Fluvoxamine: A Toxic and Potentially Deadly Antidepressant, Now Here to Save You From ‘COVID’
Toxic SSRI treats ‘COVID’, say the usual vested interests.
I’ve previously written about the SSRI antidepressant fluvoxamine (aka Luvox), which has established a solid track record for causing severe agitation, psychiatric disturbances and suicidal behaviour. Fluvoxamine is by no means the only antidepressant possessing these effects, but numerous studies have shown it to be even worse than other SSRIs for triggering suicidality.
To call it a garbage drug that should have been banned long ago is to be polite. Yet it is now being pimped by the vested and the ignorant as a treatment for ‘COVID’.
I was dismayed when I saw this junk being positioned as a ‘COVID’ treatment back in 2020. I was tempted to write something, but then the poison prick campaign kicked off and I figured fluvoxamine would be quickly forgotten.
If only. Three years later, I still see fluvoxamine being recommended as a ‘COVID’ treatment - even on Telegram groups, where normally skeptical commentators have been convinced there is a sinister campaign to suppress this “inexpensive”, “safe” (COUGH, COUGH) and “non-patentable” treatment.
Oh, the irony.
Fluvoxamine is brought to you by the same industry that created the dangerous gene therapies. Furthermore, Washington University has filed a patent for the use of fluvoxamine as a COVID treatment, on behalf of ‘inventors’ Eric Lenze and Angela Reiersen, whom you’ll learn more about shortly.
An Awful Drug is Born
Fluvoxamine was first released in Switzerland in 1983. Despite generating a noteworthy volume of unflattering literature, it 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. Debate raged about whether the drug contributed to Harris’ actions, but I think it’s safe to say it failed dismally to exert any beneficial ‘antidepressant’ effect on the teen.
Fluvoxamine was briefly withdrawn from the US market in 2002, three years after the Columbine shootings, due to fraudulent data in the New Drug Application that led to the FDA approving US sales of Luvox in 1994. Despite this egregious dishonesty on the part of then-owner Solvay, and nothing having materially changed about fluvoxamine itself, it 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 (the drug continued to be sold in other countries, and fluvoxamine remained available in the US in generic form). Jazz is an Irish company who, also in 2007, agreed to pay $20 million in penalties and victim compensation relating to the illegal marketing practices of its wholly-owned subsidiary Orphan Medical, Inc. Orphan pled guilty to felony misbranding and illegal promotion of the prescription medication Xyrem for unapproved uses.
Xyrem was Orphan’s brand name for gamma-hydroxybutyrate, or “GHB,” the powerful and fast-acting central nervous system depressant abused worldwide as a recreational drug. The powerful sedative has also become a favourite of sex predators, who use it to incapacitate victims for the purpose of sexual assault, leading to GHB’s widespread reputation as a "date rape" drug.
Despite Jazz’s role in the sordid Xyrem saga, FDA approval was granted and Luvox reappeared on US pharmacy shelves in 2008. As an added bonus for Jazz, Luvox received additional FDA approval that same year, as a treatment for social anxiety disorder.
‘Re-purposing’: A Toxic Treatment for Depression Becomes a Toxic Treatment for a Non-Existent Virus
As if the Great Corona Con wasn’t already enough of a farce, in May 2020 media outlets began claiming fluvoxamine held the potential to treat ‘COVID’ by preventing so-called "cytokine storms" - where the immune system allegedly "goes into overdrive and floods the body with immune cell mediators called cytokines."
If researchers really wanted to help ‘COVID’ patients, they should’ve shelved the bad weather analogies and instead called for hospitals to stop killing people for profit. Sticking patients on intubators, for example, was a last resort option that suddenly became a routine practice because of the financial incentives offered to hospitals by governments who clearly hated their citizens (even the ‘fact checkers’ admit that hospitals were given extra money for labeling patients as ‘COVID’ admissions and rewarded extra handsomely for sticking them on ventilators). Not surprisingly, forcing potentially infectious pipes down people’s throats and stressing and weakening their lungs via forceful mechanical inflations dramatically raised their death rate when compared to patients lucky enough to avert this state-funded barbarity (see here, here and here for representative studies).
