Is This Fraud Ever Going to End?
By Dr Vernon Coleman
I sometimes envy the zombies who believe that the only problem is an infection which causes a disease called covid-19.
They get up in the morning, check in the mirror to make sure they haven’t died in the night, munch their chocolate flavoured bran flakes, choose a mask that goes best with their chosen outfit for the day and venture out into the world a little nervous but confident that their government is doing its best to protect them in these tricky times.
As they go about their business they disinfect their hands at every possible opportunity, carefully obey the social distancing rules and wait impatiently for the vaccine.
In a way I occasionally envy them their ignorance. They are like not very bright goldfish swimming round and round in one of those glass bowls.
People sometimes refer to the ignorant as sheep but this isn’t fair.
I have kept sheep and they are far more intelligent than most people imagine. Hardly anyone has bothered to do any research because, like cows and pigs, sheep are just farm animals and farmers and vets don’t have much interest in studying animals whose destiny is to be slaughtered, chopped up and eaten.
For example, the books will tell you that sheep are colour blind. They aren’t.
I used to have a four wheel drive vehicle which was the same model as the vet’s. My car was blue and his was green. When the sheep saw my car coming they ran towards me because I always gave them biscuits. When they saw the vet coming they ran away because he always wanted to check their feet and they didn’t like that. I later tested with different coloured feed buckets and I can promise you that sheep are not colour blind. They are actually very bright animals – far more intelligent than Gates, Fauci or Whitty and invariably a darned site better conversationalists. And they are brave too. My sheep once frightened a dog so much that the dog’s owner begged me to call my sheep off his dog.
So, to me, the ignorant thickos who still believe the coronavirus is the new plague are zombies or collaborators.
The vigilance of the collaborators means that every trip to the shops has become something of an ordeal.
The staff in the supermarket are always fine and actually a few seem genuinely sympathetic. But there is invariably one customer who worships Bill Gates, probably has his picture above his bed, and who feels it is his duty to confront any intelligent people he sees with naked faces.
This morning I hadn’t got more than three feet into the supermarket when a pompous, sanctimonious mask-finder general, one of Commander Dick’s shame police, rushed up to my wife and rudely and aggressively demanded that she put on a mask. That’s Commander Dick of the Metropolitan police.
My wife was startled and upset and politely told him that she was exempt. He still scowled, and I thought he deserved more. And with my wife’s permission, I explained that it wasn’t really any of his business but that she’d had surgery for breast cancer and a month’s radiotherapy which has caused damage which makes breathing difficult. Thanks to the absurd coronavirus hoax, the hospital physiotherapy department is still closed so she is in pain most of the day. I wish someone would explain that to me, incidentally. My wife can have a tattoo, were she so inclined, or her hair done, but she cannot have physiotherapy because the physiotherapy department is still closed. I pointed out to the mask-wearing prefect that nurses at the hospital told her to remove her mask after she almost collapsed with palpitations caused by her condition.
You might have thought a human being would have been embarrassed. Not a bit of it. The Dick police specials are shameless. The cretin, utterly indifferent and uncaring, just shrugged and demanded to know why I wasn’t wearing a mask.
I always explain to the thickos that the mask they are wearing does absolutely no good, that mask wearing is dangerous, that they didn’t wear a mask last year so why are they wearing one this year and that covid-19 has killed fewer people than the flu.
I do this because I think these zombies need to be educated before they accost an elderly or frail person and cause serious upset.
Sadly, however, in my now generous experience the mask promoting lunatics always run away when you reply to their muttered, `where’s your mask?’ mantra. The collaborators compound their selfishness and their ignorance with good old-fashioned cowardice: without exception, they run away. Say something, anything, in reply and they scoot away back to the hole in the skirting board.
And that’s what happened with this coward. He ran off. All mouth but no guts.
`You are an idiot!’ I shouted at the retreating mask wearer.
Not witty, I admit, but adequate.
The collaborators will destroy our lives as well as their own unless they are brought to heel.
I had trouble in the bank, too. There was, inevitably, a lengthy queue outside which was fine because Bill Gates’s cloud of calcium carbonate hanging in the sky was keeping the sun at bay though I wonder how many people will freeze to death when the weather becomes a little chillier. All part of the Agenda 21 plan to get rid of the elderly and the frail.
