Crony Capitalism, COVID-19 and Ivermectin
One of the more disturbing features of modern society is the practice of crony capitalism: ‘a capitalist society that is based on the close relationships between business people and the state’.
An obvious consequence of crony capitalism is that products and services which are not subsidised are uncompetitive at best, and rejected at worst. While this may not seem like a big deal, it is often the difference between life and death in a pandemic. Sadly, this may have been the case with Ivermectin, as bombshell research papers from the University of Liverpool and the American Journal of Therapeutics reveal.
The Efficacy of Ivermectin
Ivermectin has been in use since 1975 to treat various illnesses ranging from parasitic diseases to RNA viruses. In April this year, Ivermectin was approved by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) for use as a treatment against COVID-19. For an extended analysis of the effects of Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19, see Dr. John Campbell’s recent review.
Since its approval, India has seen an 80 percent reduction in its daily COVID-19 cases, plummeting from 414,188 to 84,332.
Dr. Justus Hope writes in The Desert Review:
Those Indian states that adopted more aggressive Ivermectin policies saw their cases fall far more than 80%, states like Uttar Pradesh — down 98% [37,944 to 596], like Uttarakhand — down 97% [9642 to 287] and Goa — down 90% [4195 to 423]. Delhi saw a 99% drop [28,395 to 238].
Dr. Tess Lawrie, co-author of ‘Ivermectin for the World’, writes:
Recently, we evaluated Ivermectin to protect and treat COVID-19 infections. Our evidence shows that Ivermectin is effective, safe, and very cheap. We should be using it for both prevention and treatment of COVID. However, governments and health organisations are ignoring the evidence — and there’s a mountain of it — and I think this is because they are heavily invested in novel treatments.
Further, the Financial Times reported:
The University of Liverpool’s Andrew Hill and others carried out a meta-analytical breakdown of 18 studies that found that Ivermectin was associated with reduced inflammation and a faster elimination of Sars-Cov-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. Dr Hill said the Ivermectin results were encouraging, but further studies were needed to provide global regulators with evidence robust enough to warrant approvals.
While demanding more robust evidence may seem like a positive step, Dr. Tess Lawrie explains why this is not necessarily the case:
This is partly because the integrity of systematic reviews and meta-analysis has become degraded by the increasing requirements about the conduct of randomised controlled trials, the considered gold standard of clinical studies, that favour the pharmaceutical industry.
If Ivermectin is allegedly so effective at dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, why are major health authorities and governments so invested in dismissing it?
Vaccines aren’t Exempt from Cronyism
Put simply, there was a lot of money to be made by major pharmaceutical companies to produce a vaccine. World governments spent literally tens of billions of dollars funding the research, testing and production of vaccines. Just take a glance at Figure C.
According to Pfizer’s First-Quarter 2021 Earnings Report, the organisation “expect[s] revenues of approximately $26 billion” USD from the vaccine in 2021. Moderna’s first quarter of 2020 saw a net loss of $124 million USD, in contrast to a net income of $1.2 billion for the same period in 2021. After receiving hundreds of millions of dollars of public money, AstraZeneca pulled in $275 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2021, recently-released documents reveal that there is a limit to its ‘non-profit pledge’.
Whether or not these vaccines are as effective is now, it seems, besides the question. What is undeniable is that the enormous financial backing these companies have received has propped them up as the exclusive government-backed option. This has consequences for the research and analysis of alternative treatments, particularly those which are not novel, and which do not receive government backing.
Whether or not a drug has government and institutional approval has a direct impact on its cost and accessibility. As Dr. Hill shared in a recent interview:
[Ivermectin is a] generic drug used all over the world. It costs 12 cents to make the drug substance. The drug costs $3 in India, $960 in the US.
Why is a drug which costs 12 cents to produce and has a demonstrable record of reducing COVID-19 recorded cases and deaths being suppressed? It would appear that the ability of Ivermectin to be used as a treatment for COVID-19 is obstructed by crony capitalism within the pharmaceutical industry, enabled by exorbitant government subsidisation.
The Corruption of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Health ‘Experts’
Since the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was clear that the WHO had a vested interest in protecting China’s reputation at all costs. Like the United Nations, the WHO has the ostensibly virtuous goal of promoting world peace and wellbeing, though this is far from what it actually delivers.
For starters, the WHO initially refused to acknowledge that COVID-19 was being transmitted human-to-human from the very start of the pandemic — a suppression of information which proved disastrous for the spread of the disease.
