QAA Podcast - Episode 158: Ivermectin Fever feat Marisa Kabas

Episode Date: September 9, 2021

We dig into the latest "alternative" treatment for COVID-19 that has exploded in popularity among right wing pundits. Who is pushing Ivermectin? Why are some of them doctors? And why are people slurping Ivermectin horse paste and landing in the hospital? Our guest is Marisa Kabas, a reporter for the Huffington Post who has personally interviewed some of the figures involved in promoting the drug. ↓↓↓↓ SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH SO YOU DON'T MISS THE SECOND WEEKLY EPISODE ↓↓↓↓ https://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous Follow Marisa Kabas: https://twitter.com/MarisaKabas QAA Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: https://qanonanonymous.com Episode music by Nick Sena (http://nicksenamusic.com) Sources Hydroxychloroquine for Coronavirus: The Urgent Need for a Moratorium on Prescriptions https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(20)30445-9/pdf The FDA-approved drug ivermectin inhibits the replication of SARS-CoV-2 in vitro https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166354220302011 The Approved Dose of Ivermectin Alone is not the Ideal Dose for the Treatment of COVID-19 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32378737/ Tweet from Dr. Benhur Lee https://twitter.com/VirusWhisperer/status/1429271379858362376 Efficacy and Safety of Ivermectin for Treatment and prophylaxis of COVID-19 Pandemic https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-100956/v2/7b9e8a25-9b7f-47ea-8894-14699d794817.pdf?c=1629143783 Flawed ivermectin preprint highlights challenges of COVID drug studies https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02081-w A Prominent Study Said Ivermectin Prevents COVID, But The Data Is Suspect https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/ivermectin-covid-study-suspect-data What's Behind the Ivermectin-for-COVID Buzz? — Maverick physicians spurn randomized trials while "people are dying" https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/90552 People Are Eating Horse Paste To Fight COVID. These Doctors Are One Reason Why. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/horse-paste-ivermectin-flccc_n_612d1980e4b02be25b5edd15?ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000067 QAnon Is Harassing a Hospital Into Giving Bogus COVID ‘Cure’ Ivermectin https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvz4yz/qanon-is-harassing-a-hospital-into-giving-bogus-covid-cure-ivermectin

What's up QAA listeners? The fun games have begun. I found a way to connect to the internet. I'm sorry, boy. Welcome listener to Chapter 158 of the Q&A anonymous podcast, the Iver Mekton episode. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakatansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View. This week, we're taking a bit of a detour to the local livestock supply. store. As Travis has been on a seven-day Ivermectin treatment, Apple-flavored, of course,

and he's going to be sharing his experiences with us. So am I getting this right so far, Travis? No, not at all. Not the slightest. Okay. Yeah, I got to back up one, no problem. Okay, here's, okay. This week, Travis will be taking us through the many aspects of the Ivermectin controversy in an attempt to figure out how this drug became so prevalent among the right-wing talking heads, and why self-prescribing the horse version of any drug is probably not a good idea. Nonetheless, the QAA podcast does not choose its topics. That's done by the degenerate hive mind known as American political culture. So, unfortunately, you're going to have to get your horse tack in order, and we do ask that you go easy on the whip. Our equine fleet is

still recovering from horse COVID-19, which Travis gave to them. Well, I don't think that's true either. You kissed the horses and gave them. No, yeah, I don't think that's accurate. Travis is looking very incredulous right now. He's got no time for your shit, dude. This is because he's been researching Ivermectin. You really, it's like, that'll suck the humor right out of you. The horse paste, it dries up your mouth of all humor. Yeah, not to judge, but he came in humorless, sat down humorless. We started recording no humor, no jokes whatsoever. It's clear to meet, at least, that this research has broken him in a specific kind of way. Oh, man, yeah, I can tell. I just looked at the opening line. And it says sometimes people ask me, Travis, why is this happening? Oh, man. Just like an existential flailing, like, into the abyss.

Well, conspiracists out there, you have him on his back heel. Like, he is, he is absolutely... He is rolling on his shell, trying to flip himself back over belly side down. If you invent a third drug that you've got... got to start taking that is not right, Travis will probably perish. He's had to do an episode on hydroxychloroquine and this now. Please. Next week, Travis has to cover how people are encouraging others to shove the entire Q-tip up their nose. Yeah, well, nose would be an ideal with that outcome. It could be a lot worse. Ivermectin. I do often get DMs whenever

some things, trends in conspiracy world that go to the effect of, you know, Travis, why is this happening? This shouldn't be happening, so why is it? Now, this and this question varies, but recently I've been getting the question, why are people consuming horse dewormer paste in order to treat or prevent COVID? By this they mean Ivermectin, the hot new COVID miracle cure that recently gained popularity among anti-vaxxers and conspiracists. Now, before I proceed, I do want to be, I do want to warn that we're going to be talking about medicine and scientific research in this episode. And I'll be listing my sources in the show notes so you can check on what I'm saying. But let me be clear, under no circumstances should you allow podcasters to influence your decisions about your health.

I'm asking you to just love your body and your mind more than that. And to put my cards on the table, the highest level of formal science training I've ever received is a marine biology class. I took at Palomar Community College almost 20 years ago. I would like to request that people start doing kind of quote JPEG's with Travis's new, amazing quote, I'm asking you to please love your body. More than allow it to be influenced by podcasters. That's the important part. I'm excited about the potential marine biology memes that we're going to get out of this.

This is, of course, not the first dubious treatment for COVID that gained popularity. Last year, Trump and others in the MAGA world hyped up the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine. You may remember that hydroxychloroquine got a boost when it was promoted by the organization America's Frontline Doctors, which claims to be a grassroots coalition of doctors. But in reality, America's frontline doctors has connections to the Tea Party Patriots and the Council for National Policy, which is a shadowing network of Christian fundamentalists that coordinates efforts between conservative megadoneers, political operatives, and media owners.