Eventually, when I got a foot in the door, a girl whom I could identify as a staff member only because of her uniform, asked me where my mask was and wanted to know if I was exempt. I smiled and nodded and she offered to get me a lanyard with a label to hang around my neck to show that I was exempt. Since I don’t want a lanyard with a label any more than I want a mask I just smiled and said no thank you and explained that masks are entirely useless because viruses go straight through the material.
`I know,’ she said. `But wearing a mask gives people confidence.’
What madness. She knows that masks are useless but she thinks they give people confidence. Does she think all their customers are half-witted five-year-olds? The answer is obviously yes.
And talking of five-year-olds, when is someone going to start arresting parents who force small children to wear masks? In England, children under 11 are exempt from mask wearing. (Look at the Government website for the latest information because the rules change almost daily.) There is much talk of authorities taking children away from parents who disapprove of vaccination. I think they’ve got it the wrong way round. They should be taking children away from parents who force children to wear masks or let them get vaccinated.
Just before we left town, we saw a maskless man come out of the supermarket. Like conspirators we chatted for a few moments. He was quite awake and aware of the fraud being perpetrated upon us. He told us that he watched UK Column and the old man in a chair. He didn’t have the faintest idea the old man, without his chair, was standing just two feet away from him. We didn’t mention it.
You and I are involved in a war where we are not quite sure whom we are fighting or precisely what their final aims might be – other than the fact that we are destined to be drones, slaves, proles in a world run by a new self-appointed aristocracy.
The minute we think we have worked it out and know what the rules are they change the rules. It is a world which appears to have been designed by Lewis Carroll to make Franz Kafka feel comfortable.
The only stable currency is the lie.
It is no exaggeration to say that it is fair to assume that everything anyone in authority says will be a lie. They do it so naturally that I sometimes wonder if any of the politicians and their advisors realise just how much they are lying. Maybe it’s just like breathing. They do it without thinking.
I think we perhaps all misunderstand how vile politicians are. Auberon Waugh once said that the only thing that any of them is really interested in is the chance to make decisions and see them put into effect – to press a button and watch us all jump.
He was right, but the politicians have recently been joined by an army of advisors, hangers on and confidants who are also in it for the power, and who have very real views on how the world should be but who cannot be bothered to stand for election. The Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Gates, Soros and so on are all too arrogant to expose themselves to the ballot box and I suspect they all hold us in contempt.
It is often said that the truth will set us free but the one certainty these days is that long before we get there we will be disappointed, frustrated and not a little angry.
They say we must be prepared for a second wave.
A second wave of what?
Did we actually have a first wave? Covid-19 killed less people than the flu. What sort of wave is that? More of a ripple really.
How can there be a second wave without a first wave?
We could, I suppose, have a second ripple.
Take out the hundreds of thousands of old people who were murdered in care homes around the world, and the hundreds of thousands who were put down as dying of covid-19 but actually died of something else and the total number who have allegedly died of the coronavirus can hardly be called a wave. It certainly wasn’t much of a pandemic.
In England and Wales, the excess number of deaths has fallen below the five year average for the fifth week in a row. Moreover, the figures now show that more than 90% of covid-19 deaths occurred in people over 60, and 90% of those who died in hospital had existing health conditions before they got infected. In due course the real figures will be available and they will, I suspect, show that over 90% were in their 80s or older, and had two or three co-morbidities.
There are regions of England where I suspect that more people are dying from falling off horses than are dying from the coronavirus. Does that mean that we’ve having an epidemic of deaths caused by people falling off horses? In many parts of the world anything that actually kills people is a bigger threat than the coronavirus. Is rabies now a global pandemic? How about falling off mountains? I would bet that there have been more suicides, caused by fear and despair for the future than covid-19 deaths in some places in the last month.
Nothing much makes any sense any more, does it?
And yet, as hypnotherapist and author Colin Barron points out, many of the so-called experts on covid-19 don’t have any medical qualifications. Neil Ferguson is a mathematician and yet his predictions were used as the basis for the global lockdowns.
