Category: pandemic

Vaccinations in school; why shouldn’t they be the parent’s “choice”?

February 12, 2022 • 12:20 pm

I have floated this question before, but want to raise it today to see if I can understand a distinction. And that distinction is between many people’s argument that they cannot be forced to get a Covid vaccination to stay on the job, but at the same time they allow their children to be forcibly vaccinated to attend public school.

Now there is no law in the U.S. saying that you must be vaccinated, period, though of course there are mandates specifying that you can’t work unless you’re vaccinated. New York City’s mandate for municipal workers went into effect today, after the Supreme Court turned down an emergency request yesterday to stall it. Up to 3,000 people might have lost their jobs this morning.  And yet many people still refuse to get vaccinated even if it means the loss of their livelihood. I see them on the news every night, making loud protests about their “rights” being violated by vaccine mandates. Along with that goes the mantra “this is my body and therefore it’s my choice.” And so they get fired, and some of them die, while others infect their fellow citizens.

This mass protest has culminated in the Great Truckers’ Protest of last week, and I hope it’s over now. (Did Trudeau show some moxie?) It was an act of civil disobedience, and therefore warrants punishment, but I had little sympathy for them.

What I don’t understand is this: these same people who assert their rights and bodily autonomy—and I see no “right” to be able to endanger the public safety by infecting others—make not a peep when they get shots for their kids to go to public school.

Not everyone understands that in the U.S., and presumably other countries, any child wishing to attend public school has to get a series of immunizations,

Here, for instance, are the vaccinations required for a child in to attend public school in Illinois.  I count 14 jabs needed to stave off ten diseases. That’s a lot of shots!

Click charts to enlarge:

 

 

Now why aren’t the parents protesting this forcible vaccination? Isn’t that a violation of either the parents’ or the students’ “rights”? If you’re one of the many who talk about “rights” and “my decision”, and yet still want to walk around in public, yes, it’s certainly hypocritical to not bring up “rights” for your children as well. But, except for a few fringe anti-vaxxers, or believers who want religious exemptions for their kids (I’m not sure these are even allowed for school vaccination), we hear no talk of rights for school immunization.

Is this hypocrisy? Well, I can think of several reasons why you could say “no”:

a.) The school vaccines have been proven safe and effective over years of trial, while, of course COVID vaccines have been around just a bit more than a year. The parents could say, “These vaccines work and don’t have bad side effects, so I won’t speak of “rights” But then you could ask them how much safety must be proven before vaccination becomes mandatory. As I recall, when the polio vaccine came out, it became mandatory within just a few years, and people were begging to get it.

b.) You could say that you have the right to decide for your own body, but not for the bodies of your kids, and therefore they should get vaccinated. But this doesn’t work because parents make decisions about the medical treatment of their kids all the time, especially before the kid is sentient enough to make its own choice, which is at a pretty advanced age. For school vaccinations, the parents have to agree by the time the child is five or six.  (Note as well that parents feel that have the right to decide their children’s religious beliefs before the kids are old enough to choose!)

c.) The parents could say that they have the alternative of no employment if they’re not vaccinated, but there’s no alternative for their kids if they’re not vaccinated. That’s not entirely true: there is homeschooling, which is free, and private (often religious) schools that don’t require vaccination. But The latter are often pricey.

d.)_ They are willing to risk getting Covid, but the children are too young to afford that risk. But this reverts back to a) above: if the vaccine isn’t risky for your children, why is it risky for you? (In fact, it’s more dangerous for adults to get Covid than for kids).

There is more to discuss here, but I won’t get into it. I’m just curious why parents who obediently let their kids be vaccinated (even with COVID shots for college!) turn into enraged don’t-tread-on-me” types when it’s their own jabs at issue.

If there’s a rational answer, I would say that a)—proven safety and effectiveness—would be the one, but of course the Covid data so far shows that the risk is minor compared to the effectiveness. Certainly we know that the chance of illness, hospitalization, and death is greatly reduced for adults if they get the shot (we’re talking about resistance of adults to getting vaccinated). Vaccination for adults is, without doubt, a net good save for those who are medically compromised.

But I suspect that more is at stake here—perhaps ideology.  People have largely lost control of their lives during the pandemic, and refusing shots is a way of getting control, and also of showing the government that they can’t control you. This is likely connected with a conservative or libertarian ideology that opposes government intervention. In the case of the truckers, it seems to me they’re pissed off about a lot of things, including  loss of jobs and rising prices, and protesting against vaccines is the nucleus around which these resentments coalesce.

