Now as we approach the nineteenth month of this COVID-19 pandemic, I am shocked at the current narrative. The anger that is being expressed in our community is disturbing. Families and friends are being divided based on vaccination status and medical beliefs. Both sides are adamant that they are right and blame the other side for the current medical situation. In Washington, D.C., they are threatening health care workers with losing their license if they do not receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Health care workers who a year ago were viewed as heroes as they tirelessly cared at enormous personal risk for covid patients are now being viewed as the villain less than one year later. 

What is more disturbing is the comments I read on social media such as “they can choose…a different profession.” Why have we become so callous and decided that “one size fits all”? In fact, it was only six years ago that President Barack Obama announced that the United States would embark on a government-funded precision medicine initiative that will enroll over one million people. My question is why we are not following this advice today.

I know we are in the middle of a terrible pandemic where many have lost their lives. This is a great tragedy for the many families who lost a loved one. To end this unnecessary suffering, we must first take a “time-out.” We need to first end this “civil war” pitting the vaccinated against the unvaccinated. Every individual in this country is someone’s brother, sister, father, mother, daughter and/or son. We need to work together to find a solution. As a medical student in the 1990s, I witnessed firsthand the devastation caused by the AIDS epidemic. While training at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York, I saw the overwhelming toll this illness took on health care providers, patients, and families alike. Because this was a new virus, science was constantly evolving. I remember being a fourth-year medical student helping take care of a patient on mechanical ventilation on a regular medical floor because of a shortage of ICU beds. My attending physician at the time taught me the importance of trying every drug in our arsenal (as long as they do not harm the patient) in order to give these individuals a chance at survival. He reminded me that medicine is both a science and an art that often relies on a “trial and error” approach. What he said we must never do is watch and wait when potential options are available. Today’s comparison would be the families rushing to court to get the hospitals to prescribe FDA approved medications off-label.

This is why the term “follow the science” really bothers me. This phrase is misleading especially in a pandemic of a novel virus where information is constantly changing. Because of this, we are constantly “reacting” and changing guidelines.  Following one narrative can often be dangerous as it does not allow for discussion and disclosure. My brother often jokingly reminds me that “medicine is practice, so let me know when you get it right.”  Moses Maimonides, a twelfth century physician, said this best in the following prayer:

Keep far from me the delusion that I can accomplish all things. Give me the strength, the will, and the opportunity to amplify my knowledge more and more. Today I can disclose things in my knowledge which yesterday I would not yet have dreamt of, for the Art is great, but the human mind presses on untiringly.

In this situation, we must not forget the most important person in this equation, the patient. Medical practice must not become so rigid to be only about the science. Each patient is an individual, and the solution must be personalized for each one. Otherwise, we are in danger of damaging the doctor and patient relationship. Trust is a fundamental characteristic of the physician-patient relationship. Patients must trust that their physicians will work in their best interests to achieve optimal health outcomes. We must be flexible and avoid this one size fits all approach. Although the greater good is important, we must not lose sight of the person that sits in front of us. In that encounter the individual is our priority and deserves our best. As my mentor told me while I was a medical student, “…a patient’s trust in a health care provider is both a great gift but also a great responsibility that no one should take lightly.”

Action steps that I feel are necessary to help us move forward include:

1.  Focus on helping individuals take steps through lifestyle, supplementation, and diet which help strengthen overall immunity and prevent disease

2.  “Listen to our patients”—they know their body better than us and let us partner with each individual to develop a plan together which will help protect them

3.  Keep the medical office as a safe destination where all individuals feel cared for no matter what their individual beliefs and/or vaccination status

4.  Gather our great scientific minds including frontline healthcare providers and encourage disclosure and discussion to help find a better solution

5.  Look for outside examples, other countries, and learn from their successes and failures in formulating public policy

6.  Most importantly, keep an “open mind” when looking for potential solutions

In spring 2020, Dr. Keith Berkowitz discovered in the medical literature the life-saving covid treatments developed by Drs. Paul Marik, Pierre Kory, Joseph Varon, Umberto Meduri, and Jose Iglesias and suggested they form the FLCCC to help bring their protocols to the world.

