Drug Story: Ivermectin

For every disease, illness, or discomfort, there is a drug. There are so many drugs, drugs that

“seemingly work miracles and change the world, and drugs that are put in the service”

of fighting a melody for decades only to learn much too late, but they have almost no effect at all. You could tell the story of the world through the drugs we take, and the diseases they are designed to manage. This is what the new podcast "Drugg Story" is all about. On the show, Creator and Host Thomas Gets tells the story of the disease business one drug

at a time. Each episode explores one disease and one drug. Druggs end up being an incredible

lens to view our world. This week, we are featuring an episode of "Drugg Story" an independent documentary journalism podcast. The kind of podcast just don't hear about anymore and one that deserves your full attention. It is so good of listen to every episode. Here's one of my favorites.

“Imagine living with constant itching that never stops or slowly losing your sight, not because”

of age, but because of a simple fly bite. That is the reality of uncocer cases, also known as river blindness. One small tablet of ivermectin, taking one or twice a year, helps stop transmission and protects entire communities. This is how each installs. This is how blindness is prevented and this is how a generation grows up, free from river blindness. Imagine that you are a worm. A very specific kind of worm, uncocerca, volvulus. Your

goal in life, your mission, your only purpose, is to worm your way into the human body. You are a parasite. You need the human body to survive and to thrive. Humans, perhaps understandably, do not care for you. They curse you and your larvae, your larvae especially, because once they get into humans, they squirm everywhere. They crawl until legs and they cause unbelievable itching, horrible, infernal itching. And when they arrive into the eyes, humans

go blind. For centuries, there was nothing humans could do, but spite you, but then they found a pill, a horrible pill that kills your darlings. This pill, ivermectin, makes life very difficult for a parasite. Welcome to Drug Story. I'm Thomas Kets. Today's drug is ivermectin, which truly is a wonder drug, a veritable miracle cure. It is really, really good at killing parasites that cause diseases like river blindness or elephant sizes. These

tropical diseases mostly happen in Africa or South America or parts of Asia. ivermectin is also affected against hookworm, which a century ago was endemic in the southern United States. And it's going on heartworm, which affects pets, dogs and cats, and it kills parasites in horses or other livestock. But in the United States these days, you have probably heard of ivermectin not as a treatment for river blindness, but for different purposes altogether.

I just did a parasite cleanse. I never thought those words would come out of me. Things

literally came out of me. I've used ivermectin when I was really sick. I actually think you know, I think that it's probably not a bad idea to use it once or twice a year to cleanse it out of your body, right? Some of my patients will take ivermectin as a prevention for viral illnesses, totally fine, totally safe. I use ivermectin for 12, 7 days, which is every 12 hours, 12 milligrams, 7 days. And the reason is, all literature that's coming

out about ivermectin is an anti-cancer. You know, if you have a hidden parasite and how

“do you get rid of it, 30 recommend doing a parasitic detox, which you should talk to.”

Own doctor about, because I am not licensed to practice medicine, but I do take a form of ivermectin and fin bendazole. So yeah, Google tells me that right now there are many tens of thousands of videos on YouTube ravine about ivermectin. But cancer, parasite cleanses and viruses. What is this drug? What does ivermectin do? Really? In this episode

of drug story, we're going to tell the story of ivermectin, this amazing medicine.

We are going to talk about parasites a lot. And we will dig into what got all those

they believe it works on. Not just parasitic diseases, but viral diseases like COVID or even cancer,

“which would be great if there's, you know, evidence that it actually works for those other diseases.”

