AMA Warns Against Ivermectin

On September 1st, 2021 the American Medical Association (AMA) along with the American Pharmacists Association (APhA) and the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) put out a press release warning that they collectively “strongly oppose the ordering, prescribing, or dispensing of ivermectin to prevent or treat COVID-19 outside of a clinical trial (bold in the original).” The title was even more strident and ominous-sounding as it called for (demanded?) “ending the use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19”.

Their reasoning, if we could call it that, begins with the undisputed facts that Ivermectin is approved for certain parasites in humans, but not approved to prevent or treat COVID-19.

They fail to mention that the most common use of ivermectin in the US pre-pandemic was for scabies, which is also not an approved indication in humans.

They go on to write that they are “alarmed by reports that outpatient prescribing for and dispensing of ivermectin have increased 24-fold since before the pandemic”, and “exponentially over the past few months.”

And because of the above, they call for “an immediate end to the prescribing, dispensing and use of ivermectin.”

Depending on patient demographics anywhere from 20-90% of all outpatient prescriptions are used for unapproved indications. There are few cases of parasites in the US treated with ivermectin, but there are about a million cases of scabies a year, some of which are treated without ivermectin, but let’s say a million is the yearly ceiling for pre-pandemic ivermectin prescriptions.

There have been 39 million cases of COVID-19 in the US so far. So a 24-fold rise in prescriptions for ivermectin, which has primarily been used as a preventive measure and is most commonly prescribed that way for 1-3 months at a time, doesn’t seem unreasonable, assuming of course that it works or there is evidence suggesting it might.

Doubling Down

They continue to provide some more of their reasoning, writing that the CDC and FDA have issued advisories along the same lines: i.e. ivermectin is not approved for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19.

Again they fail to mention the epidemic of dangerous prescribing for scabies that has been ongoing for decades and without any large randomized controlled trials to back it up.

All this time patients have had to rely on word of mouth and small, underfunded studies to prove to themselves that they are no longer infested with the severely itchy mites after a dose or two of ivermectin.

Next, they continue their appeal to authority: the NIH, WHO, and Merck, the manufacturer of ivermectin, “all state there is insufficient evidence to support the use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19.”

But they have it wrong. What Merck actually said in their press release was even more incendiary: they insisted there was no evidence at all to support the use of ivermectin for COVID-19.

A few weeks later Merck issued another press release. This time for their new wonder pill that’s in the works for treating COVID-19 and which already has a $1.2 billion commitment from the federal government.

Ivermectin, an off-patent, dirt cheap, Nobel-prize-winning drug that Merck gave away for free decades ago vs the promise of a new on-patent antiviral that is set to make billions of dollars. No conflict of interest was disclosed because billion-dollar corporations don’t have those.

As with all these press releases and bureaucratic statements, Merk left out any discussion of the scores of studies on ivermectin conducted in tens of thousands of patients, or some of the more thorough meta-analyses of those studies, which at least suggest, if not outright prove that ivermectin has a beneficial effect in treating COVID-19.

After the foregoing, the AMA switches into high gear insisting that the “use of ivermectin for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 has been demonstrated to be harmful to patients.”

As their sole example of this harm, they write that calls to poison control centers have gone up 5 times from their pre-pandemic baseline.

They are careful not to mention what exactly that pre-pandemic baseline was or if the calls turned out to be serious or not.

They are also careful not to mention if the call or calls were from a patient or patients who had resorted, out of desperation, to using the infamous horse-paste version of the drug, and whether or not they had inadvertently used too much of the concentrate.

They quote a recent CDC advisory that emphasizes the potentially toxic effects of this drug (that, by the way, is safer than Tylenol, aspirin, ibuprofen, Benadryl, and beer).

Ivermectin can cause such serious symptoms as “nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.” Then before anyone has a chance to consider that those side effects might not be so bad compared to dying with COVID-19 or developing long COVID, they let loose with the real kicker: “Overdoses are associated with hypotension and neurologic effects such as decreased consciousness, confusion, hallucinations, seizures, coma, and death.”

Overdoses of water will do the same thing.

So will overdoses of most drugs.

Why are people in danger of overdosing on horse ivermectin in the first place? Is it maybe because all the doctors are scared to prescribe human ivermectin with the correct directions for use?

A recent in-depth review of all available information on ivermectin safety done by a prominent pathologist confirms ivermectin’s nearly unmatched and excellent safety profile.

Perhaps we should warn everyone about the danger of listening to the AMA.