You can click here on FLCCC for more information on COVID-19 prevention and treatments for all stages of the disease, and subscribe to support our independent reporting on censored doctors and treatments with these buttons:

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Academy Award-winner Louis Gossett Jr. is best remembered as the tall and straight-as-a-sword, old-school Marine Corps drill instructor in An Officer and a Gentleman, barking commands at fresh-faced Naval Officer aviation wannabee Zack Mayo (Richard Gere). Late last December, Gossett created national news for walking out of a suburban Atlanta hospital. Sick with COVID-19 for about a week, he’d spent two fearful days deteriorating on the COVID-19 ward. He didn’t want the ward’s walls to be the last thing he saw before dying.

“I watched the best doctors and nurses in the world doing all they could to help people sick with COVID,” he says in a telephone interview. “Doctors and nurses were stressed out from the strain of taking care of COVID patients and working long hours. I saw desperation in their eyes. My sense of security just left me.”

“The pandemic hit our country like a big bomb went off,” he adds. “I saw people dying in hospital beds. I thought I’m going to die with them. I could do better outside. I got out of bed and walked out of the hospital.”

His grown son, Satie Gossett, lived outside Atlanta and took him home on December 29, 2020—a day coinciding with a nationwide spike in the coronavirus, totaling 19.9 million people, and a reported 633,000 confirmed cases in Georgia, which topped 10,000 deaths. Gossett was home with no medical care. He was eighty-four years old with significant co-morbidities and getting sicker by the hour. The deadly inflammatory phase of COVID was blooming in his lungs.

Word of the aging actor’s dire health flashed around the entertainment industry, where he has been a leading player for decades and a mentor to young actors. His Facebook page received some 10,000 responses. Fans around the world prayed for the beloved figure, the first black actor in history to win an Academy Award as best supporting actor.

A native of the Brooklyn neighborhood home to actor Harvey Keitel and playwright Arthur Miller, Gossett grew to an imperial six-feet-four and was fast on his feet playing basketball. He earned a scholarship to play for New York University but subsequently left sports for theater. His credits include an Emmy Award for his 1977 role in Alex Haley’s miniseries Roots and, most recently, another Emmy in HBO’s nine-episode series Watchmen. He also founded the not-for-profit Eracism Foundation, dedicated to racial equality by fighting ignorance and apathy.

Now, with Gossett’s life at stake, his friends went into action. One of his protégés, Michele Shay, a Tony Award-nominated actress and a professor at the University of Southern California School of the Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles, learned that Gossett had walked out of the hospital because COVID-19 patients around him were dying. “I freaked out,” she says.

She called Jeremy Boros, a former student of hers at New York University’s Atlantic Theater Company who was now an aspiring actor and producer living in West Hollywood. Boros had been posting on Facebook, before vaccines were available, that his father, a prominent physician in the Florida Keys, was using an effective alternative medial therapy for treating patients with COVID-19: ivermectin. “I mentioned that my dad had been doing a lot of research about another drug that helped to treat COVID,” he says.

Shay asked Jeremy if his father could phone her friend, a famous actor who was in desperate need of help, and give him urgent medical care.

Shay, an acclaimed actress in more than twenty productions, says she owed everything to Gossett. “Lou is responsible for my being an actress,” she says in a phone interview. “He literally coached me for my auditions for school at Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama and literally walked me to the audition. I had never been in a play before. He was the first person to tell me I had talent and he brought it out of me. I was terrified for Lou. He is a mentor and a beloved friend. So I put Lou in contact with Jeremy’s dad as quickly as I could.”

Jeremy’s father, board-certified cardiologist Dr. Bruce L. Boros, had been successfully treating COVID-19 patients with an ivermectin protocol that he had created in July 2020, one of the first doctors in the United States to aggressively use ivermectin for COVID.