So we're going to explore that today with an open mind, an open notebook, and an open door to science in the drug story ahead. We tell each episode in three parts, the diagnosis, the prescription, and side effects. This is part one, the diagnosis. Where we explore the disease behind the drug. Or in this case, the diseases, because ivermectin is proven to work on many diseases, diseases with one thing in common. They are caused not by it bacteria, or a virus,

but by an animal, a parasite. Oftentimes it's a type of worm called a helmet. Now technically speaking, a parasite is an organism that lives inside or on another creature and feeds off of it. A tick is a parasite, so our life, as is the tongue eating louse. That's this little

“crustacean, it's a relative of the shrimp that swims into a fish's gills, winds its way into the”

mouth, and then eats the fish's tongue. Yeah. And get this. It then takes the place of that tongue. It lives there. In the mouth, helping the fish eat just as a tongue would, but taking a nibble of food every now and again. That, my friends, is a parasite. There are thousands, maybe millions of parasites on earth. Yeah. It just makes your skin crawl. In fact, there's actually a condition called delusional infestation, also called delusional parasite tosis, where people are convinced

that they have parasites. You might feel a bit of this right now. Feeling like something is crawling on your skin, under your socks, maybe under your shirt. It's a little itchy and no, a parasitic cleanse is not the answer. There is no evidence that those cleanses work. If you really think you have

“parasites, go see a doctor. Do not DIY this. Anyway, parasites have been warming their way”

into the human body for as long as there have been humans, even before. Just as fish and birds and dogs and horses all get parasitic infections, so do we. Many of these parasitic diseases started in the trunks. Since about 1492,

basically over the past 600 years of conquest and migration and slavery,

parasitic diseases have spread around the world. Parasites are everywhere. Here's a fact, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is based in Atlanta, Georgia, because 75 years ago parasitic diseases were common in the deep south. It was mostly malaria, but also hookworm. In fact, let's start our tale there in the southern United States with a story about hookworms, circa 1900.

Charles Styles was born in New York and educated in the zoological sciences at the finest institutions in Europe. Styles was particularly interested in parasites in livestock, like trick and noses in swine and tapeworm in cattle. At the time, the study of parasites, this is called parasitology, this was a brand new field of medicine. Parasites it was discovered caused diseases like jardia and malaria and compared to bacteria,

parasites were easier to find, sometimes even visible to the naked eye without a microscope. But that did not make them any easier to deal with. So around 1900, Charles Styles took a job as chief zoologist for the U.S. Public Health Service. And when he heard about health problems at the American South, Anemia, Stunted Growth, he had a hunch that parasites were involved.

So Styles began to research, well, there's really no other way to say this, he went on a study of human shit across the South. He took stool samples from everyone willing to let him, and soon he had definitively identified hookworms as a cause of widespread malaise. Based on his poop studies,

he estimated that around 40% of southerners, whites and blacks, almost always poor,

they carried hookworms. He called these parasites "necitor Americana," which translates as "American Mergerwood." This was a misnomer, actually. People really die of hookworm infections,

20th century to be poor in the South meant almost no sanitation. No running water, no toilets,

“often no outhouses. People pooped, well, wherever, in the woods, behind bushes,”

and most poor people went without shoes, children, especially. It was just easier that way, shoes cost money. These were ideal conditions for the hookworm to prosper. Let's start in the dirt. Hookworm larvae live in the soil and burrow through to reach their target, human feet, where they quickly slip into the pores of bare skin. This might cause a rash, it was called ground-edge. But the worm is in. The larvae, which are super tiny,

scarcely visible to the human eye, they then wriggle their way into blood vessels and enter

the bloodstream. And now the ride is on. The larvae flow to the heart and they are pumped out into the lungs. This usually causes a cough, which is just what the hookworm needs. Because with every cough,

“the hookworm is forced out of the lungs into the mouth, and then, gallop, swallowed. And now the”

worm is home-free. In the small intestine, the worm latches onto the intestinal wall. There it feeds on blood and grows to just half an inch long at most. From there, the adult worm produces more larvae, which are expelled with a stool into the dirt past the bush, where the worms wait for other feet to pass by. And so the cycle continues. But let's hook back, sorry, to the adult worms, back in the intestines. As they fester, sucking the blood out of their host,

hookworms cause anemia. That is a severe and chronic iron deficiency caused by blood loss. Symptoms of anemia are weakness and extreme fatigue. The English language is full of words to describe this. Indulence, sloth, lethargy, lassitude, laziness. In 1902, at the Pan-American Sanitary Congress in Washington, DC, Charles Styles announced his discovery. And he noted that there might be a connection between this hookworm, the American killer, and the characteristic state of southern lassitude.

