Tuesday Open Thread

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TGA bans largely safe drug because “people might not get vaxed”


The unelected, unaudited and unaccountable Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) in Australia has decided that consenting adults and fully qualified doctors should not be allowed to use a drug off label that’s so cheap and safe the discoverers won a Nobel Prize. Something like 200 million people use ivermectin each year. After 33 years and 3.7 billion doses of use, it qualifies as one of the safest drugs around.

The TGA says it hasn’t found any evidence that ivermectin is useful against Covid, but then we have to ask, has the TGA looked?

Ivmmeta.com lists 60 studies involving 25,000 people that show its useful and 3 that don’t:

So the TGA want to ban one drug to force the punters to pick the other drug?

Once upon a time the phrase would be “persuade me”. Now it’s just fines and jail if you disagree?

In the end the TGA appears to be banning it for psychological reasons, not medical ones — always a risky game to play when a group is trying to look like a medical agency, and not like a marketing team. It may have the opposite effect the TGA intends. If we want more people to stop using agricultural chemicals (and surely we do want that?) then don’t we want the punters to get treatments under supervision from their GP and Pharmacist instead?

If the TGA wants more Australians to trust them with the vaccines, they might want to explain their decisions better than this.

Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) stops GP’s prescribing ivermectin for Covid-19:

New restrictions on prescribing ivermectin for COVID-19

Sept 10, 2021

These changes have been introduced because of concerns with the prescribing of oral ivermectin for the claimed prevention or treatment of COVID-19. Ivermectin is not approved for use in COVID-19 in Australia or in other developed countries, and its use by the general public for COVID-19 is currently strongly discouraged by the National COVID Clinical Evidence Taskforce, the World Health Organisation and the US Food and Drug Administration.

And yet in less developed countries ivermectin has been used en mass with seeming success: India, Peru, Mexico, Indonesia, Slovakia and so many others.

As for The WHO — they told us there was no human to human transmission and no reason to stop the flights last February. Tedros has an obvious potential conflict of interest. Whatever the WHO says, it’s almost good national practice to do the opposite.

Firstly, there are a number of significant public health risks associated with taking ivermectin in an attempt to prevent COVID-19 infection rather than getting vaccinated. Individuals who believe that they are protected from infection by taking ivermectin may choose not to get tested or to seek medical care if they experience symptoms. Doing so has the potential to spread the risk of COVID-19 infection throughout the community.

People may get false confidence, and choose not to get tested or seek medical care, but exactly the same can be said of vaccinated people. How many vaccinated people ignore social distancing, or falsely believe they can’t catch Covid or pass it on to their friends? We could hardly blame them after months of hearing how those who get vaxed are helping the community.

If social media gets it wrong, why ban the doctors that get it right?

Secondly, the doses of ivermectin that are being advocated for use in unreliable social media posts and other sources for COVID-19 are significantly higher than those approved and found safe for scabies or parasite treatment. These higher doses can be associated with serious adverse effects, including severe nausea, vomiting, dizziness, neurological effects such as dizziness, seizures and coma.

The symptom list looks frightening, but high enough doses of anything have bad side effects. Most of these bad things will also occur if you drink too much water.

Dangers of overhydration:  headaches, nausea, vomiting, drowsiness, muscle weakness or cramping, increased blood pressure, double vision, confusion and difficulty breathing with cerebral edema, seizures, brain damage and coma.

If supplies are low, perhaps order more supplies?

Finally, there has been a 3-4-fold increased dispensing of ivermectin prescriptions in recent months, leading to national and local shortages for those who need the medicine for scabies and parasite infections. It is believed that this is due to recent prescribing and dispensing for unapproved uses, such as COVID-19.  Such shortages can disproportionately impact vulnerable people, including those in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

We’d all understand if supplies need to be conserved for some patients. But a year after HCQ was banned to keep it available for Lupus patients, why haven’t we solved that? Trust means acting consistently…

Corona virus and DNA double helix

Doctors on the The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners  are divided:

In comments on the RACGP site some doctors are glad this takes the pressure off them when patients ask for ivermectin, but most docs are very unhappy:

RACGP survey poll Ivermectin

74% of people who bothered to do a poll at the RACGP site didn’t agree with the TGA.

Dr Anthony

The contempt we are held in by our bureaucracy is palpable.

Dr Ayodele

…If our goal is to keep Australian safe from dying, shouldn’t we give alternatives to those who for whatever reasons will rather die than take the vaccines. Two or three people died in their homes in NSW recently and they were reportedly positive posthumously. India saved their nation with Ivermectin . Do we want people to die in their homes in the name of promoting vaccination? GPs should stand up for choice. I am in no way against vaccination. please.

Dr Sandra

This is disgusting. Is medicine only about money and power now?

…how on earth can we back up advice such as it’s fine to give these experimental vaccines to pregnant women? Who has any idea what long term side effects will occur? One case of someone with some GIT side effects from taking a wrong dose of ivermectin, and meanwhile we’ve had a significant number of deaths and serious morbidity from these vaccines. Ivermectin is low risk, may be effective, doesn’t mean you have to stop administering vaccines, and should be available on prescription from GPs.

