Insights from Quadrant

What Africa tells us
about ivermectin

These months of lockdowns and  heavy-handed, door-busting policing, the suicides and mental problems said to be increasingly prevalent amongst stuck-at-home children and teens, and, of course, the financial ruin visited upon small businesses and the laid-off– well, what if all of it could  have been avoided?

What if there was a cheap, effective, off-patent medication readily available with which to subdue the Chinese virus but whose advocates were shunned and scorned, silenced by social media and, in one case, obliged to quit the parliamentary Liberal Party after being dismissed as a ratbag and conspiracy theorist by his leaders.

Well the chairman of Tokyo’s Medical Association believes there might well be such a wonder drug: ivermectin.

His logic in the clip above is compelling, most notably the observation that African nations which distribute ivermectin as protection against parasites also happen to record lower COVID casualties — much lower.

That won’t surprise Quadrant contributors Phillip Altman, Robert Clancy, Peter O’Brien  and others.

For Australia’s premiers, their chief medical officers and the TGA’s bureaucrats, surprise will dawn only if they bother to consider Africa’s numbers and the expanding wealth of other evidence in the drug’s favour, which recent history suggests they won’t.

When COVID has run its course, there really should be a sweeping inquiry. But with so many backsides in need of cover that, too, would seem most unlikely.

— roger franklin

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