Dear Steve Kirsch: Fluvoxamine is a Toxic SSRI and Does NOT Treat 'COVID'

Another famous vaxxxine critic bizarrely speaks out in favour of a toxic pharma drug.

Last week I wrote about Dr Peter McCullough, the outspoken critic of COVID gene therapies, who recently claimed statin drugs lower the risk of Alzheimer's and dementia. As I explained, these toxic drugs do no such thing; to the contrary, well-controlled clinical trials have repeatedly shown statins impair cognition, learning and reaction time.

McCullough's mistake was to ignore the RCT evidence and instead defer to totally uncontrolled epidemiological studies. Specifically, he cited a meta-analysis of such studies - conducted by researchers with extensive ties to cholesterol-lowering drug manufacturers.

As I wrote last week, it was terribly disappointing to see someone who has admirably criticized a class of drugs that count neurological disorders among their most prominent side effects, now praising another class of drugs that count neurological disorders among their most prominent side effects.

So you can imagine my dismay this morning when I opened my inbox and saw an article by prominent 'vaccine' critic Steve Kirsch, gushing about a new study in which fluvoxamine-containing drug combinations were allegedly "100% successful in preventing hospitalization for COVID."

As with McCullough's pro-statin claims, this is sheer nonsense.

Fluvoxamine: Nauseating, Suicide-Inducing Garbage

Fluvoxamine (aka Luvox) was the third SSRI antidepressant drug to hit the market in the early 1980s (the first two were withdrawn due to adverse effects). The drug established a solid track record for causing severe agitation, psychiatric disturbances and suicidal behaviour. Numerous studies have shown fluvoxamine to be even worse than other SSRIs for triggering suicidality.

Despite this, fluvoxamine managed to avoid any meaningful public scrutiny until stories began circulating that Columbine shooter Eric Harris had been prescribed the drug. His post-mortem examination confirmed he had indeed been taking fluvoxamine at the time, with therapeutic levels of the drug detected in his blood work.

To praise this awful drug, now the least prescribed of the SSRIs because of its side effect profile, as an effective ‘COVID’ treatment is absurd.

With Big Audiences Comes Big Responsibility

Before I explain just why fluvoxamine is a dud for treating re-badged colds and flu, a quick primer on Kirsch. He writes that he was double-pricked with the Moderna mRNA gene therapy as of March 29, 2021.

Soon after, he says, he started hearing stories from friends with relatives who died, or who themselves became permanently disabled. This, he says, began his transition to being "100% red pilled."

His latest article shows he's not there yet.

So too does his limp attempt to assert that Sars-Cov-2 has been isolated - citing research I've debunked here and here. Tellingly, Kirsch writes of the adulterated muck being passed of as 'viral isolates':

"Do these isolates have other stuff in them? How were they created? I don’t know because I haven’t analyzed them personally. But my scientist friends seem happy with them."

Wow.

"I rely on expert opinions of people who I trust for certain issues like whether or not the virus has been 'isolated.' It’s a reasonable approach if you are careful about which experts you trust."

Among the 'experts' he carefully trusts is the highly litigious Robert Malone, who made a name for himself by erroneously claiming he invented “mRNA vaccine technology.”

Kirsch claims "the anti-vax movement" was "launched" on June 11, 2021, when he and Malone appeared on a Darkhorse Podcast.

That's quite a claim, given the sizable number of us who could see through the COVID scam from the outset, and steeled ourselves to resist the inevitable mandates well before the vaxxxines were even released.

It's also a rather ironic claim, given that vaccine development is how Malone makes his living. In an interview with Steve Bannon, Malone stated "I’m the opposite of an anti-vaxxer, I’m a true believer" (at 5:42 here).

To say that Kirsch's writings have far reach and are well-supported would be an understatement: According to this site, of the tens of thousands of newsletters on Substack, Kirsch's ranks at #48. He sits in that elite group of top Substack earners, pulling in over $500,000 annually in reader subscriptions.