Dr Irene

…We at this moment are not treating patients and only isolate them till they worsen and went to hospital ( which is late). I am surprised to see that ivermectin was unsafe …

Dr Paul

The TGA? Are they the same people who approved a Covid vaccination for adolescent boys , a recent study from Univ of Ca has shown, has a 6 times greater chance of them being hospitalised with myocarditis after administration than being hospitalised with Covid. (which has a 99.999…% survivability in that healthy demographic)

And the TGA didn’t read the fine print in the emergency use of the vaccine in pregnant women.The study supporting its use in pregnancy lasted 3 months. When I was in school, pregnancy lasted about 9 months. Any chance of longterm cognitive, behavioural or other effects in offspring. Is informed consent even possible?? We do need an inquiry into ATAGI and TGA when all this is over.Their advice has been abysmal.

Dr Anthony

 I’m not aware of a single study where mortality increased with ivermectin therapy. so I’d love to see the data supporting the “it’s not safe” advice. The metanalysis conducted by Prof Tess Lawrie shows about a 49 – 84% reduction in mortality.

There are so many big questions going unanswered. If ivermectin is not approved, why isn’t it? If the correct study has not been done, why hasn’t it? And most of all, why is no one, apart from bloggers and people like Craig Kelly, and Malcolm Roberts asking these questions? Where is the legacy media… Where is our PM?

RELATED POSTS

REFERENCES

Andy Crump and Satoshi Omura (2011)  Ivermectin, ‘Wonder drug’ from Japan: the human use perspective , Feb 10; 87(2): 13–28. doi: 10.2183/pjab.87.13

Bryant, Andrew MSc1,*; Lawrie, Theresa A. MBBCh, PhD2; Dowswell, Therese PhD2; Fordham, Edmund J. PhD2; Mitchell, Scott MBChB, MRCS3; Hill, Sarah R. PhD1; Tham, Tony C. MD, FRCP4 (2021) Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of COVID-19 Infection, A Systematic Review, Meta-analysis, and Trial Sequential Analysis to Inform Clinical Guidelines, American Journal of Therapeutics: June 17, 2021 – Volume Publish Ahead of Print – Issue – doi: 10.1097/MJT.0000000000001402

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Renewable bandaid burns money: New transmission line alone costs as much as new advanced Coal Plant

Humelink map

The Humelink transmission line does not connect a single large city.

Just another hidden renewable subsidy.

Boy O boy, that bill blew out fast:

Households could be up for $2b electricity transmission cost blowout

Peter Hannan, Sydney Morning Herald

Transgrid now expects its proposed HumeLink – a 500-kilovolt line connecting Wagga Wagga, Bannaby and Maragle – to cost $3.317 billion, up from $1.35 billion estimated in January 2020. That would make it “by far the most expensive transmission project” in Australia, said Bruce Mountain, director of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre…

NSW Households will be forced to pay $60 per year above their already-inflated-costs whether they want renewable energy or think windmills are a bird-killing, shamanistic health-hazard that won’t stop storms, floods or droughts any better than crystal shields do.

We can see why the government won’t let people choose to buy green power voluntarily.

Transgrid said the steel and materials costs more, but wow, golly, there was also a bill for “environmental offsets” through the Kosciuszko national park of an eye-watering, wait for it, $935 million. Perhaps they are transplanting the trees they cut down, and rehoming the eagles?

The new transmission line will decrease the property value of houses nearby but make it “economic” for wind and solar plants to operate. Remember costs are for consumers, profits are for the unreliables industry.

Welcome to Renewables-World where we spend $3.3b to get half a billion in benefits:

HumeLink claimed in its submission to the Australian Energy Regulator in July that the project would have a net benefit of $491 million for consumers. That sum excluded a price on carbon emissions avoided from fossil fuel plants and gains created in regional towns from the major construction.

Since cutting carbon emissions is a net loss (less fertilizer for crops) the gains in regional towns amounts to paying people to bury bottles of cash.

Keep reading  →

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Your Body, My Choice, says Biden

Your body, My Choice. Joe Biden. Babylon Bee.

Babylon Bee

Biden announced that all companies with 100 or more employees must enforce mandatory vaccination. People will have the freedom to quit their job or perhaps get tested every week, and be treated like a leper…

It’s not about health —  there is no allowance for people who have already caught Covid and survived, who likely have much better protection. Israeli research suggests people who have caught covid are 13 times less likely to get reinfected than the double vaxxed are to catch covid six months after vaccination. If the unvaxxed have to get tested, why don’t the vaxxed?

Something in this message does not add up. What could it be?

The virus is deadly, and the vaccine works, but you are too stupid to decide for yourself. Trust us, we care and respect you!

My headline above was shamelessly stolen from The Babylon Bee:

Biden Unveils ‘Your Body, My Choice’ Vaccination Program

Babylon Bee

WASHINGTON, D.C.—In a speech today, Joe Biden unveiled a brand new program to force the rest of the country to get vaccinated, entitled “Your Body, My Choice.”

Companies will be forced to comply with the mandate until the Supreme Court strikes it down in a few hours.

Is this the moment the non-Left discover their Mojo?

There comes a point when every totalitarian movement goes too far. Even people who are pro-vaccine are anti-mandatory vaccination. The RNC “Intends to Sue Biden Administration on Unconstitutional Mandate”, and Governors are too:

Governors Immediately Push Back On ‘Unconstitutional’ Biden Plan: ‘Will Fight Them To The Gates Of Hell’

Daily Wire

The pushback from governors comes after the administration said on Thursday that The Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) will force all employers with 100 or more employees “to ensure their workforce is fully vaccinated or require any workers who remain unvaccinated to produce a negative test result on at least a weekly basis before coming to work.”