But maybe I’m not asking a meaningful question. It’s just that when I see a bunch of angry people yelling about “rights” and “bodily autonomy” on television, it makes me wonder whey they go all quiet when the needle goes into the arms of their kids.

A reader’s Claptonesque vaccine rant

January 30, 2022 • 9:30 am

The politically charged topics I get the most pushback about, whether it be in personal emails or comments (not all of which I post) are two: transsexual issues and criticism of bogus remedies for Covid. I can’t tell you the rancor I’ve seen about my view that we should be very wary of letting biological men who have assumed the gender of women compete in women’s sports. For that I have of course been called a “transphobe”, but I brush off that invective for I have no fear or hatred of transsexuals; sports is an issue of fairness towards women, and you can’t ignore the evidence. And yes, there is evidence about the performance, physiology, and morphology of men who transition (with or without medical treatment), and it’s not favorable towards the idea that they should take part in in women’s sports.

And of course when I went after ivermectin, people tried to trounce me, even though there was no evidence that it worked to prevent or cure Covid-19 (and there still isn’t).(I got a long email, for example, from Heather Heying, who very politely tried to convince me of the error of my ways.) But most of the ivermectin-pushers have no sense of the scientific reality: even if ivermectin did work, it wouldn’t work nearly as well as vaccinations, for the latter have been tested thoroughly and if Ivermectin had equally profound effects, we’d know it already. Taking all the side effects into account, you’re way, way better getting the jab than taking ivermectin, a drug used in humans for non-covid purposes like parasitic lice and worms.

I just realized that one of the reasons I write here, and what gets me most fired up, is when people misuse science to promote their ideological ends. Both ivermectin and transsexual issues have involved that kind of misuse, as does the current flap in New Zealand, where a tsunami of Wokeness is getting the government and universities to promote Mātauranga Māori, or Māori “ways of knowing”, as a form of science that should be taught as coequal to science in the classroom. While MM contains kernels of empirical truth, the whole movement is little more than an ideology of valorizing the oppressed being turned into science. (This is also happening in the U.S. with nonsense like “sex in humans is not binary” being promulgated as sacred truths.)

Others can believe such nonsense if they want, but when they try to force it on others, or teach it as “science” or “fact” to others, it becomes something I can’t abide. As Hitchens said, more or less, “you can have your toys if you want, but you can’t make me play with them.” Nor can you make my children play with them—in this case “my children” being those who haven’t been exposed to (or who don’t know how to assess) scientific data.

But I digress. It was just a passing epiphany. At any rate, speaking of Covid-19, I got this rather unhinged comment trying to force its way onto my website this morning. I don’t know why reader “Alex” (this would have been his screen name) is so heated up about vaccinatoon, but he seems to be one of those Claptonesque people who cannot abide the idea of being forced to be vaccinated. These people apparently don’t realize that for children to attend public school in America, they need to get many vaccinations. Otherwise, “no school for you.”

I’ll leave it to readers to respond to the comment below. Say what you will to “Alex”, and I’ll send him a link to the comments here.  As always, try to be polite (granted, it’s hard with a hothead like this), and abide by the Roolz, even though Alex didn’t.

Here’s what I got:

A new comment on the post “Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying go unvaccinated for Covid, take and promote Ivermectin instead” is waiting for your approval

Author: Alex

Comment:It’s January 2022. Do you still want to keep banging the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” drum? Because, despite all of your willingness to smear and deride the unvaccinated, I believe those authoritarians who want to continuously ramp up punitive measures against the unvaccinated in the face of the facts before us are the true, anti-scientific deplorables..It’s appalling to me that people want to coerce others into getting this vaccine through loss of livelihood, stripping of freedoms, and even criminal penalties, especially given that we don’t have legal recourse against these companies. That fact alone to me excuses anyone for turning down the vaccine. It’s fine if you personally want to take that risk (I did myself), but to want punitive measures or even to just endlessly ridicule those who decide not to take those odds is reprehensible to me, given the more dubious efficacy of these vaccines than promised and the other repeated breaches of trust from our institutions through this entire pandemic.And I say this as someone who got two shots of Moderna, so you can’t hurl unoriginal “anti-vaxx” insults my way. Seriously, you all need to realize that the tone and comments expressed on this page are totally unconvincing and alienate those like me from your positions. Do what you will with that information.