After Trump himself recommended hydroxychloroquine, this led to an immediate 46-fold increase in prescriptions according to the American Journal of Medicine. 46! That's the president that Trump is, too. Well, he's 45. Nope, he's also 46. This sometimes made it difficult for lupus patients or rheumatoid arthritis patients

to refill the prescriptions of the medication. I checked on the recent status of hydroxychloroquine, and I found an American Journal of Medicine article that's titled Hydroxychloroquine for coronavirus, the urgent need for a moratorium on prescriptions. They essentially concluded that based on randomized trials, that they show no benefit and they actually show a suggestion of harm. So they're asking doctors to stop prescribing this. Like hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin is a real drug with real world applications. It's an antiparacidic agent that was discovered in 1970. and came into medical use in 1981. It has been used to treat things like scabies and river blindness all over the world for decades.

As his advocates often like to point out, it is on the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines and the discoverers of the drug received the Nobel Prize in 2015. Boy, are they regretting it now. They must have so much egg on their face. They can no longer put this on their CV with peace on their mind. Oh, they're cooks. They probably caused Trump's rise by getting it in 2015. Well, you know, it is a useful drug, but it's just weird that people point out, hey, it won the, you know, the Nobel Prize, ergo is useful in this context. It doesn't make any sense.

It's like you're, you're, I don't even know what river blindness is. What is it? Yeah. Travis? Is that when you stare at the sun reflecting on a river for too long and you just can't see anymore and then you have to take a. Do you warm up? No, it's a disease caused by parasites, which affects the sight. I don't know the details exactly.

That's enough details for me. We're blessed to not have it very much here in the United States. Which part of me do I have to clench a little tighter so the river can't give me this? Your eyes, right? Yeah. Ivermectin apparently works against parasites by binding to certain chloride channels on nerve and muscle cells that are present in worms and insect's nervous systems. This paralyzes the invasive critter inside of the body of an animal or human, and when it works, frees the host of the associated diseases.

Now, a reasonable person might ask, doesn't the COVID virus have no nerve or muscle cells? Why on earth would anyone think that an antiparasitic drug would be effective against the virus? And those are really excellent questions. But the idea that we could hypothetically discover that ivermectin is helpful in some yet unknown way came from an experiment. on a cell culture. In June of 2020, the scientific journal Antiviral Research published a paper titled the FDA-approved drug Ivermectin inhibits the replication of SARS-CoV-2 in vitro. The researchers infected a cell culture with Sarge Cov-2 and added in various concentrations of Ivermectin. What they found was that, in a petri dish, at least, Ivermectin

decreases the ability for the virus to reproduce. All right, that sounds promising. However, the concentration of the drug necessary to achieve this effect is about a hundred times more than what is reached by a standard ivermectin dosing. So that's a big potential problem. Yeah, don't let people read that part. In October of 2020, the journal Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics published in evaluation on ivermectin's potential. It concludes, quote, the likelihood of a successful clinical trial using the approved dose of ivermectin is low. Dr. Ben Hurley, who is a performance, professor of microbiology at the ICAN School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has an even dimmer evaluation of ivermectin's potential. He said this on Twitter.

Ivermectin simply cannot reach a high enough concentration in lung or blood to have any meaningful impact on SARS-CoV-2 replication. It is unethical to conduct trials with Ivermectin when it cannot possibly work even in principle. Now, not everyone agreed to that assessment, of course. So researchers all over the world started clinical trials and attempt to discover if ivermectin had any positive effect. One of the most promising early studies was sponsored by Benhah University in Egypt. The paper based on that supposed study is titled, Efficacy and Safety of Ivermectin for Treatment and Prophylaxics of COVID-19 Pandemic.

And the paper was really influential and even got some scientists to think that Ivermectin might actually work. The study examined 600 subjects, 400 of whom had confirmed symptomatic cases of COVID, and 200 of whom were health care workers or household contacts of COVID-infected people. They were divided into six groups, and some took hydroxychloroquine, and some took Ivermectin. The clinical trials seemed to show that Ivermectin could reduce COVID-19 death rates by more than 90%. And that sounds great. But there wound up being a few problems with the study.

It was discovered that some parts of it were plagiarized. In addition to that, some researchers found that the data didn't hold up to scrutiny. According to an article published in the journal Nature, the papers are regularities, came to light when a University of London student named Jack Lawrence was reading it for a class assignment. He noticed that some phrases were identical to those in other published work. When he contacted researchers who specialize in detecting fraud and scientific publications, the group found other causes for concern, including dozens of patient records that seemed to be duplicates, inconsistencies between the raw data and the information in the paper, and perhaps

most concerningly, patients whose records indicate that they died before the study's start date. So either they're running these clinical trials on corpses, which wouldn't be helpful in this context, or the paper did not actually reflect a real study that was being conducted. You know, this happens, and this is, you know, part of the process, you know, this is the idea like scientific is self-correcting and the ideally scientific researchers put their data out there for other researchers to check on and, you know, possibly reproduce. Have you considered that the Ivermectin brought the corpses back to life? It dewormed them into revival? That's a good point. That was unreported by the paper. But as a consequence of these irregularities, the paper was withdrawn.

But before the withdrawal, the paper was viewed more than 150,000 times, cited more than 30 times, and it was included in a few meta-analyses, which of course fueled belief that it was effective. Another highly influential study came from Argentina. It was overseen by a professor of internal medicine named Dr. Hector Carvayo. This study examined the impact of ivermectin plus a couple of other medicines on COVID-19 infections. According to that paper, ivermectin prevents COVID infection 100% of the time. So this is a big, huge of true. A discovery that could save hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of lives if the data is accurate.