Governors vowing to stop this include the Governor of Florida, Texas, Mississipi, Georgia, South Dakota, South Carolina, Arizona, Askansas, Iowa, Montana, Oklahoma, Missouri, and the list grows… Wyoming, Tenessee, Alaska,

There are some good comments under The Daily Wire.

The vaccines reduce hospitalization and deaths significantly in high risk groups. It makes sense for some people to get vaccinated, but not for all. And the long term risks aren’t known. Where is the informed consent?

If governments cared about our health they would combine vaccines with cheap antivirals to reduce the risks and the rate of spread. They’d let us choose the therapy we want with our doctors help.

If governments want us to trust them, they have to act trustworthy

@CraigKellyMP

STOP dividing our society

STOP medical segregation & apartheid

STOP trashing our fundamental human right of #InformedConsent

In Australia, appallingly, the TGA has just forbidden doctors from prescribing ivermectin. If Pfizer were actually running the TGA would the decisions have been any different?  We train doctors for six years, but expect them to act as though they are robots for government bureaus. I’ll have more to say on this soon.

We need a free market in medicines. We need a free market in doctors.

REFERENCE:

Gazit et al (2021) Comparing SARS-CoV-2 natural immunity to vaccine-induced immunity: reinfections versus breakthrough infections, doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415

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If CO2 mattered, the UN would prefer Australian coal

Global Coal Production, Graph, Top 6 countries.

What will it solve if Australian coal stays underground?    | Graph IEA

If Australia stops digging up clean high energy coal, hands up who thinks Indonesia, Russia, India or China will cut back too? Anyone?

Australia is stopping the world from digging up more dirty coal.

To lower greenhouse gas emissions — burn more Australian coal

But it’s never been about carbon dioxide…

Abolish our coal industry? Tell ’em they’re dreaming

Greg Sheridan, The Australian

Australia is typically the second biggest exporter of coal. But we are not the dominant producer of coal. Australia produces only about 6 per cent of the world’s coal. China produces about 50 per cent of coal globally.

Most nations that use coal have some coal of their own. Australia, with such a small population of 26 million, exports most of its coal. Our biggest coal export competitors are Indonesia, Russia, Colombia and South Africa.

In the event that we were self-destructive enough to abolish our coal industry, global coal use would not decline. Our export markets would be taken by Indonesia, Russia and so on. Countries such as China and India would be forced to use more of their own coal.

But Australian coal has a significantly higher calorific value than Indonesian, Chinese or Russian coal. This means it produces more energy per tonne. You burn less coal to produce a kilowatt-hour of energy. Coal-fired power stations using Australian coal produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions per unit of energy than those using Indonesian, Chinese or most other coal.

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Weekend Unthreaded

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Bizarre: Early samples from Wuhan patients also have bits of Influenza, Nipah, Leukemia, HIV

China sure has some explaining to do.Covid, Coronavirus, Bioweapons.

Samples of lung fluid were taken from five of the earliest people to get Covid. One team of researchers has just fished through the genetic entrails and discovered not just Covid, but a surprising “menagerie” of spare parts from other deadly viruses too. It almost looks like a grab bag sample of work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is especially significant since all 20 of those viruses were under study by the Wuhan Institute of Virology at the time.

Before anyone leaps to the obvious, the researchers point out that it might be contamination OR vaccine research. But no matter what it was, it seems to me that the WIV was working on a bunch of very deadly diseases and being Far Too Sloppy. Even if they were only trying to honorably create vaccines to this deadly array, a lab that leaky is no place for the highest risk bio-nightmare bugs to live. 

That’s the nicest possible interpretation I can make. There are nastier ones…

Some body parts of an influenza virus known as H7N9 (Avian flu) were in the  mix, as well as parts of Nipah virus. Avian flu has a mortality rate of about 40% , and Nipah virus is deadlier than Ebola, killing of nearly 9 out of ten. There were as many as 20 different parts-of-viruses present including HIV, Hepatitis, as well as monkey and mouse viruses,  and leukemia viruses. Seriously?

Another clue that this is not very natural, is that the Bird flu Influenza body part comes packaged with a gene vector too, called PVax1, which, you guessed it, is normally used to create vaccines. As far as anyone knows, bird flu doesn’t spread from human to human. The CDC tells us that since 2017 the total global caseload of known human H7N9 victims is all of three people. So odds are “pretty good” that  all five of the earliest victims of SARS 2 in late 2019 were not also suffering a natural H7N9 infection too.

So these genetic fingerprints glow like plutonium, but the only thing we can say for sure is that we need  full and transparent investigation, and we probably shouldn’t be posting BSL Level 4 pathogens to Wuhan.

Early Coronavirus Samples Uploaded From China Had ‘Genetic Manipulation of the Nipah Virus’: Expert

Neil Campbell, VisionTimes.

A recent study by a U.S. scientist found early samples taken from Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients in mainland China were contaminated with Nipah Virus, an H7N9 influenza vaccine, and 19 other virological elements.