What I did with this information is given Alex an entire post to rant about the vaccination. That’s better than just ditching his comment as medically uninformed and potentially dangerous, which was my first inclination.

Eric Clapton argues that pharmaceutical advertising hypnotized him into getting the covid jab that did him in

January 25, 2022 • 9:00 am

The more Eric Clapton opens his gob about vaccination, the dumber he looks. He would be well advised to shut up and play his axe.  While there is a minute possibility that Clapton did indeed get sick from his injection, I suspect that if he is now chronically ill, it may well be due to something else. But even if it was the jab that did him in, he has no business trying to persuade the world to avoid vaccination against Covid.There are enough data on immediate side effects to show that he is a real outlier and not the norm.  And the idea that he was hypnotized into getting the jab. . . . well, I have no words.

See the tweet at the bottom for what is also my reaction.

Below is the first part of a two-part interview of Clapton by “The real music observer”, David Spuria. (A second part is promised.) This one is eighteen minutes long, and prompted the NY Post article below it.

The most bizarre part of this video is Clapton’s claim that he was manipulated by Big Pharma advertising into getting a covid jab. The notes below, which are from the interview, were reprinted in the Post.

Eric Clapton’s career “had almost gone anyway” until his campaign against conventional medicine took off.

The 76-year-old musician went on the Real Music Observer YouTube channel to discuss how his life has changed since reluctantly taking AstraZeneca’s therapy in 2021. Clapton has since become outspoken about his anti-vaccination stance.

He claimed that he’d been duped into getting the COVID-19 jab by subliminal messaging in pharmaceutical advertising — and urged others not to fall for it.

“Whatever the memo was, it hadn’t reached me,” he said, referring to the “mass formation hypnosis” conspiracy theory, which gained traction in 2021 as part of anti-vaccine propaganda. (In related circles, it’s also been called “mass formation psychosis.”)

Credited to Belgian psychologist Mattias Desmet, the theory essentially points to a sort of mind control that has taken over society, allowing for unscrupulous leaders to easily manipulate populations into, for example, accepting vaccines or wearing face masks.

“Then I started to realize there was really a memo, and a guy, Mattias Desmet [professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium], talked about it,” Clapton continued. “And it’s great. The theory of mass formation hypnosis. And I could see it then. Once I kind of started to look for it, I saw it everywhere.”

JAC: That is known in the trade as “confirmation bias.”

Clapton recalled “seeing little things on YouTube which were like subliminal advertising,” he said.

His “preexisting condition”, which he claims caused him to get really sick after the jab, seems to be a bad back caused by a nerve inflammation. Well, perhaps. But to blame your taking the jab on subliminal manipulation—hypnosis, for crying out loud!—is risible.

:. 

More from The Post and the video, including his collaboration on anti-vax music with Van Morrison:

The former Cream guitarist also talked about his efforts with fellow British songwriter Van Morrison to speak up on behalf of other artists against vaccine requirements.

“My career had almost gone anyway. At the point where I spoke out, it had been almost 18 months since I’d kind of been forcibly retired,” he said, as pandemic restrictions shut down live events for months.

“I joined forces with Van and I got the tip Van was standing up to the measures and I thought, ‘Why is nobody else doing this?’ … so I contacted him.”

He said Morrison, 76, complained that he wasn’t “allowed” to freely object to vaccine requirements.

“I was mystified, I seemed to be the only person that found it exciting or even appropriate. I’m cut from a cloth where if you tell me I can’t do something, I really want to know why,” the “Cocaine” singer said.

He sounds calm and rational (the British accent helps), but what’s coming out of his mouth is nonsense. Now of course he has the right to say anything he wants, including his theory of “mass hypnosis”, but we can fault Clapton for trying to persuade others to avoid a preventive that has been shown to work. As he says, “I had a tool [his music], and I could do something about that” [i.e., promulgating his crazy views].

Click on the screenshot to read the Post article, though if you watch the 18-minute video above, you don’t really need to. 

I think this tweet is appropriate.

h/t: Barry

Bari Weiss: anti-vaxer?

January 22, 2022 • 11:30 am

In this segment of Bill Maher’s show last night, Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres from New York, Bari Weiss, and Maher discuss Covid-19, with the topic being “whether it’s time to move past Covid restrictions and get back to normal.” Weiss and Maher seem to say “yes,” while Torres urges caution. 