However, this is where I'm cutting off the episode. The rest is gated. However, as recently reported by Stephanie Lee and Ken Ben Singer for BuzzFeed News, that paper also has major problems. The cite a few examples, the numbers, genders, and ages of the study's participants were inconsistent. A hospital named in the paper as taking part in the experiment said that it has no record of it happening. Health officials have also said that they have no record of the study receiving local approval. Hector Carvio also failed to provide the raw data for the study to one of the study's own co-authors in response that co-author removed his name from the paper.

Further, this paper was published in a journal that is new and not widely known or respected. It has the very official-sounding name of Journal of Biomedical Research and Clinical Investigation, but it has only been around since 2019 and has just published 10 articles. The journal reportedly charges up to $1,950 to publish an article and the peer review process, for this particular paper only took a week. So that led lots of people to no longer put a lot of stock in it either. I mean, it was sounding shady even before people really looked at it closely because 100% effectiveness rate, prevention rate is basically unheard of, I'm told, so it's too bad.

So it's my understanding that this is a general issue for COVID-Ivermectin research. Now, when the studies don't crumble under scrutiny, they tend to be too small or too low quality in order to draw definite conclusions for most doctors and researchers. But my thing is, like, why are there so many groups of researchers that seem like they're trying to slam a square peg through a round hole? They're like, we got to figure out a way to get this horse pace to work. There's something about it. I don't know exactly what it is, but there's something we got to keep trying this one.

Well, I think it really has to do with, like, it would be actually wonderful if a wide, available generic drug could treat COVID because, you know, there are still parts of the world that don't have easy access to the vaccines, but do have access to other medicines. And so, you know, this is a serious emergency. And people are, they're trying to basically MacGyver medicine, you know, they're trying to figure out what resources we have available to combat this very serious problem. Yeah. In addition to all that, other studies have shown no benefit to taking Ivermectin. One of the largest trials studying Ivermectin for COVID-19 is called the Together trial, which enrolled more than 1,300 patients. The data set from that study shows that

Ivermectin is no better than a placebo at preventing hospitalization or prolonged stay in an emergency room. There's also a review of 14 Ivermectin studies published in the Cochrane database of systematic reviews in late July, which didn't have any better results. The authors of that study conclude this. evidence available does not support the use of ivermectin for treatment or prevention of COVID-19 outside of well-designed randomized trials. So it seems to me, again, based upon my layman's understanding of the available literature out there, that the most charitable thing you could say about ivermectin is that the jury's out when it comes to its ability to be helpful in any sense whatsoever for COVID. Now, it's ongoing, research is ongoing, and like I said, it would be a wonderful

thing if Ivermectin does can help in some capacity, but just very, very few people think that there's really anything substantive there. Now, if the science of the efficacy of Ivermectin for treating COVID is so shaky, how does we get to a point where people are so desperate to get the stuff that they're buying a version of the medicine designed for horses at tractor stores? One major early proponent of Ivermectin is an organization called the Frontline COVID Critical Care Alliance, or the FLCCC alliance. This is not to be confused with America's frontline doctors. In fact, the FLCCC sent out a tweet explicitly distancing themselves from America's frontline doctors. The organization said this. The physicians and associates of the frontline COVID-19 critical care alliance FLCCC are neither affiliated

nor aligned in any way with the group calling itself, quote, America's frontline doctors that demonstrated outside the U.S. Supreme Court on July 28th. In fact, the FLCCC strongly rejects the entirety of the group's claims, including that there is a cure for COVID-19 and that there is no need to wear masks. So that's, you know, it's interesting to point out that they really are saying, like, we are not with the hydroxychloroquine loons. Yeah. Well, everyone's got their favorite drug that they,

self-administer. This initial spark was reported by our guest today, Marissa Cabus for the Huffington Post. Now, what's really interesting about the FLCCC is that it appears, at least to me, that it started with noble intentions, but it spun out into weird crankery as the vaccines became available. The FLCCC is a group of doctors who came together in the early days of the pandemic to swap ideas about how to tackle the virus. The initial goal was to find treatments that worked until vaccines were widely available. Their first major hypothesis had nothing to do with ivermectin at all. They speculated that corticosteroids would reduce mortality and severe COVID patients.

Now, this went against the conventional wisdom at the time that steroids would do more harm than good in treating the virus. Based on their hypothesis, they formulated a steroid-based hospital protocol called Math Plus. And there was evidence that this protocol actually worked. In June 2020, the results of a study called the recovery trial show that steroids did reduce the mortality rate of severe COVID patients. As a consequence, the protocol was green-lighted for use in the U.S., so, of course, hugely validating for this group.

Dr. Pierre Corey, who is the most prominent member of the FLCCC, told the Huffington Post this. When I came out and told the world that corticosteroids were critical to save lives, I got crushed for that until the recovery trial came out and it became the standard of care worldwide overnight. I think this is very interesting. And based upon what I've seen, I think this is really key to understanding Dr. Pierre Corey is that he is a guy who came up with this theory that we was opposed by the establishment and the available science. But he was a guy who was like working on the ground. But then he was validated. It proved that he was right. defiance of the consensus.

He got what every Q&N follower wishes they could get. Yeah. And every human being wishes that they could get. Everybody wants that moment where the entire world goes, I'm sorry, you were right. You were right. So the FLCCC naturally explored other kinds of treatments that might be out there for COVID. That's when they discovered Ivermectin. Even though the medical community generally considered the data on Ivermectin as a COVID treatment to be

very low quality, they thought they had the next big breakthrough. So they added Ivermectin to the Math Plus protocol, as well as to a new prevention protocol that they called iMask Plus. Another doctor who helped found the FLCCC alliance, Dr. Paul Merrick, rejected allegations that his work could undermine vaccination. He told the publication MedPage today this. I was vaccinated yesterday, and I believe this is a bridge to vaccination. We need to do something in the meantime. Now, these very exciting claims about Ivermectin even caught the attention of some people in Congress. On December 8th, 2020, Dr. Pierre Corey testified about the use of Ivermectin during a hearing for the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

Corey was invited by Senator Ron Johnson, who has publicly stated that he isn't going to take the vaccine and once held a news conference that brought together people who claimed that they had an adverse reaction to the vaccine. This Senate testimony helped catapult both Pierre Corrie's profile and Ivermectin as a possible treatment. And when you watch the testimony, you can see why. Corey is a very passionate speaker who sounds like he is earnestly desperate to get across life-saving information.