Ivermectin is an FDA-approved anti-parasitic drug, often used to treat scabies and lice, with a forty-year history as one of the safest drugs in the world. The World Health Organization includes it on its list of a hundred “essential medicines.” In 2015 the Nobel Prize for Medicine went jointly to the drug’s discovers William Campbell, at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey; Satoshi Ōmura, at Kitasato University in Tokyo; and Tu Youyou of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Beijing.

Ivermectin is the generic name for Stromectol, developed in 1981 by pharmaceutical giant Merck. Its patent expired in 1996, and when Boros started his treatments the cost was about five dollars a pill in the U.S. and less than a dollar in the rest of the world. Ivermectin is also used to treat heartworm in dogs and worms and other parasites in horses, cattle, and livestock. But that is far overshadowed by its use in many evolving human illnesses that created its reputation among scientists as a wonder drug for humans, and led to the Nobel Prize for its wide benefit to humanity. In treating COVID-19, prescription ivermectin is administered along with vitamins, antibiotics, and steroids as needed.

Dr. Boros, seventy-one, stands an inch under six feet with a burly build. Miami-born and a second-generation medical doctor, he owns three urgent care centers ranging over 110 miles in the Florida Keys—in Key West, Marathon, and Key Largo—employing seventy medical staff. His care centers were taking a priority over his forty-year cardiology practice when the COVID-19 pandemic swept Florida. Waves of patients complained of fever, severe muscle and joint pain, and extreme difficulty breathing. As the main doctor on the island, he was asked to talk about COVID to the Key West city commission meeting on March 3, 2020, eight days before the WHO declared an official pandemic.

It was two months later, May 2020, when the federal government launched Operation Warp Speed to pursue public-private partnerships with pharmaceutical companies and accelerate the development, manufacture, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.

Boros felt the wait for the vaccines would be dangerous and lead to many deaths: “Doing nothing to help patients would be doing harm.”

In April 2020, as COVID-19 dominated the daily news, Boros’s wife, Christina Boros, who had been doing ongoing research to help him, directed his attention to an article about a study from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, that demonstrated ivermectin effectively killed the coronavirus in vitro.

In May 2020 Dr. Boros found a large observational study of 1,300 COVID-19 patients in the Dominican Republic published by the renowned cardiologist and internist Dr. José Natalio Redondo, involving clinical observations in three medical centers. The study reported that 99.3 percent of patients presenting COVID-19 symptoms recovered in the first five days with care that included ivermectin. Redondo also noted a marked reduction in the length of hospital stays and a profound reduction in deaths of patients on ventilators.

Dr. Boros called Dr. Redondo and had a lengthy conversation with the Dominican physician, who also has a home in Miami, because “I needed more information from the horse’s mouth.” Boros relates that Redondo told him, “They were having incredible success and tremendous results, with minimal side effects. Ivermectin has occasional uses in the United States, but it was a medication they had been using their entire lives in the Caribbean to treat parasitic diseases and knew how safe it was.”

Boros kept researching. “I felt compelled that if I’m going to run three urgent care centers, then I had to know a lot about COVID,” Dr. Boros says. “I had to become expert from prophylaxis to outpatient treatment.” He was reading everything he could find in medical literature and on the Web about ivermectin as a possible off-label drug with anti-viral and anti-inflammatory properties available now that could be used to treat COVID-19 patients.

“And I looked around the (hospital) room and I said this might be the last room I’ll be on Earth, let me get out of here. So I fought it day and night (at home) and I got this avalanche of well wishers. I was blown away; I was touched. People around the world. I call them angels. And one of those angels called and said, “I have something for you.”

~ Lou Gossett Jr., from his FLCCC interview: click here.

He researched ivermectin with the same eagerness he had devoted to his undergraduate years at the University of South Florida followed by the University of Miami Medical School, a medical internship, two years of a medical residency program, and two more years in a cardiovascular fellowship—thirteen years of medical study.