Everyone with a certificate in basic woodwork has suddenly become a medical expert.
The other day the Scottish Daily Mail printed a letter from someone called Professor Greg Philo of Glasgow University who warns `the fear is real and we need a strategy to eliminate the virus’.
So, what is Professor Philo’s medical speciality? Medicine? Surgery? Epidemiology? General Practice?
None of the above.
The only Professor Philo I could find is a professor of communications and social change.
And if you’ve got any idea what that means then you have my commiserations.
Why do such people assume the right to pontificate about whether or not a virus infection is a threat?
As Dr Barron says, there was a time when only taxi drivers were experts on everything. These days even professors of communications and social change want to share their conclusions about a complex piece of global manipulation.
We have reached the strange position where paranoia is no longer a medical condition. It is a rational state of mind. Governments have lied about lockdowns, they have lied about the number of deaths, they have lied about the need for masks and they have lied about social distancing. Trying to dismantle the lies and find the kernel of truth is like playing three dimensional chess and if that isn’t the most mixed up metaphor in history then I’ll try again another day.
I can’t remember the last time a politician said anything that bore even a faint relationship to the truth. You’d be mad not to assume that everything the dishonest, deceitful cynical politicians and the advisors say is a barefaced lie. We’re being ruled by crazed psychopaths who have somehow succeeded in encouraging the collaborators to believe that it is possible to remove all risk from human life.
Politicians and their advisors should be forced to wear logos on their suits to list their sponsors, allegiances and connections. They’d have so many advertising logos they would look like race car drivers. All BBC staff should have EU and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation logos on their clothing at all times. The Guardian too. Anyone with links to a drug company should be banned from any sort of public role. As I have shown in previous videos, the world’s drug companies are more dishonest and dishonourable than tobacco companies. We would be better off if the world were run by a cabal of Colombian drug barons than the pirate crew currently striving for global control.
Telling lies is the new normal in our world.
They say that wearing masks will provide protection. This isn’t true. What evidence there is shows that masks are entirely pointless and potentially dangerous. Only the clinically insane and people with IQs in single figures think masks are of any value whatsoever. Why don’t footballers have to wear masks when they’re playing? Because masks impede their breathing. Why do even politicians and government advisors agree that those with respiratory problems don’t have to wear masks? The answer is obvious – because masks impede breathing.
They say that it will be necessary to introduce more lockdowns to prevent more deaths. But even governments now admit that lockdowns cause more deaths than they prevent. So the only possible reason for having more lockdowns is to kill more people.
They say they need to introduce new laws to avoid a second wave of infections and deaths. The truth is that it was the last lot of laws – the social distancing, the lockdowns and the masks – which have caused the deaths. More laws will result in more deaths.
They say we have to close our borders to keep out the virus. This is bollocks. In March I suggested closing airports to control the infection rate. But airports were left open. Now that the death rate has collapsed they want to stop people travelling. They are desperate to stop anyone travelling or having a good time. They are deliberately creating fear to sustain their corrupt, satanic ideology.
They say that testing is showing up more cases. This is so deceitful it’s worthy of Bernie Madoff. The tests which are being used throw up so many false positives that they are about as much use as a castrated ram in a field full of sheep. And even the politicians and their advisors must realise that if you test ten times as many people then the chances are that you will find more people who have or have had the infection. Tracking and tracing is simply an infringement of our civil liberties. It is of no value whatsoever.
They say the only way we will ever get back to normal will be with a vaccine. This is the biggest lie of all. Worst of all, they say that the new vaccine will be safe. They cannot possibly know this. The dimmest, most stupid person you know can judge whether their new vaccine will be safe as well as they can.
Politicians, advisors, commentators and professors of golf course management claim that the world will not get back to normal until there is a vaccine available. There is of course, another unspoken option: that the majority will realise that the coronavirus scare is a hoax; a massive fraud deliberately arranged by people with malignant intentions.
And that’s what is going to happen.
I will leave you with a quote from the Robert Donat film version of the Count of Monte Cristo: `They call me mad because I tell the truth.’
What more can I say?
Vernon Coleman’s bestselling book about the coronavirus is called `Coming Apocalypse’. It is available on Amazon as a paperback and an eBook.
