White House COVID commissar dismisses ivermectin, promotes Pfizer product

White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha discredited the use of ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment and promoted Pfizer’s Paxlovid in a tweet which, if read aloud, some say sounds like a Pfizer commercial. 

“In the least surprising but still helpful study, Ivermectin is great as a dewormer in horses. It does not work for COVID. We all wish it did. It doesn’t. But thankfully we have drugs that do. Like Paxlovid. So if you get COVID — skip the Ivermectin and get a medicine that works.” 

Jha’s tweet contained several debunked points.

For one, the tweet was quoted above a preprint study showing that ivermectin was not effective when taken 7 days after the onset of symptoms. What Jha neglected to mention is that ivermectin is a treatment for early COVID-19. 

Second, Jha repeated the media's smokescreen that ivermectin is a “horse dewormer”, also neglecting to mention that ivermectin is manufactured for humans as well. 

Third, Jha is recommending Paxlovid as a “medicine that works”. But not only did Paxlovid perform no better than placebo for sustained symptom relief over four consecutive days, Pfizer has stopped enrollment in its Paxlovid trials for less vulnerable populations because the drug has been found to be ineffective, according to Fierce Pharma. 

Most importantly, Jha is now on record as telling the general populace to “skip the ivermectin” - advice that contradicts science and can prove fatal for high-risk groups, at a time when a growing number of public health officials are pushing to make ivermectin more available for COVID-19 patients. 

The FDA has recently become the target of a lawsuit by several prominent doctors for making similar comments about ivermectin, reported The Epoch Times last week.

“You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it," tweeted the FDA in August 2021. Many questioned the agency weighing in on the off-label use of a drug already approved in 1966, when the FDA itself says that “once the FDA approves a drug, healthcare providers generally may prescribe the drug for an unapproved use when they judge that it is medically appropriate for their patient”. About 20% of all prescriptions are written for off-label use.

The doctors are seeking a permanent injunction against the agency to prevent it from interfering in the use of ivermectin to cure early COVID-19.

In other words, either Jha is correct, or they are. 

But as reported by Frontline News, Jha is credited as being the “Founding Father of Lockdowns”, having received widespread media attention in March 2020 for calling for a “national quarantine".   

Jha is also credited as being partially responsible for the now-infamous “two weeks to flatten the curve” strategy.  

In April 2020, Jha said that the U.S. didn’t lock down fast enough.  

The mainstream media anointed Jha as the COVID “expert”, despite not being a virologist, vaccinologist or immunologist, and showered him with attention.  

“He has been one of the most publicly visible public health experts in America, appearing on networks and shows from Newsmax to MSNBC to Sesame Street,” reports the Daily Caller. “In the first 14 months of the pandemic, despite not being a virologist, immunologist or vaccinologist, Jha either appeared or was cited on television news more than 60,000 times, according to TVEyes. He was making 10-12 TV appearances per day at his peak. He claims to have, at one point, been receiving more than 100 media requests per day.”  

Jha also pushed for masking children, even urging Democratic governors who began to lift mask mandates to keep kids masked, despite them being the lowest-risk age group. 

But despite his love for lockdowns, Jha maintained that the Black Lives Matter protests and gatherings in 2020 were justified, because racism carries with it “a serious risk and grave public health cost".  

Needless to say, Jha has also been a staunch advocate of vaccine mandates, particularly on airplanes. 

Despite scientific evidence that lockdowns caused untold harm and had no positive impact on health, Jha has never retracted that call.