Science Vs - Ivermectin: The Story of a Wonder Drug

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

Today, we’re digging into the weird and wooly world of ivermectin. When promising papers came out early in the pandemic, a lot of scientists got excited about the drug, but then … cracks started to show. We went down the rabbit hole and realized that there's way more to this story than the headlines. We’ll hear from Dr. Pierre Kory, as well as Jack Lawrence, Dr. Kyle Sheldrick, and Professor Roy Gulick. Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/3k1dknq Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Fest. This is from Gimlet. So there's a story that's been going around during the pandemic. And it's this. There's a drug out there that works wonders against COVID. But we aren't getting this drug because Big Pharma wants to sell us vaccines instead. Vaccines that they're getting billions of dollars for.

And we know that these huge pharmaceutical companies, they aren't saints. A bunch of them have been caught out doing really sketchy stuff in the past. So who knows? Maybe it's true. But then there's another story out there. That all this hoopla over this drug is just total nonsense. And that some of the people gunning for it, one doctor in particular, have lost their minds to conspiracy theories.

So today on the show, it's a tale of two parallel universes. In one of them, a doctor has gone through the looking glass. In the other, he's right. And we've been taken for a ride. Coming up. No, sir. I'm keeping it simple. Starting small. That's trading on Kraken. Pick from over 190 assets and start with the 10 bucks in your pocket. Easy. Go to kraken.com and see what crypto can be.

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Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. Welcome back. Today we're telling the wild and bizarre tale of ivermectin. More than a decade ago, scientists were calling this a wonder drug because it was so good at treating a bunch of stuff, like parasitic worms and scabies. And one man in particular would come to think that this drug could save us from COVID. And he's at the centre of our story today. Chapter one, desperation.

As the pandemic was starting back in early 2020, it was really awful for doctors working in ICUs. Doctors like Pierre Corey. He's a critical care physician and was working at a hospital in Wisconsin, leading a team of doctors. And once COVID hit his hospital, it got pretty bad. Well, everybody was scared. Everybody was scared. I mean, they'd seen the reports and New York was getting, you know, absolutely overwhelmed. There were basically no drugs to help. One doctor working at the time told me there was f*** all. Doctors like Pierre didn't know what to do. And they were basically just watching people die. No one was really offering treatment. They were just saying, do nothing, stay home till your lips turn blue, then you can come to the hospital. In the hospital, they were doing supportive care, which is like Tylenol fluids, oxygen ventilators. It was clear here that what we were doing was not

working. These patients were dying. They were not improving. In fact, they were getting worse every day. Pierre started to feel frustrated, thinking that there had to be something he could do to help his patients. He quickly teamed up with a group of other physicians who really wanted to find drugs that could help. And one of the first things that caught their eye had nothing to do with ivermectin at all. It was steroids. These are drugs that tamp down inflammation. And Pierre and his mates were looking at their COVID patients and were sure that steroids would help. Because it seemed like for his patients, their immune system was out of control. I mean, first of all, they were coming in, fevering is a sign of inflammation. So they

were fevering. Their lungs were inflamed. So they were whited out on x-ray. And so Pierre wanted to use steroids. But at the time, the World Health Organization didn't want doctors using them. There weren't any studies showing that they worked. And they were worried that steroids might actually do more harm than good. And so Pierre told us that he got pushback from his bosses. In fact, there was one seminal event at a meeting where there was a lot of shouting, and they were basically screaming, there's no evidence for this. There's no evidence for this. How can you possibly give someone a treatment without a randomized controlled trial? So I thought it was, in my head, I was like, this is absurd. I knew they needed treatment. And I knew I was not going to be a party to a hospital or be a leader of doctors

where literally the message I had to give them was to do nothing until some randomized controlled trial at some imaginary point in the far future would tell us what to do. I thought it was absolutely absurd on its face. And so I would really happily resign. Yeah, Pierre was so frustrated that he left his job. And then a month later, in June 2020, some results came out from this big trial showing that steroids were effective. They saved lives. So these drugs that Pierre had gotten a lot of crap for, the National Institutes of Health

and the World Health Organization started telling doctors to use them. Pierre had the right idea. I felt validated, right? Because I'd endured a lot of harassment and attacks. And so here was a trial showing that steroids were indeed lifesaver. But while steroids did help, people were still getting sick and many were still dying. And so Pierre and his colleagues were keeping their eyes peeled for other stuff that could help.