To be fair, Kirsch has been a prolific critic of the COVID gene therapies and has raised some very pertinent points along the way. He's even issued monetary challenges, offering amounts ranging from $10,000 to one million dollars to those who can prove him wrong on certain issues.

I really hope he does that with fluvoxamine, because I could sure do with a million greenbacks right about now.

I'm pretty confident, however, Kirsch won't be putting his money where his mouth is when it comes to this toxic SSRI.

Like McCullough and statins, it's bleedingly obvious Kirsch has not done his homework on fluvoxamine, nor the people who have patented it as a 'COVID' treatment.

The Latest Farcical Study to Claim Fluvoxamine Fights 'COVID'

The study Kirsch excitedly writes about was just published in that preeminent disseminator of egregious COVID propaganda known as The Lancet.

One of the co-authors is Angela M. Reiersen. If Kirsch had read the disclosure in small print at the very end of the article, he would have learned Reiersen "is listed as an inventor on a patent application related to methods of treating COVID-19 (including Sigma1 agonists and specifically fluvoxamine), which was filed by Washington University in St. Louis." (Bold emphasis added).

Along with disclosure sections, it's clear Kirsch doesn't read my Substack. He should. He would have learned in July last year that Reiersen and fellow 'inventor' Eric Lenze have repeatedly tried to generate favourable clinical data for fluvoxamine as a 'COVID' treatment. While they have worded their papers in the most positive manner possible, a close read of those papers shows fluvoxamine has been a dismal failure in treating the re-badged flu known as COVID.

Changing clinical endpoints (aka outcomes) from those originally stipulated in the study protocol is a common trick in drug trials. The study protocol is the document where researchers outline the impending trial’s purpose, endpoints (eg, mortality, hospitalization, etc), and methods. Sure enough, in each of Reiersen’s three previously published fluvoxamine trials, the goalposts were surreptitiously moved by changing clinical endpoints after the fact.

Had Kirsch read my article, he would’ve learned several other research groups around the world have tested fluvoxamine against 'COVID' - without success. Unlike patent holders Lenz and Reiersen, none of those research groups tried to re-frame their negative results as positive.

In other words, the only three trials to date claiming success for fluvoxamine as a COVID treatment just happened to be conducted by authors holding a patent for the use of fluvoxamine as a COVID treatment.

When Changing Endpoints Doesn’t Work, Change Countries

Reiersen and Lenze's first effort at garnering clinical support was a small trial in Missouri. They claimed that "patients treated with fluvoxamine, compared with placebo, had a lower likelihood of clinical deterioration over 15 days." But the study was a joke. Not only was it marred by unexplained dropouts, the authors audaciously claimed that a supposedly inert placebo produced more serious adverse gastrointestinal effects than fluvoxamine, which is notorious for causing nausea.

When one of the endpoints stipulated in the original study protocol - severity of daily improvement in symptoms as rated by the subjects themselves - showed no substantial differences between groups, it was abandoned. There was also no difference between groups in change of the most severe baseline symptom.

The study was a dud. So the duo had another go, this time in a Canada-US trial dubbed STOP-COVID 2. In that trial, fluvoxamine was such a flop that the results were never even published. You can, however, access them at the ClinicalTrials.gov registry.

First World trials weren't delivering the desired data, so Reiersen and Lenze decided to do what the big drug companies have increasingly done: Go offshore, to conduct exploitation research in eager developing countries, where the costs are cheaper, the people are poorer and more willing, and local regulations are more, um, "relaxed." Meaning drug companies can get away with even more shite-fookery than they do in countries like the US, which still maintain at least some semblance of rule of law.

This strategy led them to Brazil, a naturally-blessed country that by all rights should be a superpower but, thanks to endemic corruption, is permanently stuck in "developing" mode. In Brazil, Reiersen and Lenze teamed up with a host of pharma- and globalist-sponsored researchers to conduct an RCT dubbed TOGETHER, in which multiple ‘COVID’ interventions were examined, one of them being fluvoxamine.