And that became front-page news. The headline in the New York Sun screened, "Germ of laziness found." At the time, this stereotype of a lazy southerner, especially white southerners, it was commonplace, as the north expanded in a frenzy of industrialization, the south was still overwhelmingly rural. Poor white southerners were scorned as unmotivated and slow. And the stereotype lined up neatly with racial slurs about lazy black people. And that has been an even more enduring smear.

“So Charles Styles had found his cause. But what about the cure?”

Once the germ for laziness headlines faded, no one seemed that interested in following up on Styles' work to do anything about the hookworms. It may have affected 40% of the population sure, but hookworm was mostly an affliction of the very poor and often blacks. Remember, this was the gym crow era south, not a time of great progress. So this was just not a priority for the fledgling U.S. public health service, or the growing nation.

So Styles started stumping and lecturing about what he thought should be done. He said, "My hobby may be summarized in the two words "clean up." In our filthy American habits of daily life, I see the cause of more preventable sickness and preventable death than I do in any other one factor. Eventually, in 1908, Styles hooked up, sorry, with advisors to John D. Rockefeller, the founder of the standard oil company, and the richest

person in the United States at the time. Rockefeller was interested in putting his wealth towards philanthropy and Styles' work fit the bill. Soon there was a Rockefeller sanitary commission dedicated to eradicating hookworm in the southern United States. This would later become the Rockefeller Foundation. Styles and the Rockefeller team identified three strategies to fight hookworm.

First, infected people were to be treated with thymal. This was a naturally occurring chemical

use as a disinfectant and an absence salt to kill and purge the worms. This involved a lot of vomiting and diarrhea, but it usually worked to rid of body of worms within 24 hours. Second, they went on an outhouse building campaign. One estimate at the time held that 35% of white

build an outhouse for every home with a pit at least four feet deep. Third, shoes.

Now this was a big cultural change. Children in the south rarely wore shoes, especially in the summer, but shoes keep the worms out. The hookworm campaign quickly took off. State government's got engaged. With Rockefeller money, many southern states established sanitary commissions and better state departments of health. Soon there was talk of an expanded national public health service. One that could build on the success of the Hookworm campaign and advance

sanitation and health care across the land. The Rockefeller coalition framed this as a movement for the conservation of country life. But they were really demanding that people change how they

“lived, where they lived, what they wore, how they ate. Change was the only way to keep disease”

at bay, and many people did not like all that change. Enter the national league of medical freedom. This opposition group condemned scientific medicine, arguing that people should be free to pursue whatever form of treatment they believed best, and that the federal government should steer clear of endorsing certain kinds of medicine as more worthy than others. The league was funded by

homeopaths, osteopaths and others in the alternative medicine business. At first, it worked. The league

and a successor group, the American Medical Liberty League, they managed to delay approval of what was called the medical octopus, a stronger national health organization. But by the time of the new

“deal and more effective drugs and treatments in the 1930s, the opposition faded, though it did not”

disappear. That idea of defending medical freedoms against mainstream medicine does that sound familiar? That idea would not die. It has not died. So now back to hookworm. That was eliminated in the Southern U.S. more or less by the 1950s, though it's not entirely gone from the south, and it still appears in dogs and cats and horses nationwide. And hookworm is still sadly common around the world, which takes us to another one. Let's follow our drug story to Africa to meet

another parasitic disease, river blindness. In the villages of Sub-Saharan Africa, in countries like Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon, people depend on rivers, because that is where the food is, where the

“water is, that's where the work is. The water from the rivers is precious indeed, but the rivers”

are treacherous. They produce the black fly that brings blinds. That's from a 1983 documentary about river blindness. The black flies bite, and with a bite they transmit the larvae of a worm called uncocerca, volvulus. The worm grows and breeds under the skin. The human body generally tolerates the adult worms with a low immune response. But when the baby worms, the larvae get into the eye, a more intense immune reaction can cause inflammation, and that leads to blindness.

