NY Post tries to attack ivermectin
In an article published yesterday, the New York Post made a strong effort to portray ivermectin as dangerous. It failed spectacularly.
The piece was titled “Judge denies emergency order for NYC hospital to give ivermectin to COVID patient” and was a follow-up to a prior story about a COVID-19 patient’s request to be administered ivermectin.
In January, Erika Quintero-Sherry filed an emergency motion to force Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City to administer ivermectin to her COVID-19-stricken husband. The man was intubated for some time and was showing no progress nor signs of recovery.
Like many hospitals, Mt. Sinai refused to administer the drug citing the fact that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved it for COVID-19 treatment. So Erika sued the hospital to allow the drug to be administered.
Ivermectin has been in the crosshairs of the mainstream media and medical bureaucracies ever since it began to be used to treat COVID-19. There are only two arguments that are used to claim ivermectin should not be used to treat COVID-19:
- Ivermectin is a “horse de-wormer".
- Ivermectin has not been approved by the FDA or medical bureaucracies to treat COVID-19.
The New York Post used both arguments. It called the drug a “horse de-wormer" and mentioned the drug’s non-approval by the FDA no less than five times.
It is true that ivermectin is a horse de-wormer. It also comes in a variant made for humans. While it is intended as an anti-parasitic drug, medical professionals around the globe have come to realize the enormous benefits of using it off-label for COVID-19. In addition to having a high success rate in curing COVID, it is also significantly cheaper than other drugs.
America’s Frontline Doctors, an organization of some of the world’s foremost physicians, have repeatedly pushed for the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) to be used to treat COVID-19.
One of the physicians associated with America’s Frontline Doctors is Dr. Brian Tyson, who is considered to be the “COVID expert”. Tyson treated 17,000 COVID-19 patients with HCQ and ivermectin. One was hospitalized. Zero died.
It is also true that ivermectin is not approved by the FDA to treat COVID-19. There are many drugs that have not been approved by the FDA for off-label use yet are prescribed by physicians in common practice. In fact, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, around 20% of all prescriptions in the United States are for off-label use.
In other words, a drug not being approved by the FDA does not mean that it’s harmful or in any way risky.
Yet that’s exactly what the New York Post called it.
“...Supreme Court Justice Lynn Kotler said she wouldn’t grant the emergency request to force the hospital’s staff to administer the risky drug based on Quintero-Sherry’s ‘paltry’ evidence...”
Unfortunately, the New York Post does not cite any evidence to show that ivermectin is risky.
However, there is quite a bit of evidence which confirms that it is effective against COVID-19.
A study from Cornell University in January analyzed the effectiveness of 10 drugs against COVID-19, including ivermectin. The list also included Nirmatrelvir (Paxlovid), for which the FDA granted emergency use authorization to treat COVID-19.
Ivermectin beat all the other drugs in its effectiveness against COVID-19.
Another study, published in the American Journal of Therapeutics, found that ivermectin reduces infection by an average of 86%.
According to a World Health Organization-sponsored review, ivermectin was found to decrease COVID mortality by 75%-83%.
These statistics are higher than those of the COVID-19 vaccine produced by Pfizer/BioNTech.
Perhaps that’s why lawmakers in various states, such as Oklahoma, Kansas, Airzona and others are pushing to make ivermectin available to COVID-19 patients.
It is therefore unclear why the New York Post decided to ignore medical evidence and promote misleading anti-science tropes.
Perhaps the best explanation could be that promoting ivermectin may directly conflict with the interests of the Post’s owner, Rupert Murdoch. The Murdoch family has become entrenched in the pharmaceutical industry, with James, the senior Murdoch's son, even taking an appointment on the board of GSK, a major pharmaceutical company, in 2009.
Within two weeks of that appointment, the New York Post had published no less than five articles trying to discredit research that questioned the efficacy of vaccines.