Rather than holding China and the WHO responsible for disinformation concerning COVID-19’s transmission, mainstream media aimed their crosshairs at then-President Donald Trump.
Trump was swiftly denounced by mainstream media for suggesting that the virus originated in a Chinese lab, and was dubbed a racist by ‘experts’ for labelling COVID-19 the ‘China Virus’. It was only when President Joe Biden ordered a review of COVID-19’s origins that leftist news media was willing to even consider this hypothesis.
A bombshell email leak exposed Dr. Anthony Fauci (Chief Medical Advisor to the President and Director for the U.S. Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) as having funded ‘gain-of-function’ research in Wuhan beginning as far back as 2012. Predictably, this story barely made a dint in the media cycle and has since been swept under the rug.
Dr. Richard J. Eggleston addresses the systemic corruption of the WHO, and its relationship with vaccine sales:
The World Health Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations with a broad mandate to act as a coordinating authority on international health issues. It pioneered major advances in public health, such as polio vaccines and eradication of smallpox.
Its current annual budget is $2.84 billion, with 40 percent from vaccine sales and 40 percent from China. Increasingly, it controls private entities, such as the Gates Foundation. It has contributed almost $5 billion and is the second biggest funder of WHO.
More recently, the WHO declared Ivermectin to be ‘without proven efficacy against COVID-19’. The Chief Health Scientist of the WHO has since faced fire from the Indian Bar Association (IBA) for its disinformation campaign against Ivermectin:
The Indian Bar Association (IBA), a voluntary organisation, say it has served a second legal notice to WHO Chief Scientist Soumya Swaminathan for allegedly “running a disinformation campaign against Ivermectin”, after WHO failed to recommend use of the anti-parasitic drug as a COVID-19 treatment — due to a lack of evidence of efficacy.
It may be that the WHO’s dismissal of Ivermectin will be retrospectively seen as directly responsible for the catastrophic loss of life in India.
Editor’s Note: The above abbreviated version of Joe Rogan’s recent emergency Podcast on Ivermectin can be seen on Rumble video. Joe Rogan has 1.3 billion views on his main channel and 10.8 million subscribers but Youtube has censored his video and it can only be seen on Rumble.
Conclusion
In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is clear that crony capitalism isn’t merely corrupt: it can prove deadly. Crony capitalism may be directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of countless people due to the suppression of drugs which have had demonstrably positive results.
While government-approved vaccines have had a positive effect on limiting the spread and damage wrought by COVID-19, most of the world’s population does not have access to them. For those living in developing nations, Ivermectin may be the most affordable and accessible weapon against further spread of the virus.
The question must therefore be asked: when will governments and health organisations begin taking Ivermectin seriously?
[Image by Sergio Yoneda at BigStock]11 Comments
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Thanks for a detailed and clear article, James.
Brilliant and much needed expose of the Crony Capitalism that killing minions of people by omission. Ivermectin has been in use for over 40 years and by drug standards is one of the safest drugs available and very potent against COVID!
Killing millions that is. I love the minions.
Thanks Dr Tess Lawrie needs along with others need to be taken seriously
Let’s pray that the truth prevails. Crazy world we live in hey!
I love the truth about India’s success in turning around the epidemic – thank you for sharing. I have been sharing the information about the value of Ivermectin for almost a year, but most people react by dismissing it in favour of what the government & media put out. Nevertheless, as People of the Truth we must continue to speak the truth. I have a saying: Seek the Truth or Serve the Lie. Definitely we need to pray and keep on praying.
Yes seek the truth or serve a lie.
Dear Kurt and Canberra Declaration team,
I’ve read this article and the related ‘Knowledge, Pride and Thought Control’ article, watched Tess Lawrie’s keynote talk, and followed up numerous links you’ve given. You make a number of big claims in these articles (big tech censorship, Ivermectin’s effectiveness against Covid-19, big pharma’s and China’s control of the WHO and CDC, etc), each of which would take an hour to unpack. Let’s focus on a claim that’s most important: that Ivermectin is an effective alternative to Covid vaccines but is being quashed because of big pharma’s financial control of the research agenda.
I believe this article misunderstands or misrepresents the situation in at least two ways, not to mention new information that’s come to light that makes the claim well and truly incorrect.
1) For a start, the research into Ivermectin and Covid-19 has been over it’s possible effectiveness as a *treatment*, not a preventative vaccine.