Modern medicine, having completely lost its mind a long time ago, also figured using midazolam – an “end of life care” and lethal execution drug – would be a great way to treat patients with respiratory symptoms. ‘Fact check’ propaganda outfits like FullFact.org (whose past and present funders include George Soros' Open Society Foundations, the heavily-left Omidyar/Luminate Network, Google and Facebook), pooh-pooh the idea that use of midazolam was part of a eugenics “culling” campaign - but completely fail to explain why UK prescriptions of this potentially lethal drug increased 2.6-fold after the scamdemic kicked off – all in response to a re-branded flu with a near 100% survival rate!
To further cement the insanity, the medical profession also embraced the use of remdesivir (affectionately known as rem-death-is-near), an ineffective drug whose many side effects include respiratory failure. Because destroying lungs is always a great way to beat a respiratory infection, right?
With experts like this, who needs psychopaths!
The Fluvoxamine-for-COVID Caper, Featuring the Usual Conflicts of Interest
The ‘fluvoxamine for COVID’ charade was publicly headed by a Dr. Eric Lenze from the Washington University School of Medicine. Among his numerous conflicts of interest is his work as a “consultant” for none other than Jazz Pharmaceuticals, who now holds the license for fluvoxamine and would no doubt love a new selling point for what is now the least-prescribed SSRI.
Lenze has also received research support and “consulting” fees from Janssen, who collaborated with Johnson & Johnson to bring you the third American clot shot. He’s received research support from Lundbeck (the Danish pharma company that developed the SSRI citalopram), the NIH, FDA, the pharmaceutical companies Roche, Takeda and Alkermes, and a series of billionaire-funded mega-foundations that includes the McKnight Brain Research Foundation, Taylor Family Institute for Innovative Psychiatric Research, Center for Brain Research in Mood Disorders, the Sidney R. Baer Foundation, and the Barnes Jewish Foundation.
Lenze and one of his co-authors, Angela M Reiersen, are co-inventors on a patent application filed by Washington University for methods of treating COVID-19, including – you guessed it – fluvoxamine.
So if fluvoxamine can be shown as effective against the most over-hyped influenza in history, they stand to make a lot of money. Or at least they did. The dream, as we’ll learn shortly, is starting to slip away from their grasp.
“We know a great deal about the safety and tolerability of fluvoxamine,” the audacious Lenze told one reporter. “It can cause in about one-quarter of people some nausea, which is usually mild. It’s not fatal even in overdose, it’s been around for over a quarter of a century so there’s not going to be any unpleasant surprises about safety issues, and it’s really easy to use — it’s just a pill. I don’t see anything that should stop people from taking it.”
That entire paragraph is egregious nonsense, the kind you’d expect from someone whose bread is buttered by Big Pharma. In reality, fluvoxamine is a toxic drug that you should avoid like dog droppings on a footpath. I explained at length here and here why this regrettable antidepressant is a truly awful drug.
Let the Sham Begin
In November 2020, the fluvoxamine-for-COVID ruse made its way into print, in the form of a JAMA paper by Lenze et al. Their trial included 181 "adults living in the community with SARS- CoV-2 infection" ‘confirmed’ by the fraudulent Corman-Drosten PCR test and who were symptomatic within 7 days of the first dose of study medication.
The participants were randomized to receive 100 mg of fluvoxamine or placebo 3 times daily for 15 days (patients reportedly began with 50 mg and titrated the dose upwards). That equates to a daily fluvoxamine dose of 300 mg, the maximum therapeutic dose and a marvelous dosage if you want to feel nauseous - a very common side effect of fluvoxamine.
Only 152 patients actually participated in the study, with 29 subjects dropped at or prior to baseline, in most instances for reasons that were not fully explained.
Despite ‘COVID-19’ being sold as the deadliest disease ever to strike Planet Psycho, the authors report that no deaths occurred in the study.
According to Lenze et al, clinical deterioration occurred in 0 of 80 fluvoxamine patients and in 6 of 72 placebo patients. The fluvoxamine group, they claim, had 1 serious adverse event and 11 other adverse events, whereas the placebo group had 6 serious adverse events and 12 other adverse events.
The researchers even claimed that only one patient in the fluvoxamine group experienced "Gastroenteritis, nausea, or vomiting", compared to 5 in the placebo group.
