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by
The Front Line
COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance
MedPage Today on the Irregular Actions of Public Health Agencies and the Widespread Disinformation Campaign Against Ivermectin...
Oddly, however, even as
the clinical trials data and successful Ivermectin treatment
experiences continue to mount, so too have the criticisms and
outright recommendations against the use of Ivermectin by the vast
majority, though not all, of public health agencies (PHA),
concentrated largely in North America and Europe.
These rebuttals were publicized and provided to international media for the education of providers and patients across the world.
Our most recent response to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and others recommendation against use can be found on the FLCCC website here.
In February 2021, the British Ivermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD), an international meeting of physicians, researchers, specialists, and patients, followed a guideline development process consistent with the WHO standard.
The BIRD group's recommendation rested in part on numerous, well-documented studies reporting that Ivermectin use reduces the risk of contracting COVID-19 by over 90% and mortality by 68% to 91%.
A similar conclusion has also been reached by an increasing number of expert groups from the United Kingdom (UK), Italy, Spain, United States (US), and a group from Japan headed by the Nobel Prize-winning discoverer of Ivermectin, Professor Satoshi Omura.
Focused rebuttals that are backed by voluminous research and data have been shared with PHAs over the past months.
These include the WHO and many individual members of its guideline development group (GDG), the FDA, and the NIH. However, these PHAs continue to ignore or disingenuously manipulate the data to reach unsupportable recommendations against Ivermectin treatment.
We are forced to publicly expose what we believe can only be described as a "disinformation" campaign astonishingly waged with full cooperation of those authorities whose mission is to maintain the integrity of scientific research and protect public health.
The following accounting and analysis of the WHO Ivermectin panel's highly irregular and inexplicable analysis of the Ivermectin evidence supports but one rational explanation: the GDG Panel had a predetermined, nonscientific objective, which is to recommend against Ivermectin.
This is despite the overwhelming evidence by respected experts calling for its immediate use to stem the pandemic.
Additionally, there appears to be a wider effort to employ what are commonly described as "disinformation tactics" in an attempt to counter or suppress any criticism of the irregular activity of the WHO panel.
The WHO Ivermectin Guideline Conflicts with the NIH Recommendation
The FLCCC Alliance is a nonprofit, humanitarian organization made up of renowned, highly published, world-expert clinician-researchers whose sole mission over the past year has been to develop and disseminate the most effective treatment protocols for COVID-19.
In the past six months, much of this effort has been centered on disseminating knowledge of our identification of significant randomized, observational, and epidemiologic studies consistently demonstrating the powerful efficacy of Ivermectin in the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.
Our manuscript detailing the depth and breadth of this evidence passed a rigorous peer review by senior scientists at the U.S Food and Drug Administration and Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
Recently published, our study concludes that, based on the totality of the evidence of efficacy and safety, Ivermectin should be immediately deployed to prevent and treat COVID-19 worldwide.
The first "red flag" is the conflict between the March 31, 2021, WHO Ivermectin Panel's "against" recommendation and the NIH's earlier recommendation from February 12th of a more supportive neutral recommendation based on a lower amount of supportive evidence of Ivermectin's efficacy at that time.
Two flawed lines of analysis by the WHO appear to account for this inconsistent result:
The Severely Limited Extent and Diversity of Ivermectin Data Considered by the WHO's Ivermectin Panel
The WHO Ivermectin Panel arbitrarily included only a narrow selection of the available medical studies that their research team had been instructed to collect when formulating their recommendation, with virtually no explanation why they excluded such a voluminous amount of supportive medical evidence.
This was made obvious at the outset due to the following:
Key Ivermectin Trial Data Excluded from Analysis
Assessment of the Quality of the Evidence Base by WHO Guideline Group
The numerous above actions minimizing the extent of the evidence base were then compounded by the below efforts to minimize the quality of the evidence base.
The WHO mischaracterized the overall quality of the included trials as "low" to "very low," conflicting with numerous independent expert research group findings:
We must emphasize this critical fact:
Further, The WHO's own guideline protocol stipulates that quality assessments should be upgraded when there is the following:
In sum, the WHO's recommendation that "Ivermectin not be used outside clinical trials" is based entirely upon:
Consequently, these actions formed the basis of their ability to avoid a recommendation for immediate global use.
