesonide.” 43 India showed that early combination therapy—budesonide, ivermectin, doxycycline, and zinc, costing between two and five dollars—made COVID symptoms disappear within three to five days. By January 2021, a country of more than 1.3 billion people and a vaccine uptake of almost 7.6 percent nationally44 had witnessed only 150,000 COVID deaths.45 By comparison, the US, with a population of 331 million, had recorded 357,000 deaths.46 Many Indian officials and doctors consider ivermectin a miracle drug for controlling the outbreak. A natural experiment involving two Indian states—Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu—with opposite COVID strategies helped cement that impression.
With 241 million people, Uttar Pradesh has the equivalent of two-thirds of the United States population. According to the Indian Express:47 “Uttar Pradesh was the first state in the country to introduce large-scale prophylactic and therapeutic use of ivermectin. In May-June 2020, a team at Agra [Uttar Pradesh’s fourth largest city], led by Dr. Anshul Pareek, administered ivermectin to all RRT team members in the district on an experimental basis. None of them developed Covid-19 despite being in daily contact with patients who had tested positive for the virus.48 Uttar Pradesh State Surveillance Officer Vikssendu Agrawal added that, based on the findings from Agra, the state government sanctioned the use of ivermectin as a prophylactic for all the contacts of COVID patients and began administering doses to infected persons.
By September, the Uttar Pradesh government announced that the state’s 33 districts are virtually devoid of active cases, despite having a vaccination rate of only 5.8 percent.49 The Hindustan Times reported, “Overall, the state has a total of 199 active cases, while the positivity rate came down to less than 0.01 per cent. The recovery rate, meanwhile, has improved to 98.7 per cent.”50 When America’s vaccination rate was at 54 percent, cases were still rising and governments were still imposing draconian restrictions. As of August 10, 2021, the United States saw 161,990 new cases and 1,049 new deaths.51 Uttar Pradesh, in contrast, saw only 19 new cases and one death—more than 1,000 times lower than the US.52
Dr. Agrawal attributes the timely introduction of ivermectin to ending the first COVID wave: “Despite being the state with the largest population base and a high population density, we have maintained a relatively low positivity rate and cases per million of population.”53
According to TrialSite News, despite the Indian government’s success in using ivermectin and budesonide, “the media hasn’t shown interest in sharing this news. Instead, the comments continue to promote remdesivir as an effective drug, and the few media outlets that do refer to ivermectin call it an ‘unproven medicine’ or an ‘outdated treatment.’ It is as if there are two different treatment realities, one on the ground and one in the local health systems. Millions of patients are now receiving ivermectin, yet one would never know by the media topics.”54
Meanwhile, the Indian state of Tamil Nadu continued using Anthony Fauci’s protocol of administering remdesivir, outlawing ivermectin, and discouraging early treatment. According to the Indian Times, Tamil Nadu continues to experience cases and fatalities that perfectly match the US catastrophe.55
The massive and overwhelming evidence in favor of ivermectin includes scientist Dr. Tess Lawrie’s highly regarded, peer-reviewed meta-analysis.
Dr. Lawrie assessed 15 trials, finding a cumulative benefit of IVM in reducing deaths of 62 percent. Although the data quality of the ivermectin for prevention studies was less strong, they showed that ivermectin prophylaxis reduced COVID infections by 86 percent.56
Dr. Lawrie, a world-renowned data researcher and scientific consultant, is an iconic eminence among global public health scientists and agencies. The Desert Review has deemed her “The Conscience of Medicine”57 because of her reputation for competence, precision, and integrity. Lawrie’s consulting group, the Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy, Ltd. performs the scientific reviews that develop and support guidelines for global public health agencies, including the WHO and European governments, as well as international scientific and health consortia like the Cochrane Collaboration. Her clients have included a retinue of virtually all the larger government regulators now involved in the suppression of IVM and other repurposed drugs.
At the end of December 2000, Dr. Lawrie happened on a YouTube video of Pierre Kory’s Senate testimony on ivermectin. Her interest piqued, Dr. Lawrie conducted a “pragmatic rapid review” between Christmas and New Year’s to validate the 27 studies from the medical literature that Kory cited, assessing each of them for quality and power.
“After a week, I realized it was a go. IVM’s safety was well-established as a widely used dewormer,” she told me. “I was startled by the magnitude of its benefits. Its efficacy against COVID was consistently clear in multiple studies. I thought that all these people were dying and this was a moral obligation—this drug should have been rolled out.” Dr. Lawrie dispatched an urgent letter to British Health Minister Matt Hancock on January 4 with her Rapid Review attached. She never heard back from Hancock. But in a suspicious coincidence, someone leaked a meta-review by WHO researcher Andrew Hill to the Daily Mail.58 Three days later, Hill posted a preprint of his study. In the one month since he testified enthusiastically beside Dr. Kory in favor of ivermectin before the January 13 NIH panel, Hill had made a neck-wrenching volte face. Cumulatively, the seven studies in Hill’s original meta-review still showed a dramatic reduction in hospitalizations and deaths among patients receiving IVM. The leaked version of Hill’s meta-review included all the same papers that formerly supported his gung-ho promotion of IVM as a miraculous cure for COVID. Hill had altered only his conclusions. Now he claimed that those studies comprised a low quality of evidence, and so although they yielded a highly positive result, Hill assigned the result a “low certainty.” He could then declare that WHO should not recommend IVM without first performing long-term, randomized placebo-controlled studies that would require many months if not longer. “Someone got to him,” suggests Kory. “Someone sent him the memo. Andrew Hill has been captured by some really dark forces.”
On January 7, Dr. Lawrie summarized the overwhelming evidence from her Rapid Review in a video directed at British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, urging him to break the logjam and roll out IVM immediately. Her video, says Dr. Kory, was “absolutely convincing.” She forwarded the video appeal to the British and South African Prime Ministers on January 7. She heard nothing from either.
On January 13, 2021, Dr. Lawrie used her convening power to assemble an invitation-only symposium of twenty of the world’s leading experts, including researchers, physicians, patient advocates, and government consultancy advisers, to review her meta-analysis and make evidence-based recommendations on the use of ivermectin to prevent and treat COVID-19. She called the conference the British ivermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD) study.