“Ivermectin has been working for decades in other countries on deadly viruses like dengue fever, Zika, Ebola, eastern equine encephalitis, and others,” he says. “These were success stories. And this led me to believe it could be extremely helpful with coronaviruses.”

By July 2020, “I was ready to use it, I was ready to prescribe. And based upon the Helsinki Accord of 1964 [which recommends guiding medical doctors in clinical research based on the doctor’s mission to safeguard the health of the people], since there was no other medication available to treat COVID, and given its incredible safety profile, I was prepared to start treating patients even if it meant I might lose my medical license. I’m not going to let people I know die when I know there is something we can do and the rest of the world is doing it.”

While doctors and government health ministries around the world are using ivermectin to treat Covid with great clinical success and support from many observational studies and randomized controlled trials, critics including the FDA, NIH, and WHO say there’s not enough evidence from large, European or American randomized controlled trials for use to treat the disease. Critics of the critics, like Boros, answer that it’s unethical in a pandemic not to use a safe drug that’s working. Yet on September 2, the American Medical Association called for the “immediate end” to using the drug to treat COVID-19.

“Ivermectin has many big, powerful enemies, and getting the issue of administering ivermectin to patients suffering from COVID-19 seems like the epic battle of David versus Goliath,” Dr. Boros says on a phone call. “I was terribly frustrated that I couldn’t get the word out because it was working.” In an email, he adds: “I need a more aggressive and open-mic forum to get all the truth out! We don’t have a big enough hammer to beat this nail of disinformation in the ground! I’m very sad and frustrated and so limited in expressing my front line experiences.”

In October, Boros discovered the non-profit Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care (FLCCC) Alliance (www.flccc.net), a worldwide organization led by five renowned U.S. academic critical care doctors who offer leading treatment and prevention protocols that include ivermectin for all stages of COVID.

He found support for his beliefs in ivermectin’s anti-viral and anti-inflammatory properties in the FLCCC Alliance’s president, Dr. Pierre Kory, a former University of Wisconsin-Madison medical school professor, and Kory’s mentor, Dr. Paul Marik, a professor at the Eastern Virginia Medical School with an international reputation for clinical research garnered from published books and hundreds of peer-reviewed papers.

“I got in touch with Dr. Kory and we hit it off,” Boros says. It was Dr. Marik who first discovered the “data signal” that ivermectin was being successfully studied and used around the world to battle COVID, and Dr. Kory started the global clamor for ivermectin with his U.S. Senate testimony on December 8, when he strongly urged the drug’s global use based on dramatic benefits in preventing COVID and stopping viral load, hospitalization, and mortality.

While Drs. Kory and Marik were intensivists concentrating on “the sickest of the sick” in the ICU, Boros was providing innovative outpatient care, successfully keeping people out of the hospital and out of intensive care.

By July, Dr. Boros and the staff of his three urgent care centers up the length of the Florida Keys were prescribing ivermectin with protocols that had many similarities to the FLCCC protocols. For every hundred patients tested for COVID-19 at his urgent care centers, thirty-five tested positive. In September he created a test-and-treat protocol to get people started on ivermectin immediately and not wait for results that might take up to eight days, by which time many patients could be critically ill. “Early treatment saves lives,” he says.

“My clinics first checked to see if patients didn’t have a cold or something else before we treated them for COVID,” he says. “If anybody came in with any viral symptoms, we tested them with a nasal swab and sent the tests via FedEx for analysis. We gave them a prescription the same day. Some people were indigent. For them, I bought $7,000 of ivermectin and gave it to those patients.”

On December 29, Dr. Boros was at home and ready to board a boat with his wife, along with his sister and brother-in-law visiting from their home in Virginia, for a 5 p.m. sundown cruise and dinner in the Straits of Florida off the island of Key West when son Jeremy phoned.

