Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Proof
Still Waiting for Mel Gibson to Provide It
I’m not going to tell you I won a Nobel Prize. Why not? One, because it’s not true, and two, because a quick search would confirm I was lying. It would be an extraordinary claim, and you’d want to know it was really true by seeking strong proof. Even simple lies can lead one to a whole lot of trouble (and even a prison sentence), as pardoned felon and college volleyball legend George Santos can well attest.
That extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof shouldn’t be a difficult proposition to accept, yet getting people to back up their claims often proves to be challenging. For some, the abject failure to provide proof is proudly worn as a “badge of honor” by faithful followers of whomever made the claim. Their word is gospel; no proof is required. A notable example is the extraordinary claim that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen, even though dozens of court proceedings failed to reveal any proof to back up this notion.
Why am I talking about extraordinary proof? Earlier this year, actor Mel Gibson went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to discuss a variety of matters. While on the show, he made an extraordinary claim: that not one, not two, but three of his friends had cured themselves of cancer using ivermectin (in combination with fenbendazole and maybe some other things, including the dye methylene blue). You likely remember ivermectin as an anti-parasitic drug that was (falsely) claimed during the pandemic to be able to cure and/or prevent COVID-19. It’s hard to keep track of the myriad fantastical claims made for the drug, which have one thing in common: no actual proof that the drug worked in that setting. There is proof, however, that ivermectin can sometimes interact with other drugs, and this can lead to seizures, coma, or death.
If you were able to cure yourself of a fatal disease, would you be sharing this good news with the world, or would you be keeping that fact hidden? Aside from his extraordinary claim, Gibson has revealed virtually nothing else about his fortunate friends. I’ve got questions:
Who were they? Why have their names never been made public?
What types of cancer(s) were they battling, and at which stage was each of them diagnosed?
Had they undergone conventional treatments first, or did they immediately start down the ivermectin path? If the former, then why wouldn’t they ascribe their miracle cures to the primary treatments they were given?
What were the specific dosing regimens that they were taking?
What was the source of the drug that they used?
Who has seen their medical records and can confirm that they really did have cancer (and have subsequently been cured)?
There have been a number of grifters who claim to have been cured of cancer (often at Mexican or German wellness clinics) but who were later shown to never have had cancer in the first place. Check out Netflix’s series Apple Cider Vinegar (based on the true story of Belle (not related to Mel despite both being Aussies) Gibson, who claimed to have cured herself of brain cancer, but never had the disease. The story is well covered in The Woman Who Fooled the World: The True Story of Fake Wellness Guru Belle Gibson, by Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano.
If you want to try to cure yourself of any affliction by taking drug X, well, that’s entirely up to you. You are welcome to risk your own life, but if you start sharing lies, you are putting other people at significant risk, and that raises serious concerns.
Why would anyone who didn’t know Mel’s friends care about this story? Because he told it on Joe Rogan’s show, one of the world’s leading podcasts with over 11 million listens per episode. Gibson’s claim has gotten a lot of people interested in using ivermectin to battle their own cancers. Sometimes this is in combination with “standard of care” treatments, but other times it might be in place of those, and that’s a big red flag. Cancer, as most of you know, is a serious and often fatal disease if not treated. It’s not something you want to mess around with. As someone who is a three-time cancer survivor, I spend time almost every day providing online advice and support to cancer patients and their caregivers. Some of these folks talk about skipping the standard chemo/radiation protocol to take ivermectin instead. This is deeply disturbing. I don’t like to see people die of curable diseases because they read or heard something online from someone with no medical training at all.
We know that lots of people have turned their backs in the last few years on conventional medicines (including vaccines). They claim that Big Pharma is hopelessly corrupt, and that it has deliberately hidden cheap cancer cures in order to fill its pockets with your money. Big Pharma does have corruption problems, but don’t ignore the fact that Big Pharma employees die from cancer every day. Some of these “Big Pharma is corrupt” folks are now running the public health programs for the U.S. federal government. Many of them come to their jobs from either Big Wellness or Big Law, where they previously profited from you in other ways.
So now the state of Florida, where public health leaders have turned their backs on vaccines, would like to determine whether or not ivermectin really is an effective anti-cancer drug. Florida, of course, is run by a legislative governmental body, not a medical group, so exactly how they are going to figure this out remains to be seen. The state has some $60M that “needs” to be distributed for in-state cancer research, and Casey DeSantis, first lady of Florida and a cancer survivor herself, thought following up on Mel’s podcast claims would be a good use of state money. Presumably the good people of Florida will be happy to pay for these clinical trial(s) because there’s a lot of spare money piling up from the savings achieved by not vaccinating their citizens against dangerous infectious diseases.