River blindness itself is rarely deadly to individuals, but it can prove fatal to a family, or to a village. Because blindness often comes to men and women in their prime productive years. Suns or daughters must drop out of the workforce to care for a blind parent. Marriages and parenthood are less common. Eventually young people flee the village.

For decades, there was little to be done for uncocerciasis. As many as 20 million people were

infected with the parasite worldwide, and hundreds of thousands were blinded or had impaired vision because of the disease. In the 1970s, the world bank began using DDT and other insecticides to kill black fly populations in West Africa. This works in places, but it was terrifically dangerous to the environment and to human health. And then, in 1981, a new drug appeared that might work for river blindness. And for other parasitic diseases too, including hookworm. This was Ibermectin.

And we'll get into that after a break in part two.

and the use of a drug to treat disease. And today's drug is, of course, Ibermectin.

“The creation of Ibermectin begins of all places on a golf course, south of Tokyo, Japan in 1973.”

On the edge of the course, looking east over Sagami Bay, a young scientist named Satoshi Omura was digging up dirt. Now at the time, it was well known that soil, dirt, was full of life and full of microbes in any patch of earth, a war is going on. With various bacteria producing chemical agents to kill off rival bacteria in the quest for food and survival. Since 1943, it was known

that some of those microbes could be isolated and turned into medicines. One of the first antibiotics

streptomycin was isolated out of soil. Tetracycling, rapomycin, and a dozen other medicines started in dirt. Omura was a director at the Kita Sato Institute and he had just begun a research project with Merck, the New Jersey-based Pharma Company. Part of Omura's habit was to carry sample bags

“with him, so that when the mood struck him, he could shovel up a soil sample for testing later.”

The sample from that golf course was just one of 40,000 cultures isolated in Omura's lab. The promising ones were then sent overseas to New Jersey, and exactly one turned out to have an anti-paracetic effect. It killed worms. For the next few years, the Merck team led by William Campbell, they sweated the stuff, trying to create a stronger brew of this microbe. They tested it against various pathogens from bacteria to parasites. And after countless experiments, they had Ibermectin.

A drug that worked reliably and consistently to kill parasites in a livestock. In 1981, Ibermectin was approved for use in animals to kill various kinds of parasites. Mites and ticks and roundworms and hookworms and heartworms. Merck would make a lot of money this way.

“A parasites were also a problem in humans, particularly in less developed countries.”

So that same year in Senegal, Merck began testing Ibermectin in people for the prevention and treatment of river blindness. And those experiments worked too. Ibermectin was approved for use in humans in 1987. But who would pay for the drug? It would be no small expense to manufacture and distribute the drug to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. So Merck did something remarkable. The company agreed to give away the drug for free, as much as needed and as long as needed

as the company's chairman set at the time. Within a few years, Ibermectin was being distributed to whole villages, whole countries. Soon, people started returning to the rivers in a land rush, as villages and communities were reborn with hope. And then another triumph. In the mid-1990s, Ibermectin was proven effective for treating lymphatic philoriasis. Another widespread parasitic disease. In this case, worms delivered by mosquito bite.

This disease afflix a hundred million people and causes chronic swelling in the limbs and genitals,

leading to horrible conditions, like elephant tiasis. Again, Merck donated the drug for free. 40 years after these triumphs, we now know that Ibermectin works against a great many parasites. And it is easy to take just one or two pills a year. It gives countries a fighting chance to push back on disease and to reclaim land that has been abandoned due to infestation. To date, five countries have eliminated river blindness outright and several more are really close.