“He said he knew of a famous actor who needed medical help,” says Dr. Boros. “I asked him who it was and he said he’s Lou Gossett, Jr. I made it clear to Jeremy that I would help anybody who has COVID. I said, ‘We need to do it now, I’ve got about twenty minutes before the boat leaves, let’s get started.’”

Gossett called Dr. Boros. The actor said he had just walked out of a hospital and asked for help. “We’re talking on cell phones,” Dr. Boros says. “I told him I need for you now to go look at the FLCCC Alliance website (flccc.net) and become briefly familiar with ivermectin. I texted him the website and he went over it. By then I had treated 300 people successfully with ivermectin.”

The actor promptly called back, asking a few questions. “He was very sick, on day eight of COVID, when the lungs start blowing up,” Dr. Boros says. “He had difficulty breathing, couldn’t speak a sentence without stopping to cough. He had pain in his muscles and joints. He was tired. He said he felt like he was going to die. I said give me the telephone number of the pharmacy that’s closest to where you live.”

Dr. Boros asked how much Gossett weighed and took a medical history to clear the pathway to prescribe ivermectin, inquiring about any underlying conditions. It’s public record that in 2010 Gossett had recovered from prostate cancer after early detection. At the time of their phone conversation, vaccinations weren’t available to the public, and Gossett had not had a shot.

In an interview, Gossett recounted their first conversation: “He asked: ‘how was I doing?’ I said I was desperate.”

Dr. Boros phoned Gossett’s pharmacy with the ivermectin prescription for small three-milligram tablets along with an antibiotic that had two properties—one as an anti-viral, and the other to help absorb zinc, a major component of killing viruses. Gossett’s son Satie drove to the pharmacy and picked up the prescriptions while the doctor joined his wife and their guests for the planned sunset dinner cruise.

“I called him at eleven o’clock that night to see how he was doing,” Dr. Boros says. “He said pretty good.” Gossett said in another interview that he was amazed that the brain fog COVID often causes had already dissipated. “I told him to take the pills again tomorrow. I called him two or three times a day like I do with all very sick patients. I called him in the middle of the next day and asked how he was doing. He said he was doing good. His voice sounded stronger. He was substantially improved.”

Gossett took six ivermectin pills one day and eight pills the next day. “I felt much better,” he says. “After four days, I went to a clinic that people recommended. I was told that I didn’t have COVID anymore.”

When the vaccine became available, Gossett said he and his son got their shots.

Gossett said he walked out of that hospital “because there was death in the air.” The doctor and the actor celebrated warmly at the actor’s eighty-fifth birthday party, and have remained close friends.

Gossett calls Dr. Boros “the angel that saved my life.”

The Angel That Saved My Life

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Share RESCUE with Michael Capuzzo

Peter Joffre Nye is a prize-winning journalist, magazine editor, and author of several books, including the revised and updated second edition of Hearts of Lions: The History of American Bicycle Racing and The Fast Times of Albert Champion: From Record-Setting Racer to Dashing Tycoon, An Untold Story of Speed, Success, and Betrayal.

Since late August, there has been a full-on media assault against ivermectin for COVID-19. Part of the media coverage included the story of the Cincinnati, Ohio, woman who filed a lawsuit in Butler County to compel West Chester Hospital to give her husband ivermectin after they told her there was nothing more they could do for him. Her husband, Jeff Smith, had been on a ventilator for about one month.

After a lengthy discussion with his wife concerning Mr. Smith’s clinical status and his medical history, I agreed to prescribe ivermectin to Mr. Smith—since the hospital was refusing any additional therapy. The case went forward, and the judge granted the court order.

Then the media pounced.

They called ivermectin “horse dewormer,” though it has saved millions the world over for decades since it was approved by the FDA in 1987. It is one of the world’s safest medicines. It is on the WHO’s list of “Essential Medicines.” It is inexpensive and globally available. Plus, dozens of peer-reviewed, scientific studies show that it is efficacious for every stage of COVID-19 disease.

And it won its developers the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015 for its ability to save millions of lives throughout the world.