Copyright Vernon Coleman August 2020
Is ivermectin effective against covid?
By Sebastian Rushworth M.D. | January 17, 2021
Over the last two months I’ve literally been bombarded by people asking me about my opinions on ivermectin as a treatment for covid, so I figured I’d better look in to it. Ivermectin is an anti-parasitic drug, used primarily to treat infections caused by parasitic worms. It was discovered in the 1970’s, and the researchers who discovered it were awarded the Nobel prize for their discovery in 2015.
The interest in ivermectin as a potential treatment for covid-19 is likely due to a study published way back in June of 2020, that showed a large reduction in SARS-CoV-2 in a cell culture after addition of ivermectin. If ivermectin were shown to be effective against Covid, that would be great, because it’s generic, cheap, safe, and widely available, so it would be easy to start treating people quickly. Unfortunately, that also means western pharmaceutical companies have zero interest in doing research on ivermectin, because there is no way to make a decent profit from it.
Who does have an interest? Poorer countries, that can’t afford expensive new drugs. That means the research on ivermectin as a treatment for covid has been pretty much entirely carried out outside the west.
I’ve managed to find four reasonably large randomized controlled trials looking at ivermectin for covid, and those are the trials we’re now going to discuss (I also found a fifth one, but it only enrolled 12 patients in each group, which to me is so small it’s not even worth looking at). Note that (as far as I’m aware) none of these studies has yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Personally, I don’t think peer-review is worth very much, so that doesn’t bother me at all, but it’s just something to be aware of.
The first trial was carried out in Bangladesh and completed in October. It included patients over the age of 18 with mild to moderate covid confirmed with PCR. Patients with severe covid were excluded from the study. According to the researchers the study was double-blind and placebo-controlled, although it is unclear from the study protocol whether the control group actually received a placebo, and what the placebo consisted of.
The intervention group received a single 12 mg dose of ivermectin plus 100 mg of doxycycline twice a day for five days (doxycycline is an antibiotic). Thus this wasn’t really a trial of ivermectin, it was a trial of ivermectin + doxycycline.
A total of 400 people were recruited in to the trial, and they were divided evenly between the intervention group and the control group. The average age of the participants was 40 years. The primary end point for the study was recovery within seven days, which the researchers defined as follows: absence of a fever for at least three days, significant improvement in respiratory symptoms, significant improvement on lung imaging, absence of complications requiring hospitalization, and an oxygen saturation above 93% .
This is a problematic end point, because a couple of the things in that list are not very specific, which leaves it up to the researchers to decide whether someone has recovered within seven days or not. Maybe that wouldn’t be such a problem if we could be 100% confident that there was complete blinding of the participants and the researchers, but based on the information provided I’m not even remotely certain that that was the case. And if there wasn’t blinding, then the researchers could easily have manipulated the results to make them appear more impressive.
Ok, let’s get to the results.
In the group treated with ivermectin + doxycycline, 61% had recovered within 7 days, and in the control group, 44% had recovered within 7 days. The difference was statistically significant (p-value <0,03).
At the two week mark after recruitment in to the study, participants had a second PCR test performed. In the group receiving ivermectin + doxycycline, 8% had a positive PCR test at two weeks. In the control group, 20% had a positive PCR test. Again, the result was statistically significant, in fact highly so (p-value <0,001).
Three people died in the control group, compared with zero people in the treatment group. However the result was not statistically significant (which of course doesn’t mean that there isn’t a difference – even if there is a real difference in mortality, this study simply was not large enough to be able to detect it).
So, what can we conclude?
This study suggests that ivermectin + doxycycline can shorten symptom duration, and also decreases viral load. If the results are real, the effect is actually pretty impressive. However, it is not clear from the published data that the study really was effectively blinded, and that means we can’t be very confident that the results are real. Additionally, it is unfortunate that the researchers chose to combine two separate drugs in one study, because it muddies the waters and makes it impossible to know whether it was the ivermectin or the doxycycline that was producing a benefit. Let’s move on to the next trial.