Ivermectin has been shown in numerous studies to be effective at stopping the growth of cancer cells in laboratory culture dishes. So have hundreds of other compounds, and the vast majority of those tested in clinical trials were either ineffective or quite toxic to actual human beings. Finding new and effective cancer drugs is a difficult business, unlike hyping all sorts of substances that float around the internet like so much digital snow. Testing ivermectin in clinical trials raises a number of issues, both ethical and practical, that need to be dealt with.
Under what circumstances would someone get ivermectin? Many standard cancer therapies (surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and immunotherapy) are highly effective against the disease. Many cases can be cured, or folks can have their lives extended, by taking these standard therapies. Yes, many of these treatments have awful side effects that any thinking person would want to avoid, but is the fear of them enough to risk your life? For some, it absolutely is. Maybe the same wellness and detox devotees who are turning down life-saving vaccines would volunteer for these ivermectin trials following a cancer diagnosis?
Would it be ethical to give people ivermectin in place of these often-curative standard treatments? The Informed Consent form might be longer than Tolstoy’s War and Peace. There are all sorts of legal risks in giving people ivermectin in place of “standard of care” treatments. Florida lawyers will make damn sure you can’t sue the state if your ivermectin treatment doesn’t save your life.
Suppose Florida doctors decide to give patients ivermectin in addition to their standard treatment. If the patient was cured, how would we know if it was the standard treatment that saved them, or if it was the ivermectin? That could be very difficult to distinguish.
One could give ivermectin to patients where the primary “standard of care” treatment has failed them. If ivermectin works at that late stage, it would be great news, and this could be a realistic option for testing the drug. But suppose ivermectin doesn’t help people who have already had the standard treatment. Wellness hucksters will claim that the drug was given too late, or that “standard of care” treatments were so toxic that they rendered the patient unable to respond to ivermectin’s life-saving properties. Maybe the drug would have worked if given earlier in the disease process? So now we are back to making ivermectin the first option for people. Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), the folks whose job it is to make sure medical treatments are ethically given, might have a wee problem with that, even in Florida.
Who is Florida going to find to run these clinical trials? There are many doctors trained to do this, but they are likely the same folks who deliver the conventional, “standard of care” treatments. They understand their value and are not likely to want to run ivermectin trials. It’s highly likely the state will turn to second and third tier medical folks. RFK Jr. had no difficulty finding folks to conduct his “what causes autism?” studies, even if one of them is not a doctor, has published debunked studies that were later retracted, and was sanctioned by a state medical board for practicing medicine without a license. RFK Jr. said before assuming his new role of Secretary of Health and Human Services that the FDA was deliberately suppressing the use of ivermectin and other agents, so he may have some potential candidates in mind.
Florida likes to go against the medical grain. It’s already a notorious haven for doctors working to defraud Medicare. The state Surgeon General, Joe Ladapo endorses this effort to study ivermectin, which comes as no surprise. He said, “I hope we continue to reject the normal and pursue a path that feels righteous.” Righteous? Now we’re getting into Elmer Gantry territory.
The cancer curing claim made on Joe Rogan was for ivermectin AND fenbendazole (and again, maybe other things). So testing ivermectin alone immediately runs into the problem of not testing the combination. Maybe both drugs are needed? Expect that any failures of ivermectin alone will eventually get blamed on not using the correct combination (or dosage) of drugs, whatever that is. I’m betting Florida is not going to do the proper studies to find this out, and its cancer patients will pay the price for this.
Republican lawmakers in a number of states, including Tennessee, Texas, Idaho, and Louisiana have made it possible to buy ivermectin in their states without a prescription. This legislation has enabled a small army of online wellness influencers who are happy to sell you ivermectin for COVID-19, cancer, arthritis, dementia, and a wide variety of other maladies. Step right up!
Ivermectin is beginning to resemble the “One Ring” from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: it is all powerful and controls everything. What the Big Wellness folks need you to believe is that ivermectin is the One Drug, that it can successfully treat almost any disease, and that you should buy it from them before the FDA destroys the remaining stocks in the volcanic fires of Mount Doom. Or at least that’s what Gollum told me.