So why has ivermectin been in the crosshairs of the media? My take: Ivermectin is cheap, so it is unprofitable. It is a workhorse of a drug and has emerged as a proven, lifesaving therapy for COVID-19. This, while pharmaceutical companies race to develop their own “ivermectin-like” antiviral drugs—whose modes of action are similar to ivermectin. These new drugs won’t be cheap. They will be very profitable. But I believe that when they are rolled out in the future, they will never be able to be as efficacious for COVID-19 as ivermectin is right now.

So this is just to let you know that regardless of what the media may say, I know this medicine, as part of a multi-modal protocol that also includes vaccines, saves lives. On the day I became a physician, I swore to “first do no harm” as part of the Hippocratic Oath. With this essay, I am publicly recommitting myself to that oath. It is my hope that other physicians around the world will do the same.

It is true that after a patient has been on a ventilator for a prolonged period of time fighting the debilitating effects of COVID-19, options to recover these patients are few. But I have seen patients who’ve spent weeks on a ventilator be successfully weaned away and return home to their families—with the addition of ivermectin to the therapeutic cocktail.

I have worked with Buffalo, New York, attorney Ralph Lorigo on several of these cases requiring court orders for ivermectin. Lorigo has prevailed in all but one of these cases. That means that the judges are recognizing the validity of the science for ivermectin.

It is written in the Talmud that “those who save one life save the entire world.” Where there is life, there is hope. If we forget that as doctors, and if we throw up our hands and do not try everything we know to save every life we can, then we are in violation of the oath we took to act in the best interest of every patient.

Every patient.

In early January, 2021, when the Critical Care team of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) met with the NIH’s COVID-19 treatment panel, nearly 4,000 American were dying every day of COVID-19. The team asked the NIH to recommend ivermectin as part of a COVID-19 prevention and early treatment protocol (I+MASK+). The NIH came back with a “neutral” stance on ivermectin, falling well short of the advice of the FLCCC to recommend the early treatment protocols that were saving lives in the regions and countries of the world where they were being used. This is a profound failure of the U.S. government to protect its citizens during a killer pandemic.

So, to Jeffrey Smith and his family, I will keep fighting for you. You deserve this chance. And I will do everything I can to ensure that you get it.

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If you’d like to to know more, go to the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Allliance’s Summary of the Evidence for Ivermectin in COVID-19.

Share RESCUE with Michael Capuzzo

The novel coronavirus COVID-19 was already looking dangerous in February of 2020. More than 75,000 cases had been reported in China, the death toll was approaching 3,000, and virologists around the world were warning of an epidemic—with no medicine to fight it.       

Then, late in the month, Mirta Carvallo, M.D. a retired pediatric dermatologist in Buenos Aires, Argentina, heard a rumor. “Something’s going on with ivermectin in Australia,” she told her husband, Hector. Researchers at Monash University had reportedly neutralized the Covid virus in laboratory tests, she said.  

A retired endocrinologist, professor of internal medicine, and former director of one of the city’s largest hospitals, Hector Carvallo, then 63, was instantly intrigued. An anti-parasitic medicine, ivermectin has saved millions in the southern hemisphere from the plague of onchocerciasis, or river blindness. 

He and Mirta had prescribed it countless times for dermatologic ailments like scabies and rosacea, and he calls it “one of the safest medicines I’ve ever used.” Acclaimed as one of the most important medicines of the 20th century, ivermectin won its discoverers the Nobel Prize in 2015.

Within weeks—long before the Australians even reported their findings—Carvallo and a colleague would conduct the first human trials of ivermectin for prevention in the fight against Covid.

“I am not ashamed to say I cried when we got the results,” Carvallo recalls in a recent Zoom interview. 

Alas, months later, “I cried again,” Carvallo says. That’s when medical authorities in Argentina—and soon others around the world—began their ongoing effort to suppress public knowledge of ivermectin’s efficacy and safety, and to question Carvallo’s results and attack his reputation.