Interestingly, one of their fellow TOGETHER researchers was a character by the name of Edward J Mills, who spends most of his time designing trials for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. When queried on the suspect reporting of the ivermectin arm of TOGETHER, he responded with such helpful insights as "Fuck you", "Fuck off. Pray to your stupid god for insights", and "Glory to Satan."

Seriously.

Did you do any research on these people, Steve?

As with all the previous Reiersen and Lenze fluvoxamine trials, TOGETHER was an absolute carnaval de merda.

Once again, the results were so bad that the authors had to get muito shifty, chopping and changing the original primary and secondary endpoints until they could find something that kinda, sorta, if you squeezed your eyes hard enough, looked like a statistically significant result.

The best they could come up with was a relative risk of 0.71 for fluvoxamine in "The proportion of patients observed in an emergency room for >6 hours or admitted to hospital due to COVID-19."

The original time frame for this endpoint was >12 hours. Of course, there was no difference between groups in that endpoint, so the shameless authors dumped it and created a new one.

An utterly meaningless one, I might add, because waiting in an emergency ward for six hours before you even get attended to is not at all unusual even in ‘First World’ hospitals. It’s a meaningless outcome that could have been affected by such factors as time of admission, efficiency of staff during different shifts, and so on.

Not to mention Brazil is a country with Mexico-like crime and homicide rates, so if you roll up to an ED there with the sniffles, don’t be surprised if you’re made to wait while staff prioritize people with serious injuries instead.

When we look at outcomes that matter, “There were no significant differences between fluvoxamine and placebo for viral clearance at Day 7, hospitalizations due to COVID, all-cause hospitalizations, time to hospitalization, number of days in hospital, mortality, time to death, number of days on mechanical ventilation, time to recovery or the PROMIS Global Health Scale.”

Once again, fluvoxamine was a failure.

So …

Fluvoxamine flopped in Reierson and Lenze’s double-blind Missouri trial.

It flopped in their larger double-blind US/Canada trial.

It flopped in the double-blind Brazilian trial.

There was only one thing left to do - conduct a completely unblinded trial in Thailand!

I’m not kidding you.

Sawasdee Khrap to More Misleading Crap

The Thai study cited in Kirsch’s latest post was an unblinded, open-label trial - meaning both the researchers and participants knew who was getting fluvoxamine and who wasn’t!

That right there is cause to scrunch up this paper and hurl it full speed at the nearest trash can. Bias is a concern whenever any degree of unblinding occurs; this was a totally unblinded study where one of the listed authors has a vested financial interest in the results!

Breathe Anthony, breathe.

The Interventions

The purpose was to assess the efficacy of combinations of fluvoxamine, bromhexine, cyproheptadine, and niclosamide, in adults with 'confirmed' mild infection of the never-isolated SARS-Cov-2 virus.

Participants were randomly assigned to receive treatment with fluvoxamine alone, fluvoxamine + bromhexine, fluvoxamine + cyproheptadine, niclosamide + bromhexine, or standard care.

In case you’re wondering, niclosamide is an anti-parasitic that specifically targets helminth worms; bromhexine hydrochloride is a mucolytic that helps clear chest congestion; cyproheptadine is an anti-histamine.

“Standard care” in Thailand at the time was the antiviral favipiravir, although not all subjects may have received it. Standard care was not specified or mandated in the protocol, but simply encompasses whatever care participants received by their clinicians.

The Attrition Figures Stink

Because of the prevailing COVID paranoia at the time, the trial was conducted in a fully remote, contactless manner. Which, when you think about it, would really help if you wanted to diddle the data. It’s always easier to manipulate figures when you eliminate in-person contact. Just ask Uncle Joe.

The authors write that, “Because of the complexities in performing this trial, of the 1900 who underwent randomization, 905 were subsequently withdrawn ...”

