But most importantly, ivermectin is also a low-profit competitor for another new Merck product for COVID-19—a high-cost antiviral drug, molnupiravir, for which Merck had the highest financial ambitions. Ironically, molnupiravir, a copycat formula, utilized an identical mechanism of action as ivermectin.74 That drug will retail at around $700 per course75 but only if Merck can kill its cheap rival.
It’s worth a moment to consider molnupiravir’s pedigree, because the drug emerged from a shadowy black market of spies, pharmaceutical mountebanks, biosecurity profiteers, and Pentagon contractors who played key roles in militarizing and monetizing the COVID pandemic, and whom you will meet later in this book. The CIA officer and bioweapons developer, Michael Callahan, one of molnupiravir’s key patrons, has dubbed this group of shady bioweapons operators as his “Secret Handshake Club.” Molnupiravir is a protease inhibitor that mimics the antiviral properties of ivermectin. Unlike ivermectin, molnupiravir showed safety signals so alarming that some of its codevelopers at Emory University protested its introduction into human Phase I trials. Among other problems, they cite the possibility that it will cause birth defects.
Callahan’s boss, bioweapons enthusiast and former DHHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Robert Kadlec, MD—an unabashed “gain-of-function” promoter with military and intelligence agency pedigrees, who built his career profiting from hyped pandemics—almost single-handedly created the $7 billion National Strategic Stockpile and runs it as a private fiefdom to enrich his friends and connections. Kadlec also runs the super-secretive P3CO Committee inside of NIH, which greenlights—and never denies—Tony Fauci’s gain-of-function bioweapons research projects. Gain-of-function refers to experiments that intentionally modify a pathogen to create the ability to cause or worsen disease, enhance transmissibility, and/or create novel strains with potential to cause global spread in humans.76 One of Kadlec’s many dodgy business partners is John Clerici,77 a Washington lawyer, lobbyist, and artful rogue who almost single-handedly created The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), a new agency formed after 9/11 under the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) of which Kadlec was director during the Trump administration. BARDA is a taxpayer-infused investment fund that purchases and develops technology for Kadlec’s Strategic Stockpile and postulated future threats. Clerici boasts that, “If someone wants to get BARDA money, they’ve gotta go through me.” His LinkedIn profile crows that “John has assisted over three dozen companies in obtaining nearly $3 billion in funding and research for development and procurement of public health countermeasures for the federal government, including the majority of the awards made under Project BioShield, the US government’s initiative for preparing the nation against biological attacks.”
Clerici brandishes, also, his innovative authorship of the PREP Act, a corporate welfare boondoggle that bestows protection against liability upon manufacturers and providers of vaccines and all other pandemic countermeasures to shield them from lawsuits. Under the PREP Act, no matter how negligently or reprehensibly the company behaves and no matter how grievous the injuries to their victims, the companies cannot be held liable—unless the injured party can prove willful misconduct. Even then, a lawsuit can commence only with the approval of the Secretary of HHS.
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA),78 another Pentagon bioweapons agency and corporate welfare program for military contractors, provided $10 million in 2013 and 2015 to Emory University to develop molnupiravir as a veterinary drug for horses (against equine encephalitis). NIAID contributed $19 million79 then transferred the toxic drug in a golden handoff to Merck and another drug company, Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, along with a guaranteed market and rich returns. As we shall see in later chapters, DTRA was a major funder of EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak’s “charity” that sought out lethal animal viruses around the world, retrieving the most deadly for the Pentagon.
In June 2021, as FDA and NIAID were cranking up the medical cartel’s opposition against IVM, the HHS agreed to purchase 1.7 million 5-day treatment courses of molnupiravir from Merck for 1.2 billion dollars80—when the drug wins FDA approval, a contingency that can be virtually guaranteed while Anthony Fauci is Washington’s drug kingmaker.
On June 9, 2021 President Biden dutifully reiterated the US government’s commitment to procure approximately 1.7 million courses of the NIAID-funded drug from Merck.81 BARDA collaborated with a confederacy of other shady Defense Department operatives, including the DoD Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense (JPEO-CBRND) and the Army Contracting Command, on the $1.2 billion purchase. Not only was the drug developed with taxpayer money, but its $712 per dose price to the taxpayer is forty times more than Merck’s $17.64 cost of production. Merck, which expects to make $7 billion per year on the new blockbuster, saw its stock price spike on news of the government contract and after President Biden’s televised plug.
With so many powerful and important godfathers and the United States president fully committed, it would be unprecedented for FDA to deny authorization to molnupiravir, no matter how disastrous the clinical trial results may be. Merck is so certain of FDA’s approval that by September 2020, it was already scaling up manufacturing, even though its clinical trials are still underway.
Merck announced in October 2021 that molnupiravir had shown “game-changing” results against COVID in clinical trials, reducing hospitalizations and deaths by 50 percent against a placebo. “The news of the efficacy of this particular antiviral is obviously very good news,” trumpeted the White House’s Chief Medical Advisor and Pharma spokesperson, Anthony Fauci. “The FDA will look at the data and in the usual very efficient, very effective way, will evaluate the data as quickly as they possibly can, and then it will be taken from there.”
Horse Drugs
As Merck stood poised to release its new horse drug molnupiravir onto the market, the other US behemoth, Pfizer, was racing Merck neck and neck with its own antiviral pill, PF-07321332,82 an ivermectin knockoff that is so similar to IVM (except, of course, in price point) that critics call it “Pfizermectin.”83 Like IVM, it is also a protease-inhibiting antiparasitic. With these two new drugs teed up for a simultaneous FDA approval, the entire medical/media cartel launched a final coordinated coup de grace against IVM—branding it a dangerous horse drug. Mainstream media outlets across the US and overseas obediently ran stories promoting the horse medicine propaganda scam.
In late August 2021, NIH, FDA, and CDC launched an innovative new campaign to slander ivermectin as a “horse dewormer” that only deluded foolhardy nincompoops would consume. Picking up on those themes, The Independent asked, “Ivermectin: Why Are US AntiVaxxers Touting a Horse Dewormer as a Cure for COVID?”