Checking in on Western Scientific Supremacy
No-one is saving lives until the self-appointed Gatekeepers of Science have spoken.
From the lofty perched bestowed upon me by my white (male) privilege, I very occasionally dare to descend into perhaps the must brutal of spiritual battlegrounds that is racism.
But not in that way. I’m not here to disprove the obvious fact of incidental and structural racism, don’t worry.
Because if you still thought there was a pressing social issue that I couldn’t tie HCQ/IVM into, you are are destined to be disappointed (I assume by this point I can safely use their three letter abbreviations without confusing anyone). Who would have thought two nondescript, beige and objectively-unpoetically-named pharmaceuticals could be so useful in unravelling before our eyes the clown world that we are finally transitioning out of?
Thus, I present to you a term which I think I am the only person using: Western Scientific Supremacy (WSS). We can probably exchange ‘Scientific’ for ‘Medical’ — given the focus of our science is mainly on the ‘Rona at the moment — but I am very partial to alliteration. It’s also tempting to exchange ‘Western’ for ‘White’, but that’s not really fair: all you other shades-of-skinned people who are caught up in this scientific ridiculousness don’t get a free pass either.
So, where to start? I wrote an article on WSS bang on 6 months ago (time flies in a global pandemic, doesn’t it?), when the existence of this particular form of cultural oppression started to dawn on me. The article documented the quite extraordinary phenomena of Western establishment scientists whitesplaining away the research and real world evidence of the effectiveness of HCQ from countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. You should go and read it — it is fairly short by my standards — or at least go and appreciate how utterly appropriate that cover image I found is.
To be honest, half a year later, nothing much has changed — in fact, it has probably become even worse (hence why I have decided to swap ‘Exceptionalism’ for ‘Supremacy’, because I think we need to up the stakes a bit). There is a special kind of amusement — or frustration, depending on my level of tolerance on that day — I feel when I see a very smart, academically-trained sciencey person state decisively and conclusively that Hydroxychloroquine Doesn’t Work — The Science Is Settled! The World Has Moved On! — whilst seemingly completely oblivious to the fact that it has been and continues to be working in what a previous Orange President might have unkindly described as Shithole Countries. Much like for Trump then, civilised words fail now when discussing HCQ, which is why snark is usually my only go to to avoid resorting to outright mockery and derision.
I don’t want to dive back in too deep, and as always I will just point you to this ongoing meta-analysis of HCQ research. Standard disclaimer: I’m not saying this website or the people who run it are perfect, but it sketches out a picture that is/should be virtually impossible to refute. The key is to ignore the mixed and confusing spread of findings across all studies, and focus only on those using HCQ as an early intervention, where findings have been almost exclusively positive. Anyway, looking across the whole body of HCQ research, this is my ‘favourite’ outcome:
“Studies from North America are 3.7 times more likely to report negative results than studies from the rest of the world combined, p = 0.00000021”.
Let’s leave poor Canada out of it, and put this squarely on the shoulders of the Yanks. I’m sure this perplexing finding has nothing to do with the hopelessly-flawed or retracted studies that all conveniently came out at around the time Orange Man gave the kiss of death to this previously uncontroversial chemical compound. I’ve said it before and I have said it again: TDS is the real killer of this pandemic.
Anyway, let us move on. Because, in a depressingly inevitable development, we are now seeing the same thing occur with IVM.
I have lost count of the number of times during an online exchange wherefore I am doing my diligent best to change the minds of someone continuing to deny the evidence on IVM — pointing them towards peer reviewed academic articles, the opinions of a growing amount of experts, the real world data from a variety of non-Western countries (more on each of these to come) — only to be counter-pointed to the the ongoing fence-sitting of health advisory groups such as our very own Therapeutic Goods Administration.
Now, I am going to be unusually blunt and crass here, but given the stakes it feels appropriate and necessary: I don’t give a fuck what a select group of politically compromised health bureaucrats have to say about IVM, whether in Australia or elsewhere. Not a single F. And neither should you, or anyone, by this point.