Chapter two. This is big. So here's where ivermectin enters our story. Pierre had known about ivermectin as a drug that kills worms in humans. It's also used for cattle and horses as a dewormer. And in the past, there had been some lab studies that showed it might be able to kill viruses. So Pierre started looking into it. And the first thing he came across was this lab experiment from Australia where ivermectin destroyed the coronavirus. But it's in a test tube. This is just cell culture, which usually doesn't send us because, you know, not everything makes the leap from the bench to the bedside, right? So we had a question mark on it. We didn't recommend it. We didn't use it. We just had no data beyond that cell culture model. But after a few months, studies in people start trickling out,

human trials. And they were showing that sick COVID patients were getting better on this stuff. Like in November of 2020, there was this one big and very impressive paper. It came out of Egypt. It was put on a server for preprints. So this meant that it wasn't peer reviewed. But during the pandemic, lots of academics had been putting articles on these kinds of servers. It was to get information out fast. So the paper said that they had studied 400 people with COVID. Some were given ivermectin, some not. And they reported that it worked, like really well. In the patients who had severe COVID, they said that 94% of them got better after taking ivermectin. And that was a lot better than the patients who didn't get it. And that meant that according to this study,

if you were really, really sick with COVID, you were all but guaranteed to survive if you were put on ivermectin. The lead author of that paper was a professor called Ahmed El-Ghazal. And so Pierre calls it the El-Ghazal paper. And like literally El-Ghazal was like this really powerful result. It looked really good because it was randomized. It was relatively large and it had this massive magnitude of mortality. I thought it was a great study. It just made everything even more convincing than it already was. At this point in the pandemic, towards the end of 2020,

Pierre's working at a different hospital and things are really bleak. And Pierre starts thinking, damn, if we started using ivermectin on these patients, we could really help them. Like all of these people that were going to hospitals, filling ICUs didn't have to go anymore. Like literally if you, because the other thing about ivermectin, right? So here's where it really get me, like almost gave me goosebumps is that ivermectin, right? So here's where it really got me, like almost gave me goosebumps, is that ivermectin is one of the most widely available medicines, one of the most inexpensive medicines. So like if you were to try to dream up a solution to the pandemic, you'd want it inexpensive, widely available, ridiculously safe, right, and highly effective.

As just a compound to combat a pandemic, you can't think of a better ammunition than I ever met in. Pierre had been putting all these trials he was seeing into a review paper, and he posted it in November. But I remember when I uploaded, I was like almost trembling because I was like, this, this is big. Soon after, he told me about this one email that he got from someone who had been sick with COVID for two weeks and saw his paper. She showed it to a doctor who was like, sure, I'll give you a prescription.

And she took it. And she woke up in the morning, this is after two weeks of fevers and high heart rate, she woke up in the morning and she felt really good. Like she hadn't felt in weeks. And that was my first like personal experience with someone who'd been treated with ivermectin for COVID. And then obviously so many people around me were sick.

My network of friends, friends of friends, friends of family, family of friends, you know, everybody was suddenly calling me and I just started treating everyone. Pierre started firing off prescriptions for ivermectin for his friends, for his family members. And in early December of 2020, he got invited to speak at a Senate hearing.

Arguments over COVID had become super political. And this hearing was organized by Republicans who were looking for alternative solutions to COVID-19. Stuff besides masks and quarantining. And Pierre being at the Senate hearing is kind of what took ivermectin to the big leagues. I think the only reason why the world is talking about ivermectin at this point was that thing went viral. What happened was, is I was insulted before I started to speak. One of the politicians, a Democrat called Gary Peters, said that this whole Senate hearing was about politics. Here's some of what he said that day.

We have a responsibility to follow science, to follow facts, not conspiracy theories, and not disinformation. I was really angry because I've been, I mean, I've been doing nothing but researching and treating and doing everything for a while. And here he is like kind of calling me like a political hack. And I started off just in this, I don't know, I think I showed a little temper, and then I just kept firing. We have a solution to this crisis. 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. The idea that the government was holding back a drug that was miraculous really hit a nerve. And video of that testimony racked up thousands and then millions of views. Pierre quickly became the face of ivermectin. He told me that he now regrets saying that ivermectin is like a miracle. There really is no miracle cure for anything. I know that, right? Does it cure everybody? No. I mean, I've had people fail ivermectin. And so, I mean, you never want, no doctor ever wants to

say this is a miracle cure. And the thing is that at this time, while Pierre is going whole hog for ivermectin, other scientists were showing interest in it too. I talked about this with Dr. Roy Gulick. He's an infectious disease researcher who was working with patients through the pandemic. And on top of that, he works with the National Institutes of Health to come up with guidelines on the best ways to treat COVID. When it came to ivermectin, one paper that stood out to Roy was this review that had put together around 20 randomized control trials on ivermectin.