And all along, Merck has sold a drug under the brand name heartguard to prevent heartworms and hookworms in dogs. These products quickly became the top selling veterinary medicines in the

world, earning more than one billion dollars annually. So yeah, Merck made their money as they

deserve to. And in 2015, Satoshi Amora and Merck's William Campbell were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery of Ibermectin. "Parasites are not generally regarded as being lovable. When we refer to people as parasites, we are not being complementary." Here is Campbell accepting the honor. We tend to think that a parasite is the sort of person who goes through a revolving door on somebody else's push. This is unfair. It's unfair to real parasites.

royal hynuses, your excellency's ladies and gentlemen, it is time for parasites to get a little more

“respect. We could end our story here. A miracle drug, a Nobel Prize, millions of lives improved,”

billions of dollars earned, somehow everyone is a winner. What a story. But that is not where this drug story ends. Because here our story takes a turn. Growing concern about a new and rare pneumonia-like virus that has caused at least two deaths and has spread from China to other countries

in Asia. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed the first U.S. case has been

detected in Washington state. This is truly an unprecedented situation. This virus doesn't discriminate. It attacks everyone. I want every American to be prepared. In late 2019, a new disease emerged. COVID. And suddenly, I vermectin was front page news. I have today declared that the coronavirus presents a public health emergency in the United States. Public health emergency. A declaration of emergency. COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic. We will be suspending all travel

from Europe. I am officially declaring a national emergency. It was quite crowded and we had

a wait outside for about 20 minutes before the medicine jumped into large 60. This is part three

side effects. Now usually side effects are unwanted or undesired consequences of a drug. But sometimes those unintended consequences actually open the door to new uses for the drug. It's called repurposing. Repurposing for medicines is oftentimes a medicine may be developed for one reason, one indication that may have off target effects for different disease process. So Viagra, everyone knows about Viagra. So Viagra was initially developed as a blood pressure

medicine. This is Dr. David Bulwer, a professor of medicine and infectious disease physician at the University of Minnesota. It didn't really work that great as blood pressure medicine, but it had some off target side effects. So the side effects people were like, oh, this is a thing. So it was then repurposed for sort of erectile dysfunction, even though it was originally developed as a blood pressure medicine. That's a famous example of

“something that's repurposed. Now remember when COVID hit the US in 2020, nobody knew anything.”

There was no obvious treatment. So there were a lot of ideas, some absurd ideas about what would work. Some people said bleach would kill the virus or methylene chloride. That's also known as paint stripper. Ultraviolet light was supposed to work. In India, one politician held a cow urine drinking party and 200 people showed up. There were so many teas and solves and extracts and then there were supplements. People were crushing the store trying to get their hands

on various supplements. This is Simone. She worked in a grocery store in Portland, Oregon, in the supplements section. She had a front row seat to the frenzy. Vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, elderberry, and NAC. Oh, queer, such an also. Right. And these all helped the immune system in theory. Yes. And the energy was very chaotic. Yeah. It was just a really weird time. And then there was the idea to repurpose drugs, chloroquine, and hydroxychloroquine. And it's

this through my Listen. That's an antibiotic. It kills bacteria, not viruses like COVID.

And then, on April 4th, 2020, I vermectin entered the conversation. The drug was first mentioned

in a paper published in the journal Antibiral Research. Dr. Bolwer explains what the study said. There was a publication that came out that talked about how I vermectin had in a petri dish, kind of lab situation where I vermectin had an anti-viral effect against SARS-CoV-2. We put enough of anything in a petri dish in a high enough concentration. It will start inhibiting just cells and killed cells. And so when I saw that, I was like, who was kind of, you know,

“is interested? And is that concentration achievable in the human body with normal dosings?”