In an ideal world, we would be receiving accurate and authoritative advice from these agencies and their media mouthpieces. But we aren’t, on both counts — and we most certainly aren’t living in an ideal world. There have been over 40 control studies that have found some sort of positive effect on IVM on Covid-19 patients, almost half of which have been peer-reviewed. They get virtually no media coverage, aside from being discredited essentially as junk science if they are. Yet a single inconclusive study is immediately seized upon by mainstream news outlets as proof that IVM is useless: despite the fact that the study actually did find a non-statistically-significant benefit, and despite the fact that the study has numerous design flaws that can account for the insignificant findings (not to mention the blood-red flag that the study was funded by a who’s who of Big Pharma globular entities).
It should thus be obvious by now that there is coordinated establishment suppression of this drug occurring, as there was with HCQ. I don’t know what other rational evidence could be presented to people who can’t accept this reality, even if I understand why they can’t accept it. Denial of corruption is a hell of a drug, it seems — as is, I am starting to think, the tug of the ego that stops those who are attached to this establishment from considering that they may be wrong on this one.
Because the level of cultural-scientific groupthink and hubris that has set in at the moment is truly astonishing. You might find its archetype as a smug, Labour/Greens-supporting progressive dude — likely well manscaped —sneering at IVM advocates for promoting an unproven horse medicine, completely oblivious to how unbelievably patronising this behaviour is to scientists and medical experts outside of their own intellectual bubble.
To be fair, he is probably just parroting views given to him by his favourite yoof-orientated news article, such as this particularly pungent effort from Vice News: “Ivermectin Is a Fake COVID Treatment That’s Typically Used on Horses”. And of course, the subtitle: “Stop taking veterinary drugs, people”. The unkindness that history will have on this brand of millennial cultural artefact does not bear thinking about.
How obvious is the WSS in this Vice article and the single cherry-picked expert they call in off the bench? Well, they basically say it in the clearest terms possible:
“A few promising clinical trials of ivermectin for use against COVID-19 are underway in Brazil and South Africa, which is already allowing ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19, along with Zimbabwe. But Chagla says it’s imperative to wait for the results of further testing in the U.S.”
IMPERATIVE.
Nonetheless, our aforementioned smug and manscaped Labour/Greens-supporting progressive dude deserves every shot of negative energy that comes back at him — what else is going to cut through the propaganda by this point? As does, for that matter, anyone else who allows their ego to get in the way of moving the discourse forward on life-saving therapeutics. And it is ego on a collective level, I am concluding, that is currently holding this conversation back: the inability to comprehend that the scientific culture that we have been brought up in and implicitly accept as superior to any other could be failing on this issue.
It is not just said smug and manscaped Labour/Greens-supporting progressive dude. It is also that scientist who makes sure to put his/her credentials after his/her name on his/her social media profile, flippantly declaring — despite swathes of people continuing to die from conditions that we have collectively decided to categorise at Covid-19 — that more evidence is needed before we roll out a drug with an excellent safety record and promising evidence base.
Or, for that matter, any other self-declared intellectual saying the same thing. Case in point: this effort by a bespectacled chap called Stuart Richie: a psychologist — recently graduated, if one was to judge based on his tastefully-water-colour-tinted profile picture — now masquerading as a science writer (yes, I know I am also masquerading as a science writer right now, but I’m also not cashing checks to push the establishment line like our friend Mr Richie is here).
What is dear Stuart’s contribution? To start with, he conveniently explains away the entire body of research currently available on IVM, dismissing it with his lack of credentials as ‘mostly garbage’. His two sources for this are a non-peer reviewed report from a think-tank funded by the Canadian Government, and a recently-released peer-reviewed meta-analysis. Completely ignoring other meta-analyses that have advocated for the immediate uptake of IVM, Stewie then jumps into his comfy psychologist’s seat, and provides an armchair diagnosis for us poor folk who have been duped by IVM: we are simply suckers for contrarianism and simple solutions.
The latter meta-analysis cited by Ritcho is a true head scratcher, as anyone who reads the abstract will quickly see, and deserves more scrutiny. The study actually found there was a 75% reduction in mortality when comparing Ivermectin groups to control groups, along with “favourable clinical recovery and reduced hospitalisation”. That’s right, 3 out of 4 patients treated with Ivermectin are more likely to survive! That’s amazing news (especially from a study touted by IVM haters) and essentially what everyone advocating for the drug’s immediate use has been saying. Yet the ‘conclusion’ of this paper:
“Ivermectin should be validated in larger, appropriately controlled randomized trials before the results are sufficient for review by regulatory authorities”.
