Canary - Dr. Pierre Kory's Testimony - The War On Modern Repurposed Drugs
Senator Ron Johnson “Federal Health Agencies and the COVID Cartel: What Are They Hiding?"
Dr. Pierre Kory testifies at Senator Ron Johnson’s round table hearing titled “Federal Health Agencies and the COVID Cartel: What Are They Hiding?”
Dr. Kory writes CHAPTER 5 The Global Disinformation Campaign Against Ivermectin - The “Fix” at the WHO in “Canary In a Covid World; How Propaganda and Censorship Changed Our (My) World” A collection of essays from 34 contemporary thought leaders. An Amazon #1 Best Seller.
Transcript: (RAW)
Senator Ron Johnson: Our next presenter is Dr. Pierre Khoury. Dr Kory is the former chief of critical care services at the University of Wisconsin and co-founded and serves as the president and chief medical officer of the Front Line Covid 19 Critical Care Alliance.
Dr. Pierre Kory: Thank you. It's an honour to be here. Since its founding, the FDA has approved approximately 32,000 medicines for practically every condition known to medical science. This massive library of treatments is actually a gift to humanity. But like all libraries, it also contains secrets. We are only now beginning to understand that many long established drugs have multiple mechanisms and can be used to effectively treat diseases with either similar or even different pathophysiologies. Further, the longer they have been in use, the more well known as their safety profile. Thus, there's an enormous potential for repurposing this massive sort of back catalog of well-known drugs that the FDA has already deemed safe. So why on earth aren't we systematically testing them for potential new uses? The ugly truth, as Doctor Hazen and others have referred to, is that it's not profitable to do so. Big Pharma makes money on complicated new drugs, and it effectively controls numerous levers of power. Nearly half of FDA's budget is bankrolled by the drug industry, and its tentacles are deep in media, academia, medicine and other regulatory agencies like the NIH. And for decades, it has waged war on safe, effective, off patent treatments for numerous diseases. And, I would argue, none more damaging than its decades long war on vitamin D. Big Pharma's main tactic is valuing randomized controlled trials as the infallible gold standard, while dismissing positive results of other kinds of studies, such as observational studies or smaller randomized controlled trials.
But here's the unfortunate reality these large randomized controlled trials, that's the only currency now to get approval. Well, they are not objective and they are not without bias because they cannot overcome the bias of the massive funders that are bankrolling these trials. I would argue that the only thing controlled about them is their results, as we saw numerous times in the pandemic.
Meanwhile, observational studies, which are far simpler and cheaper to perform, they can be done by independent investigators nights and weekends. Just doing chart reviews. Well, little known fact is that those kind of trial designs actually produce results that are completely consistent with randomized controlled trials. This is well known now from a meta analysis published in the Cochrane Library in 2014, where they compared 10,000 randomized controlled trials and observational trials. They looked at their results and they concluded on average, there is little evidence for significant effect estimate differences between observational studies and randomized controlled trials. Can you show my first slide? And I would argue that this belief, this heralding of the randomized controlled trial, is largely the result of massive disinformation.
I always remind my readers, I wrote a book called The War on Ivermectin, which is literally a case study in these modern wars on repurposed drugs. And they do that using disinformation. And I would I would invite the audience or listeners to read this article. It's not a long article, but it details the numerous tactics. And I would say the most damaging is the one I have on the screen. It's called the fake and it consists of three different actions that they take. One is that they design and conduct trials with predetermined results. They did that repeatedly in the pandemic, particularly negative studies to show that hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin didn't work. And then they only they selectively publish only those negative studies and they censor positive studies. This cynical manipulation of evidence based medicine is not a secret. As far back as 2009, Doctor Marcia Angell, the longtime editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, issued this prescient warning, quote it is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. No one knows the total amount of money provided by drug companies to physicians, but I estimate from the annual reports of the top nine US based drug companies that it comes to tens of billions of dollars a year in North America. End quote. This creeping decades long war and off patent drugs went into overdrive during the pandemic, when Big Pharma turned its guns against early treatments for Covid.
