Treating high risk patients with COVID as an Infectious Disease specialist
My response to the Courier Mail’s “dog wormer”
On February 27, 2023, the Courier Mail published an article about me and on their homepage, their “grabber” headline read that I had, “…allegedly prescribed dog wormer”. Why would I, as an Infectious Disease specialist, prescribe dog wormer?
Well, I wouldn’t, and I didn’t. For astute readers, this one-liner was obviously just click-bait. Unfortunately, misleading click-bait headlines are all too commonly used to draw in readers at the expense of the truth and the reputation of the targeted person.
In fact, the Courier Mail wasn’t alone. During the COVID era, many media outlets misled the public into believing that “dog wormer” was synonymous with Ivermectin.
Here’s what really happened:
As an Infectious Disease specialist for more than 25 years, I have often prescribed human-grade Ivermectin, not “dog wormer”, for my patients with various infections. As an Infectious Diseases specialist, I was compelled to offer early treatment regimens to patients at high risk of severe COVID illness. I prescribed Ivermectin as a component of these regimens, and of the more than 500 high-risk patients I treated, all recovered well with only one needing a temporary hospital admission.
Despite my judicious use of Ivermectin and my qualifications that enabled me to prescribe it (General Practitioners were prohibited from prescribing it for COVID), the Medical Board ‘cautioned’ me for using Ivermectin as part of my early treatment regimens for COVID. After about a year of back-and-forth communications, the Medical Board dropped further proceedings in the case.
Here’s the truth on Ivermectin:
Ivermectin is a widely used human medication that was first approved for human use in 1987 and two scientists who discovered its therapeutic use, William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura, won the Nobel Prize. Millions of doses of Ivermectin have been dispensed to humans for the treatment of devastating diseases such as River Blindness, Lymphatic Filariasis and Invasive Scabies (see: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2015/press-release/). In addition, in appropriate doses it has an excellent safety profile even when combined with other potentially dangerous medications. Nevertheless, from when the COVID era began, Ivermectin was suddenly rubbished by the media and relegated to being a “dog wormer” or “horse paste”.
Ivermectin and other medications in early COVID infection
As one of very few community-based Infectious Disease physicians in Australia, I was compelled to offer and arrange early at-home treatment for patients at high risk for severe COVID infection and death – observational reports throughout 2020 and 2021 from the global medical community were clearly showing that early treatment reduced severe complications and death - see https://c19early.org. Unfortunately, however, the importance of early treatment for COVID only became formally recognised, once two expensive medications (Molnupiravir and Paxlovid) were successfully marketed and released. In contrast to Ivermectin, Paxlovid has significant interactions with dozens of common medications, which means it can be unsafe when prescribed to patients taking these medications. Well before the release of Paxlovid and Molnupiravir, several potentially life-saving early treatments including Ivermectin had already been tested and used successfully in COVID, most of these had well-known and excellent safety profiles - see https://c19early.org.
It is noteworthy that the estimated cost per life saved during the COVID era for Ivermectin was around USD$26. For Paxlovid, it was over USD$1.9 million and for Molnupiravir, around USD$2.4 million - see https://c19early.org. In 2022, Ivermectin cost around AUD$30, and both Paxlovid and Molnupiravir around AUD$1100.
Please Note: Since the less dangerous Omicron variant arrived in early 2023, Dr Hale has not treated acute COVID infections – she advises general supportive measures only.