And one researcher wrote, quote, the results are compelling. Here's Roy. They concluded that ivermectin was associated with over 50% improvement in survival. And for an infectious disease researcher like you, that seems impressive to me, but for you? Very impressive. So 50% is a whopping mortality benefit. We're talking mortality. We're talking death here. If you can reduce your risk of death by 50% by doing something, in this case taking ivermectin, we'd recommend it. You should do that. And that got everyone's attention.

Of course. Including yours. Including yours, no doubt. Including mine. Including all of us. If Roy's mates at the NIH had recommended ivermectin, doctors all around the US would have started using it So we wanted to be cautious Some of those early studies were from desperate doctors who were just seeing if there was anything here

And Roy knew that better, more well-designed studies were coming out soon So we figured, let's wait for those The World Health Organization also held off. But with the pandemic raging, none of this made sense to Pierre. Patients were dying. And by now, countries across Latin America had started using ivermectin, giving it to hundreds of thousands of patients. So Pierre's like, why aren't we doing that here in the US? Let's go. In June of 2021, he went on Joe Rogan's podcast, which is reported to have millions of listeners. Here he is on the show. When I look at the evidence for ivermectin, I've never seen

a collection of trials so consistently and reproducibly positive. They line up in a way, it's almost visually beautiful, in that the treatment effects are always so large. Pierre said that his dream is that every household has ivermectin in the cupboard. And after this Rogan interview, in the U.S., ivermectin mania hits. Well, you've probably heard of ivermectin. Ivermectin. Ivermectin. Ivermectin. ivermectin mania hits. Well, you've probably heard of ivermectin. Ivermectin. Ivermectin. Ivermectin.

Ivermectin. Ivermectin. Ivermectin. Fox News picks it up and starts talking about it. It's not some crackpot fish tank cleaner. It's a real drug. Real drug. Real drug.

Prescriptions for ivermectin go through the roof. In just one week in August, insurance companies in the US, it's estimated, doled out more than $2 million for ivermectin prescriptions for COVID. People get so desperate to get this stuff that they start taking the veterinary form that's meant for animals like horses. Dozens of Floridians are showing up at hospitals

for poisoning after taking a horse deworming drug. One person drank an ivermectin formulation intended for cattle to prevent getting COVID-19, and he ended up in the hospital for nine days, confused, hallucinating, and shaking. With some people thinking that ivermectin is now the cure to COVID, academics worry that it's going to undermine the vaccines. And sure enough, surveys show that people who believe ivermectin works are less likely to get vaccinated. Chapter three, the Avengers assemble. So here is where a polite young student from the uk enters our story i'm jack lawrence i'm a biomedical science student from st george university london i'm currently doing a master's degree um i

also did a degree in biomedical science my my only memory of dissection, all I remember is someone saying, I'll give you $10 if you lick it. And, like, that's my... Yeah, so that tells you a lot about where I went to school. Wow. I didn't lick it. It was a human cadaver. $10?

So tell me, Jack, how did all this ivermectin story start for you? Yeah, so I was aware of the drug, but I was not really aware that people thought it worked for COVID until I was assigned a paper to look at. Jack gets this assignment where his lecturer asks him to critique a paper. You know, it's standard stuff like, what did the authors do? And what are some limitations of their study? And the paper he's given is that ivermectin trial from Egypt. That was that big paper that showed for people

who were really sick with COVID, 94% of them got better on ivermectin. And by this point in the pandemic, that paper had actually become really important. It was included in a bunch of these ivermectin review papers, including the one that caught the attention of Roy from the NIH. And just generally, it really helped to make the case that ivermectin was working here. So Jack dives in. I opened the paper and I just like the first thing that struck me was just how badly written it was.

And I put that down at the time to the authors be not having English as their first language. I thought, well, that's, you know, that's fairly fair. That's not something I'm necessarily going to critique them for. But then a couple of things started like jumping out at me. Jack realizes that some of the sentences are written very well. Perfect grammar, perfect syntax, everything was perfect. So I was a bit confused about why that happened. And that's when I started putting those sentences into Google because I started getting a bit suspicious. And I found

out that those sentences were directly plagiarized. Pretty much the entire introduction looked like it had been copied from elsewhere. And then some sentences weren't exactly the same, but it looked like someone had used a thesaurus to change some words here and there. So for example, the name of the COVID virus is SARS-CoV-2, right? Which stands for severe acute respiratory syndrome. But in the paper... So severe acute respiratory syndrome was turned into extreme intense respiratory syndrome. Extreme intense respiratory syndrome. Oh, you can't do that.

