Michael Abrahams | Does Ivermectin have a place in the management of COVID-19?

The COVID-19 pandemic is still stuck in our collective craw. Having made its appearance in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China, in December 2019, it remains a global nuisance. Over three million people have died and many are battling severe or chronic symptoms from the virus as we speak.

There is no cure for COVID-19, but from early in the pandemic, several drugs have been touted as being effective in significantly managing the illness and subsequently dismissed or found to be not as effective as was initially thought. For example, hydroxychloroquine was thought to be useful but was later downgraded. The antiviral drug Remdesivir is also not as useful as initially thought. Fortunately, vaccines are now available with varying degrees of efficacy, but there is still no drug with antiviral activity that is effective and available to be used to treat persons with COVID-19 in the early stages of the disease.

Ivermectin is not new. It belongs to the avermectin family of compounds and was discovered by Satoshi Ōmura of Kitsato University and William Campbell of Merck in the 1970s. Ivermectin was introduced in 1981 and has been extremely useful in the treatment of river blindness, lymphatic filariasis (which causes elephantiasis), and strongyloidiasis, illnesses caused by parasitic worms, as well as scabies and lice. It has also been used to reduce malaria transmission. For river blindness and filariasis, Ivermectin has been given as part of mass drug administration campaigns that distribute the drug to all members of a community affected by those diseases. The drug has been so effective and has positively improved so may people’s quality of life that half of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to Ōmura and Campbell for discovering avermectin.

SAFE AND EFFECTIVE

Ivermectin is not only effective, but also safe. It is on the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines, a list published by the World Health Organization that contains the medications considered to be most effective and safe to meet the most important needs in a health system. It is also FDA-approved as an antiparasitic agent.

More recently, in 2020, researchers from Biomedicine Discovery Institute (BDI) at Monash University in Australia discovered that Ivermectin inhibits the replication of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in vitro. In other words, it kills the virus outside of the body under laboratory conditions. Since then, multiple clinical studies in humans have been done, with the vast majority showing positive results. According to ivmmeta.com, of 55 studies done at the time of this writing, 96 per cent show positive effects for early treatment and prophylaxis. Statistically significant improvements are seen for mortality, lung function, hospitalisation, cases, and viral clearance. The site also claims that “the probability that an ineffective treatment generated results as positive as the 55 studies to date is estimated to be one in 23 trillion”. In other words, based on the results of the studies, it is extremely unlikely that the drug is of no use in treating COVID-19.

In February 2021, the British Ivermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD), a group consisting of physicians, researchers, specialists, and patients, recommended that Ivermectin be immediately deployed early and globally, based on numerous studies reporting that Ivermectin use reduces the risk of contracting COVID-19 by over 90 per cent and mortality by 68 per cent to 91 per cent.

Other expert groups from the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, the United States, and a group from Japan headed by the Nobel Prize-winning discoverer of Ivermectin, Professor Satoshi Ōmura, have also made a similar recommendation.

Despite the many studies demonstrating Ivermectin’s effectiveness against COVID-19, the WHO released this statement on March 31, 2021: “The current evidence on the use of Ivermectin to treat COVID-19 patients is inconclusive. Until more data is available, WHO recommends that the drug only be used within clinical trials.”

UNDERMINE INCLUDED STUDIES

The Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) describes itself as a “non-profit humanitarian organisation made up of renowned, highly publicised, 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”. On May 13, it issued a “Statement on the Irregular Actions of Public Health Agencies and the Widespread Disinformation Campaign Against Ivermectin”. They claim that the WHO “arbitrarily and severely limited the extent and diversity of study designs considered”, and “mischaracterised the overall quality of the trial data to undermine included studies”.

But why would the WHO do that? Dr Tess Lawrie, a world-class researcher and consultant to the WHO and a member of BIRD, reported that using the WHO’s data, from the studies they have analysed, it has been calculated that over two million fewer people would be dead if Ivermectin had been deployed early in the pandemic. So, why the resistance?

According to the FLCCC, two major socio-political-economic forces serve as barriers preventing Ivermectin from being incorporated into widespread public-health policy, and they are “Big Science”, (which includes “Big Pharma”), and the presence of an active “Political-Economic Disinformation Campaign”.

In other words, powerful organisations stand to make a lot of money from selling antiviral drugs, vaccines, and other pharmaceutical products, and their profits will be significantly less if Ivermectin, an inexpensive drug whose patent expired long ago, were to be promoted for widespread use.

What do I think? Having read the literature, and the reviews of the studies, I am convinced that the drug is of value and that there is, in fact, a concerted effort to suppress research findings and censor those who come out strongly in favour of it. I have been on Facebook for many years and have posted many articles critical of powerful individuals, governments, and organisations and never had an issue with that social media platform. Last week for the first time, I was banned from the platform for 24 hours. The reason? Because I posted an article about a study that concluded that Ivermectin is useful and effective in the treatment of COVID-19 and should be widely used. For that, I was punished. Interesting, huh?

- Michael Abrahams is an obstetrician and gynaecologist, social commentator, and human-rights advocate. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and michabe_1999@hotmail.com, or Twitter @mikeyabrahams.