For a whole year more people were dying in Mexico than normally died. There’s been one long bloodbath there and an untold story. Mexico may not have hit the “photogenic” headline stage that Brazil, Iran, and India did, but nonetheless, somewhat unnoticed, it’s been continuously bad. Mexico has the dubious honor of being one of the worst for testing, with positivity rates at the virtually the highest in the world, running at 35% and even reaching over 50% at times. Few countries have had higher rates (currently only Tunisia, Namibia, maybe Colombia are worse). The Case Fatality Rate has run at 12% for a year, only confirming that there weren’t enough tests to know the real scale of the infections. The excess deaths graph tells its own story. The wave of 2020 ran for a whole year with deaths running at 50 – 100% higher than in a normal year. Since the pandemic began some 350,000 excess deaths have been recorded. The death toll for Covid in Mexico may be 60% higher than the official Covid casualty count of 230,000. As winter made the situation even worse, things got desperate enough (finally!) for cheap treatments to be organized.
Ivermectin use at 200 microgram/kg started on December 21 and was gradually rolled out across Mexico. It took months, but finally, for the first time in a year, Mexican deaths are back to normal, and even slightly lower.
Obviously some countries are too rich to use cheap drugs. For them, only patentable ones with big profits attached can “solve” this crisis.
Vaccinations did not start en masse til February 15th, and by the start of June only 17% of the country had even received one dose.
Ivermectin use began being rolled out on December 21, 2020. @jjchamie
How many lives would have been saved and how many lockdowns could have been prevented?
Obviously excess deaths in a pandemic are also due to hospitals being overwhelmed, and shortages or restrictions and the failure of normal healthcare. It may be years before those factors can be unravelled and a better estimate of Covid deaths can be made.
After Mexico City introduced Ivermectin, COVID hospitalizations and deaths were reduced
Concerned about hospital capacity in the summer of 2020, the Mexican government devised an aggressive testing regime, ramping up from 3,000 tests per day in June to around 24,000 antigen tests every day by that November, according to TrialSiteNews. Mexico City Ministry of Health head Oliva López later announced that doctors will give ivermectin and azithromycin to treat COVID-19.
“The Ministry of Health has identified that there is enough evidence to use in people positive for SARS-CoV-2, even without symptoms, some drugs such as ivermectin and azithromycin,” López confirmed in a press conference.
Local authorities created a home-treatment-kit, including ivermectin, for its 22 million-strong population on December 28, 2020, following a spike in cases of COVID-19.
Dr. Juan J. Chamie-Quintero, a senior data analyst at private Colombian university EAFIT, followed the trends in hospitalizations and deaths in Mexico City before and after the government implemented its ivermectin treatment program.
UPDATE: Cases and deaths are on the rise again in Mexico this week. J Chamie says ‘…the war isn’t over in Mexico Not a surprise that a new surge is growing from Quintana Roo (bottom right in the map)) where a group of MDs are actively blocking IVM treatments. facebook.com/COVIDQRoo/post h/t TIP
The wonder drug that disappeared
If you only email friends one link — make it this story. It’s the biggest medical scandal since 1850— Why is a cheap safe drug being ignored? Could it be that there would be no medical emergency and no need to rush out other riskier new treatments which are still classed as “experimental” if there was a safe alternative? There are billions of reasons to ask this question but newspapers wouldn’t publish the story. In desperation, some Americans are going to court to get rulings to order doctors to use Ivermectin on their loved ones. Even if they win, sometimes hospitals still refuse to use it on patients with few options left. One family hired a helicopter to take their mother away from intensive care in a hospital that refused to give Ivermectin (and had a happy ending). The debate is so suppressed, there are rumours the US President was treated with it in secret last year.
For peer reviewed studies read: The BIG Ivermectin Review: It may prevent 86% of Covid cases.
Ivermectin has also been used, with apparent success in India, Peru and Mexico (and so many other places). Covid cases fell in the states of India that approved Ivermectin use but rose in Tamil Nadu where it wasn’t permitted. Despite the success, India’s Health dept suddenly stopped Ivermectin use again and people in India are suing the WHO in disgust. In Peru, Ivermectin cut covid deaths by 75% in 6 weeks.
The FDA and others will say there is little evidence of success so far, but that’s a scandal in itself. Why are there no large trials? And why are other drugs like Remdesivir approved with only one trial? Ivermectin is so safe some 3.7 billion doses have already been used around the world. The inventors won a Nobel Prize for its discovery in 2015. We’ve known it might be useful since April last year, when an Australian group searched through many cheap safe drugs looking for any that might help against Covid. The news then was “Another possible cure for coronavirus, found in sheep dip: Ivermectin”. This was just a lab study, and it suggested doses would need to be too high. Even so, successes keep turning up in the real world? By July last year there were already signs Ivermectin could save as many as 50%. Why were large trials not started then? The UK trial is hobbled from the start.