Business Insider warned that people were “poisoning themselves trying to treat or prevent COVID-19 with a horse deworming drug.”
Associated Press assures readers that, “No Evidence Ivermectin is a Miracle Drug Against COVID-19.”
On August 15, the FDA instructed, on its website: “You are not a horse.” In an August 21, 2021 Twitter post,84 the FDA expanded the theme: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” The White House and CNN also urged listeners that they should avoid veterinary products. CDC joined the chorus, warning Americans to not risk their health consuming a “horse dewormer.” Elsewhere on its website, the CDC urged black and brown human immigrants to load up on ivermectin. “All Middle Eastern, Asian, North African, Latin American, and Caribbean refugees should receive presumptive therapy with: ivermectin, two doses 200 mcg/Kg orally once a day for two days before departure to the United States.85 Whether this was intended to deworm them or to prevent COVID transmission during travel to the US is unclear.
Only Green Med Info, a health news and information site, saw through the chicanery: “A Media Smear Campaign Timed to Clear Market for Pfizer’s Ivermectin Clone Drug, Which Will Be Hailed as a ‘Miracle.’”
Demonizing IVM as a “horse drug” was, of course, ironic, given that NIAID initially developed Merck’s replacement therapy, molnupiravir, as a horse drug. Furthermore, calling ivermectin a horse drug is like calling antibiotics a horse drug. Many long-established basic drugs are, of course, effective in all mammals because they work on our shared biology. But facts be damned, media companies called all hands on deck to push these stories. Ivermectin’s devastating effectiveness against infections from parasites and solid 40-year history of proven safety have made it, also, the world’s most prescribed veterinary medicine—but the Nobel Prize was for those billions of times it helped humans, and the government’s silly safety warnings were, of course, specious.
Compare ivermectin’s safety record to Dr. Fauci’s two chosen COVID remedies, remdesivir (which hospital nurses have dubbed “Run-death-is-near”), and the COVID vaccines. Over 30 years, ivermectin has been associated with only 379 reported deaths, an impressive death/dose reporting ratio of 1/10,584,408. In contrast, over the 18 months since remdesivir received an EUA, about 1.5 million patients have received remdesivir, with 1,499 deaths reported (a dire 1/1,000 D/D ratio). Meanwhile, among recipients of COVID jabs in the US during the ten months following their rollout, some 17,000 deaths have occurred following vaccination, a reported D/D ratio of 1/13,250. Ivermectin, therefore, is thousands of times safer than remdesivir and COVID vaccines. The science also indicates that it is far more effective than either.
Dr. Fauci himself took early charge of spreading the rumor that ivermectin was poisoning deluded Americans. “Don’t do it,” he told pharma propagandist Jake Tapper of CNN in an August 29, 2021 interview. “There’s no evidence whatsoever that that works, and it could potentially have toxicity . . . with people who have gone to poison control centers because they’ve taken the drug at a ridiculous dose and wind up getting sick. There’s no clinical evidence that indicates that this works.”
Jake Tapper, who has sounded progressively more like a pharma rep than a journalist as the lockdown dragged on, slavishly parroted Dr. Fauci’s new talking point:86 “Poison control centers are reporting that their calls are spiking in places like Mississippi and Oklahoma, because some Americans are trying to use an anti-parasite horse drug called ivermectin to treat coronavirus, to prevent contracting coronavirus.” It mattered not that both Mississippi and Oklahoma officials quickly denied that anyone in their state had been hospitalized for IVM poisoning.
An AP story claimed that 70 percent of calls to the Mississippi poison control center were for ivermectin overdoses; it turned out perhaps 2 percent of calls were. Barely anyone saw the grudging retractions.87
Additional news articles reported alleged rises in ivermectin-related overdoses in other states. These, too, were exaggerated. Kentucky poison control acknowledged a slight uptick in calls about veterinary ivermectin overdose—about six per year compared to an average of one per year. Despite claims of mass poisoning, the media could not find a single case of IVM leading to death or hospitalization. People were not dying from horse ivermectin overdoses. They were certainly not dying from appropriately dosed and prescribed oral ivermectin. But many were dying from untreated COVID-19.
Bill Gates’s surrogate group GAVI asked in a press release: “How did a drug many used to treat parasites in cows come to be of interest to doctors treating humans with COVID-19?” The characterization was especially insincere. Gates’ foundation and GAVI were, at that moment, distributing millions of doses of ivermectin annually to Indian children for filariasis, and to Africans for river blindness and filariasis.
It wasn’t just the safe drug and caring physicians that were under attack. When, in September 2021, the popular comedian and podcast host Joe Rogan announced he’d kicked COVID in just a few days using a cocktail of drugs, including ivermectin, the global press, government, and pharmaceutical interests coalesced to denounce, vilify, and gaslight him. NPR, which has taken $3 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, jumped on the dogpile and deceptively insinuated that Rogan took horse-level doses:88
Joe Rogan has told his Instagram followers he has been taking ivermectin, a deworming veterinary drug formulated for use in cows and horses, to help fight the coronavirus. The Food and Drug Administration has warned against taking the medication, saying animal doses of the drug can cause nausea, vomiting and in some cases severe hepatitis.
But Rogan never took veterinary ivermectin paste. Rogan said he had talked with “multiple doctors” who advised him to take the drug. He followed their advice and he got well, remarkably quickly.