Did the ivermectin ban cost lives?

It appears that we live in a reality where doctors are censored and early treatments such as ivermectin are banned, apparently to ensure public confidence in the government’s vaccine rollout is not undermined.

AHPRA and National Boards threatened doctors with regulatory action on March 9, 2021 if they made any statements that ‘undermined public confidence in the vaccination rollout’. The TGA also banned ivermectin’s use for the prevention or treatment of Covid in September 2021 because, according to the TGA, if people had access to it they may not get vaccinated. Are we seeing a trend?

In whose interests are decisions really being made? Ivermectin is safe, cheap, fully approved, and has been shown effective in the prevention and treatment of Covid, as will be demonstrated. As repeatedly outlined in Senate estimates by Martin Fletcher, CEO of AHPRA, doctors can use their clinical judgment and the best available evidence to treat their patients – except they can’t in this country because of excessive government overreach. These decisions do not seem to make any medical sense, let alone resemble public protection. Is it possible that the TGA, being 96 per cent funded by the pharmaceutical industry, is influencing restrictions and approvals? Some in the medical industry have asked the question now, and in the past, including a ‘scathing review’ from the BMJ in July of 2022. The TGA has always maintained that their decisions are made independent of financial attachment. Even so, a Goldman Sachs analyst suggested in a 2018 report, ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model? These questions arise when trying to explain the banning of ivermectin as a safe, Nobel prize-winning, WHO essential medicine which showed a strong signal of benefit, under the banner of sudden safety concerns.

What the TGA does is to cite safety and a lack of evidence against ivermectin, and then instead it goes in favour of vaccines only provisionally-approved, novel, poorly tested, and lacking in safety data. These are vaccines that in reality don’t work well and at the same time have the highest rate of adverse events of any therapeutic ever prescribed, according to government information outlets, both in Australia and overseas.

On September 10, 2021, a delegate of the Secretary of the Department of Health considered the advice provided by the Advisory Committee on Medicines Scheduling (ACMS) and made the decision to amend the Poisons Standard by creating a new Appendix D listing for ivermectin, and thus eliminated its use as an off-label treatment option for Covid. This occurred with reference to subsection 52E(1) of the Therapeutic Goods Act 1989, in particular paragraph (f), which empowers the Secretary to act on any other matters that the Secretary considers necessary to protect public health.

The Australian Medical Professionals’ Society made a public submission to the TGA Consultation on September 29, 2022 arguing that the Poison Scheduling for ivermectin was inappropriate, not evidence-based, and not in the best interests of medicine in Australia. Our submission reviewed extensive evidence showing ivermectin use was associated with statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance for Covid. It can be argued and indeed it is, in fact, being argued here that denying Australians access to ivermectin poses a threat to public health and the secretary’s other matters were not used appropriately to protect the public.

The TGA on February 3, 2023 following a review of multiple extensively-referenced submissions decided not to amend the current Poisons Standard in relation to ivermectin, ‘for your safety’, of course. This decision continues the ban on doctors’ ability to prescribe ivermectin either in isolation or as part of a multi-drug protocol for the prevention or treatment of Covid.

In our opinion, from a scientific and medical perspective the TGA approval decisions surrounding ivermectin make no sense. The TGA banned a cheap, safe fully approved repurposed medicine that showed great promise for the prevention and treatment of Covid with 95 clinical trials worldwide. It was banned in favour of promoting a provisionally-approved (experimental) novel genetic lipid nanoparticle synthetic mRNA vaccine that was never tested for transmission, and had poor efficacy of unknown duration with what amounts to limited reliable safety data, according to the TGA’s own reports. Ivermectin efficacy has been tested in more than 90 clinical trials including more than 100,000 patients while the Advisory Committee on Vaccines (ACV) recommended Pfizer be approved on data from one study with the FDA issuing the EUA on efficacy data of 170 patients.

The risk versus benefit analysis by the TGA claims first that ivermectin safety is an issue, and secondly that the efficacy evidence base for use in Covid is not well established. Our AMPS submission addressed these two reasons for denying Australians access to ivermectin for the treatment of Covid.

