Horse laugh on “horse therapeutics” for COVID-19

Vincent J. Curtis

9 Oct 21.

RE: Doctor who said he gave Ivermectin to rural Alberta COVID-19 patients prompts warning from health authority. Wallis Snowden CBC News Posted Oct 8, 2021 12:36 PM MT.

“A doctor who was filling in at a rural Alberta hospital says he treated three COVID-19 patients with Ivermectin, triggering a warning from provincial health authorities about the dangers of the controversial drug.  Ivermectin is used primarily to rid livestock of parasites.  It has not been approved for use in either Canada or the United States for the treatment of coronaviruses and no clinical studies have proven whether it can slow or stop the spread of the coronavirus.”

Actually, neither has Aspirin been so approved.  But if a doctor advised the taking of Aspirin in the course of treating COVID, would that make Aspirin a “controversial drug” that “wasn’t approved?”  Oh, and neither Aspirin nor Ivermectin nor any other therapeutic “slow the spread” of COVID-19; they are intended to mitigate the effects of COVID in a patient infected with it.

So runs the story.  The urban sophisticates having a horse laugh on those Alberta rubes for taking a “horse drug” to treat COVID-19.  The medical community can rely on journalists being too lazy to look up what Ivermectin does, or why it comes in tablets for human consumption, as the picture accompanying the story plainlyshows!

A quick Google search shows that Ivermectin was developed and patented by Galderma Labs, a division of Merck & Co.  A long list of patents dating from 2014, which I quickly perused, indicate that the use of Imvermectin is as an anti-inflammatory.  If its major use by weight is in livestock anti-parasite drugs, it is for its anti-inflammatory function in the anti-parasite compound.  Inert binders are also used in the compounding of pills.

Because it is an anti-inflammatory, it makes sense that Ivermectin could have some use in the treatment of COVID-19.  One of the adverse effects of COVID is to drive the body’s immune response into overdrive.  Drugs that calm the tissues can be of help in those circumstances when the body is overreacting.  Dexamethasone is another “horse drug,” which, ironically, has recently been approved for use in the treatment of COVID-19.  It is a corticosteroid that is used on people on ventilators because it helps keep patient lungs from being damaged by the forcing of oxygen into them.  Corticosteroids are like cortisone, the hormone the human body produces to calm inflammation and the body generally after lots of adrenaline has been secreted into the bloodstream.  A cortisone shot is used to relieve joint pain by reducing the swelling of irritated tissue.

Another widely derided drug is hydroxychloroquine.  Used as a prophylactic against malaria, it too has anti-inflammatory properties, and that property may have been the reason why it showed promise in the early days of the pandemic.  That is, before Trump championed the idea and so it had to be destroyed.

For some reason, the grand poohbahs of public medicine in Canada don’t want it known that therapeutic drugs are available for the treatment of COVID-19.  You never hear about Remdesivir in Canada, even though it was approved for use in Canada for COVID in July, 2020.  You never hear about monoclonal anti-body treatments from Regeneron or Eli Lilly.

Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are cheap and widely available.  Big Pharma makes no money selling them.

However, Merck & Co. stands to make $1.2 Billion selling 1.7 million doses of its new COVID-19 therapeutic Molnupiravir, but only makes pennies on each Ivermectin pill it sells.  Connection?

Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) thinks so!

So, who’s getting the horse laugh: the rural rubes who get relief from “a horse drug” that cost pennies a pill, or those urban sophisticates who are willing to pay US$705 a dose for Merck’s new COVID therapeutic Molnupiravir?

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