Ebola micrograph

Ebola

On July 3, Dr. Steven Quay and three other researchers published a paper examining sequencing data found in five early COVID-19 patients in China. In a press release for the preprint publication of the study, the researchers said their findings, “Reveal[s] that the laboratory at the Wuhan ERInstitute of Virology (WIV) was contaminated with a wide range of viruses, including Nipah virus genes in a cloning vector.”

The data examined was originally sequenced by the WIV itself in 2019 and were part of a study published by coronavirus gain of function research champion Shi “Batwoman” Zhengli.

In the press release for Quay’s paper, he states, “It was surprising to find a menagerie of deadly viruses, strange pathogens, and even honeysuckle, plant genes in patient specimens sequenced at the WIV in December 2019, especially since this patient sequencing data has been publicly available to the entire scientific community inside of the US NIH GenBank database since February 2020.”

The Epoch Times points out that some Henipah viruses were sent from a Canadian lab in mid 2019 by naughty researchers who got fired. Perhaps they weren’t the same viruses, but then, perhaps they were?

Exclusive: Samples From Early Wuhan COVID Patients Had Genetically Modified Henipah, 1 of 2 Types of Viruses Sent From Canadia

Omid Ghoreishi. TheEpoch Times

Henipah was one of the two types of viruses sent to China by Chinese-born scientists from a Canadian laboratory at the center of a controversy over the firing of the scientists and collaboration with Chinese military researchers. It’s not clear whether the virus found in the Chinese samples is related to the virus samples sent by the Canadian lab, which were shipped in late March 2019.

Keep reading  →

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Portland State Uni supports vilification, disruption, intimidation to enforce ideological conformity

Peter Boghossian has taught philosophy at Portland State University for ten years and he has just quit in protest.

Peter Boghossian, Portland University

Peter Boghossian

He fought against Woke ideology. He helped write hoax papers to expose how meaningless peer review is and exposed students to politically incorrect speakers to hone their powers of reasoning. For that he has been subject to extraordinary vilification, inquisitions, and a campaign of disruption. His students were interviewed to find instances of “discrimination” and the investigators even asked them if they knew anything about him “beating his wife and children”, fueling rumors that he was a violent misogynist. He was given no right of reply. It’s character assassination by any means possible. The University did nothing to stop it.

Even petty methods were used to silence and intimidate him. Fire alarms interrupted an interview, bags of faeces were delivered, and speaker wires were pulled out during a live panel discussion.  This reminds me of stories of how the Chinese Communist Party targets dissidents overseas with petty disruptions like having minions bang pots and pans in alleys to wake them in the dead of night.

It’s almost like the CCP runs the universities of the West.

My University Sacrificed Ideas for Ideology. So Today I Quit.

Bari Weiss

…brick by brick, the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible. It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division.

Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues. Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions. This has created a culture of offense where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly.

Fear and silence is the motto of higher education:

The more I spoke out about these issues, the more retaliation I faced. 

Early in the 2016-17 academic year, a former student complained about me and the university initiated a Title IX investigation.  (Title IX investigations are a part of federal law designed to protect “people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance.”) My accuser, a white male, made a slew of baseless accusations against me, which university confidentiality rules unfortunately prohibit me from discussing further. What I can share is that students of mine who were interviewed during the process told me the Title IX investigator asked them if they knew anything about me beating my wife and children. This horrifying accusation soon became a widespread rumor.

With Title IX investigations there is no due process, so I didn’t have access to the particular accusations, the ability to confront my accuser, and I had no opportunity to defend myself.

The investigation found only that there was “insufficient” evidence and recommended he “get coaching”. But the process is the punishment. Who wants that kind of acidic work environment?

The university supports vilification.

… in 2017, I co-published an intentionally garbled peer-reviewed paper that took aim at the new orthodoxy. Its title: “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.”

Shortly thereafter, swastikas in the bathroom with my name under them began appearing in two bathrooms near the philosophy department. They also occasionally showed up on my office door, in one instance accompanied by bags of feces. Our university remained silent. When it acted, it was against me, not the perpetrators.

The university supports disruption:

Meanwhile, ideological intolerance continued to grow at Portland State. In March 2018, a tenured professor disrupted a public discussion I was holding with author Christina Hoff Sommers and evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. In June 2018, someone triggered the fire alarm during my conversation with popular cultural critic Carl Benjamin. In October 2018, an activist pulled out the speaker wires to interrupt a panel with former Google engineer James Damore. The university did nothing to stop or address this behavior. No one was punished or disciplined.

Read it all. 

Is there any better reason to just cut academic funding from any institution that doesn’t endorse free speech?

Civilizations need civility.

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Thursday Open Thread

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Nine o’clock horror: Climate change causes shape shifting animals

Cockatoo, parrot, Australia.

A postmodern coal-powered Cockatoo is larger, meaner and nastier than any bird photographed in the paleolithic.      | Photo by Photoholgic on Unsplash

It’s a new horror to scare the kiddies:

Animals ‘shape-shifting’ as climate warms: study

Paris: Some animals are “shape-shifting” and have developed bigger tails, beaks and ears to regulate their body temperatures as the planet warms, according to a new study.

The Australian parrot, for example, had shown an average 4-10 per cent increase in the size of its bill since 1871 and the authors said this positively correlated with the summer temperature each year.