There is a drug that is proving to be of miraculous impact. And when I say miracle, I do not use that term lightly. And I don't want to be sensationalized when I say that. that is a scientific recommendation based on mountains of data that has emerged in the last three months. When I am told, and I just heard to hear this in the opening sentence, that we are touting things that are not FDA or NIH recommended, let me be clear. The NIH, their recommendation on evermectin, which is to not use it outside of controlled trials, is from August 27th.

We are now in December. This is three to four months later. mountains of data have emerged from all from many centers and countries around the world showing the miraculous effectiveness of ivermectin it basically obliterates transmission of this virus if you take it you will not get sick i recognize this guy know where i recognize him from where all the fucking like qanon and conspiracy theory accounts all of the new age medicine uh you know Instagram influencer shit. This was going around.

This, I, like, I saw this being spread so much in the conspiracy community, this exact video. Please, oh, please listen to this passionate doctor. It was, it was always framed as like, look, like, there are other cures out there. Like, listen to this man. He's a real doctor. And the thing is, they're right. Yeah.

Troy Casey, aka the Certified Health Nut recently endorsed Ivermectin, which is very funny because he usually hates all big pharma stuff. And he just kind of ignores that this is made by Merck. And it's, you know, bizarre. But yeah, he's down too. Everyone is. It's a stance. It's a cultural stance. Now, what evidence is Corey referring to here?

For one, he cites that hopelessly flawed paper from Argentina that I talked about earlier. We just came across a trial last. night from Argentina by the lead investigator of Ivan Benton in Argentina, Dr. Hector Carvayo. They prophylaxed 800 health care workers. Not one got sick. Corey sounds sincerely and understandably devastated by personally witnessing the devastation caused by COVID. And I watch them every day. They die. By the time they get media in the ICU, they're already dying. They're almost impossible to recover. Early treatment is key. We need to offload the hospitals. We are tired.

I can't keep doing this. If you look at my manuscript, and if I have to go back to work next week, any further deaths are going to be needless deaths. And I cannot be traumatized by that. I cannot keep caring for patients when I know that they could have been saved with earlier treatment. And that drug that will treat them and prevent the hospitalization is ivermectin. At the end of his testimony, Corey breaks down a bit while talking about the tragic toll that the pandemic has had are the most vulnerable people. We have immense amounts of data to show that Ivermectin must be implemented and implemented now. Senator, the last thing I want to say is, you know who's dying here?

It's our African-American and Latino and elderly. It's some of the most disadvantaged and impoverished members of our society. They are dying at higher rates than anyone else. It's the most severe discrepancy I've seen in my medical career. And we are responsible to predict. those disadvantaged members. We have a special duty to provide countermeasures. The amount of evidence to show that Ivermectin is life-saving and protective is so immense and the drug is so safe. My colleagues have talked about it. It must be instituted and implemented. I'm asking the NIH

to review our data and come with recommendations for society. Thank you. So in isolation, I have to admit, it's compelling stuff. And you can't really like, you know, brush him aside to some crank. You know, Dr. Corey, he's a seasoned pulmonologist who has been practicing since the early 2000s and even served as the critical care service chief at a Wisconsin hospital. Beyond that, he already developed one treatment for severe COVID because he created that steroid protocol. Now, it shouldn't be surprising that in the pre-vaccine era, this doctor's testimony to the Senate caused a lot of people to listen to what he had to say. In fact, in January 2021, Corey and his colleagues presented their data to the National Institutes of Health

Treatment Guidelines Panel. After that, the NIH changed their guidance on Ivermectin for COVID treatment from against to neither for nor against. So now he's even influencing like, you know, government health officials. That same month, Corey, along with the FLCCC founders and a handful of other doctors, released a study that they thought would finally convinced the CDC and other major health organizations that Ivermectin was indeed the miracle that Corey claimed it was. It was set to be published in an open access platform for peer-reviewed scientific journals called Frontiers. But on March 2nd, Frontiers announced that it was rejecting the article because of a series of strong unsupported claims based on studies with insufficient

statistical significance and at times without the use of control groups. Meanwhile, vaccines were more and more accessible in the U.S. with each passing day, and the FLCC had not updated its protocols to include vaccination. Now, here's what really concerns me about Dr. Pierre Corey. Now, I don't have any reason to doubt

his sincerity or his credentials, but he has gone out on a limb and sacrificed a lot professionally in order to promote Ivermectin. He told MedPage today that he quit his job at Aurora St. Luke's Medical Center. After his Senate, he

because the hospital wanted to limit his freedom to speak, as he put it. Which means that if he is off base on ivermectin, then he has provided bad medical advice publicly in testimony to Congress, plus he also derailed his career for no good reason, and that would be a lot for anyone with a healthy ego to come to terms with. Some of Corey's tweets don't seem to indicate that he's participating in a dispassionate investigation of the science. For example, there is one incident in which one Dr. Andrew Hill of the University of Liverpool published a meta-analysis that was positive for ivermectin as a treatment.

But after it was discovered that the analysis was based on a flawed study, Andrew Hill retracted the paper. That's a very responsible move. But this is how Pierre-Corri reacted to that incident on Twitter. Andy, stop. Seriously, you are causing untold deaths, man. For another WHO paycheck in the future, WTF! Me and Tess have both blown up our careers because history demanded it.