Bari Weiss declares that she’s “had it” with Covid, that masks don’t work, that you can be vaccinated and still get infected with omicron, that lockdowns cause suicide, that few children have died from Covid and that “it’s time to end it”, apparently meaning we no longer need to take precautions against Covid, including getting rid of masks, lockdowns, and vaccinations. She’s arguing, as Torres characterizes her view, that “the response to the disease has been worse than the disease itself.” But have 800,000 Americans committed suicide from Covid-induced depression? No: look at the data from StatNews:

Those of us who posited that suicide rates may actually decline during the pandemic were either dismissed or criticized. But we were right: Provisional data released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that for the entire year of 2020 — when most lockdown procedures were put in place, many communities saw their highest rates of Covid-related deaths, and economic uncertainty was at its peak — suicide rates dropped by 3%.

For verification of this, see here and here (the latter is the Suicide Prevention Resource Center, which says that more data should be analyzed when it comes in later).

As for the efficacy of masks, the data summarizing their value can be seen at the CDC website, which actually gives data and doesn’t just say “wear masks”.

The gist of what she says here is that we shouldn’t have done anything about the pandemic. Maybe we would have had 2 millions deaths, but that’s just collateral damage.

Torres makes the point that nearly 100% the people in the hospital with Covid now are unvaccinated. They’re still dying, so how can you claim that vaccines don’t work? (The original clinical trials, of course, confirmed the efficacy of the vaccine.). As reader Paul wrote,

At least on COVID, Bari Weiss seems to have joined the other side. She and Bill seem to believe that the vaccine only protects the recipient against hospitalization and death and doesn’t help them avoid catching and passing on the disease. In general, Weiss seems to be positioning herself as a “media personality” rather than a writer, at least that’s my take.

Not only that, but she’s not even hewing to the data.  She’s come perilously close to being an anti-vaxer, if she isn’t one already.

In Weiss’s case, she hasn’t stayed in her ideological position while the left moved further left. No, she appears to be shifting to the right. I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually she become a never-Trumper Republican. I hope not, but what she had to say in this short segment greatly disheartened me.  And so did Maher’s response.

Weiss, at least, owes America a clarification of what she means when she says, “it’s time to end it.” End WHAT?

 

You can order your free Covid test kits now

January 18, 2022 • 11:30 am

Although American households were supposed to order their 4 free Covid test kits beginning tomorrow, reader Paul, quick to the mark, found out that you can order them NOW.

Just go to this site (or click on the screenshot below), and enter your name and address after pressing the blue button. Check out (no charge), and you’ll immediately get a confirmation email from the USPS.

The details (remember, rapid antigen tests aren’t usually accepted for international travel):

  • Limit of one order per residential address
  • One order includes 4 individual rapid antigen COVID-19 tests
  • Orders will ship free starting in late January

DO IT NOW!  Thanks, Paul.

A funny title but a serious point about ivermectin and Covid-19

December 16, 2021 • 9:30 am

Reader Martim sent me a link to this article in The Economist, which is pretty much paywalled but includes a paragraph and two graphs you can see. Click on the screenshot below to see what’s viewable:

And the figures, which buttress the title’s assertion:

Just using Fisher’s Exact Test* on the directionality above (dots to left or right of line), the difference is not statistically significant, but it is in a suggestive direction. We need more data to see if this disparity is statistically significant and thus “real” (i.e. not produced by chance under an equal frequency null hypothesis).

Now this is basically all of the article I’m allowed to read, but it hints at why some studies may show a positive effect of Ivermectin on patients infected with Covid-19. To put it simply, worms are a “comorbidity”, that might be eliminated with ivermectin. If having worms makes raises your chances of dying or hospitalization from having the virus, then taking ivermectin could help save your life not by affecting the virus, but by ramping up your immune system after the worms have gone.  Ivermectin would not, then, be of any use in treating patients unless they’re known to be affected with roundworms. (Ivermectin helps get rid of roundworms that cause intestinal strongyloidiasis and onchocerciasis, conditions that weaken your immune system.)

The graphs above suggest what one might predict: ivermectin would be more efficacious against Covid-19 in countries with a higher prevalence of worms, specifically the kind of worms killed by ivermectin. And that’s what the graphs show.

Of course, some of the studies above, both positive and negative, may already have been discredited by subsequent inspection (I haven’t checked), but I’m surprised that nobody has suggested this explanation before. (If they have, I haven’t seen it.)

