No publicity is bad publicity

The most successful promotional campaign ever in generic pharmaceutical history

I was recently in a discussion on various aspects of the PsyOp we’re living in.

One person asked if ivermectin was a component or an innocent byproduct of other PsyOps.

Here’s my lengthy post. If I wasn’t so lazy and incompetent, I ought to make an opinion piece as a Substack article, being clear that I’m merely building the pieces from knowledge of the industry and not for any other reason.

Best wishes

Mike

[Tim’s note: this proviso duly noted, here it is]

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I’m sure it’s a PsyOp.

I understand market dynamics of off-patent drugs for reasons too boring to expand on here, but it was related to off-patent inhaled drug / device combinations that I was involved in professionally.

Here, I’m talking about “COM or composition of matter patents”, which covers the molecule itself.

All patents must represent a first disclosure of a new invention, which must be useful & not obvious to someone “skilled in the art”.

Once off patent, almost all marketing budget from the expired patent holder is pulled, because there are generally numerous competitors making generics the day of COM patent expiry and all advertising does is float all boats, not the entity paying for advertising.

Prices plummet up to 80-90% (small molecules; dynamics are very different in biological drugs like antibodies and proteins).

Usually, volumes also fall (because advertising goes away).

Total revenue often goes down way over 90% & the whole thing becomes a commodity play.

Most big pharma exits generics or engages in deal making with top tier generic companies (because there are still trade secrets that the independent generics have to work out for themselves).

Anyhow, I’ve never seen a generic do more than a minor bounce if for example a new medical use is suggested. While it’s possible to secure a “use patent”, it’s incredibly weak to enforce. You can only stop a competitor from specifically promoting that one use. Doctors can prescribe off label anyway.

There are tons of formulation patents for off patent agents including ivermectin but they’re very narrow. And they still need to be new.

What I read happened between 2019 and the unfolding nonsense is that sales of plain, generic ivermectin tablets rose 890% (I recall this in a trade magazine dated around 2023…your mileage may vary). Up a LOT in any case.

That my friends is not a suppressed or all but banned drug.

No, that’s the result of THE most successful promotional campaign ever in generic pharmaceutical history.

You can take that to the drug store and the bank.

Now, the PURPOSE of the PsyOp has to be speculative, right? Because there’s no official reason available.

My own assessment is two fold:

1. MAIN PURPOSE: convince people there’s a pandemic/ been a pandemic. Why else would so many people be using it? Why else would so many doctors be recommending it? Why else would so many sellers be advertising it? Maybe it’s even helpful? If so, it was helpful before, because nothing new is happening, except the extreme PsyOp.

This was an operation. It cannot have solely been due to the innocent, accidental discovery of a new use. First, because there was no new use.

Second, it’s not possible to ramp up production to the degree observed without pump priming.

Completely out of trend requirements for raw materials were suddenly encountered. Lag times are substantial, especially for raws that are not routinely used in the synthesis of other molecules.

Ivermectin is a mixture of two molecules that are unlike the rest of the pharmacopoeia. I believe they’re natural products, possibly obtained using fermentation techniques (themselves far from simple & most generics houses won’t have the means to operate these) followed by purification steps and then at least one synthetic chemical reaction, followed by further purification and formulation, tableting and packaging & shipping (most generic are no longer made in EU/USA).

If I was tasked with overseeing such a production process by a given date, acknowledging that this isn’t my field of expertise, I would be talking with a lot of people, expecting to be told of unavoidable delays while multiple rate-limiting steps were spooled up. Happy to be corrected by anyone involved.

The big giveaway though is the unprecedented sales uplift.

2. SECONDARY PURPOSE: there is a body of literature back in the 1990s and later, showing that, at sufficiently high doses, ivermectin has adverse effects on reproductive health of several species of animals. General rule of thumb in toxicology is anything that happens in more than one species is assumed also to happen in humans. Now we’re talking only of safety margins, if any, over the recommended human doses.

Of note, ivermectin is removed from the body by active pumps called p-glycoproteins (PGP), a well studied set of pathways. This is not at all uncommon

But it’s noteworthy that several commonplace supplements also use the PGP pathways. The sort of supplements advertised by some of the same outlets that started selling ivermectin.

Lots of people take supplements. That means, if you take certain supplements as well as ivermectin, drug levels of ivermectin in your body will be elevated and for longer. It’s as if you’ve taken a larger dose of ivermectin.

Nobody appears to have studied this drug-drug interaction (DDI) in a quantitative sense as far as I know (again, please correct me if you have a good paper in front of you, showing the extent of the DDI). How then can we be sure it’s safe?

The onus is not on the critic to prove that there’s a problem. I’m simply pointing out why there might be. The obligation is on those promoting a use to ascertain safety under the likely circumstances of use.

I speculate that the perpetrators were quite happy if people of reproductive age & who had avoided the injections instead took ivermectin and supplements, because this would bear down on total population fertility.

It’s all but impossible to delineate from the whole the specific contribution of this speculative, but logically plausible, mechanism to the obvious falls in total population fertility observed in recent years.

If you want to assert that the effect is zero, knock yourself out. I don’t seek to gain anything from the case I’m making. And I speculate that the primary purpose for pushing it is as laid out.

Dr Mike Yeadon

I offer all my musings in good faith and request conversations on these subjects are conducted similarly.

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