Ivermectin: Op or Prank?

This is MY war on ivermectin

The first piece of scientific literature on ivermectin for COVID-19 was published on 3rd April, 2020 in the journal Antiviral Research. Although the manuscript may have already been circulating during the month of March, it’s impossible to say who had seen or not seen the paper. It is therefore fair to put 3rd April as the date when ivermectin well and truly “entered the chat.”

The paper’s premise is simple and direct: “The FDA-approved drug ivermectin inhibits the replication of SARS-CoV-2 in vitro.” What a stroke of luck! You may ask yourself, how did this team of scientists (working out of Monash university in Melbourne, Australia) get the idea to try out a humble, off-patent anti-parasitic (it’s normally used to treat worms, not viruses) against this new and poorly-understood COVID-19? It is here where our story starts to drift in two directions at once. On one side there are those who speak of ivermectin in prophetic tautologies— “Ivermectin was studied for COVID-19 because we have always known that ivermectin would treat COVID-19.” On the other side, there are those that bothered to read a bit about what happens when a new virus is discovered. If the virus could affect rich people it’s all hands on deck. If the virus only affects poor people in some faraway hot country, the answer is sometimes not so much. With limited funding (or, in the case of COVID-19, in parallel to more costly work streams) one of the tools at your disposal is to try drug repurposing. What have we already got that might help? Because these drugs are almost always cheap as chips, the people who get the virus might actually be able to afford them! So the first thing you do is line up a bunch of drugs and test them in vitro (in a petri dish, more on which in a moment) to see which ones look promising. Then it’s on to mice, and from there to humans. (I am simplifying here otherwise this would be a book-length article.)

The fact is ivermectin had already been studied before. It was studied in 2015 as a possible treatment for the Zika virus. Some day I may write about Bob and Jill Malone—who I think are a folie à deux (meaning two people who share one madness between them)—but their history has been covered by smarter people than me so do your own. Anyway, the point is that testing ivermectin is a perfectly normal and un-weird thing to do. We just never hear about the drugs that failed (and finding out that ivermectin was tried for Zika took some digging) because the vast majority of drug repurposing experiments fail. It’s cheap to try but has a low win rate. It’s a trade-off.

But can’t we dream a little? Ivermectin has just shown it inhibits the replication of SARS-CoV-2 in a petri dish! Well, what I would have told everyone if I had even heard of ivermectin on 3rd, April 2020 is how the test is done: you infect a bunch of monkey kidney cells with your virus, put ‘em in a petri dish, then you absolutely drench them with the molecule of your choice. It turns out, however, that a lot of things kill viruses in petri dishes. Because this is Australia we’re talking about, I was fond of telling people that barbecue sauce could probably kill SARS-CoV-2 in a petri dish. (I’d throw down some money if anyone would actually do this experiment for me.)

And then a weird thing happened.

Shit Gets Weird

The same day the Monash paper appears—I shit you not, THE SAME DAY—an anonymous user (allegedly from India, but I doubt that) posts on 4chan “Single Dose IVERMECTIN Kills Corona in 48hrs” and, underneath, “Spread this information all over Twitter, so Trump can authorize this.”

First of all, if this person were acting in good faith, they would be more transparent about the “barbecue sauce caveat” and when they say “Also previously found to be effective against other viruses,” they should have said “but only in either petri dish or mouse experiments, since ivermectin is not presently used to treat any viruses in humans.”

But that scarcely matters since the channers are off to the races.

Wow, they already knew the vaccine had microchips in it before it was even invented? 4chan is modern.

It’s remarkable how the conversation turns to using veterinary formulations of ivermectin almost immediately. Literally the same day an in vitro study appears.

“They say even a single dose is extremely potent .. So if people are already using it for other diseases, no harm in trying similar doses to check if it works against Corona […] I plan to buy it OTC for just in case use.”

Uh huh! Really!

This one is kind of disturbing. This anon claims that in vitro results can be taken “more seriously” because anti-parasitics “spread very efficiently throughout the body.” He’s making that up. That’s just not true.

If you wonder why freaks like William Makis now claim ivermectin is a cancer treatment, well here is what I believe to be the source.

Here’s someone who has advice for what to tell your doctor.

Mmmmm. Apple flavour. Wait, you mean the horse formulation? How do you know all this already?

“They told you it was horse paste! Skreeeeeeeee!” (It literally is horse paste sometimes.)

The narrative was pre-baked before vaccines for COVID-19 were even invented. It’s ivermectin vs vaccines. That’s it. No other choices. And if you like one you must hate the other. You have been drafted to fight a fake war between two non-enemies.

You have no idea how happy literally everyone in the scientific community would have been if ivermectin worked. Because then there would be no need for a vaccine. Do you see why this is weird? Surely nobody would deliberately promote a fake treatment for a disease so that they could claim it was being suppressed in favour of a vaccine, which would stoke a further division and polarisation in society. Who would do such a thing?

(There are going to be people reading this who don’t think COVID-19 is, well, real. To them I will say, the real virus is the one that got us to turn against each other. But if COVID-19 can be observed under a microscope, it’s real. Pretty much everything other than that is up for discussion, but it’s real. Sorry.)

Worms cause cancer? They don’t. But you can see how quickly a narrative is building here.