As soon as I read those results, I knew they were garbage. Sorry folks, but when someone tries to tell me a toxic drug produces less adverse events than a supposedly inert placebo, my intelligence is being insulted and I have no other option but to call bullshit.
Monitoring of moderate-to-serious adverse events was the responsibility of two of the study authors, one of whom was the antidepressant-friendly and Jazz-remunerated Lenze. He would be familiar with the side effect profile of antidepressants which, all predictable claims to unimpeachable virtue notwithstanding, creates the potential for data of patients presenting with typical fluvoxamine/SSRI symptoms to be ignored or altered.
The problems with the paper hardly end there.
One of the secondary endpoints stipulated in the original study protocol was the severity of daily improvement in symptoms as rated by the subjects themselves on a subjective scale of 0-11. However, this endpoint was subsequently abandoned "because the daily trajectory curves of the two groups) curves showed no substantial differences."
Yes, when an endpoint doesn’t deliver the results you want, throw it in the round file.
There was also no difference between groups in change of the most severe baseline symptom.
The original protocol stated “Following the intention to treat principle, all participants who are confirmed to have taken at least one dose of study medication are included in the analyses.”
So in a study requiring 45 doses of a medication, even those who took just a single dose then ditched their pills were included in the efficacy analysis. Just how this ridiculously flexible criteria affected the study results we’ll never know, because no compliance data was presented for the participants.
If you read the study protocol, you'll also find it was quietly amended in April 2020 to remove the original "exclusions for currently taking chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin or colchicine."
So we learn that a study supposedly comparing fluvoxamine with an inert placebo was now being confounded by people taking antibiotics, which effectively treat bacterial respiratory infections, and colchicine and chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine, all of which have been posited as potential treatments for ‘COVID’!
This was not mentioned in the main paper.
As to how the allowance of such interventions affected the results, again we’ll never know, because the researchers also didn’t bother to include any data on how many patients in each group were receiving these extracurricular therapies.
Given the inherent conflicts of interest and the study’s many flaws, it proves nothing. Those claiming a toxic SSRI was going to help save the world from a ‘pandemic’ really needed something better than this rot.
Subsequent Research
So researchers conducted more studies.
Lenze and co began a bigger study, which they called STOP-COVID 2. It involved patients across the US and 2 provinces of Canada of “age 30 and older, who have tested tested positive for COVID-19 and are currently experiencing mild symptoms.” Similar to the first study, the treatment period was approximately 15 days.
According to Lenze, the study’s Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) "recommended an early stop for futility due to a low case rate and difficulty recruiting patients."
The study was never published, but you can view the results at the ClinicalTrials.gov website.
It makes for interesting reading. Despite a 300 mg dose remarkably causing less adverse effects than an inert placebo and only a single case of nausea in the original trial, Lenze et al employed a lower dose of 200 mg for the larger STOP-COVID 2 trial.
This suggests to me not all was as rosy as claimed for the fluvoxamine participants in the original trial.
In STOP-COVID 2, some 670 participants were randomized to the trial before it was aborted. There were similar numbers of dropouts reported for both groups, leaving 272 and 275 participants in the drug and placebo groups, respectively.
Only one endpoint is listed in the ClinicalTrials.gov report, which is "clinical deterioration" (shortness of breath or hospitalization for shortness of breath or pneumonia and/or fall in oxygen saturation below 92%). The number of participants who experienced this endpoint in the drug and placebo groups was 13 and 15, respectively. In other words, there was no difference.
Again, despite COVID being heavily promoted as the deadliest disease in the history of everything, no-one died in the study. There were 13 adverse events reported for the fluvoxamine group, compared to 12 in the placebo group.
Events deemed to be non-serious, which were comprised entirely of nausea/vomiting, occurred in 15 of the fluvoxamine patients and only 5 of the placebo patients. The exact opposite, it bears mentioning, of what was seen in the original trial.
Interestingly, pneumonia (which is what the early published reports of 'COVID' patients really were) was reported as a serious adverse event in six fluvoxamine patients compared to only 1 placebo patient.
Little wonder that the study was aborted. Fluvoxamine was a flop that did nothing to STOP-COVID.
