I want to thank Steve Simasko for taking the time to write a thoughtful response (Daily News, March 3) to my editorial on ivermectin, and I want to respond to some of his observations.
Simasko noted that we should not expect ivermectin to be a dependable treatment for COVID-19 because it was intended for something else. That’s true, but before the COVID-19 vaccines were released in 2021, many scientists spent 2020 trying to repurpose most known drugs to fight COVID-19.
Yet sometimes drugs do have surprising repurpose abilities. Sildenafil, the generic version of Viagra, was designed by Pfizer to fight hypertension and angina before its more familiar side effect for men was discovered.
Last month WSU’s College of Veterinary Medicine reported that Sildenafil could also be the long-awaited treatment for dogs with a rare disorder called megaesophagus. The condition involves a loss of ability to move food to the stomach, and untreated animals inhale food into their lungs and suffer from aspiration pneumonia
So, Sildenafil has been repurposed once for humans and repurposed again for dogs. On this basis, we can conclude that a drug’s intended purpose does not entirely exclude other treatment possibilities, as long as scientists are willing to experiment and develop its potentials into solutions.
Simasko clarified that the “only real way to test if a drug is useful is to do the clinical studies.” I 100% agree. I’ve called for a science-based approach to decisions regarding COVID-19 since the beginning. I encourage Simasko not to blindly accept the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and World Health Organization marketing but to research for himself the results of the clinical studies over the last two years.
The best site I’ve seen is c19early.com/ which is maintained by PhD researchers and scientists. No spin, no agenda, and vociferously pro-vaccine, they provide real-time analysis of nearly 1,500 research studies consisting of 548 potential treatments from abacavir to zinc. They welcome feedback on their methodologies, and daily update the site’s research compilation from the last two years. They catalog the 70 countries around the world who approved early treatment for COVID-19. As anyone can guess, the U.S. was not one of those countries.
Next, Simasko ignored the fact India, which fought COVID-19 using Ziverdo Kits (ivermectin, doxycycline, and zinc acetate), ranks No. 133 (in the bottom third) in the world for Covid-19 death rates. India’s death rate as a country was far lower than any single U.S. state. Ziverdo Kits had a different purpose before COVID-19, but their potential has proved to be more widespread than originally intended.
Finally, I want to respond to über-liberal, democrat partisan Nick Gier. His COVID-19 focus has, unsurprisingly, been identical to Biden’s: a monomaniacal fixation on annihilating the virus at all costs.
From the beginning, it was unrealistic to have a goal of zero COVID-19 cases. And it has failed miserably. It was short-sighted and turned us into brittle, insecure, clutching fanatics who lost sight of the basics of universal health and wellbeing.
I addressed public health concerns in my April 2020 Daily News column, discussing the impact of shutting down the economy. I wrote that unemployment would lead to “suicides, heart attacks, strokes, alcohol poisoning, drug overdoses, violence, etc.” Further, “many have to deal with the consequences of domestic violence, failed marriages, childhood trauma, increase in crime, etc. Others turn to drugs and alcohol to relieve the pain and boredom.” All of these came true.
The consequences of lockdown cover a broad spectrum of public health concerns. Even though the virus targets the elderly and those with comorbidities, Gier’s approach of treating everyone as members of his boomer geriatric generation is ludicrous. It has hurt minorities and low-income families the most and cost a generation of school students two years of their lives and education.
Gier’s tactic is political science rather than real science. He vilifies eminent epidemiologists like Drs. Gupta, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff with whom the novel consensus scientists disagreed. But real science doesn’t take the cowardly, political approach to opposition by deplatforming it.
No matter how the media changes its tune to say that the previously settled science has “evolved,’’ remember that the science isn’t evolving at all. It is rather the medical whims of our politicians and people like Gier who are forever shifting and adapting to fit their sociopolitical agenda.
Courtney served 20 years as a nuclear engineering officer aboard submarines and 15 years as a graduate school instructor. A political independent, he spends his time playing with his 7 grandchildren in Moscow.