Your fake cautiousness is the saddest shit I have ever seen. Fuck you. And that is putting it mildly. Oh, man. Everything is just Twitter beef shit. And everyone who's wrong is going to like double down on being wrong forever. It rocks. Senate testimony plus, you know, promotion from other people obviously caused people to seek out

Ivermectin in early 2021. But they came across a barrier. Many doctors were unwilling to prescribe the medication for, off-label use. And even if people were able to get a prescription, it may not be filled right away because it's normally such an uncommon medication to get in the United States. But a solution emerged, getting formulations of the drug for animals, which were much easier to access. In February of this year, a local news station in Texas called News West 9 interviewed a woman who was taking Ivermectin for horses. Horse paste. It doesn't sound appetizing, but that was

enough to stop Alexandra Bibby from trying Ivermectin after reading about it online. It doesn't taste very good, but it's like a bitter apple flavored paste or gel. She started taking the drug back in October after getting worried about catching COVID-19. She took it hoping to protect herself and her family. I would take it anywhere between like once a week, depending on if I felt like I was going to be in risky situations to like once a month. I'm not normally somebody that's like into like alternative medicines. That's not really my thing. But obviously I was like a little bit desperate to, I don't want to get COVID.

I was visiting my parents and they're kind of elderly. To that station's credit, it generally is a very responsible report. It emphasizes the lack of evidence or approval for the use of Ivermectin. But no way this, I mean, this woman, she sounds so reasonable. I mean, she's like, oh, I was just being cautious. I was worried about this thing. I heard about Ivermectin. I thought I'd give it a try.

I had to take it this way. She's not a raving lunatic. You know, it's really interesting that they're just openly talking about. They're taking horse pace because recently on Twitter, the discourse seems to revolve around like, how dare you shame people by telling them that they're taking horse paste when Ivermectin is a real serious medicine. But at least earlier this year, Ivermectin proponents were straight up admitting that they were taking horse paste.

For example, here's a video from a YouTuber called the Self-Sufficient Mama, which has been viewed more than 100,000 times. Today I wanted to do a quick video on Ivermectin. I've been getting asked some questions on other people's YouTube videos and also on Facebook. And I wanted to go over it real quick because if you don't have a doctor, they can prescribe it to you to treat you for COVID, then there is an alternative. And it is safe for human consumption, and I know people that have taken it. So what I'm going to be talking about is this horse paste right here. Of course, for those who weren't interested in the horse paste, there was another option, the telemedicine website Speak With an MD.com, which is heavily promoted

by America's frontline doctors, according to the recent reporting from NBC News. So, you know, the hydrochloroquine people, they got excited about the ivermectin too, which I don't know. It seems like self-reflection. If you thought hydrochloricin was a miracle cure, don't you want to, you know, ask why it didn't work, while you're moving on to the next trendy one? So that website advertises consultations for $90 and fills prescriptions through a Ravku pharmacy, an online pharmacy that America's frontline doctors advertises as partners. The report doesn't really say this explicitly because I don't think it was probably proven, but it sort of suggested that they're earning a commission or like they're possibly, you know, basically they're taking some sort

of cut from these prescriptions from this pharmacy. On a speak with an MD.com intake form, prospective patients are asked, what medication do you prefer? The user is then presented with three options, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, or not sure. I'm thinking very soon we'll have people in Costco giving out samples of the horse paste. This is going well. In April of this year, the Food and Drug Administration caught wind that people were taking veterinary medicine and issued a statement advising people against it. FDA is concerned about the health of consumers who may self-medicate by taking Ivermectin products intended for animals, thinking they can be a substitute for

Ivermectin intended for humans. People should never take animal drugs as the FDA has only evaluated their safety and effectiveness in the particular animal species for which they are labeled. These animal drugs can cause. serious harm in people. Ivermectin, of course, got a big boost from arguably the most toxic component of the information ecosystem, podcasters. And let me be clear, in no healthy world with podcasters have any meaningful degree of influence. And if you disagree with that, you can write it into Travis. Ivermectin's main proponent in the podcasting world is the evolutionary biologist Brett Weinstein. Weinstein, for those who aren't aware, rose to prominence over the last few years.

part of his association with the so-called intellectual dark web, alongside other commentators like Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris. Now, this kind of stuff is usually a bit outsider, usual scope, but if you want a more comprehensive look at Weinstein, I'd recommend the podcast Decoding the Gurus. Wait, I thought you just said not to listen to podcasters. You know, I contain multitudes. Really contradictory, a bit like the studies about Ivermectin. Yeah.

I'm working on my study about Travis, but. Trials are limited and data is scarce. Have you gotten some horse, Travis paste? Brett Weinstein, along with his wife, Heather Hying, hosts the Dark Horse podcast. And let me ask you this. Have either of you heard of the Dark Horse podcast? Sounds kind of familiar, but Dark Horse to me is a comic book publisher. Well, it humbles me to say that it is, by all appearances, much more popular than our own podcast.

Nice. When I checked it this morning, it ranked as the ninth most popular. podcast in the category of science, which makes it, right to the above, like, even like corporate-produced podcasts from places like NPR, IHeart Radio, and Gimlet Media. We should switch to science not because we know anything about it, but because that's clearly a weak category where we could rise to the top by clobbering our enemies. Yeah, it seems like science is very popular nowadays. Yeah, well, everyone's into science now.

Well, Travis, you better go to school now. You better get a medical degree so we can continue this podcast. On a June 1st edition of the Dark Horse podcast, Weinstein spoke to Dr. Pierre Corey and made the extraordinary and unsupported claim that Ivermectin alone could end the pandemic. If it is used prophylactically, the effect is so good that the number of people you actually have to treat therapeutically is very low, and they have a very good prognosis on Ivermectin. And so the composite of those two things, I believe, is clearly enough to end the pandemic. think about how insane this claim is, is that basically is that there is this widely available medicine that could end this wretched, horrifying, economic, destroying, life, destroying, health, destroying society, destroying pandemic. And the only barrier to it being implemented

is basically the egg heads and the scientific world and health officials who don't want to recognize how good it is. Yeah, the medical deep state. The YouTube video of that podcast episode was demonetized by Google. And Weinstein's channel received a strike. which prevented him from posting content for a week and could lead to its removal if he receives two more strikes within 90 days. Now, this, of course, only pushed Weinstein further into conspiracyism. Later that month, he appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight, the highest rated program on cable news. Their Weinstein alleged some kind of coordination between pharmaceutical companies, big tech, and the CDC to suppress any kind of treatment of COVID besides vaccines. Tell us what you think this means and why Google would be opposed to talking about ivermectin.