And so when I did the mathematics, kind of back in the vocation, it was like a hundred times higher level than you would ever achieve in the human body. And we're talking about five minutes realized like this is unlikely to be a viable treatment option because the concentration needed for an anti-viral

I mean, it's just so far beyond the normal dosing range that you would to get that dose,

“you have to take a massive amount and you need running a toxicity most likely.”

Because a lot of things work in a petri dish, a lot of things work in a mouse, like my gosh, we can cure cancer in a mouse, we can cure heart disease in a mouse,

but doesn't mean that whatever drug is always going to work in humans, but it's a starting point

that you start there and then you've got to do a clinical trial to actually test it and see, is there actually a benefit in actual humans with the disease? Now, Dr. Bolwer and others spotted this right away, that it would take a huge dose, a dangerously huge dose in humans to have the same effect. That was a pretty significant limitation, basically, a disqualifier, but it was lost in the heat of the moment.

And the media was all over this study. One headline said, "I vermectin kills COVID in 48 hours.

“Newsweek wrote, anti-parasite drug used since 1980s may help stop coronavirus, new study says,”

okay, that was not what the study said, but so it goes." Just days later, another paper appeared, proposing even stronger evidence for ivermectin. This paper claimed it had data from a company called Surgesphere, based in Chicago. Supposedly, they had records from nearly 1,400 COVID patients from hospitals around the world. Half of these patients, the paper claimed, had been treated with ivermectin

in the first days of the pandemic. Remarkably, the ivermectin patients showed a much lower

mortality rate than patients who had not taken ivermectin. Just over 1% of the ivermectin patients died compared to more than 8% of the non ivermectin patients. This was a staggering result, but the data was sloppy and inconsistent. And one of the researchers asked to see it,

“the Surgesphere researcher demirred, and he eventually disappeared. It was all fake.”

All made up. The doctor behind Surgesphere, Sapan Desai, he was discredited. He holds the dubious honor of being among the first hustlers to try to exploit COVID for fame and fortune. The only trouble was that the headlines were already out there. These two papers and others published with fake Surgesphere data, they have been cited by other researchers thousands of times. The damage was done.

Here's a Senate hearing from December 2020 into quote unquote hidden treatments for COVID convened by the honorable Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. We are now in December. This is three to four months later. Mountains of data have emerged from all from many centers and countries around the

world showing the miraculous effectiveness of ivermectin. It basically obliterates transmission of

this virus. If you take it, you will not get sick. The speaker was a Wisconsin doctor named Pierre Corey, an August at 2023, the American Board of Internal Medicine revoked Dr. Corey's board certifications for spreading false or inaccurate medical information. So what did those mountains of data actually say? Well, it turns out Dr. Bolwer was among those doing the hard work away from the TV cameras. And I got involved with something called Active Six, which was a public

private partnership. It was sponsored by NIH and was running out of Duke. It's a co-chair. So we looked at my vermectin. We looked at clocked team. We looked at inhaled steroids that are used for asthma. We did sort of the normal dose of ivermectin three days of ivermectin early in treatment to see could you reduce the rate of hospitalization and could you get better faster? Three trials I was involved with over a thousand people per trial and basically no statistical benefit over placebo.

And no, like you can't be like, "Oh, you just need more people." Because there was no benefit whatsoever. And so for me, after the first trial, I was like, "Hmm, okay, I'm pretty convinced." And then the second trial was like, "Well, I'm pretty convinced." But then I said, "Oh, no, no, higher dose." So we used a higher dose and it's like, "Okay, third trial, higher dose longer duration and there was no benefit whatsoever." And so to me, I was, I mean, I thought that kind of

closed the door on it and that was in 2022. But still, like, people are still talking about it, still promoting it. And it's bizarre to me because it's one thing up front when we didn't know and there was some prelim data that suggests, "No, maybe this has been official." But like, we got multiple trials like, "You kind of need to move on to something else."