AMPS showed ivermectin has a well-established safety record – ‘more than 3.7 billion doses of ivermectin have been administered to humans worldwide since the 1980s’. The TGA’s 2013 AusPar Report for ivermectin stated, ‘No significant safety concerns were found with the use of ivermectin.’ Very importantly, the report found no safety concerns even at 10 times the (then) current approved dose of 200ug/kg. The U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH) has recognised that ‘ivermectin has been widely used and is generally well tolerated’.

A recent systematic review stated ‘ivermectin at the usual doses is considered extremely safe for use in humans’. In 2018, ivermectin was added to the WHO list of Essential Medicines, and in supporting the submission for inclusion in the list, the WHO concluded that the adverse events associated with ivermectin are ‘primarily minor and transient’. The clinical evaluator in the WHO Report found that there were no significant safety concerns or serious adverse events reported with the use of ivermectin.

Ivermectin is one of the safest medications on the planet. Why, then, in 2021 the TGA decided ivermectin was all of a sudden unsafe is perplexing. Coincidentally, ivermectin was banned just as the government was about to start implementing vaccine mandates. Correlation doesn’t equal causation…

In response to claims by the TGA that there is not enough evidence of ivermectin effectiveness in Covid our submission detailed extensive evidence of efficacy. A comprehensive systematic review summarises the antiviral effects of ivermectin, including in vitro and in vivo studies over the past 50 years. Another paper titled, Ivermectin: an award-winning drug with expected antiviral activity against Covid put forward that ivermectin, an FDA-approved broad-spectrum antiparasitic agent, had demonstrated antiviral activity against a number of DNA and RNA viruses, including severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). As well as ivermectin’s antiviral benefits there is also research literature that outlines its recognised ‘anti-inflammatory capacity’.

Further, a review titled Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy of Ivermectin in the Prophylaxis and Treatment of Covid concluded:

Meta-analyses based on 18 randomised controlled treatment trials of ivermectin in Covid 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 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 has been identified.

Additionally, an online real-time meta-analysis of the clinical safety and efficacy of ivermectin in Covid disease is well worth considering and can be found at www.ivmmeta.com : as of September 9, 2022, this includes 91 studies, of which 41 were randomised controlled trials involving 11,141 patients. This resource illustrates the high level of international interest in the clinical submission of ivermectin for potential use in Covid. When taken in totality, the clinical data presented at www.ivmmeta.com presents a compelling case for the safety and efficacy of ivermectin. More than 20 countries (including India, Mexico, regions of Peru, Argentina, Japan, Dominican Republic, and Brazil) have adopted ivermectin for the management of Covid. Collectively, the studies strongly suggest that ‘ivermectin reduces the risk for Covid with very high confidence for mortality, ventilation, ICU admission, hospitalisation, progression, recovery, [number of] cases, viral clearance, and in pooled analysis… Meta-analysis using the most serious outcome measure shows 62 per cent [57-70 per cent] and 83 per cent [74-89 per cent] improvement for early treatment and prophylaxis.’

A juxtaposition of the evidence and risk-versus-benefit analysis for the provisionally-approved vaccines shows the safety and efficacy profile comparisons are not even close. To begin with, provisionally approved by definition means lacking in safety and efficacy data. To understand our confusion over the decision to ban ivermectin on safety and efficacy claims one need only look at the safety and efficacy information provided by the TGA. The TGA’s own Australian Public Assessment reports (AusPAR) for the provisional approval of Pfizer in January 2021 published prior to the vaccine rollout stated that in addition to the unknown longer-term safety and unknown duration of vaccine protection, there are other limitations with the submitted data.

The following questions have not yet been addressed:

Vaccine efficacy against asymptomatic infection and viral transmission.

The concomitant use of this vaccine with other vaccines.

Vaccine data in pregnant women and lactating mothers.

Vaccine efficacy and safety in immunocompromised individuals.

Vaccine efficacy and safety in paediatric subjects (< 16 years old).

A correlate of protection has yet to be established. The vaccine immunogenicity cannot be considered and used as the surrogate for vaccine protective efficacy at this stage, as stated by the FDA in May 2021.

Other important identified risks are anaphylaxis.