That’s a massive attrition rate.

When you look at Table 1 and Figure 1 to see why so many participants were withdrawn, two glaring anomalies immediately stick out.

Most of the attrition was not from dropouts, but removals conducted by the researchers themselves.

The second glaring anomaly was the monumental disparity in dropout rates between the standard care and treatment groups. Of the 390 participants randomized to standard care, only 14% were withdrawn from the study.

In the four drug groups, however, the withdrawals ranged from 54 to 57%!

That’s huge.

This massive disparity deserves a thorough explanation but, as is par for the course in drug trials conducted by vested interests, we don’t get one.

The researchers list the following reasons for withdrawal among the groups:

• Experiencing issues related to systolic and diastolic blood pressure

• Refusing to discontinue smoking and alcohol consumption during the trial period

• Taking unknown cosmetic supplements

• Unable to clearly confirm their psychiatric status

• Using illicit drugs or stimulants

• Participants refusing to stop consuming caffeinated beverages

• Oxygen saturation levels below 92% at baseline

• Withdrew from the study before receiving treatment

In every instance, these reasons for withdrawal occur at a far greater rate in the drug groups.

This makes absolutely no sense, especially considering this was allegedly a randomized trial. What logical reason is there, for example, for 2 to 3 times more treatment subjects to be taking “unknown cosmetic supplements”?

When compared to the standard care group, why would the treatment groups average three times as many people who are using illicit drugs or stimulants?

When compared to the standard care group, why did 10 to 12 times the number of intervention subjects mysteriously withdraw from the trial before receiving treatment?

It is important to reiterate that the standard care group was part of the randomization process. So once again, these withdrawal figures are untenable.

They stink, and in the absence of a convincing explanation as to why the intervention groups were magically and mysteriously plagued by a far higher number of druggies, underground cosmetic users, caffeine addicts and devout smokers and boozers, I can only assume the worst.

I can only assume what many of us have come to assume about the unexplained discrepancy in the corrupt Pfizer trial, where hundreds more vaxxxine subjects were mysteriously withdrawn from the trial for unnamed reasons.

I can only assume that the researchers themselves manipulated the withdrawal data in order to remove unfavourable results occurring among the intervention subjects.

That’s my assumption, and I’m entitled to it. It’s the one I’ll be sticking with until the researchers can provide a coherent, non-ridiculous explanation for the absurdly imbalanced withdrawal figures.

I won’t be holding my breath.

Outcomes

Remember how COVID was allegedly an uber-deadly disease?

And remember how everyone in this study allegedly had COVID?

And remember how Thailand is a low-income, developing country, and how developing nations were supposedly at greater risk of COVID harms because, well, a bunch of billionaire wankers said so?

Well, guess how many people died in each group? In fact, guess how many people died in the entire study, according to the researchers?

Zero.

So the most important endpoint of all did not occur in any of the groups (at least not among the minority of patients the researchers didn’t ‘withdraw’ from the study).

Despite this, the researchers had no qualms making the shady claim that "When started very soon after symptom onset, these repurposed drugs have high potential to prevent clinical deterioration and death in vaccinated and unvaccinated COVID-19 patients." (Bold emphasis added).

This study showed no potential to reduce death from COVID, because COVID was about as deadly as a Nerf Ball attack.

That left hospitalization, which the researchers claim did not occur in any of the combination drug groups. Not one.

Sure.

In the fluvoxamine-only arm, we’re told only nine subjects experienced clinical deterioration by day 28.

In the standard care group - the same group that mysteriously, inexplicably had almost twice as many participants at the end of the study - a whopping 321 of 336 subjects experienced clinical deterioration. Many of these subjects allegedly required at least some degree of hospitalization.

I have a simple, one-word scientific term for these findings:

Bullshit.