This was an open-label trial (i.e. both the researchers and the patients knew who was in which group) involving 140 patients, and the results were posted on MedRxiv in October 2020. As with the previous study, the treatment being tested was ivermectin plus doxycycline. The study was carried out in Iraq.
In order to be included in the study, patients had to have confirmed covid (based on a combination of symptoms, radiology, and PCR). All levels of severity of disease were admitted in to the study. Those with mild symptoms had to have been symptomatic for three days or less, while those with severe symptoms had to have had severe symptoms for at most two days, and those with critical symptoms had to have had critical symptoms for at most one day. The researchers motivate this somewhat weird set of inclusion criteria by saying that they wanted to see how effective ivermectin plus doxycycline is at the earliest stage of each phase of the disease.
Patients were randomized to either 200 ug/kg of ivermectin per day (roughly 14 mg per day for an average 70 kg person) for two days, and 100 mg of doxycycline twice a day for five to ten days. Unfortunately the researchers decided to break randomization because they felt it would be “unethical” to put people with critical illness in to the control group (personally I think it’s unethical to break randomization, because the results become less scientifically valid and thereby less useful to all the other millions of patients around the world). So all participants with critical covid recruited in to the study ended up in the ivermectin + doxycycline group. In the end there were 48 people with mild to moderate disease in each group. In the ivermectin + doxycycline group there were 11 people with severe disease and 11 people with critical disease, while in the control group there were 22 people with severe disease and no people with critical disease.
So, technically, this study wasn’t actually randomized at all. However, the fact that everyone with critical illness was placed in the treatment group should make the treatment look worse, not better, so if there is a positive effect of treatment in spite of that, then it’s likely bigger than this study shows.
The average age of the patients was 50 years in the treatment group and 47 years in the control group. Among those with mild to moderate disease, symptoms had started a median of three days earlier, while those with severe disease had first become symptomatic seven days earlier, and those with critical disease had started having symptoms nine days earlier.
The primary end point was time to recovery. This is very problematic in an unblinded study, because “time to recovery” is quite subjective, and it is very easy for the researchers to manipulate the results in whatever direction they want. Anyway, let’s look at the results.
The average time to recovery was eleven days in the group treated with ivermectin plus doxycycline, and 18 days in the control group. The result was highly statistically significant (p-value < 0,0001). That would mean that ivermectin and doxycycline together shorten the time to recovery by almost 40% in relative terms! If the study had been double-blind, and it was very clear exactly what the criteria for “recovery” were, that would be a very impressive result, especially considering that the people in the treatment group were on average sicker to start. However, since neither of those things are true, the result is highly questionable.
Two people died in the ivermectin + doxycycline group, compared with six people in the control group. This also seems impressive, but again, the study isn’t statistically powered to show an effect on mortality.
So overall so far we have two studies that suggest that the combination of ivermectin and doxycycline can be beneficial when used to treat patients with covid-19. However, both studies have flawed methodologies that make the results suspect. And if there is a real benefit, then we still don’t know whether to attribute that benefit to ivermectin or to doxycycline, or to some combination of the two. Let’s move on.
Next up we have a trial that went up on MedRxiv at the beginning of January 2021. The study was carried out in Nigeria. It was double-blind, which is good, but unfortunately it was very small. 62 patients were included in total, and randomized to three different treatment arms, so there were only around 20 patients per group.
Participants were included in the study if they had a positive PCR test. There was apparently no requirement that they have any symptoms. Obviously, this is a problem, since we know that the risk of a false positive result rises enormously when asymptomatic people are being tested. Funnily enough, even though they included asymptomatic people, they excluded people with severe covid, so this was really a trial of people with mild to non-existent disease. Why they tested people without symptoms is unclear, and why they then went even further and decided to try treating asymptomatic people with drugs is even less clear.
After inclusion in the study, participants were randomized to one of three treatments. The first group received a 6 mg dose of ivermectin which was repeated every 48 hours. The second group received a 12 mg dose of ivermectin, also repeated every 48 hours. The third group was the “control” group, but for some reason the researchers opted to give the “control” group lopinavir/ritonavir rather than a placebo. No explanation is offered for this strange decision. Since the control group was given an active drug rather than a placebo, we can’t say for certain whether the ivermectin is helping the patients, even if there is a positive treatment effect. It’s equally possible that the lopinavir/ritonavir is hurting the patients.
