A Pennsylvania newspaper tracked down Dr. Kenneth Brown — who wrote Merck’s original research protocols in the 1980s for studying ivermectin as a “river blindness” treatment.
They describe Brown as 85 years old, retired, and “proud of his association with Ivermectin.”
More than 4 billion doses of ivermectin (renamed Mectizan) have been administered globally in the effort to eliminate river blindness, the leading cause of preventable blindness worldwide. Historically, river blindness — transmitted by the bites of black flies that breed near rivers and streams — is prevalent in 36 countries in Africa, Latin America and Yemen. Brown saw firsthand in west Africa the miracle at work, often administered by local townspeople — who could neither read nor write — trained through Merck’s donation program.
“We want to celebrate Ivermectin for what it’s done around the world,” said Polly Ann Brown, Brown’s wife.
They asked how he feels about people “willing to bypass evidence…collected through traditional scientific studies” to try self-administering their own levels of the drug in home experiments seeking remedies for Covid-19. (The article notes that even the author of an often-cited Australian study that initially claimed a benefit from ivermectin has since said “[T]he potential repurposing plausibility if any is at present not very likely, because the antiviral concentrations would be attainable only after massive overdose.”)
Brown tracks questionable claims about medicines as a retirement job… The main thrust of many pushing the use of ivermectin [as an unproven Covid-19 treatment] goes something like this: Big pharma doesn’t want the public to use ivermectin…because the pharmaceutical companies don’t make vast sums of money on what is, essentially in the U.S., a horse dewormer. Billions of people — they will argue — have taken the drug safely.
What they don’t say, or don’t know, is that ivermectin has been administered billions of times. But because ivermectin is not a one-and-done treatment (it has to be administered once annually) that’s an exaggeration. And while it’s been used for decades, there are no established safety protocols for its use as a COVID-19 treatment. The way Brown sees it, the affection for ivermectin rather than one of the COVID-19 vaccines authorized for use in the U.S. reveals an anti-science bias.
Brown’s advice?
“Don’t get your information or medical advice from Facebook or Instagram,” Brown said. “No social media can be reliably accurate.”
Elsewhere in the article, Brown stresses that Ivermectin is “not magic…”
“It is a danger to trust the dream we wish for rather than the science we have.’
Read more of this story at Slashdot.