Careful or You'll Wind Up in One of My Books

Hemingway put it perfectly: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

I’ve said it before but it bears repeating because it’s the truer than the paint match at an authorized Ferrari repair shop: writing The War on Ivermectin with Dr. Pierre Kory was one of the greatest joys of my life. Way better than being interviewed by Khloe Kardashian on the TODAY show or going on a few dates with Skippy from Family Ties; more like up there with meeting and marrying my husband and bringing our children into the world (and at times only slightly less painful than the one delivery that was epidural-free; sorry Pierre).

Khloe, Hoda, and me having way less fun than I had writing TWOI with Pierre.

After months of toiling and pruning and hair-pulling, Pierre and I submitted to our publisher what we were smugly positive was a masterpiece. Our editor—who turned out to be brilliant and tireless and altogether a joy to work with but was a complete stranger at that point—replied almost immediately with the least effusive response I’ve ever received (or hope to receive) to a manuscript submission:

“I read the first fifty pages and find the narrative compelling,” Hector wrote. “The manuscript is sound with logical chapter to chapter flow, and the writing is accessible.”

Pierre and I were ROFL over the phone. “Accessible? What did we turn in, a wheelchair ramp? A motion-sensor door? One of those old-guy electric recliners that push you up to a standing position?” As I got to know Hector through the editing process, I came to understand that that was actually just Hector… being effusive. (Thank you, Hector.)

It turns out, accessibility in this sense—meaning writing that is both engaging and easy to understand—is fairly hard to come by in medical books, likely because doctors often suffer “the curse of knowledge.” They casually pepper their writing with phrases like “distal to the elbow,” and “supraventricular tachycardia,” and “rhinotillexomania” when we laypeople want to read “from the forearm down,” and “rapid heartbeat,” and “obsessive nose picking.” (Well, nobody wants to read obsessive nose picking, but you know what I mean.)

I’m sharing this story because I was just doing something I do thirty-seven times a day occasionally: perusing our Amazon reviews. We have hundreds of them now, and of course a great many express outrage over the scandalous suppression of a life-saving medication—as they should. An overwhelming majority speak to Pierre’s heroism, bravery, and dedication—as they should. But to my delight, a healthy chunk also appreciate the book’s writing, its flow, its humor, and dammit Hector, its incredible and almost shocking accessibility. To wit (warning: not-so-humble bragging is about to commence):

“A page turner of a book.”

“Well researched, well-written, and easy to read. I cannot put it down.”

“Fun and easy to follow despite the serious nature of the topic. A MUST read.”

“This book is brilliant and eye-opening and fascinating to read. I was worried it might be a little dry – it is NOT at all. It reads like a thriller with humor, and I can't turn the pages fast enough.”

“I was stunned, enraged, & entertained. I could not put it down & finished it in two days. Dr. Kory & Jenna McCarthy are world class writers.”

I suspect some if not many of my subscribers have already read The War on Ivermectin, but for those who haven’t, I thought I’d share the short but powerful first and last chapters here (don’t worry, there are no major spoilers if you’ve been following Pierre for any length of time and you’re all following Pierre and have been for a length of time, right?); the bookends to an incredible, exhaustive library of knowledge and history that, at the risk of overstating my feelings on this, I am honored and humbled to have been a part of.

I hope you enjoy this impossibly accessible bit of prose. If you feel inclined to subscribe or share, I wouldn’t even mind.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble­makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

—Steve Jobs

I do quite a bit of public speaking these days, and part of my schtick has become somewhat of an “ode to the old Pierre.” When I say old, of course, I mean pre-Covid.

Old Pierre believed that the elite, esteemed medical journals represented the best of scientific thought and study. The Lancet or the New England Journal of Medicine said so? It was settled then. Old Pierre religiously read the New York Times from cover to cover, because it was the paper of record; the arbiter of truth. If you wanted to know what was really going on, you read the Times. Period. He voted for Biden (although in his defense, he wasn’t exactly a fan and never put a BIDEN-HARRIS ring around any of his social media profile photos), trusted the government (I know!), and actu­ally believed that public health agencies were committed to safeguarding and improving . . . wait for it . . . public health. He knew—knew, I tell you!—that vitamins were a scam and that hospitals were life-saving centers of care, compassion, and excellence. Old Pierre dutifully lined up for his own annual flu shot and followed the childhood immunization schedule to the letter with his three daughters.

He was a clueless sonofabitch.

Nobody, least of all me, could have predicted the insane series of events, discoveries, and decisions that would transform him (me) into the wildly different doctor—and man—that I am today.

But here we are.

So this is my story. What started as a daily brain dump, a place to record the happenings and heartbreaks occurring at work and at home, slowly mor­phed into this crazy peek into a decidedly broken medical system. I set out to understand and expose what was happening with repurposed drugs, iver­mectin specifically. By October of 2020, we had identified an inexpensive, safe, widely available medication that was showing tremendous potential not just as a treatment for Covid but also as a preventative. As the weeks and months wore on, the data supporting its safety and efficacy were astound­ing. And yet the backlash against it was swift and furious. Positive studies were overturned and retracted. Negative studies appeared out of thin air. Around the world it was quietly being used to tremendous, almost impos­sible success, and yet doctors were punished for prescribing it, pharmacies refused to fill valid prescriptions for it, and the media would only touch it to call it “the horse dewormer.” To a physician fighting on the front lines of this battle, this systematic smear campaign was unfathomable.