Using their control over the high impact medical journals, they consistently published studies designed to show predetermined negative results. With the size of these studies and the control over the journals, they managed to convince the world of a lack of efficacy using only a handful of studies, despite hundreds of others concluding efficacy. Further, these studies, numerous fatal flaws were ignored. For example, the to prove a medicine didn't work. They consistently use the lowest doses for the shortest courses while enrolling patients as late as possible into the disease, while including only the mildest cases. They did the exact opposite actions when they were trying to prove something was effective. Like Paxlovid. Those trial designs were mirror images of each other. They were opposites. Can you show the next slide, please? This is what's called a forest plot that shows 43 effective medicines in Covid. I've circled the only ones that were approved for use in United States, and actually the circles are off. But if you look, you probably can't see it. But if you look at the cost, the only things approved in United States. All costs in the many hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. Every zero, $1, $2, $5 medicine was completely ignored and never would reach regulatory approval. Further, when they did not get the result they wanted, in several instances they were forced to change the original endpoint a supposed never event in research science.
Despite these manipulations, each of these studies publications launched massive negative PR campaigns and recommendations from health agencies against the use of these inexpensive, safe, repurposed drugs. Last slide. If you look, this is just a little summary of the evidence base as we sit here today. As of today, there have been 420 controlled trials studying hydroxychloroquine in Covid. That includes over half a million patients with ivermectin. There have been 100 controlled trials with over 125,000 patients. And summary analyses of these evidence spaces all show large magnitudes statistically significant benefits in all important outcomes. Yet in this country, ivermectin is considered an ineffective horse de-wormer and hydroxychloroquine, the drug of fringe quack right wing anti-vaxers.
So what's the way forward from here? We need to create a framework to test off patent and off label drugs and model their clinical benefits and cost savings. A public private partnership of diverse, independent, unconflicted stakeholders accountable to Congress could conduct sustained, independent, systematic studies of repurposed drugs that would complement FDA review, clinical practice, and the role of natural immunity in health. It won't be easy, but if physicians, health care leaders, and politicians unite behind this call to action, we can push the system towards greater accountability and help more people in the process. Thank you.
Senator Ron Johnson: Thank you doctor. I remember in December of 2020, I specifically asked Francis Collins, this is after your hearings in November and in December, what is the NIH doing in terms of exploring these molecules as generic drugs? And he said, Senator, we spent hundreds of millions of dollars exploring this. And I said, well, good. Send me the information, it won't surprise you that I never got that information. What can doctors do? I mean, what resources can they research? And quite honestly, what can patients do to find this information? Find doctors who actually, you know, think outside the box and do something other than what Big Pharma tells them to do.
Dr. Pierre Kory: I would say the best answer as of right now would be my nonprofit organization co-founded by Professor Paul Marik. We have done immense amount of work at looking at the role of safe, available, repurposed medicines in a number of disease models. And I think I think that would be the start of a resource. But, you know, we're just a little nonprofit. This is a major issue that affects a massive population, not only in the US but around the world. And clearly we need more resources put to this, to the study of these medicines. And as my colleagues have alluded, there's just no financial incentive to do that for those that control literally public health and medicine in general. This is the enemy. This is the Achilles heel of the entire pharmaceutical industry. They are terrified of repurposed drugs. You will never get a repurposed drug to reach regulatory approval if there's more profitable alternatives.
Senator Ron Johnson: Mr. McKernan has a question.
Mr. KcKernan: Yes. I just wanted to highlight the asymmetry in the publication that's going on here, because Deb brought up this great paper of 99 million patients. If you go to that paper, it was a $10 million study, and it was funded by the CDC and HHS. The HHS has $400 million in vaccine royalty and CDC, we heard from Brian Hooker has vaccine money and yet their paper is heralded all over the place. And if you look at that paper, it says data not available. I worked in the Human Genome Project with taxpayer funded money. We put data public every 24 hours when we did this. And then folks like yourself, Sabine and Jessica and Pierre, you put data out and you get retracted and your data is available. So there's just a massive asymmetry in peer review right now that is also captured in is a topic that needs to be addressed.