For one, do bird-bills cool birds? For two, how many parrot bills were measured in 1871 in Australia and do we think we would know if their bills got 10% bigger? For three, there is no “Australian parrot”, there are 56 different species. And fourthly, even if they had got bigger, and we could measure that, which we probably can’t, how do we know it’s not due to “something else” that changed in the last 150 years, like all the orchards, crops, trees and other things we planted? According to some botanists, there are more foreign plants in Australian than native ones. Maybe that matters?

Though not, apparently, when there is an ARC Grant for climate scares.

Gang Gang, parrot, bird.

A Gang Gang parrot suffering from a deficiency of carbon credits.             | Photo by Steve Franklin

Never ever before in Australia have parrot beaks changed by 4% in 150 years!

Researchers say the damnedest things, things that don’t even make sense:

Climate change is heaping “a whole lot of pressure” on animals, said Sara Ryding of Deakin University in Australia, who led the study, in a press release. “It’s high time we recognised that animals also have to adapt to these changes, but this is occurring over a far shorter timescale than would have occurred through most of evolutionary time,” she said.

We know this is unprecedented, yeah,  because back in 2,456,000 BC we know what the size of parrot beaks were in Australia, and how they changed by 2,455,850 BC?  Indeed, for every 150 year period going back to the beginning-of-parrots, 59 million years ago, we have a representative sample of fossilized beaks. That’s 393,000 consecutive sample periods for 56 species spread over 7 million square kilometers.

It takes a lot of data to know that this has never happened before.

Looks like the real danger in modern Australia is that the nation is sinking under the weight of 2 billion fossilized beaks. Either that or the nation is being crushed by incompetent, poorly trained experts in the bloated carcass of Australia’s academic sector.

 

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The media bonfire over imaginary hordes of Ivermectin casualties

The War on Ivermectin continues:

Rolling Stone, M1

Photo of gunshot victims looking suspiciously overdressed for August heat waves. 

After news spread that Joe Rogan took ivermectin for Covid the legacy media “discovered” (in the magical sense of the word) that people were overdosing on it. It was so awful that gunshot victims had to wait for treatment and people were going blind.

“Gunshot victims left waiting as horse dewormer overdoses overwhelm Oklahoma hospitals, doctor says.”

As Dr Jason Mcelyea said:

“Some people taking inappropriate doses have actually put themselves in worse conditions than if they’d caught COVID.”

“The scariest one that I’ve heard of and seen is people coming in with vision loss.”

It was such perfect Psy-Ops against ivermectin it’s like it could have been written by a Hollywood studio. Within a day it turned out to be fake news. RollingStone got the hot quotes from Doctor Jason A. Mcelyea, who is affiliated with two hospitals in Oklahoma.  One of the two, NHS Sequoyah, went so far as to issue a statement which basically said he hasn’t worked at the hospital in the last two months, and far from there being a queue of blinded people vomiting up their ivermectin, there was not one, as in zero, patients:

NHS Sequoyah has not treated any patients due to complications relate to taking ivermectin. This includes not treating any patients for ivermectin overdose.

Our hospital has not had to turn away any patients seeking emergency care.

The hospital even changed its home page to make sure people got the message.

There are a lot of other hospitals in Oklahoma where gunshot victims might have laid waiting for hours, but Zero Hedge reports that according to the Oklahoma Centre for Poison and drug information the total number of Ivermectin poisonings reported in the whole state in the last four months was eleven.

Zero Hedge also phoned the other hospital that Mcelyea worked at, and all they got was a laugh, “the gentleman who answered the phone sounded quite amused.

So this was a slap in the face to Rolling Stone

It’s a legendary fail in journalism. The illustrious pop culture review magazine hadn’t even bothered to make one phone call to check the veracity of anything before going to press. It was grovelling apology and retraction time. Instead, Rolling Stone called it an “Update” and added:  “Rolling Stone has been unable to verify any such cases…” 

Even though the new information basically slayed the entire original story, they simply added the new information at the top, turning the headline into a Rorschach test where anyone could find whatever endpoint they wanted.

It’s one of the longest, most uselessly ambiguous headlines you can read anywhere. If I tell you not to think of Pink Elephants, what animal are you thinking of?

 

Robby Soave at Reason.com  lists the global news pile on and points out just how ugly this was. The deplorables were not just fools risking their own necks, they were wrecking hospitals for everyone as well:

It was quickly picked up by national news outlets, such as Rolling Stone, Newsweekand the New York Daily NewsNumerous high-profile media figures, including MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, tweeted about ivermectin overdoses straining Oklahoma hospitals—the implication being that the right-wing embrace of a crank COVID-19 cure was dangerous not only for the people who consumed it but for the stability of the entire medical system. It was a story that appeared to confirm many of the mainstream media’s biases about the recklessness of the rubes.

InsiderNewsweek,  and The Guardian “updated” their articles (somewhat). The New York Daily News has not.

It was all confirmation bias writ large and moving at the speed of cut-n-pasting.

Strangely Twitter has not banned any of the guilty parties, nor slapped warnings about disinformation on any of their accounts.

The problem is not just the media — it’s the medical swamp too

Rolling Stone added that there were 459 cases of ivermectin overdoses in the entire US in August according to the National Poison Data System. It sounds like a lot but since there are 6,000 hospitals in the US, that means each hospital might see one ivermectin overdose over the course of a whole year. It’s probably not the cause of too many delays with gun victims.