Which is like, that's the name of the disease. Like that is not, you can't use a cinnamon. That is just the name. And I was like shocked. I just cannot believe what I've just found. This is like the most insane thing. And then I was like, the problem is like where there's smoke, there's fire.

That's sort of my logic. So I was like, okay, so I mean, plagiarism is bad. More important is, is the data legit? Because you can almost, I don't want to say you can excuse plagiarism, but you can almost look past the plagiarism and say, okay, well, is the data legit? To get to the bottom of that, Jack needs to get access to the raw data of the paper. That is, he needs to see the details of the patients, not just read the study. Now, luckily, there's a link of the paper. That is, he needs to see the details of the patients, not just read the study. Now, luckily, there's a link in the paper that basically says, get your raw data here. He needs to buy a subscription to get it.

So that's what I did. And it was password protector. I was like, oh, and so I was like, okay, fine. Let me just make a couple of guesses. So I was like, okay, what would they title it? Like COVID password, didn't work. And then Farns was like, you know what? What about one, two, three, let me just make a couple of guesses. So I was like, okay, what would they title it? Like COVID password, didn't work. And then Farns was like, you know what? What about one, two, three, four?

And immediately the data sheet opened in front of me. I could see it. And that was quite an achievement. I was so happy. I was like, yes. So now he's got this complicated data sheet and he's not entirely sure what to do with it because Jack's just a student. So he figures, I'll just start simple.

I'm just going to count up like the number of people who've died because that's like a pretty major thing that you should get right. Jack starts with the people who had mild COVID at the beginning of the study. And out of this group, the paper had said that four of those who didn't get ivermectin died by the end of the trial. In the raw data, though, it showed something different. None of the patients with mild COVID died, whether they got ivermectin or not. What was written in the paper was just wrong.

That's very weird. At that point, I realized this was above my pay grade. I had done what I could. I found all these issues, but I needed more help. Jack reaches out to people who study this kind of thing when science goes bad. He gets connected with a guy called Kyle Sheldrick. OK, we're running.

A doctor from Sydney, Australia. I've been interested in research fraud in particular since before the pandemic. Soon, there's five nerds trying to work out what the devil is going on with this paper. Really, it's the paper that brought us all together. Like the Avengers assembling or something. Exactly.

Jack sends Kyle and the other guys the raw data in the evening, Australia time. And Kyle told me he doesn't sleep that night. I imagine what happens next is like a montage scene of a movie where the bright glow of the monitor reflects into Kyle's eyes and we just see spreadsheet numbers in his pupils, scrolling and scrolling. Kyle zooms in on the people who had severe COVID in the study. And one thing he notices is that all of the patients

seem to have died on the exact same three dates, and they kept repeating. And Kyle tells another guy in the Avengers, I think something's up here. Who tells him, Kyle, zoom out. It's not the death dates are occurring. These are whole blocks of patients that have been copied and pasted again. All of their details recur. Oh my gosh. They can see that the patient's details, like symptoms, patient initials, and even typos were exactly the same. And then the team takes a closer look at those death dates. And they realize

that some of the people died before the study started. So they were recruiting dead people, but only into the arm that didn't get ivermectin. Whoa, wait a sec, wait a sec. So there are patients in the data set who died before the study began, but only in the non-ivermectin arm. Whoa. Okay. So can you just explain why that's so bad? So if you want to know whether there's a difference in the rate of death between two treatments, so giving ivermectin, not giving ivermectin, you have to start with patients that are alive. I mean, that should be, I don't think that should be a controversial statement. If you, on the other hand, have decided I am deliberately going to fake this research to get a particular result, a great way to do that is to recruit patients you know have died and you know didn't

get ivermectin to inflate the death numbers in that arm. So one of the biggest problems in medical research fraud as a whole is going, well, is this fraud or is this sloppy? Is this person bad or did they make mistakes? Elgazar does not fall into that gray area. This is the most obviously incontrovertibly deliberate fraud I've ever seen. There's no explanation for most of these other than that somebody sat down and said, I'm going to fake some research. We reached out to Professor Elgazar several times for an interview, but he never responded to us. And it's not clear why a scientist would do this.