It's confusing in some ways. It is confusing, but I think to understand it, the thing to do is to consider the question of what would be ideal from the perspective of the pharmaceutical industry at the moment. It would be ideal if vaccines were recommended for all people, irrespective of their age, irrespective of whether they had already had COVID-19, and irrespective of whether or not they were pregnant. And it would be essential that there were no safe and effective alternatives to the vaccine because if there were safe and effective alternatives, the emergency use authorizations that allow the administration of the vaccines would evaporate. So I think ultimately that is at the root. And what we see is that all of those things that I've called ideal and essential are in fact the position, the official position of the CDC, which the tech sector has encoded as their censorship policy on the social media platforms. This is one of those conspiracy theories that I don't think is evidence very well, but you can't just dismiss out of hand.

This is just because of the history of corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. Pfizer, for example, was forced to pay $2.3 billion back in 2009 for illegally promoting certain pharmaceutical products and paying kickbacks to health care providers. So the basic premise that these companies can be deceitful and corrupt for the sake of money isn't by itself very absurd. The problem is that he doesn't actually have any direct evidence. of this conspiracy theory and arrests on the unsupported assumption that ivermectin is effective for treating COVID and further that these companies know that's effective. You have concluded from watching carefully in your experience that this really is being driven by the pharma companies. You hate to think that. Well, it's a little hard to say.

I can say that that is the only hypothesis I have heard that explains our current position on who should be vaccinated and what treatments should be administered. At the moment, it is not acknowledged that we have drugs that work on COVID-19, and so they're not being administered. And that is a medical abomination. Of course, Ivermectin has also been promoted by King podcaster himself, Joe Rogan. Rogan had both Brett Weinstein and Corey on the show to discuss the drug. And just this past week, Rogan announced that he tested positive for COVID and would be treating it with Ivermectin and other drugs. Got tested and turns out I got COVID.

So we immediately threw the kitchen sink out of all kinds of meds, monoclonal antibodies, ivermectin, Z-Pack, prednisone, everything. So it seems to me that the ivermectin craze actually has a bit more legs than the hydroxychloroquine one. And unfortunately, it's having some real-world consequences beyond convincing people that they don't need to get vaccinated. On August 26th, the CDC released a health advisory warning of severe illness. caused by ivermectin overdoses, including vomiting, diarrhea, and hallucination. One man cited in the CDC bulletin landed in the hospital for nine days. Despite the warnings from government health officials, there was a horrifying report from the Associated Press that inmates in Arkansas jail were being given Ivermected to treat COVID.

And worse than that, three inmates told the Associated Press that they weren't even told that they were taking Ivermectin. One of those inmates, Edric Floral Wooten, said that he, He was given Ivermectin at the jail after he tested positive on August 21st. He was quoted as saying this. I asked, what are they? And they just tell me vitamins. With me being sick and all of us being sick, we thought that they were there to help us.

I never thought they would do something shady. I don't, yeah, the report didn't specify exactly how the hell this happened. It sounds like possibly some pilled corrections officers or someone that the jail was so thoroughly convinced that this worked, that they felt entitled to give it to the inmates and then lie about it. As friend of the show, David Gilbert recently reported for Vice News, the Ivermecting craze also led to QAnon influencers harassing a Chicago hospital. Now, some of you may know Veronica Wolsky, who gained some notoriety for posting Q&N conspiracies on a bridge in Chicago. She reportedly caught COVID and was hospitalized at Amita Resurrection Hospital,

according to posts on her telegram channel. Wolsky supporters claimed that after two weeks, she had convinced a doctor in the hospital to administer Ivermachian, but she was told that the hospital system would not allow any doctor to prescribe the drug to treat COVID. This did not go down well with Wolski and their followers, so Wolski's friends launched a campaign to try and force the hospital to respond. The campaign said that Wolski, quote, is being held as a medical hostage and that her advocates had been barred from the premises.

One participant in this campaign is QAnon lawyer Lindwood. He said this on telegram. I called Amita Resurrection Hospital and spoke with a male care provider in ICU. I gave him Veronica's name and stated that she had a legal right to try Ivermectin. He informed me that Ivermectin was not on the Amita Protocol, and Veronica would not receive it. When I tried to respond, he was rude, talked over me, and hung up on me. That's right he did. Wake up America, the corporate hospital's protocols are the killer, not COVID.

Pray for Veronica. And if you are in the area of Amita Resurrection Hospital, let your voices be heard. This is medical tyranny. This is genocide. We cannot tolerate crimes against humanity. You know, I'm really interested in sort of the story of how Ivermectin started to become a miracle cure because of how it doesn't quite mesh with typical explanations about why misinformation and disinformation. get popular. You know, people, for example, they say, well, misinformation right now is popular

because people lost trust and institutions and authority, rightly or wrongly. And so they're turning to alternate and false sources of info. But that doesn't really apply here because the scientific journals, you know, they published the studies that show the positive effect of Ivermectin. They just happened to fall apart later. Dr. Pierre-Core and the other doctors associated with the FLCCC. I mean, they're also the real doctors, their authorities. And they recommend taking Ivermectin. I mean, there are small minority of doctors, but so it's arguably compatible. So taking Ivermectin in this sense is arguably compatible with believing in certain authorities. You also can't blame like political propagandists or like dark money entirely for the