What the researchers are asking us to believe is that fluvoxamine - a drug that has already failed in one single-blind and five double-blind clinical trials around the world - suddenly becomes super-effective, both by itself and with other drugs, when tested in an open, unblinded trial.

Only two things could explain this:

1. Thais and expats living in Thailand are genetic freaks who carry a super-responsive fluvoxamine gene;

2. The unblinded nature of the study allowed the researchers, consciously or subconsciously, to act upon a pro-fluvoxamine bias and manipulate the study data.

The first possibility is absurd; the second is entirely plausible. It’s the very reason we have double-blind studies.

If the researchers become indignant at this suggestion, then I welcome them to confirm these results by testing fluvoxamine under far more exacting double-blind conditions.

Oh wait, they did that already. Three times. Without success.

I rest my case.

Fluvoxamine: Once a Dud, Always a Dud

Incredibly, Kirsch writes in his article:

“We presented evidence from multiple trials of the efficacy of fluvoxamine in early 2021 to the FDA in our EUA application, but they said that the benefits didn’t outweigh the risks and denied our EUA.

Their decision made no sense as the scientific evidence couldn’t have been more clear at the time.”

Yes, the scientific evidence could not be more clear: Fluvoxamine is a garbage antidepressant, and double-blind studies show it’s a garbage ‘COVID’ treatment.

I’m no admirer of the FDA, but on this occasion I have to agree with their assessment of fluvoxamine: The (non-existent) benefits do not outweigh the risks. Heaven forbid someone with a predisposition for agitated depression be given this junk to fight a re-badged flu. The peak suicide danger periods with SSRI use occur within the first 4 weeks of treatment, the first 4 weeks after cessation, and after a dosage change.

Fluvoxamine is yet another toxic drug that should never have been allowed to market. Just like the COVID gene therapies.

Update March 19, 2024:

Yesterday I left the following in the comments section of Kirsch’s pro-fluvoxamine article. Kirsch has not acknowledged or responded to the comment and, to be honest, I don’t expect him to. Admitting you’re wrong is not always an easy thing to do.

Hi Steve,

you've done a lot of good work in calling out the toxic COVID 'vaccines', so it's terribly sad to see you glorifying a truly garbage drug like fluvoxamine.

Your article ignores several key points:

1. The Thai study you cite in this article is not worth the paper it's written on. It's a completely unblinded, open-label study, meaning the researchers knew which group each subject was in. When one of those researchers, Angela M Reiersen, just happens to hold a patent for the use of fluvoxamine as a COVID treatment, that's a problem. A big problem. The potential for bias and misreporting of the results is obvious.

2. There clearly was misreporting in this study, because the withdrawal data stink like rotting fish on a 40C day. A la the Pfizer vaxxxine study, the treatment groups had a remarkably higher rate of 'withdrawals' than the standard care group, and the researchers don't explain why. This was a randomized trial, and the standard care group was included in the random allocation of subjects, so there should be similar withdrawal rates between groups. Looks to me like the researchers created more 'withdrawals' in the treatment groups to remove subjects with unfavourable data.

Also, zero clinical deterioration and hospitalizations in the combo groups, a mere 9 among the fluvoxamine-only group, yet a whopping 321 of 336 standard care subjects with "mild" 'COVID' experienced clinical deterioration, with many requiring hospitalization?

Yeah, sure.

If this slop was a COVID vaxxxine study, everyone here would be hurling rotten tomatoes at it. Because it's not a vaxxxine, we're supposed to pretend that it's unfairly suppressed research. Sorry, but unblinding, blatant conflicts of interest and extremely suspicious withdrawal and outcome data are not okay just because we're dealing with a non-vaxxxine.

I dismantle this farce of a trial here:

https://anthonycolpo.substack.com/p/dear-steve-kirsch-fluvoxamine-is

3. The gold standard for drug testing is randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials. Something you don't mention here is that there have already been 5 double-blind trials and 1 single-blind trial of fluvoxamine against 'COVID.' Each and every one showed fluvoxamine to be a dud in the treatment of 'COVID.'