Maybe Kyle's wrong and it's just the sloppiest science you've ever seen. Or maybe they were hoping to get academic glory for doing one of the first big studies showing that this amazing drug could end this god-awful pandemic. We don't know. So Kyle, Jack and the other guys put their concerns with the paper into an email. And in July of last year, Jack sent it to the server that had posted the preprint, saying that they should take it down. And Jack can't believe that any of this is happening. I mean, this was meant to be an assignment.

This was meant to be like a paper for university, and then suddenly it's turned into like a major international story. You know, like whatever was going to happen was going to be big. Within a few days, the paper was withdrawn from the server. Professor Elgazar told a journalist in an email that he wasn't given a chance to defend his work. Here's Kyle. It's been half a year now, we haven't heard anything. He just said, I'm going to defend myself. I'll put out the real data and smoke bombed, disappeared, never heard from again. But one man that was hearing from Elgazar was Pierre Corey,

the doctor who was so excited about ivermectin. What does he make of all this? And the nerd Avengers. They're out of their minds. They're out of their minds. Coming up after the break. Welcome back. welcome back we just heard that a key piece of evidence in the case for ivermectin is dodgy like real dodgy and pierre cory who thought that study was a goodie even citing it in his senate testimony he'd been in touch with the professor who wrote it, Professor Elgazar. So we had been communicating. And so as soon as that story popped, we wrote to Elgazar.

We're like, hey, because he said his first reply is that's not my source data. He claimed that whatever they had found, that was not the source patient database. And we said, fine, so why don't you share it? And the fact that he didn't want to do that and he didn't give a great reason, I was actually pretty pissed off. I was like, I don't know what this guy's about. Like I wanted to believe him. Basically, I kind of wrote him off at that point. Today, Pierre doesn't know what to make of that paper. He says, maybe there was something fishy about it, but that still doesn't change how he feels about ivermectin.

I'll give this paper. I don't care about this paper. Whatever. So it's a fraud. Take it. I don't know what it is, but I don't care. When you look at ivermectin, you're talking about 78 control trials with every one except for maybe four or five with a benefit. There are thousands of doctors

around who've been using ivermectin. We know it's an effective drug. So it's really tiresome to talk about like one study that's probably fraudulent. Like it doesn't matter to me. But like Jack said, where there's smoke, there's fire. And it turned out that it wasn't just one Dodge paper. Soon after Jack and Kyle and their mates rang the alarm over the Elgazar paper, they started looking at other ivermectin studies. By the end of it, I think we, after a few months, we'd looked at, I think, about 20 or 30 papers.

And how many were a bit Dodge? Quite a lot of them. So, for example, the team found that a study on ivermectin, which also had these really dramatic results, also seemed to have copied and pasted their patients. In that case, the academics said it was an accident, but either way, the paper was retracted. And then there was another study, one that Pierre talked about

on Joe Rogan's show, which reported that taking ivermectin along with a seaweed extract prevented COVID 100% of the time. Again, something seemed a bit fishy with this paper, and Kyle realised that some of the numbers in it didn't add up. So he emailed the lead author of that study. I said, so I would like to see your data. And he wrote back saying, oh no, sorry, I can't do that. I can't release the data. My co-authors wouldn't let me. And so I cc'd them in and one of the co-authors wrote back and went, no, there's no agreement on this. Of course you can release the data. You should release the data. And then he refused to even release the data to his own co-authors, which is now, you know, a field of

red flags to say even the other people who put their name to this can't see the data. One of the authors of that paper who had just helped with it a little bit was so shocked by all of this that he took his name off the study. Now, Kyle says that there were plenty of ivermectin papers that didn't have anything suspicious with them. It's just that the studies that showed that ivermectin worked really well, they tended to be the dodgy ones. The majority of ivermectin papers we've looked at are not fraud. The problem is that a lot of these papers were the first ones to come out. And that's not random. And it is much faster to fake a study than to run a study. And Pierre is watching as all of this is happening, as Kyle and Jack and the gang are popping his ivermectin balloons one by one by one. And he just can't believe it.

They're absolutely out of their minds. They're out of their minds. They're out of their minds. And these guys, your friends there in Australia. In my defense, they're not my friends. No, they're your friends. I can tell. What I find funny is when you line up 78 studies

and then you watch these maniacs literally chop down every tree in the forest. They chop down all 78 because oh this has a confounder this might not be true but if that team like got the elgazar paper right in that the data looks pretty dodge why why not believe them on the other ivermectin papers no i it's so oh my gosh. They have shown such overwhelming and consistent bias against ivermectin. Here's the thing. Where is that same scrutiny and criticism analysis of the big pharma randomized controlled trials on any number of things?