wise, I don't know which one works better. And so yeah, most people just kind of move down. But some

people really kind of enamored with it and kind of stuck with things that didn't make any sense scientifically, long after the data suggests that they should have moved on to something else. So, no effect on the RCT placebo-based trials. But they did see something interesting when they did not use a placebo. What's called an open label study where you can actually see what you're taking. When you did an open label, what's from an open label study where they got in the

Halo versus they got nothing, there was a benefit. And sort of psychologically, this also speaks to why if you give any medicine, particularly in COVID, where the vast majority of people are going to get better, people think they got better because they got the medicine. And so on the individual patient perspective, like, even if you give a medicine, it doesn't have any benefit, they're going to feel better faster than going to give them nothing, which is kind of interesting.

It's the placebo. Right. Yeah. So, it is a real effect. It's just not the medicine. But it's like you, yeah, and it's like the power of thinking, but it's, yeah, it's a real thing.

“This is an important finding because in the real world, this is how people were taking medicines,”

all sorts of medicines, including ivermectin and open label. They saw the label, they took a dose and a lot of them felt better. Here is Simone again. This is the woman who managed supplements at the Portland grocery store. She went to a natural path with her husband before she got COVID. I knew that I wanted to have ivermectin on hand, but it wasn't super easy to get a hold of and he was able to get a prescription at a compounding pharmacy. Can you walk me through

what happened when you first got COVID? My husband had just had a knee replacement surgery and the next day is when I came down with COVID and so I was very out of it for the first 24 hours.

I literally just slept by day three of the incredible body pain that I was experiencing

and within a couple hours of taking just the one pill, I just felt amazingly improved. Probably, I don't know, 80% of the body pain had gone away. It was just pretty mind-blowing, actually. I mean, I would take it again. No, I want to say, I appreciate Simone's perspective and her willingness to share her story.

“She did not have to, so I am grateful to her. And I think her experience shows how hard this”

is to figure out. She had COVID, she took over Mectin and she got better. She believes ivermectin worked for her and she has reason to. As Dr. Bolwer explained, sometimes it just works that way. But there is a difference between experience and evidence and during a global crisis, it can be really difficult to let the science play out. To me, COVID was just a heartbreaking time, not just

because of the million people in the US who died of the virus or the 7 million who died worldwide.

What breaks my heart six years later is how COVID broke the trust between government and the citizens' government should serve. Between science and the people science is trying to help. Between public health and the public. COVID was certainly not the only factor at work, but man did it do a doozy on the trust people put in each other and in our institutions.

“It made it difficult for all of us to know who can we count on. Who can we put our faith in?”

In February 2021, Merck, that's the company that discovered ivermectin. They put out a statement saying that their scientists had reviewed all available research and they found that they identified, quote, "no meaningful evidence for clinical activity or clinical efficacy in patients with COVID-19 disease." And this was Merck, they stood to make a lot of money if ivermectin did work.

And then, in September 2021, there was a statement from the American Medical Association and the American Pharmacist Association. quote, strongly opposing the ordering, prescribing or dispensing of ivermectin to prevent or treat COVID-19 outside of a clinical trial, unquote. Not only did they say it wasn't helpful, but that ivermectin was demonstrated to be harmful to patients. But for those who would already lost faith in the medical establishment,

They wanted their medical freedom to do their own research and make their own choices.

“Now, I'm not going to chronicle everything that happened with COVID. I'm not getting to vaccines”

or lockdowns or where the virus originated. That story is not this story. I will just note that in late 2021, YouTube decided to remove videos from their platform

that contained dangerous coronavirus information. Over one million videos were removed.

But there are still many videos there, thousands of them, and more still on TikTok or Instagram. And sometimes it just takes one video to get people talking again. Cancer right now at all. And they had some serious stuff going on. What did they take? I see it. They took some, what you've heard they've taken.

“I've remectin, then in diseminent, as all. Yeah, that's yeah. I'm hearing that a lot.”