I soon discovered that the corruption and deceit were hardly limited to the pharmaceutical space. The entire medical industrial complex—including our governmental and international regulatory agencies, Big Pharma, pub­lic and private health care systems and hospital networks, medical schools and their journals, and at least one centi-billionaire “philanthropath”—had been collectively captured. According to Wikipedia (which I don’t often use as a reference source, incidentally, but their explanation was most succinct), “When regulatory capture occurs, a special interest is prioritized over the general interests of the public, leading to a net loss for society.”

You can say that again.

At the risk of sounding arrogant or self-congratulatory, when it came to Covid, I got a lot of things right from the beginning. So often and so over­whelmingly, in fact, that I was dubbed “Lucky Pierre,” first by the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine in a magazine interview, and then by my colleagues and friends. I want to acknowledge here, up front, that I ascribe much of that consistent, almost implausible “rightness” to this: practically from day one, I was part of a group of highly credible, extensively experienced professors, scientists, and clinicians who were deeply studied on nearly every aspect of medicine even remotely related to Covid. We shared a spirit and a purpose well before we had a name (the Front Line Covid Critical Care Alliance, or FLCCC), a website, or a nonprofit designation.

The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts, and that is expo­nentially true with the FLCCC. After all, we’re the misfits, the troublemak­ers, the round pegs in the square holes. We’re the ones standing up to the system; the child watching the bare-assed Emperor parade down the street who just can’t hold his tongue.

“But he hasn’t got anything on,” we’ve been shouting. At first, people pointed and laughed at us and called us names, but we didn’t care. That fat bastard was naked, and nothing could make us see or think otherwise! And do you know what? People are starting to catch on. More and more, some might say in droves, they’re seeing what we see and have seen for a few years now.

That is the power and spirit of the collaboration and camaraderie behind the FLCCC. From the beginning, we were bound by mutual passion and respect, and committed to uncovering and speaking the truth—no matter how difficult or isolating that proved to be.

So yeah, we’ve gotten a lot right. It turns out, that’s actually not so hard to do when you’re surrounded by greatness and your hearts are in the right place.

Blah, blah, blah, a bunch of amazing stuff about ivermectin.

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensi­ble and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chat­ting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not hud­dled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”

—C. S. Lewis

I began this book by introducing you to “old Pierre,” the journal-devouring, New York Times–worshiping, vaccine-loving physician who meant well but was blind to what had become of the medical system he thought he knew. Old Pierre is now at the tail end of a three-year journey of discovery; a journey during which he lost three jobs and his academic and teaching career ended. Today he has state licensing boards and professional societies trying to discredit, delicense, and decertify his ass; the media dreams of destroying him. And if he could go back in time and do it all over again, he wouldn’t change a single godforsaken thing.

Let me clarify: Of course, if he had a cape and a magic wand and unlim­ited wishes, he’d overhaul the corrupt health care system and fire all of the fake journalists and fraudulent scientists and sprinkle ivermectin like fairy dust all around the world. But he’d still stand up and fight back and call bullshit every chance he could get. He’d lose the jobs and suffer the insults and be roundly disappointed by humanity a hundred times over, because he knows with absolute certainty that he is on the right side of history.

Mark Twain said, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the major­ity, it is time to pause and reflect.” If only someone would mandate reading more Mark Twain.

Sometimes I wonder about my legacy, as well as those of the people who have been on the wrong side of this thing: the scientists and journalists who accepted large bribes and small ones; the doctors and nurses who looked away when people were suffering, or refused to treat unvaccinated patients, or who muttered, “I’m sorry, I’m just following orders,” as they forbade fam­ilies from being together in those precious, final moments of life; the pedia­tricians who are seeing their young patients suffer heart attacks and strokes and every other sudden syndrome under the sun and yet keep jabbing those tiny arms day in and day out. Can they look at themselves in the mirror? Can they meet their children’s eyes without shame?

I can.

Daily I drown in patients amid the humanitarian catastrophe of vaccine injuries and deaths while so many former colleagues are gaslighting and dismissing injured patients and actively pushing the next round of boosters. I worry about the population effects of the sudden and massive drops in birth rates around the world. I’m disturbed by the palpable losses from the workforce via the disability and death of working age Americans. I fear—how is there not an actual word for shake with terror on a cellular level?—the long-term, still unknown effects of this genetic therapy experiment that was forced upon humanity.