Important potential risks include vaccine-associated enhanced disease (VAED) including vaccine-associated enhanced respiratory disease (VAERD).

In September 2021 a delegate of the Secretary of the Department of Health used their power to act on any other matters that the Secretary considers necessary to protect public health to ban the Australian people from accessing ivermectin. A questionable decision that appeared to support the government’s vaccine-only strategy. Ivermectin has been proven safe, has been given in billions of doses with very low side effects, and has extensive data evidencing its effectiveness in the prevention and treatment of Covid. mRNA Covid injections have been proven neither safe nor effective, have been given in billions of doses, and have the highest rate of adverse events of any medicine in human history including rocketing all-cause mortality rates. A recent preprint analysis using the Bradford-Hill criteria demonstrates a causal link with the Covid vaccination roll-out. We appear to be experiencing what he calls an iatrogenic pandemic.

On the information presented, whose interests are served by the banning of ivermectin? Perhaps Dr Pierre Kory is onto something when he says, ‘When you see our health agencies literally working in the service of the pharmaceutical industry by destroying the credibility of repurposed drugs, it’s terrifying. They’re not working according to the interests of patients or physicians but the pharmaceutical companies.’ His comments were made in relation to the US legal case involving a group of doctors who are suing the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services for their attempt to ban the prescribing of ivermectin to treat Covid.

Banning doctors from prescribing ivermectin for the prevention or treatment of Covid does not appear to be following the science, nor does it seem to be about public protection. Ivermectin in comparison to mRNA injections is safe and effective and can save lives. If our TGA cannot follow the evidence, what are they following?

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/did-the-ivermectin-ban-cost-lives/ ?

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Covid’s cockups and conspiracies: Australia wasn’t immune

Those debating whether the deadly schemozzle of pandemic mismanagement that has cast a pall over the last three years was due to a cockup or a conspiracy should abandon binary thinking. All the evidence, from both sides of the Atlantic, indicates that there were both cockups and conspiracies and they came not as single spies but in battalions.

In the UK, the ‘Lockdown files’, a trove of 100,000 WhatsApp messages released by the Telegraph over the last week, provide a portrait of former health minister Matt Hancock as a cruel careerist and a clown better suited to appearing on ‘I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here’, which he did for a fee of hundreds of thousands of pound, rather than running Britain’s pandemic policy.

The liberty of millions of Britons was curtailed based on the whims of decision-makers who, because they were not subject to parliamentary scrutiny, simply claimed they were following the best scientific advice.

Guilt and fear were shamelessly used to enforce the draconian dictates with Hancock writing that he would ‘frighten the pants off everyone’ with a new strain to get compliance.

A fan of Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum (WEF), Hancock wrote that he hoped Covid would propel his career into the next league. He discussed with his advisers how ‘pushing on vaccines’ would be ‘the most politically beneficial thing’ to do. When Dame Kate Bingham who led the UK vaccine taskforce suggested in October 2020 that only people who were ‘at risk’ should be vaccinated, Hancock branded her as ‘wacky’ and ‘totally unreliable’.

In the US, the Twitter files made public by Elon Musk exposed a conspiracy between key members of Team Biden, agencies such as the FBI and Big Tech to help Biden get elected and to censor and smear those who criticised the government orthodoxy.

Evidence of conspiracies continues to be uncovered by House Republicans. The latest emails show that Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022 and chief medical advisor to the president from 2021 to 2022 and Dr Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, the third largest charitable foundation in the world, hid their roles in February 2020 in the writing of a scientific paper whose purpose was to cast as much doubt as possible on the fact that the Covid virus originated in a lab in Wuhan. Both pretended they played no part in the paper’s genesis but both prompted the scientists to write it, Farrar edited it and Fauci hid the fact that his agency funded research in a Wuhan lab to make bat coronaviruses more dangerous.

In view of Farrar’s role in obfuscating the origins of Covid, leading scientists such as Dr Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers University, has called for him not to take up an appointment announced last year to be the next chief scientist at the World Health Organisation.