Three of those previous trials were conducted by Reiersen and fellow patent holder Eric Lenze, who has financial ties to Jazz Pharmaceuticals, which now holds the license for fluvoxamine.

In one of their trials, STOP COVID 2, fluvoxamine was such a flop that they didn't even bother publishing the results. The other two failed to show any benefit, so the authors chopped, changed and deleted original endpoints in an attempt to contrive something resembling a significant result. They then tried to word their papers as if fluvoxamine was effective. It wasn't, as I explain here:

https://anthonycolpo.substack.com/p/fluvoxamine-a-toxic-and-potentially

Note that the other research groups around the world, who did not have a vested interest in fluvoxamine as a COVID treatment, did not attempt to re-frame their negative results as positive.

Bottom line is that the 3 of 7 trials claiming efficacy for fluvoxamine against COVID just happen to feature Reiersen on the author list, who holds a patent for the use of fluvoxamine against COVID.

4. Fluvoxamine is an SSRI antidepressant. This class of drugs is problematic at the best of times, and fluvoxamine stands out as an especially disagreeable drug. Someone else here wrote that it has a 'superior side effect profile'. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is notorious for causing nausea, agitation, psychiatric disturbances and suicidal behaviour.

The heightened risk of suicidality caused by fluvoxamine is a function of its penchant for causing stimulation and agitation. Depressed people often ideate about suicide, but thankfully most never act upon these thoughts. However, when someone is both depressed and agitated, you have a particularly dangerous state where they are more likely to act upon violent impulses and cause harm to themselves - and others.

The treatment period in the Thai study was 14 days. The peak suicide danger periods with SSRI use occur within the first 4 weeks of treatment, the first 4 weeks after cessation, and after a dosage change.

I've seen with my own eyes what this fluvoxamine junk can do to people, which prompted a 3-part deep dive that you can read at the following links (with plenty of links to the cited studies):

https://anthonycolpo.com/the-great-ssri-scam-how-taking-anti-depressant-drugs-can-kill-you-part-1/

https://anthonycolpo.substack.com/p/the-great-ssri-scam-how-taking-anti-depressant-drugs-can-kill-you-part-2 (this installment contains the most research on fluvoxamine)

https://anthonycolpo.substack.com/p/the-great-ssri-scam-how-taking-anti-depressant-drugs-can-kill-you-part-3

I strongly urge you to read my critiques and the research I have linked to, and reconsider your stance on fluvoxamine. It is an awful drug that should have been pulled a long time ago.

Oh, and one last tidbit. You seem to believe the FDA is 'suppressing' fluvoxamine. Here's the reality: Fluvoxamine's US approval in the US was achieved on the basis of a fraudulent application by then-owner Solvay:

https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/nda/2007/021519s000_MedR.pdf

I suspect this came to light because of the controversy caused when it was revealed Columbine shooter Eric Harris had been taking fluvoxamine at the time of the shootings.

Fluvoxamine was temporarily withdrawn from the US market in 2002. Despite Solvay's egregious dishonesty, and nothing having materially changed about fluvoxamine itself, the drug was quietly green-lighted again by the FDA in 2007.

Perhaps to assist this ruse, Solvay had licensed the right to market Luvox to Jazz Pharmaceuticals, pending FDA approval to reinstate the drug for sale in the US. While all this was going on, fluvoxamine remained available in the US in generic form.

Does that sound to you like a drug the FDA is trying to suppress?

The reason fluvoxamine has not been approved as a treatment for 'COVID' is simple: Repeated double-blind studies have shown it is useless as a treatment for 'COVID.' The data is so poor that there's no amount of statistical sorcery that can hide the fact this drug is useless for that purpose.

There are so many better options for dealing with respiratory and flu-like ailments that I can't fathom why people look to toxic drugs like fluvoxamine.

Kind regards,

Anthony Colpo.