Hats off to Nicholas Hulscher, Peter McCullough, Harvey Risch et al. for their newly published paper on the anti-cancer properties of Ivermectin and Mebendazole.

Reading the study prompted me to review the fascinating story of Ivermectin — the wonder drug with a marvelously wide range of bioactive properties.

Increasingly I wonder if the "War on Ivermectin"—as Dr. Pierre Kory described the ferocious smear campaign that was waged by government health agencies against the compound—was not only to suppress ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19, but also to sabotage general interest in how the cheap, off-label drug could be useful against other maladies such as cancer.

Those interested in learning more about the story of ivermectin and the nihilistic war that was waged against it may enjoy reading Chapter 12 of my book (with Peter A. McCullough, MD) The Courage to Face COVID-19.

On April 3, 2020, while the media was fixated on President Trump's endorsement of hydroxychloroquine and Governor Cuomo's performances, a research team at the Monash University of Australia published a study on the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin. The team concluded:

Ivermectin is an inhibitor of SARS-CoV-2 virus in vitro. A single treatment effected approximately 5000-fold reduction in virus at 48 h in cell culture. Ivermectin is FDA-approved for parasitic infections and included on the WHO model list of essential medicines, and is thus widely available.

It would be hard to overstate the significance of this discovery. Like penicillin, derived from the Penicillium mold, ivermectin is a bioactive compound of natural origin, derived from the Streptomyces avermectinius bacterium. The discovery of this bacterium and its derivative drug, ivermectin, is one of the most fascinating in medical history. Since its large- scale human distribution began in 1989, ivermectin has cured two great scourges that had, for centuries, afflicted millions of people in the tropics— Onchocerciasis (commonly known as River Blindness) and Lymphatic filariasis (commonly known as Elephantiasis).