The Highwire with Del Bigtree - HOW DID IVERMECTIN WIN THE NOBEL PRIZE

Episode Date: September 3, 2022

Pierre Kory, MD, breaks down the incredible global health impact of ivermectin that led to the awarding of the Nobel Prize in 2015.#GetFactsinated #PierreKory #IvermectinBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

The first parasitic infections that they learned that it treated were largely concentrated in low and middle income countries. And they recognized that there was not a huge profit to be made, but there's a huge almost like global human health impact that it could have. So from the beginning, Merck decided to produce it and distributed through WHO programs for free to huge portions of the globe. Wow. And the two main diseases that it was treating at first, although it works against many of them, was a disease called River Blindness or Onco-Sychiasis. And that disease is particularly nasty in that it causes blindness. In many communities, Africa, most of the adults over the age of 40 are blind.

They're led around by the children with sticks. So there's an epidemic of blindness. Essentially, it preserved the site of future generations after it was distributed. And so it has this beautiful story. about it. It transformed like the public health status of a good portion of the globe. And for those impacts and that beautiful, really public-private partnership, you know, that impact led to the awarding of the Nobel Prize in medicine to William Campbell and Satoshi Amora.