The participants were re-tested with PCR at four days, seven days, ten days, and 14 days, and this was used as the basis to determine how successful the different treatment arms were. PCR-positivity isn’t even a remotely patient-oriented outcome, so as with so much else to do with this study, this is problematic. Anyway, let’s take a quick look at the results and then move on to the next study.
On average it took nine days for participants in the control group to become PCR negative, six days for participants in the low dose ivermectin group, and five days in the high dose ivermectin group. If the two ivermectin groups are combined, the average time to PCR negativity becomes five days, and the reduction compared with the control group is four days (42% relative risk reduction), which is statistically significant (p-value 0,007). There were no deaths in any of the groups treated, which isn’t really surprising since it was a small study and many of the participants were completely asymptomatic to begin with.
So, what can we say about this study?
Not much. The number of participants is tiny, the control group isn’t a real control group, and the results are based entirely on the flawed PCR-test, not on any real reduction in symptoms or in any other outcome that actually matters in any way. The results are somewhat promising, but that’s really all we can say.
Ok, let’s get to the final study.
Like the previous study, this was posted on MedRxiv in early January 2021. It was double-blind, and it was carried out in India. In order to be included in the study, potential participants had to be over the age of 18 and have mild to moderate covid, with the diagnosis confirmed by PCR.
I’m not sure why these studies keep focusing on people with mild disease, since it’s more important to find an effective treatment for severe disease. I guess it stems mainly from a hypothesis that ivermectin is unlikely to be effective if given later in the disease course. But we still need to know whether it’s a good idea to give it to people with severe disease, so it’s unfortunate that this group was excluded in three out of the four studies.
A total of 115 people were recruited in to the study. The average age of the patients was 53 years. Half received 12 mg of ivermectin on the first and second day after inclusion in the study, while the other half received an identical placebo pill (ivermectin has a long half-life in the body, which is why it’s generally enough to just give one or two doses and then stop).
The primary end point chosen for the study was whether or not participants had a positive PCR-test at six days after inclusion in the study. Just as in the previous study, the researchers have chosen a totally meaningless end point, that tells us nothing about whether the drug in any way actually helps patients. Luckily, they did actually measure some other things too, that actually do matter, like length of hospital stay, ICU admission, and death.
So, what happened?
At the six day time point, 68% in the control group still had a positive covid PCR, compared with 76% in the ivermectin group. So the control group seemed to do better than the ivermectin group according to the irrelevant metric chosen by the researchers. However, this difference wasn’t even close to being statistically significant (p-value 0,35). Let’s look instead at some metrics that actually do matter.
In terms of symptoms, 84% in the ivermectin group were symptom free by day six, compared with 90% in the control group. So again, the control group seemed to do better than the ivermectin group. However, again, this result was not statistically significant (p-value 0,36).
If we look at invasive ventilation and mortality however, we do see an apparent benefit in the group treated with ivermectin. Five people in the control group ended up receiving invasive ventilation, compared with only one person in the ivermectin group. Four people died in the placebo group, compared with zero in the ivermectin group. So in terms of the more serious end points, that actually matter to patients, ivermectin seems to be better than placebo. However, as with all three previous studies, this study was far too small to say whether that difference was really due to ivermectin or just due to chance.
So, the final study gives a weirdly mixed message. In terms of PCR-positivity and likelihood of being symptom free at six days, the placebo seemed to be better, but in terms of invasive ventilation and death, ivermectin seemed to be better. However, none of the differences were statistically significant and could easily just be due to chance. So, overall, the final study is not able to show any benefit to treating patients with ivermectin.
Ok, let’s wrap up. Three of the four trials did produce some signal of benefit. However, all four trials had major flaws, and two of the trials that did find a benefit were also giving doxycycline, which makes it impossible to disentangle whether the potential benefit was coming from ivermectin or doxycycline. But these trials were all small, so it’s perfectly possible that there is a benefit but that the trials were just too small to detect it. What we really need now is a big, high quality, double-blind, randomized controlled trial of ivermectin as a treatment covid.