Farrar also signed a notorious letter to the Lancet organised by Peter Daszak, the CEO of the EcoHealth Alliance who provided US tax dollars for research into bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The letter condemned as ‘conspiracy theories’ any suggestion that Covid-19 did not have a natural origin.

Conspiracies were not limited to promoting lies about the origins of Covid. As Dr Marty Makary, a professor of surgery and health policy at Johns Hopkins University said in sworn testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic’s first hearing on Tuesday 28 February, ‘The greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government’.

Makary damned public health officials for lying to the American people that Covid was spread through surface transmission, that vaccinated immunity was greater than natural immunity, that masks were effective, that myocarditis was more common after infection than vaccination, that young people benefit from a booster and that vaccine mandates would increase vaccination rates. ‘We’ve seen something that is unforgivable,’ he said, ‘and that is the weaponisation of medical research itself’.

The common link between the UK cockups and the US conspiracies is the total disregard for scientific evidence, which either didn’t exist or contradicted what policy makers wanted to do and so was ignored or discredited.

There is no comfort for Australia in any of this. Like Little Sir Echo it copied all of its pandemic policies from the US and the UK. The question is what to do now?

It is impossible to prevent cockups or conspiracies, but it is possible to make them more difficult to engage in by subjecting governments and their agencies to greater scrutiny. We could start by requiring that they table all health advice.

Agencies such as the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) need to collect more data about adverse events, for example, by requiring the same information that is collected in the US. It needs to publicly state the background rates for adverse events, the rate of these events for comparable drugs, and provide a weekly update on the rate of these events in new products so that dangerous drugs can be withdrawn as soon as warning signs appear.

The meetings of committees that advise the TGA should be publicly televised as they are in the US and anybody who advises the TGA or any other part of government on health should be required to publicly disclose any funding they receive from pharmaceutical companies or other interested parties.

The power of the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency needs to be curbed. By issuing an edict telling healthcare workers that they must do nothing to undermine confidence in the government’s response to the pandemic, it pressured health practitioners not to report adverse events or tell their patients about the potential for adverse events.

The misinformation and disinformation laws tabled by the Morrison and now by the Albanese government are also a shameless attempt to curtail totally justified criticism of pandemic polices.

Too often over the last three years, Australians’ rights and freedoms have been violated in the interest of ‘public health measures’ that were harmful.

Only by making the work of the government and its agencies fully transparent can we start to restore confidence that we will be subjected to anymore conspiracies or cockups.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/covids-cockups-and-conspiracies/

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Who qualifies for the Voice?

Alex Antic

The so-called ‘Voice to Parliament’ is a proposal for a race-based advisory body established via a referendum to amend Australia’s Constitution. We have only just commenced this corrosive process and already, we are seeing more questions than answers.

I oppose the Voice as a matter of principle. It is a cynical attempt to divide Australians by race and distract them from those contemporary issues which the government would otherwise be defending like the cost of living, inflation, and mortgage stress.

That said, one of the key issues being whispered around the dinner tables and front bars of our country, involves the question of who will qualify as a representative of the Voice and on what terms? To put it more bluntly, who will be deemed an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander? It appears to be a question that politics is too afraid to ask but is as critical an issue as any associated with this frolic.

During the last round of Senate estimates, I asked the Attorney General’s Department that very question, and the responses were underwhelming to say the least. After some bureaucratic fumbling, I was directed to the three-part test which has been used to determine Aboriginality since the Mabo High Court decision of 1992. I explained that I was familiar with the test, which has three criteria: descent or lineage, self-identification, and acceptance by the local Indigenous community. However, what I wanted the department to explain was how descent is established. In other words, how does one prove that they are Indigenous for the purposes of the ‘Voice,’ or any legal matter (for example, government grants)?

One would think this a simple question for a government seeking to establish a Constitutionally enshrined advisory board on Indigenous matters but, just as the Department of Health couldn’t tell me what a woman is, the Attorney General’s Department couldn’t seem to tell me how Indigenous people are identified, so I pressed the issue. Is one considered Indigenous if they have one grandparent, or one great, great, great grandparent, who was Indigenous?