Lenze, however, wasn’t giving up that easily.
The TOGETHER Team: Doing the Devil’s Work in Brazil
His name appeared again as a co-author in a January 2022 Lancet paper, along with fellow patent holder Angela M Reiersen, reporting a Brazilian RCT dubbed TOGETHER in which multiple ‘COVID’ interventions were examined, one of them being fluvoxamine (another was ivermectin, and to say that arm of the study was controversial would be a massive understatement).
Lead author of the TOGETHER paper was Gilmar Reis, research director of Cardresearch, a Brazilian company that conducts clinical trials on behalf of pharmaceutical companies.
There was an Australian on the TOGETHER team, Craig Rayner, of Monash University in Afdanistan Victoria, home to Monash RNA, "Australia's largest network of RNA and mRNA researchers." Rayner, boasts a proud Monash, has worked at Roche, CSL (of tainted blood transfusion fame), d3 Medicine and Certara, a NASDAQ company that provides software to assist drug companies in drug development and the regulatory approval process. In December 2022, Rayner joined Moderna Australia as Director, Regional Centre for Respiratory Medicine and Tropical Disease.
Another of the TOGETHER authors was a most regrettable character by the name of Edward J Mills. Although his affiliation is listed as McMaster University, Canada, in a May 2020 interview Mills said: “The majority of the time I work for a company called Cytel, where I design clinical trials, predominantly for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”
Cytel is a statistical modelling company that helps pharmaceutical companies get approval, and works very closely with Pfizer. Cytel performed all analyses of the TOGETHER trial.
Mills, I think it’s fair to say, is a person of questionable mental health. When queried on the suspect reporting of the ivermectin arm of TOGETHER, he responded with such helpful suggestions as "Fuck you", "Fuck off. Pray to your stupid god for insights", and "Glory to Satan."
What a Tangled Funding Web They Weave
Major funders of TOGETHER include Unitaid, a partner of the Clinton’s so-called Access Health Initiative. Hey, you can always trust the motives of a couple linked to scores of mysterious disappearances, right? Unitaid itself has numerous funders including Brazil, Chile, France, Japan, Norway, Canada, Germany, Italy, Portugal, the Republic of Korea, Spain, the United Kingdom, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Wellcome.
Another major funder of TOGETHER is Fast Grants, which in turn is funded by a spider web of money-shifting mega-foundations and billionaires, including Arnold Ventures (founded by billionaires Laura and John Arnold), The Audacious Project, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, former Twitter owner and cancel culture king Jack Dorsey, Reid Hoffman (member of the Bilderberg Group, Council on Foreign Relations, US Defense Innovation Board and Microsoft Board), Elon Musk, Schmidt Futures (founded by Google CEO Eric Schmidt and wife Wendy), and others.
The aptly-named Audacious Project, mentioned above, is itself funded by over 40 mega-foundations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Laura & John Arnold.
The latter couple, longtime readers may remember, are the same ‘philanthropists’ who wrote out a $5 million check to low-carb shills Gary Taubes and Peter Attia, who in 2012 launched a so-called ‘charity’ called NuSI to research obesity. NuSI went on to contribute absolutely nothing of value to obesity research, but did balloon the bank accounts of Taubes and Attia to the tune of over $2.1 million.
Remember the good old days, when charity actually meant helping the vulnerable and impoverished?
When Big Pharma, Big Philanthropy and Little Satan Get Together...
Given TOGETHER’s potent mix of vested interests and at least one unhinged devil worshipper, the trial’s claimed results were a foregone conclusion. But let’s discuss them anyway.
The TOGETHER subjects were adults presenting with an acute condition “consistent with COVID-19” or a positive result for the non-existent Sars-Cov-2 on the nonsensical rapid antigen or PCR tests.
The Lancet paper reports that 741 patients in the fluvoxamine arm were randomly assigned to fluvoxamine at a dose of 100 mg twice a day for 10 days, and 756 to placebo. This, they said, occurred by August 5, 2022. It seems twenty-five extra patients materialized out of nowhere, because the pre-print claimed a total of 739 patients for the fluvoxamine group, and 733 for placebo, one day later at August 6, 2022.