It’s a story the world, and history, needs to know. 

Soft-spoken and gracious, Carvallo speaks impeccable English, some of it learned watching the 1960s American TV medical dramas Dr. Kildare and Ben Casey that inspired him, as a small boy, to become a doctor. 

Days after Mirta told him about the rumors out of Australia, he explains, he sat down with Roberto Hirsch, M.D., one of Argentina’s leading experts on infectious diseases, to mull ivermectin’s possibilities.

While little known in North America and Europe except as a veterinary de-worming medicine, ivermectin was known to inhibit RNA viruses in vitro, including dengue, Zika and yellow fever—apparently by blocking the virus’ ability to transport from a cell’s watery cytoplasm to its nucleus.  But what happens in a petri dish doesn’t always happen in the human body. Could ivermectin be as potent against Covid, they wondered, as it was against river blindness? 

And so, in early March—three months before the Australians would report in the journal Antiviral Research that ivermectin had effected a 5,000-fold reduction of Covid in vitro—Carvallo and Hirsch wrote to the Journal of the American Medical Association about its exciting possibilities.  

Noting ivermectin’s “virucidal properties,” their letter theorized that ivermectin could be a safe, potent, widely available and cheap prophylaxis against Covid, urgently in need of swift investigation. They further hypothesized that it could be efficacious against Covid infections in combination with a blood thinner to reduce dangerous hyper-coagulation, and a corticosteroid to reduce the hyper-inflammatory immune response that was turning Covid infections fatal in so many patients. 

“But the editor of JAMA said he was not interested. He gave us no good reason,” Carvallo recalls with a shrug. “I was surprised. I wrote to say, ‘At least take it as a possibility,’ but we never heard back. So, we decided to form our own trials. We would replicate what the Australians had done in vitro, but we would do it in vivo.” 

Instead of testing ivermectin against Covid in a glass dish, they would test it in the human body.

First, they approached the ethics committee of Eurnekian Hospital, where they worked, one of Buenos Aires’ largest. Their proposal: to administer weekly oral doses of ivermectin to about 100 of the hospital’s health care workers regularly exposed to Covid patients. (The doses would be about three times higher than is typically prescribed as an anti-parasitic, but there was ample evidence these were safe levels, Carvallo says.) One hundred other health care workers who chose not to take ivermectin would serve as the control. All participants would continue to wear masks and wash hands.  

A lengthy randomized controlled double-blind study with placebos—the putative “gold standard” of medicine trials—would be unethical, Carvallo and Hirsh agreed. “If I had to post my hypothesis atop a pile of corpses, that’s criminal,” says Carvallo. Instead, theirs would be another classic form of medical research: An “observational” trial: no one would receive placebos, and the trial’s administrators would know who got the ivermectin and who did not.  

The hospital’s administrators were “elated” by the proposal, says Carvallo, and Buenos Aires’ health office swiftly approved its protocols. A county judge signed off, too. 

Unfunded, informal, and using donated medicine, the trial began in late April, with 131 subjects taking ivermectin and 98 not. Each person in the test group was given 8 mg of ivermectin per hundred pounds of body weight once weekly, along with several daily nasal spritzes of carrageenan, shown effective in reducing intake of rhinoviruses and other airborne pathogens.     

A month later, Carvallo and Hirsch could scarcely believe the results. “Among the 98 who did not take ivermectin, eleven had contracted the virus,” he recalls in our interview. “Of the 131 [who received ivermectin], nobody had. 

“Word spread quickly through the hospital, and the union representing our health care workers demanded the prophylaxis be given to everyone [on staff] who wanted it.” With so large a volunteer pool suddenly available, he and Hirsch undertook a second, expanded phase of the trial.

This time they recruited 966 more health care workers at Eurnekian and three other Argentine hospitals while continuing to treat the original 229 subjects. Beginning June 1 and continuing to August 1, they received weekly doses of the ivermectin/carrageenan protocol, while the 407 in the control did not. All continued to observe PPE guidelines.    