They drank hydrochlorides, something or other. There's studies on that. There's now where people have proven that they have shrinking methyl blue and stuff like that. Yeah, methylene blue, which was a fabric dye. Yeah, it was a textile dye. And then they find it has profound effects on your mitochondria. Yep. Yeah. The stuff works, man. There's a lot of stuff that does work, which is very strange, because again, it's profit. That was, yes. A Academy Award winner

Mel Gibson and comedian Joe Rogan back in January 2025. More than 12 million people have watched that

episode. Now, there is no evidence for any of that, in fact. There have been many, many studies looking into the potential therapeutic effects of Ivermectin on various cancer. Ovarian cancer, liver cancer, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, and so on. Different cancers can have very different courses in the human body. So drugs that work in one type often very often do not work in another kind of cancer. Most of the research so far is in vitro in a petri dish. So the same

caveats as above, what works in a petri dish or a mouse, it may not work in a human being. It may kill the cancer, but in amounts that could also kill the human. And none of these have been large-scale randomized control trials in humans. So the data is scanned, despite what Mel Gibson says. But what has changed is who was in charge back in Washington. And in February 2026, the new director of the National Institutes of Health, who has said the NIH should serve as the

research arm of Maha. Hey, everyone. I'm here today to tell you how we can make America healthy again. And the head of the National Cancer Institute said that they had funded studies of Ivermectin

cancer treatments that are already underway. Here's what the head of the NIH said. If lots of people

believe it and it's moving public health, we at NIH have an obligation again to treat it seriously. Well, that's not actually the way it's supposed to work. Just because people believe something does not mean it's worthy of study or that it is worth the money our money to do the research. But whatever,

“that's the way they make decisions now. Studies are underway. Maybe it works. Who knows?”

And the great state of Florida isn't far behind. In late 2025, the Surgeon General of the Sunshine State announced a $60 million cancer innovation fund that would study among other things, the value of Ivermectin for cancer treatments. This is fine. It's what I have argued for in this show after all. Do the science test your hypotheses. But like Dr. Boweer explained, if it does not work, move on. Find something better. Because even when you test something that doesn't work,

you still get a lot of placebo effects. And each of those becomes an anecdote, a story, a testimonial, and to a lot of people, anecdotes are much more compelling than statistics and p-values and relative risk reduction calculations. And we should expect a lot more anecdotes. Recently five states, Tennessee, Arkansas, Idaho, Louisiana, and Texas have voted to make Ivermectin available over the counter, without a doctor's prescription. These states are not seen in an upsurge in Hookworm

or any river blindness. It's just for people who want it on hand just in case. In the name of,

Just look at supplements. It's no coincidence that a lot of people promising

“unproven things have a product they want you to buy. This idea of evidence of validity”

it matters because when doctors or scientists say something doesn't work, they are not trying to

deny people access to something. They're not trying to hide something. In fact, they're trying to

find something. Something that works. And they're generally trying to save people from wasting time

“and money and hope. And hope is particularly precious here. Because disease makes people desperate”

and nothing is more valuable and desperate times than hope. That's it for this episode of Drug Story. For an annotated list of our sources for this episode, visit drugstorey.co. Drugstorey was created, written, and hosted by me, Thomas Ketz. Rachel Swavy

“is our producer and sound designer. Mark Bush is our engineer. Molly Warner is our research director.”

Drugstorey was produced with support from the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health. Thank you to our guests, Simone and Dr. David Bolver. Drugstorey is an independent production. If you would like to support our work, contact us at drugstorey.co. You can also subscribe to our sub-stack there and be notified when new episodes come out. And I want to let you know, we are gearing up for a season two. We have a lot more drugstories to tell.

This episode of Drug Story, my cause, itching, scratching, and googling of terms like delusional parasitosis. We recommend you wear shoes, wash your hands, and grant your doctors

and yourself. You can listen to all of the first season of drugstorey at drugstorey.co.

Go listen, it is fantastic. Season two is currently in production.