Perhaps the newly-materialized numbers were sent from hell (“Dear Eric, extra patients in case you need to pad the results. Keep up the bad work! Love, Lucifer”).
Changing the Goalposts
Every clinical trial purports to examine one or more primary endpoints. These are what the researchers deem to be the key outcomes.
Researchers also typically examine secondary endpoints. These are additional clinical outcomes of interest, but not considered as critical as the primary endpoints.
As it happens, clinical trials often return null or even negative results for the primary and even secondary outcomes. That is perfectly normal, and the reason we have controlled clinical research – to confirm or refute a hypothesis.
However, when a trial is being conducted by people with vested financial or ideological interests in the trial intervention, letting nature take its course and return an unfavourable result will not suffice. When a trial fails to confirm a treatment’s efficacy for a primary endpoint, one of the textbook standard strategies is to begin chopping, changing and mixing endpoints in order to obtain a newsworthy result prior to publication of the study’s main paper.
And that’s exactly what happened with the TOGETHER trial.
They’re All in This TOGETHER
The original study protocol claimed the primary endpoints of the trial were:
"reducing the need for hospitalization due to COVID-19-related lower respiratory tract infection";
"reducing the need for emergency care AND observation for more than 12 hours due to the worsening of COVID-19".
The secondary endpoints were:
“Reduction of viral load after randomization” (at Days 3 and 7);
“Number of days with respiratory symptoms after randomization”;
“Serious adverse events after randomization”;
“Time between the start of treatment until the need for hospitalization / emergency care due to the progression of COVID-19”;
“Time between the start of treatment until the need for hospitalization for any causes”;
“Safety and tolerability of the proposed treatment regimes”;
“Quality of life scale and symptoms (Eq-5D-5L, WHO influenza scale)”;
“Time from treatment to death at 14, 28 days and 60 days”;
“Safety and tolerability.”
However, by the time the Lancet paper made it into print, the primary and secondary endpoints had magically changed.
"Our primary outcome,” said the Big Pharma and Devil’s little helpers, “was a composite endpoint of medical admission to a hospital setting due to COVID-19-related illness defined as COVID-19 emergency setting visits with participants remaining under observation for more than 6 h or referral to further hospitalisation due to the progression of COVID-19 within 28 days of randomisation."
That convoluted bollockery bears little resemblance to the far more concise primary outcomes stated in the original protocol. That’s because the study failed to find any noteworthy effect of fluvoxamine on the original primary outcomes.
The original secondary outcomes had also undergone quite the transformation by the time of the Lancet paper:
“Key secondary outcomes,” claimed Reis et al, “include viral clearance, time to clinical improvement, number of days with respiratory symptoms, time to hospitalisation for any cause or due to COVID-19 progression, all-cause mortality and time to death from any causes, WHO clinical worsening scale score, days in hospital and on ventilator and adverse events, adverse reactions to the study medications, and the proportion of participants who are non-adherent with the study drugs. All secondary outcomes were assessed up to 28 days following randomisation.”
So, in textbook classic pharma fashion, they altered the original secondary endpoints and added in a bunch of new ones.
So we haven’t even looked at the results yet, but we already know this trial stinks. It stinks like a carton of expired milk you forgot to remove from the fridge before going on a 3-month overseas trip.
Here’s how the pre-print reported the results:
"The proportion of patients observed in an emergency room for >6 hours or admitted to hospital due to COVID-19 was lower for the fluvoxamine group compared to placebo (77/739 vs 108/733; Relative Risk [RR]: 0.71...)."
To which the logical response is … so what? Whatever happened to the original “ more than 12 hours due to the worsening of COVID-19” endpoint?
Based on this newly created endpoint, the trial's Data Safety Monitoring Committee met on August 5, 2021, recommending that the TOGETHER Trial stop randomizing patients to the fluvoxamine arm, “as this comparison had met the pre-specified superiority criterion for the primary endpoint.” You know, the primary endpoint that was made up after-the-fact. So after changing the endpoint to one that returned a favourable result, it seems they decided to begin winding up the trial before the results had a chance to turn null or negative again.
If you think I’m being a “conspiracy theorist”, you’re right, and so am I, because my theory is correct. The authors write in the pre-print “there was evidence of a benefit of fluvoxamine reducing hospitalization or observation in an emergency room for greater than six hours due to COVID-19” but it did not meet their own predetermined certainty threshold.