Even more detailed advice for obtaining and dosing veterinary ivermectin.

And here we come to the most damning part. Recall that the original poster called for users to spread the message on Twitter. Here are three anons workshopping the precise messaging. One proposes the hashtag #IvermectinKillsCOVID. The second deliberately refers to spreading information about ivermectin as an “operation” and “something based in the making.” The third amplifies the potential hoax and appears to offer to help drafting the contents of the viral tweet.

This is the same day the first piece of scientific literature related to ivermectin and COVID-19 appears. Things you saw and read (and perhaps said yourself) years later were cooked up on 4chan in April, 2020.

Op or Prank?

In one sense, does it matter? The damage is done. Maybe it doesn’t and maybe we’ll never know whether these anons are anything other than internet pranksters who thought it would be based to get people to eat horse dewormer.

But, if you are reading this Substack, you know that’s not what I’m going to say. In my long-running series Late Sleepers, I have been slowly advancing the hypothesis that several prominent figures in the COVID-19 narrative are in fact “sleeper agents” of a sort. Relax, it’s not the exciting stuff of Cold War spy films. A “late sleeper” is my term for an individual who has been profiled by a hostile intelligence agency (or even a friendly one I suppose) and identified as “potentially useful” based on their personality traits (or personality disorders) and potential blackmail vectors (e.g. sex or money). Unlike a “normal” asset, who is worked by a handler, these potentially useful people are filed away for future use should the need arise. Let’s say… in the case of COVID-19. If an opportunity arises to exploit and destabilise an emergent situation, it may be time to activate, say, Pierre Kory, who I believe was talent-spotted at St George’s University.

Now have a look at this:

Russia has been ratfucking “the vaccine debate” since before the pandemic. Am I saying Russian trolls only spit out anti-vaccine content? If someone posts pro-vaccine content is it therefore impossible they are a Russian troll? NO! Here’s the genius part, Russia plays both sides. The goal is not to take one particular side or the other. The goal is to pick something people already somewhat disagree about and make them EXTREMELY ANGRY AT EACH OTHER ABOUT IT. Remember when I said you’ve been drafted to fight a fake war between two non-enemies? Yeah. The less effectively a nation functions, the more its divisions are exploited, the more it isolates itself from its allies, the better.

4chan is the perfect platform from which to mount a digital offensive. Firstly, it’s anonymous and misdirection-via-VPN is trivial. Secondly, its users (at least the ones who aren’t spooks) will do intelligence work for free. You don’t have to pay them! Every sanctioned country’s dream! Thirdly, the threads are deleted regularly, making it hard to attribute using ordinary methods. (I used 4plebs.org, an archive of 4chan threads, to find the screenshots in this article, but one would first have to know 4plebs even exists and how to get good results searching it.) Fourthly, Russia already has form using 4chan to start shit in America.

How sure am I that it’s Russia and not the CIA, Mossad, China, or the Iranians? I’m not 100% and I’m willing to listen to alternate theories. Given that it is right out of the Russian playbook and there is ample documentation of them using both this technique and using 4chan as an attack surface, I think it’s likely. There’s also the small matter of Senator Ron Johnson and Pierre Fucking Kory, who I will return to in my main series.

B-b-b-but I took ivermectin and it worked

When I first started researching ivermectin in the summer of 2021, I initially had no opinion one way or another as to its efficacy. One thing I was, however, absolutely certain of, was that Pierre Kory is a liar. In my life I have brushed shoulders with some very unsavoury people in some equally unsavoury situations, and I think—I think—I have the street smarts that a lot of doctors and scientists lack. Because I could tell Pierre Kory is a liar it stood to reason that the thing he was lying about is ivermectin. I have read virtually every scientific study on ivermectin for COVID-19. I have digested every “pro-” and “anti-” talking point. When I say this is an obsession, I ain’t playing.

TLDR. Should there be sufficient demand, I will write a Substack going into detail regarding the multiple problems with the ivermectin literature, including fraudulent papers that are ostensibly motiveless (fraud is never motiveless, you just don’t understand the motive). Yes, I’ve read Pierre Kory’s stupid book. Yes, I’ve heard everything Paul Marik (who is a fantastic blackmail target) has to say, yes I’ve read everything, listened to every podcast. If you took ivermectin and you think it made you better, you would have got better anyway. The Kory/Marik narrative of “early treatment” is constructed precisely to maximise the user’s likelihood of crediting the drug if they recover, and also to victimise the families of loved ones who died in hospital, to make them say to themselves “if only we had given uncle Gary ivermectin sooner.” It’s ingenious and insidious. It’s pure fucking evil. It also gives them a convenient excuse to complain that the properly-run scientific trials of ivermectin always gave ivermectin “too late” to make a difference. I always make the joke that in order to satisfy the FLCCC, you’d have to administer ivermectin via past life regression.

Pierre Kory’s arguments are bullshit. And he keeps getting creepier and weirder and lying harder. He’s not the only liar either. Horror films don’t give me nightmares. But sometimes there comes a podcast that will jolt me awake at night and fill me with dread. Remember when I talked about people being profiled for their personality traits or personality disorders? What do these three men have in common? Your answers in the comments please.

See you next time, I guess?