Vaccine Hesitancy. Vaccine Types. Ingredients. Ivermectin Conundrum. Mix & Match. Variants.

Godofredo U. Stuart M.D.

In April 2020, when COVID-19 was proclaimed a pandemic, it jump-started the warp-speed global race to develop a vaccine. (According to estimates, there are more than 170 vaccines in trials.)  The vaccine was to be the silver bullet in the war against COVID. But the months of waiting were punctuated by vaccine trial pauses and cautionary reports that fueled doubts, fears, and hesitancy. It delighted the anti-vaccination bloc who found a new vaccine to wage war on, which it is, at present, winning in various population sectors.

Vaccine hesitancy is a global health challenge. While vaccination is one of the most effective ways of avoiding disease—it prevents 2-3 million deaths a year, and a further 1.5 million can be avoided with improved global vaccination programs—vaccine hesitancy threatens to reverse gains achieved by vaccination programs.

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Godofredo U. Stuart, MD

It has been more than a year since the world declared war on COVID. Quarantines, lock-downs, social distancing, separation and loneliness, masks and face shields. spikes, surges and flattening of the curve, new infections and rising death counts, herd immunity, the new ways of grieving, dying and death—they became the language of the “new normal.”

While the world anxiously waited for the vaccine, while politics battled with science, there was a desperate search for treatments and supplements to stave off the raging virus: hydroxychloroquine saw fleeting use; zinc, D3, and vitamin C continue as popular vitamin/mineral supplements; virgin coconut oil and barley as natural alternative options; prescription colchicene as anti-inflammatory; drugs for re-purposing, compassionate use or off-label use; convalescent plasma for the connected; remdesivir for the rich, leronlimab monoclonal antibody for the richer.

Despite the recent availability of the vaccine, its distribution has been hampered by politics and realities of poor nation status:
the rich and powerful stay in the front of the line, the poor and the lowly at the end. Despite vaccination efforts, the virus is far from being vanquished—it continues to threaten with surges, waves, mutations and variants, and augurs that possibility that it is here to stay, seasonally hibernating, or constantly mutating into variants that are vaccine resistant, that will need a continuing search for therapies that are both preventive and therapeutic.

One such drug with preventive and therapeutic promise for COVID-19 is ivermectin. It didn’t come out from the blue. A repurposed drug, it has been around for 40 years, an FDA-approved antinematode drug, well-studied, off-patent, inexpensive, with an excellent safety profile. (Early records of adverse reactions in the human field tainted its safety profile, but the majority of reactions were attributable to interaction between drug and disease, not the drug itself.) it has been used by more than three billion people, with immeasurable benefits to humankind.

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