In a month or two we should know the results of the properly conducted Oxford study on the effects of ivermectin on Covid-19 mortality. I’m almost positive that if the drug does have a positive effect on the disease, it will be minor—certainly much less than that of vaccination or the new Pfizer antiviral pill. But we will wait patiently. I tried to bet my doctor on 3:1 odds (if I won, I’d get $10, while if he won, and Ivermectin had a big positive effect, he’d get $30) that ivermectin wouldn’t show a greater preventive or curative effect than jabs and the new treatments, but he rejected that as a “sucker bet”!

UPDATE: I’ve just managed to subscribe for free and so have seen the rest of the article; it appears that some have considered worms as a comorbidity. A quote (emphasis is mine):

Yet ivermectin’s advocates insist that there is solid science demonstrating the drug’s efficacy. One well-documented website lists and links to 65 different papers on the subject, many of which, on the surface, seem to support this claim. Could this many studies all be wrong? Recent analysis by Avi Bitterman, a dermatologist in New York, and Scott Alexander, a prominent blogger, suggests that the answer is nuanced. Ivermectin probably does help one subset of covid-19 patients: those who are also infected by the worms it was designed to fight.

Wading through the papers whose methodologies appeared sound, Dr Bitterman noticed that the studies that looked best for ivermectin tended to cluster in regions with high rates of infections by strongyloides, a parasitic worm. Common in much of Africa, Asia and Latin America, strongyloides can cause, among other things, diarrhoea, fatigue and weight loss. However, they only pose a graver threat if their numbers grow out of control. Such “hyper-infection”, which is often fatal, becomes far more likely if a patient is receiving corticosteroids, which both suppress the immune system and appear to make female worms more fertile. And dexamethasone, a corticosteroid, is now a standard treatment for severe covid-19, because it prevents the immune system from going into overdrive and attacking the body’s own cells.

Building on observations by David Boulware, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota, Dr Bitterman concluded that strongyloides may account for the conflicting results of studies about the effectiveness of ivermectin as a treatment for covid-19. In trials conducted in countries where the parasites are common, many people could have both covid-19 and strongyloides infections. Covid-19 might already have weakened their bodies’ defences against the worms; treating the coronavirus with corticosteroids would let the parasites run wild.

In the groups who received ivermectin during trials, the drug would keep strongyloides in check. But patients in control groups would be left at the worms’ mercy. This would make it look as if ivermectin were preventing deaths caused solely by covid-19, when in fact it was preventing those caused by the parasites or by a combination of the two infections. This mechanism would explain why most studies conducted in places where strongyloides are rare showed no benefit from taking ivermectin. “Ivermectin doesn’t treat covid,” Dr Bitterman wrote. “It treats parasites (shocker) that kill people when they get steroids that treat covid.” He concluded that “taking strongyloides endemic populations, putting them into a control group with corticosteroids is a death sentence”.

In July 2020 a group of doctors argued in the Journal of the American Medical Association that it was “reasonable to consider presumptive treatment with ivermectin for moderate- to high-risk patients not previously tested or treated for strongyloides”, and said that the risk of infection by the worms in covid-19 patients should be “based on factors such as country of origin and long-term residence”. The World Health Organisation also recommends ivermectin in this context. However, most people in rich Western countries like America—where demand for ivermectin, driven by advocates on social media, is so high that some people have resorted to taking the equine version of the drug—do not fit this description. At least when treating patients who have never been to countries with widespread strongyloides, the evidence suggests that mainstream doctors in such places are right to avoid prescribing ivermectin.

None of this, of course, suggests that vaccinations are less efficacious than ivermectin in preventing death from the virus alone, much less, as Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying suggest, you’re better off not getting vaccinated than getting vaccinated. Just get tested for worms if you get covid and live in a roundworm-infested part of the world!

 

*Note that Fisher has been canceled.

More about ivermectin!

December 14, 2021 • 11:00 am

I feel bad for this man and his wife, but there’s a strong dose of irony in this story from USA Today (click on title below to read):

An excerpt:

Keith Smith, whose wife had gone to court to have his COVID-19 infection treated with ivermectin, died Sunday evening, a week after he received his first dose of the controversial drug.

He was 52.

Smith was in a hospital in Pennsylvania for nearly three weeks and had been in the hospital’s intensive care unit in a medically induced coma on a ventilator since Nov. 21. He had been diagnosed with the virus on Nov. 10.