However, lacking that, we can try to put the results from these four trials together in to a little meta-analysis of our own, just for fun, to try to compensate for the fact that these studies were small, and therefore not really statistically powered to find anything but the biggest effects imaginable. When we do that, this is what we get:
I’m sure you’re all as nerdy as me, and love looking at forest plots. What this one shows is a 78% reduction in the relative risk of dying of covid, if you get treated with ivermectin!
The result is statistically significant (p-value 0,01). If the result is real, that is pretty damn amazing. That would mean that four out of five covid deaths could be avoided if everyone was treated with ivermectin (potentially together with doxycycline), a dirt cheap generic drug that’s been around for decades, and which we know is safe. It blows all the currently approved drugs for covid out of the water in terms of effect size.
There is of course, as always, a risk of publication bias. In other words, there might be more studies of ivermectin out there that haven’t had their results published, because they were less impressive. So let’s have a quick peek over at clinicaltrials.gov, and see if there is anything suspicious going on.
There are currently five trials of ivermectin for covid listed as completed at clinicaltrials.gov, but for which results haven’t yet been published. However, four out of those five were completed less than two months ago, and one was completed three months ago, so most likely they just haven’t gotten around to posting their results yet. So the risk of publication bias seems to be relatively low. It will be interesting to see what those studies show, when they do get published.
Do I think the huge reduction in mortality is real? I think it’s very possible. These were after all randomized controlled trials, so the risk of confounding factors is low (with the exception of doxycycline, which could be responsible for some or even all of the beneficial effect seen). And, as mentioned, the risk of publication bias appears to be pretty low. And the outcome for which there is a big effect size is mortality, which is a hard outcome that is hard for researchers to manipulate.
Childless Aussie vegans getting vasectomies shows environmental movement has finally lost its humanity
© Getty Images / kzenon
By Frank Furedi | RT | January 15, 2021
During the pandemic Down Under it has become fashionable for young male vegans to get sterilised in the name of saving the planet. This Malthusian instinct shows that increasingly babies are viewed not as a blessing, but a curse.
Australia has long been the country with the second highest rate of vasectomies in the world. Since the beginning of the pandemic, however, the rate of sterilisation has doubled!
According to Australian psychiatrist Dr Tanveer Ahmed, young male vegans are getting the snip because they believe it helps reduce population and consumption, which benefits the environment.
The belief that newborn babies constitute a threat to the environment is not confined to Australia. Environmentalist lobby groups are busy condemning those who have large families, branding them “environmentally irresponsible.” Having children, especially lots of children, is treated as an eco-crime. Prince Harry, via the issue of Vogue edited by his wife Meghan, pushed this idea last September, with his promise to have only two children in the name of eco-sustainability.
Many young female environmentalists have also declared their decision to boycott motherhood. In the UK, they have formed the ‘BirthStrike’ movement. These activists have decided “not to bear children due to the severity of the ecological crisis and the current inaction of governing forces in the face of this existential threat.” The BirthStrike website features personal statements from individuals who think it is wrong to give birth. When you read these statements, you realise just how much this movement has become estranged from the experience of motherhood.
The idea that giving birth is some kind of crime against the environment is now even endorsed by celebrities. Miley Cyrus says millennials “don’t want to reproduce, because we know that the Earth can’t handle it.”
The BirthStrike movement is merely the most extreme and depressing manifestation of an anti-humanist culture of pessimism. As is the case with Australian male vegans opting to get the snip, what drives them is not simply a deep attachment to the environment, but also a sense of misanthropy that leads them to the conclusion that the world would be a better place if humans stopped having babies. Their view of babies as polluters of the planet seamlessly meshes with a sentiment that treats parenthood as an undesirable and ‘problematic’ goal.
The dehumanisation of babies illustrates the sensibility of misanthropy driving sections of the environmentalist movements. The consequences of this sentiment were shockingly brought home to me when I read an article in the Australian Medical Journal by Barry Walters, a professor of obstetric medicine.
Walters wrote that “anthropogenic greenhouse gases constitute the largest source of pollution, with by far the greatest contribution from humans in the developed world” and that “every newborn baby in Australia represents a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions for an average of 80 years.”