This is a basic but often-made distinction error. You link to the FT article on Andrew Hill’s research at the University of Liverpool. He makes clear his research is into Ivermectin as a treatment that may also help prevent spread to others *by already-infected people* – not a preventative vaccine for those who don’t have the illness. He also states it would be no replacement for a vaccine, as the full FT article states:
“Vaccination is central to the response to the epidemic,” Dr Hill said. “But this might help reduce infection rates by making people less infectious and it might reduce death rates by treating the viral infection.”
Hill also said more research was needed to confirm his results, and the article mentioned some trial data he used hadn’t been peer reviewed. As we’ll see, this was of prime importance but you omitted it. Either way, there are already a number of cheap and effective treatments for Covid, like Dexamethasone.
2) Dr. Lawrie claims that randomised control trials favour big pharma because only they have the funds for such research. I’m sure big pharma have a lot to answer for, but this claim isn’t correct in relation to at least one major aspect of the Covid situation, if not many more.
The Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine research was not funded by AZ but by the British Government to Oxford University. If the research hadn’t shown the vaccine worked, it wouldn’t have been approved. (My wife was the Lead Statistician on the project. I’ve seen the hard work and sacrifices made to get this particular vaccine out.)
Other Covid-related research is also University and not pharma-funded – like the Recovery Trial, the largest independent project to research Covid-19 treatments https://www.recoverytrial.net/results
But there’s more.
And now news has broken that the Elgazzar study of Ivermectin’s efficacy as a Covid-19 treatment, one foundational to other studies, has been found to be not just flawed but fabricated: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/16/huge-study-supporting-ivermectin-as-covid-treatment-withdrawn-over-ethical-concerns
Your articles claim that Ivermectin has been a surpressed alternative to Covid vaccines. Not so. The WHO, CDC, FDA, Australia’s TGA, the EMA and all those agencies awaiting further proof of its effectiveness were always right to wait, and more than they realised. There was no conspiracy.
These articles are spreading misinformation among the Australian Christian community and damaging our gospel witness. I hope you’ll amend or delete them.
Sheridan
God Bless you Sheridan,,
I am a research pharmacist..
It is no surprise to me that the $ of BigPharma speak loudly to the national and international authorities
who are appointed to care for our health..
I have seen the lobbying by drug company reps to GPs at first hand and the university studies financed by Big Pharma, statins Tamiflu…etc.
I have read their papers. and they are inevitably biased..
It is no surprise to me that Merck basically rubbishes ivermectin… citing unknown side effects
and citing no evidence..for effectiveness in treating Covid
when the historic Merck gave away the drug to billions of poor from 1987 to 2012..
Here is Merck scrabbling for a few cents to get ivermectin approved for scabies in 2013..
https://www.tga.gov.au/sites/default/files/auspar-ivermectin-131030-cer.pdf.
Their present motivation is profit ..not health.so they are not interested in a drug which is out of patent.
Merck at this time has received considerable… million& finance from the US government to trial
an ersatz ivermectin called molnupiravir. There is huge potential profit because it can be patented.
Be assured there is no Gospel motivation for Big Pharma… and the last time I checked there was none from the WHO.. the TGA..the EMA…the Western media..Youtube.. Bloomberg Guardian Spiegel etc etc.
These are worldly organisations and they are ever more prone to human corruption…
Ivermectin has been suppressed… by the Western media… none reports the effective use in Zimbabwe South Africa and India… the only news is of one failed trial and not the thirty or so successful trials..
as detailed here
ivmmeta.com
Hopefully the vaccines will work.. I’ve taken two AZ’s and my wife two Pf’s… but we have no idea about the medium and long term effects.Two nurses like my wife recently recorded neutropenia one month after the vax.. hopefully this neutropenia proves transient..My wife awaits the next blood test.
This is human “hopefully” and not based on the Gospel..
My Hope is not in ivermectin or Vitamin D or Zinc or vaccines.. it is in the Blessed Hope.
and in this time of Covid isolation seclusion and I pray for the glorious and imminent revival of the faithful Church led by the Holy Spirit..
In Jesus Name..
Great article. We could argue forever about Ivermectin’s effectiveness. People will always argue. However, all that needs to be done is look at the province in India that used Ivermectin as a PREVENTION against Covid to see that it virtually eliminated the Delta strain of Covid. The evidence speaks for itself. 220 million people can’t be wrong.
Thanks James. Never give up speaking truth.
Bless you