Even more surprising is that based on their "very low certainty" finding, the panel goes on to "infer" that,
This statement is insupportable in light of the above actions.
No patient could ever rationally consent to a trial in which they were acutely ill and would be subject to the possibility of receiving a placebo, once informed of:
Such a trial would result in a historic ethical research violation, causing both a widespread loss of life and a resultant loss of trust in PHAs and research institutions for decades to come.
The many methods employed by the WHO to distort the evidence base and arrive at a non-recommendation are made even more suspicious and questionable by the following:
Conclusion
As expert clinician-researchers in society, we are firmly committed to ensuring that public health policy decisions derive from scientific data.
Disturbingly, after extensive analysis of the recent WHO Ivermectin guideline recommendation, we could not arrive at a credible scientific rationale to explain the numerous irregular, arbitrary, and inconsistent behaviors documented above.
Further, after consultation with numerous physicians, guideline reviewers, legal experts, and veteran PHA scientists, we identified two major socio-political-economic forces that serve as the main barrier influences preventing Ivermectin's incorporation into public health policy in major parts of the world.
They are:
"Big Science"
Also known as "Big RCT Fundamentalism," Big Science reflects a dramatic shift in the practice of modern evidence-based medicine (EBM).
Beginning before COVID, it has since rapidly evolved into the current system that more tightly meshes the entities of,
...into the public health system's efforts at guiding patient care, research and policy.
The structure and function of "Big Science" in COVID-19 is most simply represented as follows:
Conversely, repurposed, off-patient medications such as Ivermectin do not attract Big PHA or Big Pharma sponsors to conduct the mandatory Big RCT.
Given this structural handicap, many effective medicines including Ivermectin are consequently incapable of ever meeting Big PHA standards for approval in such a system.
In the case of Ivermectin, it is then considered, first by Big PHAs, then throughout Big Media and Big Social media, to be "unproven" given it lacks "sufficient evidence" and is thus heavily censored from public discussion and awareness.
Mentions of Ivermectin on Big Social Media led to the removal of a popular Facebook group ("Ivermectin MD Team" with over 10,000 followers).
Additionally, all YouTube videos mentioning Ivermectin in treatment of Covid-19 were removed or demonetized, as well as Twitter pages locked.
Further, in Big Media, even the most credentialed independent and expert groups who recommend Ivermectin based on a large body of irrefutable evidence are labeled as "controversial" and purveyors of "medical misinformation."
A health system structured to function in this manner is clearly vulnerable to and overly influenced by entities with financial interests.
Further, in Covid, such systems have evolved into rigidly operating via top-down edicts and widespread censoring. This allows little ability for emerging scientific developments not funded by Big Pharma to be disseminated from within the system or through media or social media until years later when, and if, a Big RCT is completed.
This barrier has presented as an enduring horror throughout the pandemic given the widespread loss of life caused by the systematic withholding of numerous rapidly identified, safe and effective, repurposed medicines for fear of using "unproven therapies" without "sufficient evidence" for use.
Alternatively, and for the first time in many physicians' careers, those who seek to treat their patients with such therapies, based on their professional interpretation of the existing evidence are restricted by their employers issuing edicts "from above."
They are then forced to follow protocols that rely predominantly on pharmaceutically engineered therapeutics.
It must be recognized that distinct from "regulatory" agencies such as the FDA, whose system often relies upon the primary importance of a "Big RCT," stronger foundations used by PHAs are available.
One of the long-standing tenets of modern evidence-based medicine is that the highest form of medical evidence is a "systematic review and meta-analysis" of RCTs and not a sole Big RCT.
Disturbingly, not one of the Big PHAs mention this established principle or their long-standing reliance on such evidence-based practices for issuing recommendations.
In the case of Ivermectin, they willfully ignore the multiple published expert meta-analyses of Ivermectin RCTs, including almost two dozen trials and thousands of patients, reporting consistent reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance.