As the father of three daughters, the silence of the world’s OB-GYNs has been the most terrifying. There are hundreds of thousands of women suffering menstrual irregularities post vaccination, yet reproductive specialists continue to insist the vaccines are safe and effective in preg­nancy (and otherwise). They are neither. Birth rates are dropping precipi­tously around the world. Miscarriages and birth defects have skyrocketed as described in a recent paper by Jim Thorpe, a colleague and dear friend, and one of the few OB-GYN specialists in the US who has fought for the health of our mothers and daughters and our future. Are the rest of the OB-GYNs unwitting stooges or corporate fascists? Frankly, I don’t care. Their silence is criminal.

Where is the outrage? I have felt as if I’ve had enough for all of us. I waited for fired-up liberal college students to rise up and rally against the jab mandates. I stood by hoping for musicians to write angry, impassioned songs full of insight and truth, denouncing the injustice of it all. The silence of the global pushback has been deafening, with rare exceptions including my new friends and allies Five Times August, Right Said Fred, Zubi, Pete Parada, Jimmy Levy, Jason Aldean, Eric Clapton (bravely outspoken since his own vaccine injury), and a handful of others.

Instead, you heard A-list musicians and red-carpet celebrities issuing plaintive cries to do the right thing and get the vaccine (Pink, Michael Phelps, Jimmy Kimmel, Dolly Parton, Martha Stewart, Oprah Winfrey, Ryan Reynolds, Mariah Carey, and Amy Schumer, I’m looking at you). At the same time, dozens of their peers were suffering strokes and paralysis and dropping dead but don’t you dare ask about their vaccine statuses. That’s personal, private, HIPAA-protected information. Unless you wanted to attend nearly every US university, eat in a restaurant in New York City, or play in the US Open during the peak of Covid.

Socially, I rarely talk to any of my former medical colleagues and only a few of my old friends. Intellectually, I no longer trust journalists writing on any topic outside of fashion, entertainment, art, or travel. I read newspapers now just to see what “the other side” is up to. What’s their latest storyline or messaging to get me to believe or act in a way that furthers the goals of whoever in power is pulling those strings? Armed with this understanding, I can do the opposite. And, I believe, so should you.

The government has lost my trust—and not just with regard to medicine. Climate change, the war in Ukraine, oil shortages, a banking collapse—whatever the new “narrative” is, I’m inclined to suspect it’s usu­ally and mostly false; willfully constructed not for the common good, but for the good of those who control the institutions of society. It’s so bad that I am now even suspicious of the relentless refrain, “Ninety-eight percent of climate change scientists agree that C02 is the root cause of global warm­ing.” Do you know why? Because I heard that same “consensus” about iver­mectin, HCQ, and the vaccines. It might be true; it may not be. I may have time to “do my own research” someday; I may not. Regardless, they blew it. I will never again believe a word they say without verifying it myself through exhaustive investigation.

For the record, I still believe that the vast, overwhelming majority of people are good. And I don’t necessarily know who “they” are either; the evil forces responsible for the carnage I’ve seen. I certainly have a list of suspects; Big Pharma and Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab and the rest of the global­ist brat pack are on there, but who is above them? The industrialists with more money than God? The Rockefellers, the Bilderbergs, BlackRock, the Illuminati? Who knows? All I know is that I was put on this planet at this time in history for a reason, and so were you. Or maybe we weren’t. Maybe it’s all just a crap shoot and you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit. But I like to believe there’s a reason. It galvanizes me.

My mother is from France and my father is from Hungary; techni­cally he is Jewish because his mother was Jewish, although his father was Christian. Most of my grandmother’s family were exterminated in the Holocaust. My father only survived by being taken in by a Christian uncle. My grandmother was one of the few survivors of Auschwitz, and she was an absolute badass. She was raised in a well-to-do family, was highly educated, and was considered a great beauty throughout the region of Transylvania. To my great-grandfather’s ire, she married a poor, Christian painter, an act of rebellion for which her father promptly disowned and disinherited her. As if that weren’t bad enough, she then proceeded to get a divorce. Quelle horreur! A wealthy, educated girl from a prominent Jewish family married a Christian painter and then got a divorce. In the 1920s. She may as well have opened her own speakeasy and announced she was enlisting in the Marines.

After she emigrated to the US, my grandmother got a job as an assistant librarian at Columbia University in New York City. With the free tuition that came with the job, she ended up getting a PhD in French literature and eventually became a professor at Hofstra University in Long Island, NY, where I grew up. She lived to be eighty-nine and her badassery never waned.

I loved my grandmother and got very close to her in my twenties. We’d take long walks together and I would record our conversations, as her life was fascinating and, I felt, filled with incredible lessons. One day, with my tape recorder in hand, I asked her, “Anyu [the word for mother in Hungarian], why do you think you survived Auschwitz when so few others did?” (Among the executed was her second husband and the love of her life.) Her reply gave me chills. “I think it is because I would look the guards in the eye, showing them that I was not scared of them,” she told me. “I think they respected that.”

I know I respect the hell out of that. And I like to think I have a little bit of her badassery in me. I may be sad about the state of medicine and nervous about what the future holds for mankind, but I’m not afraid to look the guards right in the fecking* eye.

Who’s with me?

*you’ll have to read the book if you want to get this reference

The War on Ivermectin is literally $16.25 right now on Amazon in hardback. I’m just saying.