Molnupiravir, Paxlovid, vaccines. You don't see that kind of scrutiny. I took this to Kyle. Are you picking on ivermectin papers? So no, not at least not uniquely. So we do look at other things. Like Kyle and some colleagues recently did a deep dive on one of the new antivirals, Molnupiravir, and they just published a criticism of it. Carl told me that they've also analysed the COVID-19 vaccine trials and actually found problems with one of the vaccines. He hasn't published the data yet, but he told me this.

I, there are no vaccines that are approved in Australia, America or the EU that I have concerns about. Tell me more about that, because that is something that I really, I mean, our audience is going to look at this and be like, scientists can do some dodgy ****. Like, so what makes you confident that the vaccines available in the US right now or Australia are okay? Yep.

I have read every Phase 3 study that's come out, obviously, for Pfizer, for Moderna, for AstraZeneca, and for Johnson & Johnson. And when you say red, you mean with this nitpicky eye that you have? I mean, starting from a point of suspicion, which is where I start from almost every time I read read medical research going, how could this be dodgy? I would trust Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and pharmaceutical companies about as far as I can throw them. I have zero trust, but there are no red flags. If there were red flags for these, we would be saying. So they are looking at other papers and they just said there's something about ivermectin that we are seeing this more often. Okay.

I mean, I have nothing to say. Fine. I don't care what they do with their time. Listen, you have no idea the data I have, the experiences I have. And so that's why when you ask me about these jerks and they're in their computers worried about these little flaws on these tiny trials done by well-meaning clinicians, and then they want to attack them and say, see, there's no evidence that it works. I find that just go ahead, do what you do, but I don't want to talk about them. Chapter four, the science.

Okay, so in the last COVID wave in January, just a few months ago, around 200,000 prescriptions in the US were filled for ivermectin. It's clear that people are still using this for COVID. And from the science that we've talked about so far, it's pretty clear that this isn't a superstar drug for COVID. The studies that found that kind of thing tend to be sketchy. But that doesn't mean the drug is useless. Like, it could still help some people if it's just of regular effectiveness. You know, it's not Steph Curry, but maybe more like the Bill Wennington

of our pandemic drug arsenal. So, is it? Well, it's actually way more complicated than the headlines seem to suggest. Because even without the fraudulent or sketchy papers, you're still left with a lot of studies that seem to show that ivermectin can work. And these are the studies that Pierre is leaning on. And this could mean that, yes, ivermectin can do some good here. But other researchers who have looked at this are like, well, not so fast. Because some of those other studies that are left behind have some problems.

Some of them are really small. With others, they're not blinded properly, which means the doctors know who's getting ivermectin and who's not, which we know can affect the results of a study. In a few cases, even the patients know what they're getting. So that means the placebo effect becomes an issue. And with a disease like COVID, all of this stuff can really skew what you're seeing. Having a nice doctor like Pierre Corey give you a drug that they really believe will work, that's powerful. That can make you feel better, even if it's not the drug doing anything.

Plus, most people get better from COVID anyway, right? And so if you're not properly tracking your patients, you won't know who's getting better from ivermectin and who would have gotten better anyway. I talked about this with Roy Gulick, the infectious diseases guy who works with the National Institutes of Health. There's a phrase in Australia, it might be in America, that's like, if you polish a turd, it's still a turd.

Oh, yeah, we say, that's funny. In America, you say, if you kiss a pig, it's still a pig. Right, okay. So if you pull together a bunch of crappy studies, you might still have a result you can't trust. And that's exactly right. So remember that review paper that Roy was excited by? The one that found that whopping 50% reduction in mortality? Well, once those researchers took out the Elgazar paper, then there was a 38% benefit with taking ivermectin.

Then the researchers took out some of those other not-so-trustworthy studies. And suddenly, there was no significant benefit to taking ivermectin. Meanwhile, we're getting other really good quality studies. And then the final chapter, or almost final, is that a much bigger study has just come out. It's called the TOGETHER study, and it was sponsored by the Canadians. Of course, the Canadians did a study called the TOGETHER study. TOGETHER, right? To bring everybody together. Right.

So this is very convincing. It's a big study. It's randomized. It's double-blinded. So nobody knew if they were getting the real thing or a placebo. And just announced. I'm like surprisingly nervous. I'm like, what?