He went on to ask: “What then should we do as environmentally responsible medical practitioners? We should point out the consequences to all who fail to see them, including, if necessary, the ministers for health. Far from showering financial booty on new mothers and thereby rewarding greenhouse-unfriendly behaviour, a ‘Baby Levy’ in the form of a carbon tax should apply, in line with the ‘polluter pays’ principle.”
Depicting new motherhood as “greenhouse-unfriendly behaviour,” Walters proposed a baby tax. From this perspective, the very act of giving birth is a form of pollution!
The vegans who are getting snipped clearly got Walters’ message and are making absolutely certain they are avoiding any “greenhouse-unfriendly behaviour.” As potential polluters, babies cease to be those lovely cuddly things that bring so much joy to our lives. Robbing babies of their endearing innocence makes it easier to scare people off having them.
In centuries past, babies were depicted as a blessing, but now some argue that not having one is a blessing – at least for the environment. This reversal in the way we regard human life is explicitly advocated by the environmentalist writer Kelpie Wilson, who presents abortion as not so much a necessary option to allow women to determine their life, but as a sacrifice well worth making in the interests of the planet.
“To understand that a tiny embryo must sometimes be sacrificed for the greater good of the family or the human species as a whole is the moral high ground that we stand on today,” argues Wilson. Why? Because “we have to consider how we will live tomorrow on a resource-depleted and climate compromised planet.”
From Wilson’s perspective, abortion is morally justified as a resource-saving strategy. She believes that “most women who seek abortions do so in order to conserve resources for children they already have.” Scare stories about the “physical limits of the planet” are now being presented as “moral arguments about abortion.”
King Herod’s fear of newborns was confined to one baby. Today’s misanthropic fear merchants have a far more ambitious target – the act of human birth itself. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that those who believe, far from being precious, a human life is a burden on the planet are deeply messed-up people.
Frank Furedi is an author and social commentator. He is an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Author of How Fear Works: The Culture of Fear in the 21st Century. Follow him on Twitter @Furedibyte
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New Book
The Garlic Book — 2026
Lies are Unbekoming | November 5, 2026
What The Garlic Book shows
The book is in four parts.
Part One, The Record, treats the history of garlic as evidence. From the clay garlic bulb placed in an Egyptian grave nearly six thousand years ago, through the Ebers Papyrus, through Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen, the Arab physicians under Avicenna, the medieval herbals, Culpeper, and the plague years, to the last era in which Western physicians prescribed garlic as a matter of course, which ran from 1850 to 1945. It closes with the living traditions that never stopped using it, and with the folklore of charms, vampires and the evil eye.
Part Two, The Chemistry and the Evidence, sets out what is known about why a clove has no smell until it is cut, and why the order of crush, rest and heat changes the medicine. It then reads the clinical evidence against the historical record — bacteria, blood and vessels, cancer epidemiology, metals and fatigue — and names the trials that went against garlic as directly as the trials that went for it, including the 2007 Stanford trial funded by the US National Institutes of Health which found that raw garlic, garlic powder and aged garlic extract moved LDL cholesterol no more than placebo did. It then turns to onion, garlic’s closest relative, and reads the newer evidence published since 2015, before closing with the whole of the record through the terrain lens.
Part Three, Why Medicine Set It Aside, asks the question directly. One chapter contrasts the pharmaceutical model of isolating a single active compound with the folk model of combining whole plants, and reports what the garlic evidence says about which model works better. One chapter examines the economics of research on a plant that cannot be patented. One chapter — Fire Cider — tells the story of a folk preparation whose name was taken into a United States trademark by a Massachusetts company in 2012, and won back by three herbalists in 2014 who documented forty years of prior use through Rosemary Gladstar and her students into the older tradition.
Part Four, Garlic in Practice, is the working manual — the kitchen pharmacy, traditional uses by body system, a full chapter on safety and interactions, and a complaint-by-complaint practical guide. The book closes with The Trial That Was Never Run — a one-chapter reading of the whole evidential architecture.
At the back: two appendices (a traditional list of uses, and a preparation quick-reference), a full bibliography, and a live index.
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