So it was abandoned as a primary endpoint, and they created a new one.
It should be further noted that the endpoint of “ remaining under observation for more than 6 h” is a rather meaningless one. It tells us nothing about why a subject was kept waiting for this duration. Was it because his condition required an extra period of observation, or simply because hospital staff were busy with other patients?
The study was supposedly double-blinded, but we all know full well study blinds are broken on occasion, either by accident or design. If that was the case in this trial, swimming in conflicting interests as it was, deliberately holding up placebo patients a little extra longer at the clinic would have been child’s play.
"Can I get you some more chá, senhor? It’s good for the stomach!"
"Sim, obrigado!"
As for the rest of the outcomes reported in the pre-print:
“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.”
So the original primary endpoints had to be abandoned and replaced with a post hoc contrivance, while the remaining endpoints returned differences that were not significant.
The authors reported "significantly greater number of Grade 1 (mild) treatment emergent adverse events” among patients in the fluvoxamine group, but claimed no differences for more serious events of of Grades 2, 3, 4, or 5.
TOGETHER, in other words, failed to find any meaningful efficacy for fluvoxamine, but a higher rate of side effects.
But neither the pre-print nor the subsequent Lancet paper bluntly stated this truth.
Table 3 of the Lancet paper lists 13 endpoints, almost all of which showed small absolute differences and only three of which returned a probability value under the exalted .05 threshold. One of the two endpoints that returned large numerical differences and a p value under .05 was "Emergency setting visit for at least 6 h" which, for reasons already explained, is rather meaningless.
The other outcome is "Death, per protocol" which refers to the death rate among patients who allegedly took 80% or more of their designated pills. The authors claim only one of 548 fluvoxamine patients died, compared to 12 of 618 placebo patients. The placebo patient death rate equates to 1.94%, in line with the case fatality rate for Brazil of 1.9%. The reported case fatality rate for the fluvoxamine group was only 0.18%.
A toxic SSRI, we are supposed to believe, slashed the death rate from a non-existent virus by 11-fold!
What rubbish.
Recall there were originally 741 and 756 subjects in the fluvoxamine and placebo groups, respectively (at least in the Lancet paper). The researchers claim 84 participants stopped fluvoxamine and 64 participants stopped placebo owing to “issues of tolerability”. That still leaves 109 patients unaccounted for in the fluvoxamine group, and 74 in the placebo group. These, allegedly, are all the patients that took 80% or less of their pills, excluding them from the per protocol analysis.
According to the protocol, “Adherence will be assessed based on the prescribed number of drugs, the duration of treatment and the amount of drugs dispensed and returned (used and unused). Adherence reported by the research subject will also be considered.”
So adherence was determined primarily by the number of pills returned to the researchers. If you took your first day’s dosage of fluvoxamine, experienced the common side effect of nausea, exclaimed “que se dane!” and hurled the rest into the bin, then told the researchers you took all the pills because you didn’t want them to be upset with you … you were counted as fully compliant. Given that nausea is a very common side effect of fluvoxamine, we would expect this very plausible scenario to have occurred with greater frequency in the group taking the SSRI.
So what happens if we push aside the “per protocol” caper for a moment and examine the overall death rate among all participants, irrespective of their claimed adherence?
There were 17 deaths (2%) in the fluvoxamine group and 25 deaths (3%) in the placebo group, a difference that came nowhere near statistical significance and could easily have been due to chance or malfeasance by researchers beholden to Big Pharma, Bill Gates and/or Satan (I understand there is considerable overlap between those three entities).
So even after all the discrepancies and chopping and changing of endpoints, the best spin the researchers were able to place on the results was:
"Treatment with fluvoxamine (100 mg twice daily for 10 days) among high-risk outpatients with early diagnosed COVID-19 reduced the need for hospitalisation defined as retention in a COVID-19 emergency setting or transfer to a tertiary hospital."
Woo-bloody-hoo.
To top off the absurdities, this stinker of a trial won something called the “Society for Clinical Trials’ David Sackett Trial of the Year Award 2021.”
For real.
