In its desperation to preserve its fraying, tawdry narrative that Covid 19 is a deadly disease against which the only defence is vaccination and obedience to government edicts, the Australian Department of Health has descended to a new low in its decision to forbid the prescription of Ivermectin for the treatment of Covid.

I’m indebted to the British nurse and educator Dr John Campbell for this masterful take-down of this decision, and also for his reminder of the old joke: ‘Pharmacy is poison in small doses’.

The DoH gives three reasons for its decision:

1. “Individuals who believe that they are protected from infection by taking ivermectin may choose not to get tested or to seek medical care if they experience symptoms. Doing so has the potential to spread the risk of COVID-19 infection throughout the community.” This may be a sound reason to forbid the unsupervised taking of Ivermectin, but this is a ban on its prescription by doctors, who can surely be relied upon to advise their patients that the medicine they are prescribing is not a substitute for an effective vaccine. Furthermore, the vaccines currently available suffer significant ‘leakage’ and are neither 100% prophylactic, nor do they prevent transmission, so it’s far from obvious that vaccination is a substitute for an effective therapy, as the mounting number of studies shows Ivermectin to be.
2. “Secondly,” continues the DoH announcement, “the doses of ivermectin that are being advocated for use in unreliable social media posts and other sources for COVID-19 are significantly higher than those approved and found safe for scabies or parasite treatment.” As Campbell’s joke implies, every pharmaceutical therapy is toxic if consumed in sufficient quantity. By extension of the Department’s logic, any therapeutic drug is liable to be banned if someone on Social Media advocates its misuse. We are asked to believe that GPs prescribing Ivermectin, and giving patients professional advice as to its use, would increase the risk of its misuse. This is obviously demented.
3. “Finally,” says the DoH advice, “there has been a 3-4-fold increased dispensing of ivermectin prescriptions in recent months, leading to national and local shortages for those who need the medicine for scabies and parasite infections. It is believed that this is due to recent prescribing and dispensing for unapproved uses, such as COVID-19.  Such shortages can disproportionately impact vulnerable people, including those in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.”

As Campbell points out, even if scarcity were an ethically sound reason for denying access to an effective therapy, Ivermectin is made “by the ton” in India, and the suggestion that Australia could not meet its needs in short order with a couple of phone calls is laughable.

This farrago demonstrates that the Department of Health is no longer – if it ever was – motivated to promote the health of the Australian population. As this perverse, unethical decision demonstrates, its principal concern is to protect, if necessary by sacrificing the health and even the lives of Australians, the reputations of its officers and its chosen advisers, and to perpetuate the myth that Covid 19 is a plague of Biblical proportions, against which there is no defence save slavish obedience.