In early September 2021, following the FDA/CDC/NIAID’s lead, the American Medical Association (AMA), the American Pharmacists Association (APhA), and the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) called on doctors to immediately stop prescribing ivermectin for COVID outside of clinical trials.69 These influential organizations are largely dependent on pharmaceutical industry largesse.
On September 2, 2021 on MSNBC Tonight, Chris Hayes interviewed the president of the AMA, Dr. Gerald Harmon, who said that the AMA now advises doctors against prescribing ivermectin except in clinical trials. He explained that the AMA is taking this unprecedented step because ivermectin isn’t “approved” by the FDA for treatment of COVID-19. He failed to mention that up to 30 percent of prescriptions written by America’s doctors are for off-label uses not approved by the FDA. The AMA, meanwhile, ignored the cascading toll of injuries and deaths from Big Pharma’s injections, while endorsing the revolutionary notion that FDA should be the arbiter of what doctors can and cannot use to heal their patients. Physicians traditionally have had unlimited authority to prescribe FDA-approved medications for any purpose as long as they explain the risks and benefits to their patients. Suddenly, the AMA and its industry patrons and captive regulators moved to limit the doctor’s authority to treat patients. FDA has no authority to regulate the practice of medicine. As Stephen Hahn, FDA’s last Commissioner (no one has been appointed to the role since he left) pointed out in October 2020, off-label prescribing is between a doctor and his/her patient.
The sad episode, still ongoing, raises questions one expects doctors to be asking:
? Is ivermectin a safe drug?
? Will it do harm?
? Are we in a situation in which authorities have not provided a proven therapeutic for COVID-19?
? Do treating physicians have the freedom to try medicines they have reason to believe might be helpful, particularly when there is no reason to believe the medicine will be hurtful?
Doctors who answered those questions for themselves and prescribed ivermectin after early September faced growing scrutiny and heavy-handed tactics including censorship, threats to their license and board certification, and other repressive policies from governments and medical boards. Pharmacists, including the large chains like CVS and Walmart, refused to fill prescriptions. “For the first time in history, pharmacies were telling doctors what they can and cannot prescribe,” says Dr. McCullough. The directives shattered the traditional sacred relationship between doctors and patients that the profession had nurtured and protected since Hippocrates. The medical profession has long told doctors that their single obligation is to their patients. The AMA’s declaration helped march doctors into their new role as agents of state policy. The state policy is to prescribe treatments, not based upon the health interests of the individual patient but based upon the perceived best interests of the state.
“The suppression of HCQ and IVM is one of the greatest tragedies and crimes of the modern era,” Dr. Peter Breggin told me. Dr. Breggin, who has been called “The Conscience of Psychiatry,” by author Candace Pert, is the author of Talking Back to Prozac and COVID-19 and the Global Predators.70
Estimated number of outpatient ivermectin prescriptions dispensed from retail pharmacies—United States, March 16, 2019–August 13, 2021*
In Florida and South Carolina, Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) sent mass mailings to physicians notifying them that BCBS would no longer pay insurance claims for IVM, and threatened audits of any physician who wrote prescriptions for the drug.
In January 2021, Syracuse, New York attorney Ralph Lorigo filed for an injunction on behalf of a critically ill hospital patient—the mother of one of his clients— against a local hospital that was resisting family requests to treat her with ivermectin. A State Superior Court judge immediately granted Lorigo’s request. Within 12 hours of taking ivermectin, the dying woman miraculously began to recover. Two weeks later, Lorigo obtained a second injunction for a similarly situated client, who also made a preternatural recovery. When local news organizations reported Lorigo’s IVM victories, his law office telephone began ringing off the hook. Within a few weeks, he was working twenty-hour days struggling to keep up with a new cottage industry filing injunctions in New York and Ohio courts to help dying patients get access to ivermectin. To date, Lorigo has been in thirty courts. “The people who I’ve been able to get the ivermectin to on time have all lived; the others have died.” He has obtained dozens of injunctions for patients, precipitating a host of sudden recoveries. “The hospitals are so arrogant. They are letting the people die. They get $37,000 to put them on the vent, and they just let them die.”
Merck’s Steps to Kill Its Baby
During the early industry offensive against HCQ, one of the drug’s principal manufacturers, Sanofi, suddenly detected “safety concerns” with HCQ that it had never noticed during decades of profitable pre-pandemic production. In a remarkable coincidence, on February 4, 2021, Merck similarly discovered “a concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies” regarding IVM.71 Merck was ivermectin’s original manufacturer and had formerly boasted of ivermectin as its “wonder drug.”
During the 40 years that it marketed the drug worldwide, Merck had never spoken of these worrisome safety signals. Since 1987, Merck has given billions of doses to the developing world for scabies, river blindness,72 lymphatic filariasis, elephantiasis, and assorted parasites without any safety alarms. In 2016, Merck distributed 900 million doses in Africa alone. “The drug is safe and has minor side effects,” a Merck spokesman said at the time.
Unlike previous treatments, which had serious—sometimes fatal—side effects, ivermectin is safe and can be used on a wide scale. It is also a very effective treatment, and has single-handedly transformed the lives of millions of people. . . .
What prompted Merck’s sudden safety concerns?
Merck’s exclusive ivermectin patent rights expired in 1996,73 and dozens of generic drug companies now produce IVM, for about 40￠/dose, badly diminishing ivermectin’s profit profile for Merck. Furthermore, only ten days before Merck discovered its concerns about IVM, Merck signed a manufacturing partnership for the Novavax and Emergent BioSolutions COVID vaccine as it moved into final trials.
Furthermore, in December 2020, Merck had announced a $356 million supply deal by which NIAID agreed to purchase 60,000 to 100,000 doses of an experimental COVID pill called MK 7110. Merck paid $425 million to buy the Oncoimmune company which developed the drug as part of the deal. Bill Gates’s quasi-governmental organization, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), agreed to distribute the product in developing nations.