At the trial’s close in August (ended because they’d run out of free medicines), 237 of the 407 participants in the control group, or 58.2 percent, were infected. Among the 788 patients treated with the ivermectin/carrageenan protocol, nose swabs and assessments of symptoms showed no evidence of Covid infection. “None,” says Carvallo. 

By then they had launched an observational treatment trial of patients already infected with Covid, modeled on the protocol they had proposed months earlier to JAMA. Starting in June they enrolled 135 outpatients presenting mild Covid symptoms, and 32 inpatients with moderate to severe symptoms. 

All were given ivermectin weekly, based on body weight and severity of symptoms, typically oral drops in doses ranging between 24 and 48 milligrams. All hospitalized participants received 4 mg of the corticosteroid dexamethasone by injection, and aspirin or a blood thinner depending on severity of symptoms. The most seriously ill were on ventilators. 

After four weeks, none of the 135 outpatients required hospitalization, and one inpatient had died. That was an 82-year-old man, with severe co-morbidities, who had been admitted at the hospital in a desperate condition.

The 3.2 percent death rate for those on the IDEA protocol, as they called it, was one-seventh the then-prevailing 23.5 percent death rate for hospitalized Covid patients in Argentina, they later reported in the Journal of Clinical Trials.

In July, Carvallo and Hirsch submitted their preliminary findings to Argentina’s Ministry of Health. The rest they sent in August. 

“A few days later I received a call at home from the health minister’s secretary,” remembers Carvallo, shaking his head. “He said I was not allowed to keep investigating ivermectin, or it would put my job in jeopardy. I was baffled. I said, ‘Why?’ and he would give me no answer.” The usually gracious Carvallo had harsh words for the health minister before hanging up. 

“And that’s when I cried again, from frustration. I’m not ashamed to say I cried, because it’s true.”

A year and a half later, with the Delta variant on the rise—and reports of an even more virulent strain circulating in the Amazon rain forest—ivermectin still struggles for official recognition as an anti-Covid agent despite the large body of research in its favor. 

In May, 2021, for example, The Journal of Antibiotics published a metanalysis of ivermectin showing that “100 percent of 36 early treatment and prophylaxis studies report positive effects” against Covid, with 26 of those trials reporting “statistically significant improvements.” 

Yet three months later, in August, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was still pounding the same drum it first pounded in June, 2020, when the Australian researchers published their findings.    

“Taking a drug meant for horses and cattle to prevent or treat COVID-19 is dangerous and could be fatal,” the FDA warned in August. Carvallo calls the mockery and disinformation “very frustrating.” (But in this vacuum of official censorship of the drug, he still doesn’t want people self-prescribing ivermectin—not because it’s dangerous, but because they might take too low a dose or not at the proper frequency.)

Lately, the fight has become even more pointed. On September 2, BuzzFeed News published a long, critical examination of Carvallo’s ivermectin studies which, it said, “raised questions about how the study’s data was collected and analyzed,” they say. (You can read the BuzzFeed story here.) Carvallo disputes the story as medically uninformed, saying his was a legitimate observational trial.

“It’s not a matter of ignorance,” Carvallo insists of the backlash against ivermectin. “The NIH, the CDC, the FDA—they’ve all read the studies. They just don’t care, because there’s a double standard. The more expensive a compound is, the less quantity of evidence is required to get it approved. “But when a compound is cheap and available,” he says, “that’s another matter.”

He told BuzzFeed it’s only a matter of time before ivermectin is widely approved to fight Covid. “All truth passes through three phases,” he told them. “First it is ridiculed, then it is violently opposed, then it is accepted as self-evident. We are in phase two now.”

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In two new stories on RESCUE tomorrow, “Hector vs. The Journalists,” you can read Carvallo’s full response to the BuzzFeed investigation and Michael Capuzzo’s report on the media mishandling of Carvallo’s study.

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