On December 8, 2020, Senator Ron Johnson chaired a Senate hearing on early outpatient treatments for COVID-19 patients.  One of the participants was Dr. Pierre Kory, who back in May of this year argued that it was critically important to use cortical steroids to treat COVID patients, at a time when doctors were being told not to use them.

Dr. Kory spoke on behalf of a group of physicians who have dedicated the last nine months to the repurposing of drugs.  The NIH, the FDA, and the CDC have not assigned a task force to study repurposed drugs to treat the virus; apparently, these organizations have decided that this novel coronavirus is best treated and prevented through the novel and expensive use of pharmaceutically engineered drugs and vaccines.

In this video from his Senate testimony, Dr. Kory speaks passionately about the miraculous (his word) impact of the efficacy of a drug called Ivermectin that has emerged from the monitoring of data during the last three months.  In Argentina, 800 health care workers were given this drug prophylactically, and none got sick, whereas 58% of 400 health care workers not administered the drug contracted the virus.  He spoke of four randomized control trials and multiple observation trials that all confirm the preventative and curative effects of Ivermectin.

Ivermectin was invented in the mid-1970s and has been in wide use since the early 1980s.  In 2015, it won a Nobel Prize in medicine for its global impact for treating parasitic diseases, and as an anti-viral and anti-inflammatory agent.

A peer review is underway that will take several months.  "We are tired," says Dr. Kory as he pleads for the NIH to review all the data that he and his group of doctors have compiled from the almost thirty studies that demonstrate the dramatic impact of Ivermectin.  "I can't keep doing this. ... I can't keep caring for patients when I know they could have been saved by earlier treatment."  It's bad enough that this virus has convulsed the world's economy.  Our medical and political establishment must impart some of that warp-speed urgency toward promoting, not hindering, the use of proven, field-tested therapeutics and drugs, even if (unfortunately?) they happen to be plentiful, cheap, and decades old, with well known and manageable side-effects.