As I said before, words truly do fail at the extent of the gutless fence-sitting that is being laid out before us.
The Western scientific establishment has thus spoken: no-one saves lives until we give permission to.
It does not matter what real-world evidence might be pouring in from overseas from countries including Peru, Mexico, India, Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil.
It does not matter that a range of additional countries — including the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bolivia, South Africa and even the vaguely Western-ish Portugal — are also taking the plunge on a drug that has been assessed to have no anticipated safety concerns if used against Covid-19.
It does not matter that a rational and balanced analysis of the situation would conclude that not using Ivermectin is unethical and immoral.
Instead: YOU WILL WAIT FOR THE GOLD STANDARD DOUBLE BLIND RANDOMISED CONTROL TRIALS BY A VERY IMPORTANT WESTERN TERTIARY EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTE YOU FILTHY SCIENTIFIC PHILISTINES.
This is the type of cultural narcissism we are dealing with, and reading articles such as those mentioned above makes me more convinced that we need to fight fire with fire. So if it seems I’m being a tad harsh here, it’s because I am — deliberately. And it is for a few reasons.
The most obvious one is the hypocrisy underlying the caution being advised on IVM. There will be some side effects of a large scale roll-out of a drug that has not been tested for this extent of administration, even with such a proven safety record. But as we see with the vaccine, desperate times call for bold responses. And it is the same people recommending against IVM who are almost universally all aboard the worldwide rollout of an experimental vaccine that has no efficacy or safety data beyond 2 months of administration, with a belligerent propaganda campaign locked in beside it. It is clear to me that this propaganda cannot be countered simply by playing nice.
But the main reason I am over playing nice is because I am now thoroughly jaded and dismayed by this Western Scientific Supremacy phenomenon. I have seen this play out before, which is the reason why I can see it so clearly now.
When I first started researching the medicinal properties of Cannabis, probably close to 10 years ago now, it was my first wake up call to the presence of a social force that was — for reasons I was still naive to then — wilfully holding back natural medicine under the guise of ‘proper scientific process’. As talking head after talking head condescended away the claims of independent researchers and recently-converted medical potheads, I felt my first real sense of righteous anger at the way the world had been unfairly structured — particularly when it was forcing mothers to break the law simply to obtain the only medicine proven to stop their children’s life threatening seizures.
It was, in effect, my first ‘red pill’; while my mind has been opened up to many conspiracies since, the gradual infiltration and corruption of our scientific and medical establishments by the anti-nature cronies at Big Pharma is probably the issue I still feel most passionate about. And this passion is now coming to a head as this corruption is exposed in a way everyone can now see.
Did you know that not just Cannabis, but also homeopathy and Chinese Medicine, have had promising results in treating Covid-19? Well you do now — and along with everything I have written about HCQ and IVM, hopefully it is something you can keep in mind the next time you hear that there is not way out of this bar the Vax.
And this is where we get back to the issue of race, because I imagine that this type of righteous anger is exactly that felt by those who either experience or witness systematic racism.
I do not wish to downplay the social characteristics that we might most typically associate with racism — the subtle creep of racial superiority through words, social norms, even institutional biases. But I think it provides a helpful context to understand the implications of this elite scientific groupthink.
Because what we see playing out before us is a quite astonishingly brutal form of discrimination. As you are almost certainly aware, Covid-19 is disproportionally impacting racial minorities in Western nations. You are going to hear that fact discussed ad nauseam as justification for vaccinating these groups, but let’s look at it in a different way. Because I have just mapped out a situation where a Western scientific establishment appears to be working to suppress not one but two potentially life-saving medicines — suppression that is thus also disproportionally impacting racial minority groups. And, in the final dark irony, due to their higher uptake in non-Western nations, medicines that would almost certainly be more available for these groups if they were not living under Western power structures.
We all know what race the Gatekeepers of Western Science overwhelmingly are, so perhaps we should just call this for what it is: White Supremacy, in a starkly insidious and deadly form.