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Matt Taibi: “Ivermectin: Can a Drug Be "Right-Wing"?”
Related: COVID medications, ethics in medicine, gears of the machine, SARS-CoV-2 aka COVID-19 aka Coronavirus
re: Matt Taibbi: Why Has "Ivermectin" Become a Dirty Word?
re: Sebastian Rushworth MD: “62% reduction in the relative risk of dying among covid patients treated with Ivermectin”
re: Ivermectin
It is revolting to see what ethics in medicine have come to.
Ivermectin: Can a Drug Be "Right-Wing"?
by Matt Taibbi., 25 June 2021. Emphasis added.
A potential Covid-19 treatment has become hostage to a larger global fight between populists and anti-populists.
On December 31st of last year, an 80 year-old Buffalo-area woman named Judith Smentkiewicz fell ill with Covid-19. She was rushed by ambulance to Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital in Williamsville, New York, where she was put on a ventilator. Her son Michael and his wife flew up from Georgia, and were given grim news. Judith, doctors said, had a 20% chance at survival, and even if she made it, she’d be on a ventilator for a month.
As December passed into the New Year, Judith’s health declined. Her family members, increasingly desperate, had been doing what people in the Internet age do, Googling in search of potential treatments. They saw stories about the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin, learning among other things that a pulmonologist named Pierre Kory had just testified before the Senate that the drug had a “miraculous” impact on Covid-19 patients. The family pressured doctors at the hospital to give Judith the drug. The hospital initially complied, administering one dose on January 2nd. According to her family’s court testimony, a dramatic change in her condition ensued.
“In less than 48 hours, my mother was taken off the ventilator, transferred out of the Intensive Care Unit, sitting up on her own and communicating,” the patient’s daughter Michelle Kulbacki told a court.
After the reported change in Judith’s condition, the hospital backtracked and refused to administer more....
Hospitals fought hard, hiring expensive law firms, at times going to extraordinary lengths to refuse treatment even with dying patients who’d exhausted all other options...Lorigo claims the hospital initially refused to obey the court order, which led to the filing of a contempt motion, which in turn led to a pair of counter-motions and another confrontation before another befuddled Judge named James Orel.
“Why wouldn't this be tried if she's not improving?” the Chicago Tribune quoted Orel as saying. “Why does the hospital object to providing this medication?”
...
This past week, for instance, Oxford University announced it was launching a large-scale clinical trial. The study has already recruited more than 5,000 volunteers, and its announcement says what little is known to be true: that “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,” that it’s “a well-known medicine with a good safety profile,” and “because of the early promising results in some studies, it is already being widely used to treat COVID-19 in several countries.”
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Ivermectin has suffered the same fate as thousands of other news topics since Donald Trump first announced his run for the presidency nearly six years ago, cleaved in two to inhabit separate factual universes for left and right audiences...
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WIND: follow the science? What science? You cannot have science when discussion is suppressed—that’s anti-science. And when Facebook cancels you just for mentioning Ivermectin and/or when your employer fires you for talking about it... there can be no science. No doctor in his/her right mind is going to speak openly about it.
Follow the money first of all. And the politics. Ethics in medicine is an oxymoron.