But if people are overdosing on veterinary products, that means that something is going terribly wrong in the US Health system (and other nations too). Millions of people have no faith in their medical system. If patients could get prescriptions for treatments they have confidence in, there wouldn’t be this problem.

The solution we all want is for doctors to be able to prescribe the medicines they think are most appropriate, and to be able to speak their minds freely.

Talk to your GP. Give them information. Find protocol suggestions on the FLCCC site.

———————————————————————————–

Reason.com has the most detailed description of the whole incident.

The story started on a local radio station” KFOR on Sept 1.

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Tuesday Open Thread

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Big Pharma to the rescue: Ask your doctor about Pfivermectin*

For people wondering when this pandemic will end, the fastest way out is with drugs we already have, but they are too cheap. Luckily Big Pharma is here to save the day. Who knows when an extra methyl group, or a hydroxy add-on will find the drug we’ve all been waiting for — one that works like Ivermectin but costs so much more!

Thanks to the Babylon Bee.

Pfizer Releases Brand New, Never-Before-Seen Drug ‘Pfivermectin’.

Pfizer Releases Brand New, Never-Before-Seen Drug ‘Pfivermectin’.

After several successful rounds of trials and a quick overnight approval from the FDA, Pfizer proudly announced they will be releasing a brand new, never-before-seen COVID drug “Pfivermectin.”

“It’s important to understand that this drug is nothing like Ivermectin, even though Pfivermectin rhymes with Ivermectin and it pretty much does the exact same thing,” said Pfizer CEO Hans Pfizer. “Everyone knows Ivermectin is a widely discredited horse drug, and ours is not. Very important distinction there.”

Experts say that taking two doses of Pfivermectin every day at the first sign of COVID symptoms could lessen the severity and duration of the infection. Ivermectin will do the same thing, except it may also turn you into a horse and make everyone laugh at you. Not good!

A Pfizer spokesman also confirmed that their drug will be approximately 30,000% more expensive than Ivermectin.

Back in the real world, the news on Reuters five days ago:

Pfizer, Merck launch new trials of oral COVID-19 drugs

Pfizer said its latest mid-to-late-stage trial will enroll 1,140 non-hospitalized adults diagnosed with coronavirus infection who are not at risk of severe illness. Patients in the trial will be given Pfizer’s pill, known as PF-07321332, and a low dose of ritonavir, an older medication widely used in combination treatments for HIV infection.

Pfizer’s drug is designed to block the activity of a key enzyme that is needed for the coronavirus to multiply.

Merck said its new trial will study experimental drug molnupiravir for the prevention of COVID-19 among adults in the same household as someone diagnosed with symptomatic coronavirus infection. Merck and partner Ridgeback Biotherapeutics are already conducting a late-stage trial of the treatment in non-hospitalized patients to see if it reduces the risk of hospitalization or death.

Catchy name that: PF-07321332

So it supposedly blocks one enzyme Covid needs. Shame it doesn’t bind to the spike, act as a zinc ionophore, and work as an anti-inflammatory too. But at least the patent hasn’t expired.

With profits to power it, Pfivermectin can get through any regulatory authority.

10 out of 10 based on 108 ratings

Sunday Unthreaded

8 out of 10 based on 37 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

8.1 out of 10 based on 30 ratings

A petition to support free speech for Australian doctors

What is informed consent if your doctor is not allowed to inform you?

What are they Hiding? Censorship. Free speech. Even if Dr Oosterhuis is allowed to keep his license after being grilled today, the NSW Medical Board will have succeeded in scaring many doctors into silence. If our medical agencies were corrupt, the first people to point that out would be doctors who could speak freely. The gross overreaction of the NSW Medical Board tells us all that they don’t have solid evidence, and they might be covering up either their incompetence or something worse.

What are they hiding?

NSW Medical Board to grill anti-vax doctor

The Australian

A Sydney doctor has been hauled before the NSW Medical Board after he questioned evidence behind Covid-19 vaccines and promoted unapproved treatments, including Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, in a case that will test the limits of what medical professionals can say publicly.

Anaesthetist Paul Oosterhuis, who has practised in NSW’s public hospital system for more than 30 years, will front the board at a hearing on Friday, where he could be stripped of his licence after he made Facebook posts more than two weeks ago.

“AHPRA has said you can only speak good about the vaccine but I take the view you don’t have informed consent in the absence of an open, honest discussion of risks and benefits of medical procedures and advice.”

Why does The Australian call him an “anti-vax doctor” as if all vaccines are the same?  They could have said “doctor who questions Covid vax”.

The NSW Medical Board has taken only two weeks to try one of their own. How many years will it take for them to read papers on Vitamin D, Zinc, B6, Hydroychloroquine, Ivermectin, Budesonide, and all the nutrients and non-profitable medicines that might help NSW patients?

What’s more important — Pfizer profits, or sick people?

I signed this petition

Supporting Dr Paul Oosterhuis

Dr. Paul Oosterhuis is an Australian anaesthetist with over thirty years experience, including in critical care and resuscitation, who urgently needs your support. He is facing a hearing by the Medical Board of NSW for posting information on social media regarding COVID-19. His posts related to early treatment and prophylaxis, PCR tests, and risk-benefit calculations regarding COVID-19 vaccination and lockdowns (scroll down for details). His hearing is on September 3rd. Please help him by signing and sharing this petition.

https://doctors4covidethics.org/supporting-dr-oosterhuis/

Even if your signature doesn’t help in today’s grilling, it helps in the long run.