Ivermecting craze. I mean, they played a role in like popularizing it, but it doesn't seem like they got the ball rolling. People also often blame the spread of misinformation on the, you know, the tech platforms. They say like, oh, if only Twitter and Facebook would crack down a medical misinformation, fewer people would believe it. But in this case, what really caused the belief in Ivermectin go viral wasn't like a meme or like a bit shoot video made by a conspiracist. It wasn't like a pandemic, which is like a different kind of thing. What helped make this popular was testimony to the United States Senate by a doctor. Enticing misinformation is being introduced to the Senate record. It doesn't matter how well social media platforms are

regulated. It's going to get popular. And I guess like my broader point is, It's very comforting to believe that, you know, this absurd medical information gets popular only because of certain specific, very powerful and evil villains who knowingly tell lies because that allows us to solve the problem. We just need to neutralize those people. But I don't know, this seems like in this particular case, it's bigger than that. It's like real doctors, you know, elected senators. It's something that's a little bit more, I don't know, beyond the scope of what we usually. talk about, you know, why nonsense misinformation gets popular. You know, Travis, listening to you and listening to this episode, it makes me wonder

that if every single thing and every person's testimony and every first conclusion we draw about something wasn't broadcast and aired and spread, you know, for the entire world to see it instantly before it can be fact-checked and, you know, peer-reviewed, maybe just maybe people that the the quality of information that got filtered down to people by the time it did make it to us would be a little bit better so clearly we got to cancel the internet we got to stop filming stuff yeah cameras out of sentence out of court rooms oh great yeah let's go back to a secret like a deep right right yeah people should make decisions behind closed doors and smoky room. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that, yeah, we often, like, people talk about, like, you know, misinformation as like it's this aberration or this parasite that sort of, like, worked its way into the system. But I don't know. It seems like it's produced within the system. It's a natural byproduct. It's, uh, it's something that's just, it's not going to be solved just by Facebook, you know, hiring more moderators or cracking down. I'd still think they ought to do that. Um, but I think it's delusional to think that, you know, You know, it's like, oh, like we can blame all the misinformation on the world on Mark Zuckerberg or these powerful dark money people. I think it's really cool that they're all shilling for Big Pharma while screaming about Big Pharma. They want to sell more of a different product, which again, it's a consumer revolt.

I don't like this medicine. I want the other one. Big Pharma is rigged and they're trying to kill us, except with this one thing. But you have to use it wrong because that makes it right. because they are the opposite of good. We are joined now by Marissa Cabus. She is a freelance writer and author of the recent Huffington Post Report, headlined,

People are eating horse paste to fight COVID. These doctors are one reason why. Marissa, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me. Now, in this episode, we talked a lot about the FLCCC. So how did you discover that they had a central role in popularizing Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID? Well, I discovered it much in the way. I discovered a lot of things, which was going down a Twitter rabbit hole.

When I first started seeing people talking about horse paste as a COVID treatment, you know, we've seen a lot of ridiculous stories in the last couple of years, but this really struck me as particularly insane. And so I wanted to understand where this was coming from. And so basically all it took was clicking around between a few different Twitter profiles. of people who were pushing Ivermectin, and I saw them referencing the FLCC's Twitter account. And so I decided to dig a little bit deeper, and it turned out that they more or less originated Ivermectin as a COVID treatment in the United States. Now, what's really fascinating about the FLCCC is that it seems, at least to me, that they started their quest for COVID treatments with really noble intentions. Is that the impression you got as well?

I can't speak for the motivations of all of them. There's the five founders and then a bunch of other associated doctors around the world. I do think that there's a bit of, they definitely wanted to help people. They were feeling helpless in the early pandemic before there were any vaccines in sight. But I do think there was also sort of this feeling of wanting to find the silver bullet to be the ones who made the discovery of this unknown COVID treatment. And that seems to me to be their driving force. I mean, because, yeah, if you were the doctors who were fighting the establishment and then came up with a cure to, you know, to, to that ended the pandemic once and for all,

that would make you, you know, they build statues to you, right? That would, that would be a career-making, legendary, historical kind of achievement. Yeah, and actually, Dr. Merrick, who's one of the founders. he had a somewhat similar situation in 2017. He claimed to have found a cure for sepsis using vitamin C and some other things. And he was sure that this was it. This was his big discovery. And it turned out to not be.

And so it sort of felt like this was maybe his redemption in some way. And he was bringing along these other doctors with him. Now, you mentioned in your reporting, that this group of doctors, they came up with a protocol that was a steroid-based for people with severe COVID that wound up actually being effective, or at least then wound up being a approved protocol in the United States. I mean, do you think that perhaps, you know, that that early win and that sort of that evidence that their kind of perhaps unconventional kind of methodology can get results? Maybe, I don't know, maybe made them a little bit too confident that,

ivermectin can be effective? Absolutely. The work on steroids, it did turn out to be correct. They were told they were crazy. And so as history started to repeat itself with ivermectin, they thought, well, this is just going to be the same thing. They're going to think we're crazy until the trials prove that we're not. And the problem is, is that it's close to a year later and the trials have not proven them right, but they're digging in further and won't back down. Yeah, this is the, not only they digging in further, they're starting to resort to conspiracism, to explain why their treatments aren't being picked up and they're associating with people who are kind of conspiracists. I mean, this is the dangerous thing.

It's like once you sort of, once you're convinced that you have a big answer that the establishment doesn't like and they keep rejecting it, I guess I suppose you have two options. You either have to assume that there's a big conspiracy to keep you down or you have to admit you are wrong. Exactly. And they are not willing to admit they're wrong because they are a very self-assured group of doctors. And I think that they've just been working on it for so long that they feel like they can't give up at this point. And they're getting so much positive reinforcement from conspiracy groups and people who are vaccine deniers because they are so desperate for some other alternative to the, quote, government vaccine. But it's just they've set up this whole. situation where it's them against big pharma but ivermectin is manufactured by murk it's it's a big pharma product and so that doesn't really compute when you look at it at all logically but that's that's the story that they're sticking with now you you spoke to dr pierre corey personally in reporting

this story um i did so this is kind of a vague question but like is he okay because it seems like He seems like whenever I see him on podcasts and stuff, he seems a lot like, he seems increasingly frantic. He is increasingly frantic. I definitely agree with that. In our conversation, he said, I can't remember if I ended up including it in my story, but he said he was sort of falling apart. And, yeah, it's pretty evident.