This is exactly what we've been waiting for all this time. And what did they find? Ivermectin didn't work. Yeah. This trial tracked more than 1,000 people with COVID and found that you were just as likely to end up in the hospital if you got a placebo versus ivermectin. There was also no significant difference in how quickly you recovered

or your chance of dying. And this trial, it came off the back of other really trustworthy studies that also showed ivermectin didn't work here. Chapter five, Final Fantasy. As we're entering the last chapter of our story, I'd imagined that I'd take all of this back to Pierre Corey and we'd hear this tale of redemption. He and I would sit down with some tea and bickies and we'd laugh together about things like the funniest name

for a scientific journal, which is obviously a journal called CHEST. I remember an old friend, he made a bad joke one day because he saw one, I think, somewhere around the house. Oh, no. Yes, exactly. He was like, what's this? I was like, it's not what you think. Don't worry about it.

And as we giggled, we'd look at the new data and the TOGETHER trial, and we'd see that ivermectin isn't a particularly exciting COVID-fighting drug. But the thing is, I've been making science verses for six years now, and rarely does the movie come out like that. Pierre wasn't convinced by these bigger, better studies. He didn't trust how they did their stats. And he thinks that these newer trials actually help show that ivermectin works. It doesn't matter. You take each trial, every trial that you just mentioned,

if you put them into amended analysis, it does nothing but strengthen the result. But other academics told me that's not true. Then Pierre said there was a problem with the dose. The dose is insufficient. And as an expert in ivermectin, who've changed my dosing strategies because I'm a clinician, I know when something doesn't work and I know what has the dose, I increase the dose, I increase the durations, yet I'm constantly being presented literally moronic studies. It's a joke. It's literally a joke.

I guess I just don't understand. Like, it takes time to do studies. And so I feel like, you know, we do these trials at this particular dose and it takes time to get, like, the science right. Then they publish the data. And now the question is, did we get the dosage right? So now there's new trials coming out with a higher dosage. And then I wonder when they come out, then you're going to say, well, then the duration wasn't long

enough. Well, the dose wasn't high enough. Well, the variants now changed. Like, is there anything? I try not to, you're the one forcing me to talk about these studies. What I really want to talk about is not that trial and the dose they used. You're talking about raging anti-Ivermectin bias. There's been so much corruption. You have no idea because this is not about science. This is about corruption. And if you want to think it's about science, and if your friends in Australia think it's about the science, and that it's low quality, and so, therefore, Corey got it wrong, that's

a joke. It's not about the science. Oh, my God. We're talking about a fantasy that Ivermectin is not effective in COVID. And I refuse to participate in fantasy. I can't do it anymore. And I'm sorry, but I'm done. I'm done with science. They've lost their minds and it's corrupt. One big reason that Pierre doesn't trust the new trials is because he now thinks that the medical establishment is trying to stop the truth around ivermectin from getting out. He thinks it's a giant conspiracy that involves big pharma, the U.S. government, and the scientific journals.

He calls it a war on repurposed drugs. Repurposed drugs are medicines that are designed for one thing but then get used for something else. If ivermectin had worked for COVID, it would have been a perfect example of one. And Pierre says that the drug industry has a thing against repurposed drugs because they can't make big bucks off them. I was placed in a chair and I watched the world around me as it went mad because we were advocating for this repurposed drug. And by the way, this war has nothing to do with ivermectin. Ivermectin is only the latest victim of the repurposed drug wars. But you have to understand, I'm now expert to the absolute unmitigated and total corruption of health agencies and the journals.

While it is true that big pharma usually can't make good money on repurposed drugs because they've often run out of patent, the idea that the medical establishment is in on this, I couldn't find evidence for that. I mean, the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health have put bucket loads of money into testing repurposed drugs during this pandemic. And, you know, not all of them failed. Steroids, the very thing that Pierre recommended at the start of the pandemic, they are repurposed drugs. And the NIH and World Health Organization both recommend them.