Predictably, I was informed that this line of questioning was ‘not appropriate’, and the Labor minister at the table called my line of questioning ‘borderline racist’. I wonder if the minister views all Australians who are concerned about the lack of transparency regarding the Voice to Parliament in this way. It’s unfortunate that name-calling, guilt-tripping, and accusing opponents of various ‘isms’ and ‘phobias’ is all they have, given their lack of clear answers.

Furthermore, when I asked whether the department was concerned about people falsely identifying as indigenous, I was informed that this question was too ‘hypothetical’.

One would think that getting this simple matter bolted down would be a top priority for the Labor government, but this is not the case. The reason is simple: the ‘Voice’ is not about helping Indigenous Australians, but about further expanding the bureaucratic class, trashing our heritage, and exacerbating the victimhood mindset that the left uses to make people dependants.

We can expect more name-calling as the debate goes on. Such accusations are a cudgel that the left have been able to wield for too long. We must stop being afraid of being called names. If an opponent resorts to such actions, you know you are winning.

Meanwhile, details about the ‘Voice,’ such as who will qualify, how candidates will be selected remain opaque. Surely the millions of dollars the ‘Voice’ referendum will cost taxpayers could be used in a more beneficial way.

Fundamentally, the details of the ‘Voice’ are not the issue. Australia is already too divided along the lines of race due to the woke takeover of our bureaucracies, especially our education system, and the media. White children are taught to be ashamed of their heritage, and Indigenous children are taught that they are being held back by ‘systemic racism’. The fundamental assumption behind the ‘Voice’ is that Indigenous people don’t have a say in our political system – a claim that is blatantly untrue.

We do not need more racial division or welfare state solutions in Australia; we need unity, appreciation of our heritage, and practical solutions. As my colleague Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has said, ‘We don’t need a voice, we need ears.’ Never mind an Indigenous ‘Voice to Parliament’, Senator Nampijinpa Price is an Indigenous voice in Parliament. Of course, her approach to Indigenous issues is not well received by Labor and the Greens. If they and the bureaucrats in Canberra listened to her voice, they wouldn’t get to feel good about themselves for doing nothing except unnecessarily altering our Constitution to create more jobs for bureaucrats in Canberra.

Identity politics and victim culture, two tools in the so-called progressive playbook for gaining and maintaining control, are tearing this country apart. Australians should not be divided by their race. The politics of sentimentality must come to an end. If the government can’t even tell us how Aboriginality is defined for legal purposes, why are we even discussing the ‘Voice to Parliament’? Simply put, if Labor were interested in helping aboriginal people, they’d do that, rather than wasting our time and money over the ‘Voice.’

Saying no to the Voice doesn’t make you a racist. Australians will not be bullied.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/who-qualifies-for-the-voice/ ?

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Biggest problem with a four-day work week trial

There is currently a push on in Australia to cut the working week from five days to four days. Meanwhile, there is a push on in South Korea to increase the working week from 52 hours to 69 hours.

This alone probably tells you everything you need to know about those two countries.

But it’s also proof of yet another weird post-pandemic problem that has emerged: Nobody really knows how much they work anymore.

Ever since the chattering classes have been allowed to work from home and never really came back to the office, the line between work and family hasn’t so much been blurred as completely erased so that the personal and professional parts of people’s lives are now just one gluggy mess.

Even as I write this, I am pulled over in the family car on the way to a job for one boss while filing this copy for another. My last Zoom meeting was held at school pick-up and my inbox is constantly interrupted by YouTube videos about Minecraft and tweens doing shopping dares at Target.

Compounding the problem is that work is like a gas. It expands to fill whatever space it is given. And so when there are no boundaries to work, it just keeps piling up ad infinitum. There will always be something else to do, and it will always be the person already working the most who will do it.

As the old saying goes, if you want something done, ask a busy man. And it’s a saying everyone in my working life seems to be very familiar with.

But maybe that gas can also be compressed. Maybe if we officially reduce the working week to four days, everyone will just do five days’ worth of work in the same time – or at least the ones who do all the work in the first place.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/lifestyle/smart/can-we-reduce-our-working-week-when-lines-between-professional-and-personal-are-blurred/news-story/5dd2fc5a5db6998dc6044886b9b901b6

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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