The April COVID surge in India is an interesting microcosm of what went wrong in this pandemic—and what went right.
As cases and deaths began to mount exponentially, a new wave of terrifying headlines and images also began to ripple across the West, accompanied by footage reminiscent of those first videos out of Wuhan and Iran in the early days of the pandemic.
A BBC report from outside of a hospital in Delhi was nothing short of gut-wrenching. Sick people on stretchers outside of the hospital, drawing their last labored breaths before a doctor or nurse could even see them. Frantic and traumatized family members begging for someone to come see their mother, their father, their sister, their brother. No one was coming. The people outside on the stretchers slipped quietly away into eternity.
That’s how it is with this virus. In most cases, it’s like a head cold or a bad case of the flu. But in some cases, if not properly treated, what seems like a banal infection rapidly spirals into a nightmare. Given the infectivity of the virus, it can spread faster than we can respond to it. And for India, this became the case at a national level. For much of the pandemic, COVID was so mild there relative to other countries that scientists were trying to figure out why they were doing so well.
Then came the April elections, which in India are carried out in phases rather than all in one go. There were huge rallies with politicians where hundreds of thousands of people gathered, a near perfect storm for the highly infectious Delta variant. India soon became the new global hotspot for COVID. The media maelstrom fed fears that a new wave would soon arrive in the West.
But seemingly overnight, stories about India’s COVID surge disappeared from Western media. Why?
I think it was because India was too good of a case study in how the virus can be defeated without experimental gene therapy vaccines. All it takes is a cheap, safe, widely used drug called Ivermectin.
In the late 1960s, a Japanese microbiologist, Satoshi Ōmura, took a soil sample from a golf course near Tokyo, and the rest is, as they say, history. From this soil sample a new strain of bacteria was cultured, S. avermictilis, which was shown to have a remarkable effect on worms and other parasites. It quickly became a top-selling veterinary drug. In 1987, it was approved for human usage to treat the devastating tropical disease onchocerciasis (river blindness), a disease caused by worms and transmitted by flies which results in blindness if left untreated. Since then, more than 3.7 billion doses have been distributed globally, thanks in no small part to the tireless work of former President Jimmy Carter.
Over time its usage has expanded to treating other parasitic ailments, including head lice and scabies. Its safety profile is remarkable. It is so safe that it can be handed out to illiterate people in remote communities in the developing world with little instruction aside from “swallow this pill.”
In 2015, Ōmura and his partner William Campbell were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery of Ivermectin and its anti-parasitic properties. In 2012, Dr. Kylie Wagstaff discovered that Ivermectin also possessed antiviral properties. Early in the pandemic, Wagstaff and a team of researchers at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia conducted cell culture experiments to see if Ivermectin might be a useful therapy in the war on COVID. Their findings blew away all expectations.
Ivermectin halted the replication of the virus and completely eradicated it from the cell culture in under 48 hours. Their findings were released on April 3, 2020. Since then the findings have been replicated in over 60 trials and natural experiments, including 31 randomized control trials. Most of the suffering could have been avoided, but the bureaucrats who run our public health establishments condemned hundreds of thousands of Americans to death.
India’s surge was over in a matter of weeks. India’s doctors and public health authorities responded much more effectively and intelligently than our own. India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare revised its guidelines on April 28 to include a recommendation that asymptomatic and mild cases be treated with Ivermectin. Along with the government, the Indian Council of Medical Research and AIIMS, Delhi (India’s premier medical college and hospital), and many state government and health authorities also bucked World Health Organization recommendations and urged the use of Ivermectin. Since then, case counts have declined in Delhi by 99 percent, in Uttar Pradesh by 98 percent, in Uttarakhand by 97 percent, and in Goa by 90 percent.
Why would this information be suppressed by our media outlets? Well, under the FDA’s rules, an emergency use authorization (EUA) like the ones given for the three main experimental gene therapy vaccines can only remain in force so long as there is not a superior alternative therapy available. When you consider that the absolute risk reduction from taking Ivermectin as a COVID prophylaxis is far superior to that of the products from Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson, the justification for administering these experimental treatments disappears.
Billions of dollars are at stake, not just for the mRNA injections, but for efforts to develop new antiviral drugs, ones that can be patented and sold at a significant markup. Who would want to risk a heart attack when you could take a safe and effective pill once a week? Follow the money.