So I asked Pierre about this one steroid called dexamethasone. But what about dexamethasone? That's a repurposed drug and it's very, very cheap and it's a generic, like it fits. So how does that fit into the- I would say that's an exception, but no, you're actually, that's fair. That's a fair point. Dexamethasone would seem like an outlier or an exception to the repurposed drug rule. And it's somewhat is an exception, but Iurposed drug rule. And it somewhat is an exception, but I still got to tell you that I believe, it's my belief, that they kept that dose artificially low to save room for the pharmaceutical drugs. And so what would you need to see to not believe that ivermectin works here? Oh, I love that question. I would have to

unsee the hundreds of patients that I saw over the past year. So that would be the short answer to your question. So I'd have to pretend that I didn't treat them. The studies are overwhelming. Right. So nothing. So nothing, nothing. Like I guess I don't understand. I don't understand like how you can ask me. So the reality, I'll tell you why you're asking that question, because you are in a world where ivermectin is unproven. So you might get this wrong, Dr. Corey. And so what would it take for you to admit that you're wrong? And I'm sorry, I don't have an answer. I don't know about being wrong. I know it's effective. You don't, I don't know. I don't know. I'm done with that question. I think I answered it. To get me to believe that it doesn't work,

to get me to believe it doesn't work is just an empty exercise. I can't pretend that you can do that. Right. We spoke for almost two hours. Okay, here's the deal. And now I'm just going to speak plainly and I really don't care

what you or your listeners think, okay? You can just write me off as a completely biased clinician. So committed to ivermectin. He can't see anymore. I'm fine with that. And you know what? Conclude that it doesn't work and make sure that no one else uses it. That's exactly what they want to have happen. This is a war on repurposed drugs. But what if it's not? What if it's not? Like, what if you remove the conspiracy? I won't do it anymore. So, Wendy, can I just say that this is where probably our conversation will end? Because I can no longer pretend that's the case. And there's no way you can ask me to do that. And let's just leave it as this subject should be undetermined. So Dr. Corey thinks everything's a conspiracy and he's refusing to look at high quality data that shows it doesn't work.

So either I've lost my mind as a conspiracy theorist or you're a victim of propaganda. There's the only two conclusions. And it's my opinion that you are an unfortunate victim of relentless propaganda, as well as the doctors you talk to. And what's my opinion? That I'm someone who's lost in conspiracy theory. And that's fine. You are thinking that this is all a mass delusion, that everyone's a little enthusiastic and they decided to study it and their biases led to some false conclusion that it worked. And that's a really cute story, but it's just not true. After chatting with Pierre Corey, me and the Science Versus team actually looked at all of this again to see, did we miss something? Had we been taken for a ride?

And what's clear is that ivermectin is not a blockbuster drug for COVID. Whatever is going on with ivermectin, it's not saving bucket loads of really sick people. If it was, we'd see it clearly in the data, and we don't. And, you know, there are more trials coming along, so we'll wait and see what they say. But for now, the best data we have tells us that ivermectin really isn't doing much here. And the thing is, I don't need a conspiracy theory to explain any of this. Because I've heard this story before, many times, that science gets excited about a drug, there's a flurry of research, and what comes

out is that we realize, nah, it doesn't work. Grab a beer with anyone studying cancer or Alzheimer's, and they'll tell you a story like that. In fact, it's kind of the story I've come to expect. That is Science Versus. Hello? Hello, Blythe Terrell, editor at Science Versus. Hello, Wendy Zuckerman, host and executive producer of Science Versus.

I have a cough lolly in my mouth. A cough lolly? Is that a cough drop? Yeah. I guess lolly is just as good as drop. It doesn't make sense either, really. Apologies if you can hear it clinking about in there. How many citations in this week's episode?

There are 141 citations in this week's episode there are 141 citations in this week's episode 140 what and if people want to see these citations where should they go they can find our transcript which we link to in our show notes i'm gonna get this cough lolly out of my mouth are you still sucking on the cough lolly well i keep thinking we're done and then i take it out i put it right it's disgusting as i i recognize it is disgusting so uh like we said in that little update this is the end of our misinformation Spotify Joe Rogan jaunt. What a jaunt it's been. And next week we are going to be tackling processed food. Yeah, back to regularly scheduled programming. And I've got to say I'm looking forward to it.

Yeah, it's going to be fun. Yeah. All right, thanks, Flies. Bye. Bye. Bye. This episode was produced by me, Wendy Zuckerman, with help from Rasha Aridi, Meryl Horn, Michelle Dang, Courtney Gilbert, Rose Rimler, and Aketi Foster-Keys. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. A big thanks to Caitlin Kenny, Brendan Klinkenberg, Jonathan Goldstein, and Nicole Beemster-Bohr.

A huge thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr. Amesh Adalja, Professor Joseph Michael Vinitz, Dr. Patrick Evan Jackson, Dr. Maria Popp, Professor Sir Robin Jacob, Professor Sir Munir Pirahamid, Dr. Ivan Aransky, and many others. And a very special thanks to the Zuckerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.