His wife of 24 years, Darla, had gone to court to compel the hospital, UPMC Memorial, to treat her husband with ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug that has not been approved for treatment of COVID-19.

York County Court Judge Clyde Vedder’s Dec. 3 decision did not compel the hospital to treat Keith with the drug, but it did allow Darla to have an independent physician administer it. He received two doses before Keith’s condition grew worse, and the doctor halted the treatment. . .

. . .Darla sued UPMC to treat her husband with ivermectin after reading about similar cases throughout the country, all filed by an attorney in Buffalo, N.Y. She was assisted by a group called Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, which promotes the use of ivermectin in the treatment of the virus.

He received his first dose on Dec. 5, two days after Vedder’s decision in the court case. After Keith received a second dose, the doctor overseeing the drug’s administration – a physician not affiliated with UPMC – ended the treatment as Keith’s condition deteriorated.

Here’s a photo of Keith and Darla; note the caption (click photo to enlarge):

Now there may have been nothing that would save this man once he was infected, and, after all, this is only one anecdote, not a disproof of the claim (made, among others, by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying) that ivermectin is an efficacious preventive and cure for Covid-19. But I point out that we still have no good evidence that ivermectin can do either of these things, while we have strong evidence not only for the efficacy of vaccination (particularly with a booster), and now also for the new Prizer antiviral pill, which, if given within three days of the onset of symptoms, reduces the risk of hospitalization and death by 89%.  Even if ivermectin proves to have a marginal effect (and, given the studies, that’s the most it could have), it’s no match for existing treatments.

To see a summary of the “evidence”, read this short piece in Stat, a site for health and health-and-business related news (click on screenshot):

As I’ve already pointed out, many past studies purporting to show an effect of ivermectin were fatally flawed in different ways, including cases of apparent data-faking as well as post facto analysis without proper controls. Here’s a summary of the article above:

Where to look for higher quality data? A group called the Cochrane Collaboration spends its time conducting meta-analyses of the best-conducted clinical trials. After excluding dozens of ivermectin studies with “high risk of bias,” the collaboration left little room for optimism: “Based on the current very low- to low-certainty evidence, we are uncertain about the efficacy and safety of ivermectin used to treat or prevent Covid-19.” The group recommended that ivermectin use be restricted to clinical trials that might actually generate high quality data.

The World Health Organization and the Infectious Diseases Society of America concur. Even Merck, an ivermectin manufacturer, avers that there is “no meaningful evidence for clinical activity or efficacy in patients with Covid-19.” And just last weekend the FDA warned people not to use the drug as a treatment for Covid-19.

An FDA tweet. (Note: yes, people, I know that ivermectin has valid uses in humans for eliminating lice and parasites, so don’t bother to correct me. We’re talking about viruses here.)

Note that Stat reports that a properly designed study is in progress (my emphasis below).

Yet ivermectin boosters and merchants have convinced many to use this therapy for Covid-19, particularly in Latin America where its use is so widespread that researchers have had difficulty recruiting patients for trials of other potentially effective products. In June, YouTube suspended the account of Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), a member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, for a week for spreading misinformation about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

I’ve also criticized Weinstein and Heying, who work in my own field, for not only denigrating vaccines, but pushing ivermectin. Those who heeded their advice have been put in danger.

The increased demand for the drug, combined with enhanced scrutiny from pharmacists, has caused shortages of veterinary formulations of the drug. Inevitably, a spike in calls to Poison Control Centers connected to the use of veterinary ivermectin has followed.

And the money paragraph:

The University of Oxford’s rigorously designed PRINCIPLE trial is now trying to determine if ivermectin actually benefits people with Covid-19. But until those results come in, I urge people to heed the lessons of hydroxychloroquine, bleach, and all the other purported Covid-19 cures: effective treatments will be identified through systematic scientific study, not by wishful thinking, fabrication, or miracles.

Remember the Hippocratic Oath’s dictum: “First, do no harm.”

If the Oxford study shows ivermectin has appreciable value in preventing or curing Covid-19, I will admit that I was wrong, though I reserve the right to judge whether such an effect is sufficiently strong to make the drug more valuable than current treatments.

Likewise, if the Oxford study shows very low or no value of ivermectin in preventing or curing Covid-19, I expect that Weinstein and Heying will issue a statement saying, “We were wrong. We may have put people in danger.”

But I can already say with assurance that anybody following their advice, dosing themselves with ivermectin and avoiding vaccination, is doing precisely the wrong thing.