The Remaining Trials
I’ve spent quite a bit of time addressing the farce that was TOGETHER, so I’ll try and wrap the rest up quickly.
The COVID-OUT trial was officially published in the New World Order England Journal of Medicine in August 2022. This US trial examined the effect of metformin, ivermectin or fluvoxamine.
The trial's purported goal was "preventing serious SARS-CoV-2 infection in nonhospitalized adults who had been enrolled within 3 days after a confirmed diagnosis of infection and less than 7 days after the onset of symptoms." The primary composite end point was hypoxemia, emergency department visit, hospitalization, or death.
I won’t go into the metformin or ivermectin results, because one controversy at a time is enough in an article that has already run overtime.
In the fluvoxamine arm, 359 subjects were randomized to the drug and 362 to placebo, with 334 and 327 included in the final analysis.
There were no deaths in either group, and the incidence of endpoints was near identical in both groups.
The ACTIV-6 Trial
Earlier this year, JAMA published the results of the ACTIV-6 study. A total of 1,288 adults with "test-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection" (zzz...) and experiencing 2 or more symptoms of "acute COVID-19" (zzz…) for 7 days or less reportedly completed the trial at 91 sites in the US.
Participants were randomized to receive 50 mg of fluvoxamine twice daily for 10 days or placebo.
The primary outcome was “time to sustained recovery”, defined as 3 consecutive days without symptoms. There were seven secondary outcomes, including a composite outcome of hospitalization, urgent care visit, emergency department visit, or death through day 28.
By the time this trial was in full swing, gene-therapy-mania had gripped the world, which meant 67% of the subjects received 2 or more doses of the poison dart.
The median time to sustained recovery was 12 days in the fluvoxamine group and 13 days in the placebo group.
For the composite outcome, 26 participants (3.9%) in the fluvoxamine group were hospitalized, had an urgent care visit, had an emergency department visit, or died compared with 23 participants (3.8%) in the placebo group.
One participant in the fluvoxamine group and 2 participants in the placebo group were hospitalized; no deaths occurred in either group.
The authors claimed “adverse events were uncommon and similar in both groups”, but with a Conflict of Interest Disclosures list longer than an airport runway, they would say that.
At any rate, fluvoxamine once again proved itself to be about as helpful as a South Australian Police officer.
Seo et al, Korea
Korean researchers conducted a small, single-blind trial last year involving adult patients with "confirmed" (zzz...) 'SARS-CoV-2' who were admitted to a community treatment center in Seoul. The subjects were randomized to receive 100 mg of fluvoxamine or placebo twice daily for 10 days.
Of 52 randomized participants, 44 completed the trial. Clinical deterioration occurred in 2 of 26 patients in each group. There were no serious adverse events reported for either group. However, seven patients discontinued their fluvoxamine due to adverse effects, while 1 participant in the placebo group discontinued due to "consent withdrawal".
Once again, fluvoxamine showed no benefit but caused a higher rate of side effects.
SigmaDrugs, Hungary
A fluvoxamine-for-COVID trial in Hungary conducted by drug company Sigma was reportedly completed over a year ago, but no results have been posted or published as of this writing.
It’s Time to Hang Up the Fluvoxamine
The evidence is clear: Not only does fluvoxamine suck as a “happy pill”, it fails to help people with the re-badged cold/flu/pneumonia known as ‘COVID’.
Lenze, of course, is still keeping the faith. He’s still pimping fluvoxamine, egregiously claiming a few months ago that “fluvoxamine was shown efficacious as a COVID-19 treatment based on randomized controlled trials”.
His employers at the Washington University School of Medicine are currently recruiting for a trial examining the effect of the useless fluvoxamine on “long COVID”.
Good luck with that.
It’s telling that the only three trials claiming a benefit for fluvoxamine in the treatment of ‘COVID’ all involved Lenze and Reiersen.
Studies conducted by researchers who don’t hold a patent for the use of fluvoxamine in the treatment of ‘COVID’ have invariably found no benefit.
As a marker of just how poor the evidence for fluvoxamine really is, even the FDA, an eager participant of the Great COVID Con and a compliant pharma-bitch if ever there was one, has rejected it as a possible COVID-19 treatment.
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Thank you for the comprehensive takedown.