Stand up for free speech. Let doctors know you will not let them be threatened or silenced.

h/t V

Photo adapted from smoke image by Viktor Talashuk on Unsplash

9.9 out of 10 based on 91 ratings

It’s open war on Ivermectin now

Google Search, Ivermectin graph.

Google searches in Australia for “ivermectin”.

Word about Ivermectin is spreading in Australia, so much so that our Chief Medical Officer, Paul Kelly, and “news” outlets felt the need to fire shots across the bow. As predicted the drug was labeled as a horse dewormer used by fringe people and crazies.  If the drug didn’t threaten sinecures and profits,  it could have been called a Nobel Prize winning Wonder Drug used by 200 million people.

In an extraordinary turn, the Chief Medical Officer staked his reputation on something that is obviously flat out wrong and easily shown to be so. In another remarkable move, the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia advised pharmacists to refuse legal prescriptions if the patient didn’t answer in a politically correct manner.  (Who needs doctors?)

Here’s the Chief Medical Officer of Australia, who has apparently not read many papers on Ivermectin:

There’s no evidence to support the use of ivermectin to treat Covid-19. Don’t look for magic cures online, and don’t rely on what’s being peddled on the internet, because none of them work.”

Australia’s chief medical officer, Prof Paul Kelly, pleaded with the public not to take unproven medicine like ivermectin to treat Covid-19.

“The reality is, there are many trials that have been done into ivermectin, not a single one of them have shown to be effective,” he said.

– The Guardian, but also the ABC national news

There is not a single trial, there are 63 trials involving more than 26,000 people, often medical workers, that show that ivermectin may help prevent infection in around five out of six people if used prophylactically. If used as an early treatment it may help 60% of people or more.

Paul Kelly wants us to trust him with our lives but he has not taken the time to read even one study on Ivermectin?

And none of the journalists at the press conference today have apparently read one either.

Ivermectin, safety trials, Covid, 63 trials. RCT. Prevention. Treatment. Mortality.

h/t to Lance, ColA, Nezysquared, John Droz, Jim Simpson, Helen D, Clarence.t, Destroyer69, RobB,  Christine K. Popeye26, David A, Konrad, Old Ozzie and the FLCCC.

 

Ivermectin is so safe it’s been handed out en masse by illiterate non-medical staff in remote Africa:

Ivermectin has continually proved to be astonishingly safe for human use. Indeed, it is such a safe drug, with minimal side effects, that it can be administered by non-medical staff and even illiterate individuals in remote rural communities, provided that they have had some very basic, appropriate training. This fact has helped contribute to the unsurpassed beneficial impact that the drug has had on human health and welfare around the globe, especially with regard to the campaign to fight Onchocerciasis.

—  Crump and Omura, 2011, . doi: 10.2183/pjab.87.13

Like all drugs, ivermectin has side effects, risks and conflicts with other medications, so seek medical advice. But given the low cost and safety, all of us should be able to go to our doctor and talk about it. Surely the lockdowns would end sooner, and people could travel more, lives would be saved, fewer mutants would arise, and more ICU beds could be kept free. The only thing that goes badly are Big Pharma profits.

Doctors have the right to prescribe this “off label” — Health Minister Greg Hunt said so. But the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia is even suggesting that pharmacists do not supply a legal prescription?

h/t to Brenda Spence

Chemists Come Between Doctor and Patient

Phillip M. Altman Quadrant Magazine

… the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia [PSA], …has decided your local neighbourhood chemists can trump prescribing doctors if they suspect the drug is being used for other than its primary designated purpose, the treatment of roundworm parasites.

PSA recommends that pharmacists do not supply ivermectin for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19. Should pharmacists be unable to establish intended use of an ivermectin prescription, supply should be declined.

 — Pharmaceutical Society of Australia alert to members

Altman has written to the PSA:

The directive by the PSA instructs pharmacists not to supply ivermectin on prescription if they deem the prescription has been written for the management of COVID-19.  This is disturbing in that the PSA has taken upon itself, for the first time of which I am aware, to interfere with the sacred doctor-patient relationship by denying a medication, considered necessary by a doctor and legally prescribed, for a potentially serious infection.

The PSA has clearly overreached the boundary of the profession and should immediately withdraw this advice.

Phillip Altman BPharm(Hons), MSc, PhD
Clinical Trial and Regulatory Affairs Consultant

Read it all at Quadrant, and if you are a member of the PSA, send them an email.

There might be some interesting legal cases arising from relatives of any injured party who was refused a legal script…

—————–BACKGROUNDER ON IVERMECTIN————————-

The wonder drug that disappeared

Keep reading  →

9.3 out of 10 based on 110 ratings

GoogleCash: How tainted money from Google bought off Conservative Media

Ever wonder where the NeverTrumper Conservatives came from?

The Media is the problem. Magnifying Glass.In 2018 someone caught a top dog at Google bragging that they had donated money to conservative think tanks and magazines to get them to go easy on Google and not criticise their anti-Trump and anti-conservative bias. Emerald Robinson heard the rumors, and waited while the Wall Street Journal sat on the story. “The tape sounded like a smoking gun” she said, but nothing happened.

