Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Robin Whittle's avatar

Hi Alex, Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz has been completely unreasonably dismissive of ivermectin and vitamin D since this 2020-05-13 article: https://gidmk.medium.com/should-you-take-a-vitamin-d-supplement-for-covid-19-63d922f24953 . I have tried to engage him in discussion in various ways since then and nothing comes back.

The Guardian publishes his writings as if he is both an expert in the field and as if his perspective on such matters is all that is required to settle a question.

I am wary of criticising people in potentially public spaces, not least due to the potential legal repercussions. If I had anything positive to say about GMK I would say it here. I have nothing to say in this regard.

There are numerous noisy people who think themselves experts, who are frequently regarded as experts, and who may indeed be experts in all the relevant fields who complain about genuine good evidence (in my opinion) for the importance of vitamin D for the immune system, and/or for the safety and effectiveness of ivermectin as an early treatment for COVID-19. Their standard approach is some mixture of:

1 - Never actually mentioning or criticising the best evidence for the effectiveness of the nutrient or drug.

2 - Picking some weak or suspect study, pointing out its errors (perhaps unreasonably) and then portraying this as the best evidence, or representative of the best evidence, for the nutrient or drug.

3 - Portraying extreme resistance to new information as a virtue. This is usually in the form of insisting on RCTs, ideally not in third-world / developing countries, each showing splendidly positive results, to be covered by at least one and ideally more resoundingly positive meta-analyses.

There are good reasons for proposed new medical treatments need to surmount such hurdles before being widely implemented outside clinical trials - when the treatment is a new drug, where the safety is not known and is in fact difficult or impossible to research in the absence of millions of people having been given the drug over many years.

However, it is a mistake to insist on such high hurdles, which would take years and tens of millions of dollars to overcome, in the middle of a crisis, for very well researched nutrients such as vitamin D3 (or calcifediol, which what all immune cells need 50ng/ml of, and which is produced over days from D3 by hydroxylation in the liver), for a very well tested drug such as ivermectin, or for a very well researched and widely used (without prescription in the USA) hormone such as melatonin: https://c19melatonin.com.

The question of why so many physicians, immunologists etc. are so clueless about vitamin D is the most complex, perplexing, difficult and important problem I have ever encountered. One day I will write lots about it at https://nutritionmatters.substack.com .

Doctor's face extreme difficulties with the amount of knowledge and experience they are supposed to bring to bear on every clinical decision, often based on limited time and limited information. They can say X, have it misinterpreted as Y, and have Y cause harm or death to their patient or to someone else. They are very wary about changing their beliefs and are highly resistant to anyone pestering them to do so.

However, this whole global disaster would not be occurring at all if most people's 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels were 50ng/ml (125nmol/L) or more. Doctors, collectively, could have and should have recognised the need for this over ten years ago. There's a chance that in that time, they could have convinced many or most people to supplement D3 to attain this. Then SARS-CoV-2 R0 rates would generally be below 1.0, there would be no pandemic, and very few people with such good 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels would be seriously ill, even without early treatment or vaccination.

They haven't recognised this, for a variety of reasons, and this is a single point of failure for all humanity, apart from a few people who have figured out the need for good D3 supplementation, or who have been advised to do so by their doctor or nutritionist. But every single person is trapped in the global disaster of the pandemic's direct effects and the effects of the numerous attempts (lockdowns, vaccines - but little or nothing in terms of nutrition or early treatment) to control it.

Returning to ivermectin, the question is not whether there are X number of glowing RCTs and Y number of positive meta-analyses, all served up in the manner to which some people have become accustomed. The question is whether it is a safe and effective treatment for COVID-19. This question can be converted into: 'How could it be unsafe and/or ineffective in a world in which the best available trials which seem to show its effectiveness actually exist?" Since it is not possible for all those research articles to be totally or even largely faked, a proper line if enquiry leads to scrutiny of the 7 most significant Early Treatment RCTs listed in the "after exclusions" table at https://ivmmeta.com .

Click on the left column for the studies named Espita-Hernandez, Bukhari, Elalfy, Mouyra, Merino, Faisal and Aref. There you will find links to the articles and the anonymous ivmeta.com people's assessment of these studies.

Don't complain about some being preprints or being in journals not indexed in PubMed. Don't complain about them not being done in Western nations. Be glad that some MDs and other researchers have gone to the trouble of conducting these RCTs, including knowingly harming and killing some of their patients in the control arms, for the benefit of people like us who keep asking for more and more evidence.

Also have a look at their assessment of the trials with red boxes on the right, Krolewiecki (non-significant negative results, somewhat significant positive result), Vallejos (similar, low risk patients, potential difficulty excluding patients who had not already used ivermectin) and Buonfrate (too late).

Don't complain about obviously professional meta-analysis work being done anonymously - these people need to earn a living.

Now, what is the chance, given the existence of these studies, that ivermectin is either unsafe or ineffective for early treatment of COVID-19? I think the chance is zero.

As far as I know, none of the noisy critics of Ivermectin deal with the best evidence like this.

Expand full comment
PamelaDrew's avatar

My long suit is Monsanto's genetically engineered foods where Bill Gates has been a key investor and promoter of false claims and industry science that includes a vast network of front groups with media and academic shills that are featured as experts. This is more of the same.

Among the oldest and most abusive is original Big Tobacco/Petrochemical funded group ACSH who defend toxic profiteers with a stable of compromised sources. Sourcewatch has fab detail for ACSH which is worth a glance.

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_Council_on_Science_and_Health

First red flag for me is Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz — January 18, 2018 featured by ACSH to defend Red Bull energy drinks. Like most food PR he references "sugar" which is not an ingredient but is used as a blanket term to included high fructose corn syrup as substantial equivalent. That's an odd oversight error for a man centered on diabetes research.

https://www.westernsydneydiabetes.com.au/about-us/the-core-team/gideon-meyerowitz-katz

Defending Red Bull against negative study results at ACSH puts Gideon in the stable of writers who also find toxins in organic baby food alarmist.

https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/01/18/red-bull-not-going-destroy-our-youth-and-kill-us-all-12437

More ACSH focus - https://www.acsh.org/news/2021/10/06/heavy-metal-tainted-baby-food-congressional-report-omits-important-science-15855

Then we have the author Jack Goodman who has a series of lies in his reporting of COVID vaccines. This piece from 2020 Covid-19: What’s the harm of ‘funny’ anti-vaccine memes?

Goodman claims safety and efficacy for vaccines that is entirely baseless putting his "science" into question. https://www.bbc.com/news/55101238.amp

"Vaccines go through rigorous safety checks before they can be administered to the public, with side effects closely monitored. Covid vaccines: Who decides if they are safe?"

This links to an opinion piece that reads like PhARMA press release. False claims aren't debunked they are advanced.

"People will still be offered the jab even if they have had Covid-19 in the past. That's because natural immunity may not be long-lived and immunisation could offer more protection."

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55056016

Then Goodman adds "Vaccines must meet a high standard of safety and effectiveness before they are approved for use - it's misleading to call them experimental. "

Consider the source & follow the money.. his conclusion is revealing ""But the case can also be made that vaccines actually increase people's freedom to do things they otherwise wouldn't be able to, and can also contribute to safeguarding other people's personal freedoms too."

Couldn't be Bill Gates funding to media science helps bias of could it?

https://web.archive.org/web/20200414143731/https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/gates-foundation-awards-20-million-to-bbc-world-service-trust

Expand full comment
30 more comments...

No posts