Canadian Doctors & Scientists Petition Government To Make Ivermectin Available For COVID Treatment
"A potential treatment for COVID-19 exists but is unavailable in Canada, and the government won’t examine the evidence. Why?"
The question asked above by Jacalyn Duffin, MD, PhD, a hematologist and historian who held the Hannah Chair of the History of Medicine at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada from 1988 to 2017, is one that has been asked by tens and thousands of doctors and scientist around the world.
She, among thousands of others, have signed a new petition supporting the recognition and availability of Ivermectin for prophylaxis and early outpatient treatment of COVID-19.
The petition was launched on October 26th and will close on the 25th of December. It has nearly 14,000 signatures as of today. It was initiated by Dr. Kanji Nakatsu, a Professor Emeritus of Medicine, Biomedical and Molecular Sciences at Queens University.
“We, the undersigned, physicians, scientists, and other concerned residents of Canada, call upon the Government of Canada to urgently examine the evidence in favour of ivermectin and consider making ivermectin available immediately to Canadians as a schedule II medication, obtained directly from a pharmacist.“
Dr. Nakatsu rationale is based on the following evidence.
Ivermectin is safe. A third of the world’s population (2.5 billion) has taken it for parasitic infections. In almost thirty years from 1992, the World Health Organization and Uppsala University VigiAccess pharmacovigilance database report only 16 deaths and 4673 adverse effects.
Ivermectin is readily available, sometimes without charge, in several countries, including Argentina, Bangladesh, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Czechia, Dominican Republic, Egypt, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Iran, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Portugal, Slovakia, South Africa, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe.
Owing to this ubiquity of use and the reduced COVID-19 impact some of these same countries, multiple trials have examined ivermectin as prophylaxis and treatment (summarized here) Dr. Tess Lawrie founder of the British Ivermectin Recommendation Development Panel conducted a World Health Organization analysis of these trials concluding that ivermectin use corresponds to 86% fewer cases and 68% fewer deaths. She argues that future studies could refine dosing but should not use placebo control because it would be unethical not to offer everyone some of the active drug.
Ivermectin is already approved in Canada as an anti-parasitic; it is generic and inexpensive.
Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID has been approved in several countries throughout this pandemic, but in many others it's been banned and in many cases labelled as potentially dangerous. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), for example, has not authorized or approved ivermectin for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19 in people or animals. According to the FDA, Ivermectin has not been shown to be safe or effective.
This is odd given the fact that for many years ivermectin has been used to overcome several human diseases in billions of people. We are talking about ivermectin quality and dosage appropriate for human use, not the veterinary version.
According to the University of Oxford, who is currently investigating treatments like ivermectin and its ability to reduce serious illness and the severity of symptoms from COVID-19, “Ivermectin is safe, broad spectrum antiparasitic drug which is in wide use globally to treat parasitic infections.”
With known antiviral properties, ivermectin has been shown to reduce SARS-CoV-2 replication in laboratory studies. Small pilot studies show that early administration with ivermectin can reduce viral load and the duration of symptoms in some patients with mild COVID-19. Even though ivermectin is used routinely in some countries to treat COVID-19, there is little evidence from large-scale randomised controlled trials to demonstrate that it can speed up recovery from the illness or reduce hospital admission.
Here is a good summary of the science that’s emerged regarding ivermectin and COVID. It was put together by the Canadian COVID Care Alliance, a group of more than one hundred Canadian doctors, scientists and other academics.
Reducing viral replication essentially means that infection will not last as long as the virus cannot spread throughout the body as easily, allowing the immune system to more effectively rid the virus. This potential is what interested people in using ivermectin to begin with.
According to a paper published in the American Journal of Therapeutics,
Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance. Furthermore, results from numerous controlled prophylaxis trials report significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19 with the regular use of ivermectin. Finally, the many examples of ivermectin distribution campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality indicate that an oral agent effective in all phases of COVID-19 has been identified.
What's unique about the Ivermectin debate is the fact that open debate has been prevented. Doctors and scientists willing to discuss Ivermectin as a potential treatment have been barred from doing so. Social media fact checkers have plagued posts about Ivermectin, labelling many of them as false and/or misleading despite many of them being written by experts in the field.
This type of censorship on Facebook, for example, who has already deleted and censored more than 100 million pieces of content throughout this pandemic, has people asking even more questions about information that calls into question official government narratives.
How can so many doctors, scientists and papers published in peer-reviewed literature be completely false and not even worthy of discussion within the mainstream?
Joe Rogan recently welcomed Dr. Sanjay Gupta onto his podcast to discuss many things related to COVID, including the fact that CNN falsely claimed that Joe Rogan had taken a livestock dewormer when he came down with COVID.
This was a story we covered in detail through a video we put out on YouTube. In our video, we discussed how CNN had misled its audience about Rogan taking a ‘horse dewormer’, and that it was dishonest for CNN to edit Joe Rogan’s Instagram video to make him look sick.
If Ivermectin was approved for COVID early on in the pandemic, how would that have impacted vaccine uptake? Would emergency authorizations for vaccines be allowed if other treatments were available? No.