Finally, after she got confirmation from an insider, she broke the story on Twitter, hoping the WSJ would get into gear. Instead she was attacked by the National Review editor, who she hadn’t named, but who must have been feeling guilty because he did the full flame-throwing mockery non denial response. Later Breitbart and Wired ran stories, but a whole lot of others didn’t.

So this is partly a story of the complete sell-out of National Review, but it’s also a tale of all the other media that didn’t shine a light on it. Readership sank, the NeverTrumpers were shifted sideways to non-positions on a non-magazine, but the NationalReview board took a bad situation and made it worse.  Read Emerald Robinson’s withering conclusion:

How The National Review Sold Its Soul to Google

Emerald Robinson

Did the editors of the National Review learn anything from this debacle? Of course not. The feckless Rich Lowry recently handed the magazine over to the world’s only living Evan McMullin voter Ramesh Ponnuru — who was absolutely nobody’s choice to steer the magazine back to popularity. (If anything, Ramesh Ponnuru represents an even greater slide into snide effeminacy than Lowry, and few thought that was possible.) Defeat seems to be the brand for these boys. In any culture war, Rich Lowry and the gang have always been the first to stand athwart history, crying: “We surrender first!” They’ve been so weak and defeatist during the Trump years that a year’s subscription to the magazine could be marketed as an estrogen supplement.

Meanwhile the funding of the magazine now relies even more heavily on Big Tech money: the back page of the June 1, 2021 issue was a full-page Facebook ad. Inside the same issue, in case you missed the point, there was a two-page ad from Google. The National Review didn’t bother trying to win back its old subscribers by becoming more conservative. Instead, it flipped them a giant middle finger. This final insult might lead us to think the unthinkable about the soy boys who sank Buckley’s flagship. The same feeble metrosexuals who attacked the Covington Catholic boys, and printed pro-Jeffrey Epstein articles, and tried to discredit Carter Page, and pushed the Russia Hoax might not actually be conservatives after all. Their role does not seem to be halting the Left. Their role seems to be: pretending to be conservative in order to persuade actual conservatives to lose gracefully to the Left.

Conservatives must finally recognize something that’s very depressing and very important: the conservative intellectual movement in America didn’t just fail. It aided and abetted the Left for money. The Left bought off the Right’s leading conservative intellectuals. And its think tanks. And its “flagship” magazines. This is not hyperbole or conjecture. I’ve got the receipts. Until conservatives understand the depth and breadth of that betrayal, they won’t have any chance of rebuilding that movement out of the ashes any time soon.

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Thursday Open Thread

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Two top FDA docs step down over booster shots

Dr Marion Gruber and Dr Phillip Krause were not just at the FDA, they had been there for 30 years and were heading up the teams that decided last week to approve Pfizer for 16 year olds last week.

Two Top FDA Vaccine Regulators Are Set to Depart During a Crucial Period

Noah Weiland and Sharon LaFraniere, New York Times

Gruber and Krause were upset about the Biden administration’s recent announcement that adults should get a coronavirus booster vaccination eight months after they received their second shot, according to people familiar with their thinking.

Neither believed there was enough data to justify offering booster shots yet, the people said, and both viewed the announcement, amplified by President Joe Biden, as pressure on the FDA to quickly authorize them.

They are worried about that Israeli data showing people vaccinated in January only had 16% protection left in July.

White House officials have stressed that the plan for Americans to start receiving boosters next month was uniformly endorsed by the most senior federal health officials, including Dr. Janet Woodcock, the acting FDA commissioner. They have described the need to develop a booster plan as urgent in light of growing evidence that the vaccines lose potency over time — a trend that they fear suggests the vaccines’ protection against severe disease and hospitalization will also soon weaken.

 Remember this graph of the Israeli data — the one that shocked the markets in July?

Vaccine efficacy Isreal, Graph, Coronavirus

Vaccine efficacy Israel.

The January cohort (blue) may have included the highest risk people, so perhaps some immune responses won’t fold as fast in other groups. But even in the success at preventing hospitalization lies bad news. The vaccines (mostly Pfizer) were still useful at preventing hospitalization 82% of the time — but that means nearly one out of five of the highest risk people aren’t protected, even though they are double vaccinated. This might be workable if the vaccines stopped transmission, but they’re only 50% effective in stopping the virus spreading.

So it’s not surprising the Biden Administration wants to start the booster shots in just three weeks, but the FDA hasn’t done the safety checks yet. It’s an IPCC-climate-science type quandary where the outcome is known before the investigation:

…FDA regulators are in the position of trying to determine whether booster shots are safe and effective after the White House — and their own agency head, Woodcock — already endorsed administering them.

“This process has been the reverse of what we would normally expect in vaccine policy,” with the administration announcing plans based on a certain outcome before regulators can complete their review, said Jason L. Schwartz, an associate professor of health policy at the Yale School of Public Health.

Meanwhile in Israel the third booster dose is now so normalized (after all of three weeks) that the old two-dose-passports might get tossed in the bin. That ticket to freedom is now just a five or six month pass. Three-Vax can lock out the Two-Vax.

Yahoo News has the New York Times article.

9.8 out of 10 based on 60 ratings