And it's tough because I think talking to him personally gave me a little, just perspective on who he is and then where he's coming from. And he's not, he didn't sound like a bad guy. You know, his intentions didn't come across as sinister. But that doesn't mean they're not. I mean, there are lots of nice-seeming people who have, have ulterior motives. But I think he is really convinced himself of what he's selling. And he just thinks if he gives it a little bit more time, that it's going to, that he's going to be proven right. And especially because he's been the public face of this since the beginning. I mean, he started testifying in the Senate as of May of last year. So he's been at this for a long time, and he wants to be the hero of COVID treatment,

but he's essentially become a vaccine denier. And I don't think that was his original intention. You know, one thing that I was, I asked Travis, right before we jumped on the interview, is in regards to this study from Argentina that Dr. Corey cites in his original Senate testimony, you know, I was asking, Travis, you know, you were able to find the information that kind of poked holes in that study's credibility, some inconsistencies, some of it had been plagiarized, you know, et cetera. And I was like, why, you know, if you as an amateur researcher can find that, then why didn't a, you know, an established doctor like Dr. Corey, why didn't a, you know, a established doctor, didn't he also see that? And I was wondering if you could provide any insight into maybe why this

particular doctor kind of overlooked the contradictory evidence based on some of his claims. I think he and the other doctors at the FLCCC are picking and choosing the information that they're choosing to give credence. And they still have yet to do a large scale. clinical trial with the placebo, with a control group. And what they've been relying on is a meta-analysis, which is taking all the small trials and analyzing them together. But the problem is that they do include a number of faulty studies, including the one that you mentioned and then one out of Egypt that has proven to be extremely problematic and unreliable. But as long as they keep their party line together that the meta-analysis shows that ivermectin is effective in

COVID patients, then they're just not going to give it up. I mean, it's sort of like any conspiracy, any sort of fake news that's being pushed. They just don't want to ever admit defeat, so they just act like these speed bumps don't happen, like nothing ever happened. And if we don't acknowledge it, then it's not real. You also spoke to a former member of the FLCCC, Dr. Eric Osgood. What can you tell us about why he decided to join, then ultimately leave the group? So Dr. Osgood, I think he represents a doctor that's sort of somewhere in the middle between the FLCCC doctors and the very traditional by the book doctors. And he, like many others, was just desperate to find something to treat COVID when he saw his patients dropping

dead every day. He said it was unlike anything he'd ever experienced in his life. And so he was also just looking for answers. And he started reading a little bit about Ivermectin and he got connected with the FLCCC doctors. They showed him these small studies that seemed encouraging. And this was in October of last year before vaccines were widely available. We didn't know when the rollout was going be. So he latched on to it because they seemed so certain in what they had come up with. But ultimately, he felt like there was sort of a bait-and-switch because it seemed like their plan all along was push ivermectin. And then once the vaccines are widely available, we switched to recommending vaccines. And that didn't happen. And he kept waiting for them to change lanes.

And he realized last month that they never, they weren't going to. that they were never going to recommend vaccines. Of course, you know, based upon the popularity of, you know, the idea that Ivermectin could be effective, a lot of people have, of course, resorted to taking veterinary medicine or horse paste. And I noticed that a lot of, like, Twitter discourse has focused on how you should go about talking about people who resort to this. So there is kind of like a difficult question.

So how much understanding should we extend to those who forego a free vaccine and instead take, basically, drugs from their tractor supply store? I think what's missing in the discourse is a sort of a third option of understanding without necessarily extending sympathy or feeling empathy for the people doing it. That's what set me down this road. I was just so curious. I mean, you hear people, your neighbors, people who live among you are eating veterinary medicine. Why on earth would they do that?

And so I think that it's fair to say, let's look at our country and let's look at, you know, the medical system and the information infrastructure and think about, yeah, I think the logical extension of a lot of people's media diets was that they were going to end up being horse-paced. and I don't think it's unfair to be curious about that without, you know, just turning it into a joke because I think that is just not going to ultimately help solve this crazy problem. Thank you so much for joining us, Marissa. Is there anything you'd like to plug before we let you go? Sure. I would just encourage everyone to follow me on Twitter. I'm at Marissa Cubis, and I am a freelance writer for hire.

So give me a buzz if you have. something you want to investigate. Thank you so much, Marissa. Thanks so much, Marissa. Thank you. Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast. Please go to patreon.com slash QAnonanonymous and subscribe for $5 a month to get a whole second episode every single week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes. When you subscribe, you help us stay advertising free and editorially independent.

Also, if you like the podcast and haven't done so already, you know, tell folks about us. We're still indie, we're still growing. So if you know somebody that might be interested or you want to kind of stave off your friend that's always asking you how you know so much about bizarre conspiracy theories, tell them about the show. It would help us out a lot. For everything else, there's the website QAnonautanonymous.com. Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you. It's not a conspiracy. It's fact.

And now, today's autoimmune. We got it selected to the proper weight. What y'all think? Slim Jim or pork rinds. Mom, I found some eggs for you. I say we make us a sandwich. Mom, I found some eggs, Dad. Oh, there you go.

That's all you need right there. Now we're going to open our Slim Jim. We're going to make us a sandwich. Pork rind. Slim Jim and Ivermectin. Back to school snack. Let's get it, dude. Hmm.

Not bad. I never knew they made apple flavored slim jibs, but it's gonna go down.