These improvements are found consistently and repeatedly, no matter the RCT design, size, or quality, and from varied centers and countries throughout the world.
All studies were done without any identified conflict of interest with the vast majority of double-blind, single-blind, quasi-randomized, open-label, standard of care comparison, combination therapy comparisons, etc., reporting benefits.
Satoshi Omura, Nobel Prize-winning discoverer of Ivermectin, wrote in his team's recent review paper that,
This supports our public warnings against further "placebo-controlled trials" given the near absolute certainty of harm to research subjects included in a placebo Big RCT.
Conversely, despite sitting atop the highest form of medical evidence, many non-regulatory Big PHAs around the world cry out for a Big RCT.
This is while avoiding the issuance of even one of the several "weaker" recommendation options available to them in the setting of a low-cost, widely available medicine with an unparalleled safety profile and a constantly surging humanitarian crisis, even in the interim.
Insufficient evidence, unproven - these are comments from WHO, NIH, Europe's EMA, South Africa's SAPHRA, France's ANSM, United Kingdom's MHRA, and Australia's TGA.
Most disturbing to contemplate is our estimation that if the use of penicillin in bacterial infection were to have been tested in these same numbers and types of trials in the 1940s, the graphical display of benefits would look nearly identical to those found with Ivermectin.
Further, the U.S Cures Act of 2016,
We can find no evidence of an organized effort to examine the more than 14, often large OCTs that show evidence of the substantial beneficial use of Ivermectin.
Further, no PHA has cited the numerous convincing epidemiological analyses that find rapidly falling case fatality rates following Ivermectin distribution campaigns.
With the lack of a credible explanation for the absence of even a weak recommendation for Ivermectin in the setting of widespread increased death rates from COVID-19, numerous citizens have speculated that this can only be explained by the presence of an active disinformation campaign by entities with nonscientific and largely financial objectives dependant on the non-recognition of Ivermectin's efficacy.
We explore the near certainty of this occurring below.
Active Political-Economic "Disinformation" Campaign
"Disinformation" campaigns, best described in the article, "The Disinformation Playbook," are initiated when independent science interferes with or opposes the interests of corporations or policymakers.
Although thankfully rare, in certain cases these entities will actively seek to manipulate science and distort the truth about scientific findings that imperil their profit or policy objectives.
First developed by the tobacco industry decades ago, these deceptive tactics include the following;
Numerous examples of the above disinformation tactics by corporations and policymakers, particularly within the pharmaceutical industry, have been documented:
Most worrisome is that Ivermectin appears to be up against one of the largest financial and global policy oppositions in modern history, including but not limited to:
Based on the lack of a rational explanation for the above actions by WHO, Merck, FDA, and Unitaid, we conclude that they result from an active disinformation campaign, executed both through the PHA's, media and the WHO Guideline group recommendations.
As highly published researchers, we find the allegations of scientific misconduct in the writing of the WHO/United research team's meta-analysis manuscript to be deeply disturbing.
It clearly represents a disinformation tactic with an intent to distort and diminish the reporting of a large magnitude benefit on mortality among many hundreds of patients.
Further, Merck's demonstrably and blatantly false statements against Ivermectin deserve no further discussion.
It is yet another entry into the disturbing historical record of actions committed by a Big Pharma entity with the primary intent of protecting profit at the expense of the welfare of global citizens.
For These Compelling and Irrefutable Reasons, The FLCCC Makes a Call to Action
This call to action is no longer just to health authorities, but to citizens everywhere to fight back against these disinformation tactics.
We find the advice of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) to be an excellent guide to action in this regard:
As an expert group of Ivermectin researchers, we are unsure of what else to offer in order to correct or counteract this misrepresentation of an important drug.
Our belief is that, of the above actions, the most effective counter to the disinformation campaign would be that a whistleblower become active from within WHO, the FDA, the NIH, Merck, or Unitaid.
This moment in history demands a man or woman with the courage and conviction to step forward. Urgently.
In both the interests of humanity and to motivate and inspire such a citizen of the world, we leave you with the words of Albert Einstein:
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