The false, sinister, and duplicitous statements of the TOGETHER Ivermectin trial investigators

This is my third and last post on the fraudulent TOGETHER trial and it’s investigators as I am just done with it. I hope that the my global network of colleagues trying to expose this fraudulence have better success than I had so far.

(Article by Pierre Kory, MD, MPA republished from PierreKory.Substack.com)

Anyway, in Part 1, I introduced the trial in the context of a decades-long Disinformation war waged by Big Pharma (using tactics pioneered and perfected by Big Tobacco) against generic, repurposed drugs like ivermectin. In Part 2, I detailed the most brazen of a multitude (47 to be exact) of actions consistent with the aim of producing a “negative trial”, with these actions committed in both the design and conduct of the TOGETHER trial, by a group of the most deeply Pharma-conflicted study investigators of any trial in the pandemic. They brought out the superstars for this one.

I have long wondered how the investigator’s conduct can be so blatant and obvious. I only recently concluded that it is because… they don’t have to be subtle. It just doesn’t matter. The newspaper headlines are out across the world and the NIH has quietly changed its recommendation from neutral to now “against the use of ivermectin outside a clinical trial.” Which leaves us arguing over the bomb fragments of a massive detonation of what could have been world-changing and life-saving Public Health policy.

I remind all, again, that my accusations of fraud could be easily refuted or clarified, simply by an open sharing of the patient-level data by these investigators. That they refuse, even with their own outside colleagues, despite promising repeatedly to do so, is to me, damning and definitive evidence of massive fraud. What is hilarious is that instead of sharing with the public, they instead claim to have parked the data behind an organization called ICODA… funded by Bill Gates. See below. What is even more telling.. is that on the ICODA website, the trial is not even listed. Again, not subtle.

Now, to the point of this third post. In the past year, I have been privy to comments uttered or written both publicly and semi-privately by several investigators of the TOGETHER trial. I will present them here. I believe they add another pillar of evidence supporting the conclusion of fraud as they lend disturbing insight into the people who designed and conducted the trial. Liars at a minimum. You be the judge for whatever else you think they are. So buckle your seatbelts because it gets weird, disturbing, and infuriating.

First, who are these investigators? From the C19early.com group:

Possibly the largest financial conflict of interest of any trial to date. Disclosed conflicts of interest include: Pfizer, Merck, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Australian Government, Medicines Development for Global Health, Novaquest, Regeneron, AstraZeneca, Daichi Sankyo, Commonwealth Science and Research Organization, and Card Research. Many conflicts of interest appear unreported. For example, Unitaid is a sponsor [Harper, togethertrial.com (B)].

Analysis done by a company that receives payment from and works closely with Pfizer. All analyses were done by Cytel. Cytel is a statistical modelling company that helps pharmaceutical companies get approval — they work very closely with Pfizer [cytel.com]. Cytel’s software and services are used by the top 30 pharmaceutical companies [cytel.com (B)].

A co-principal investigator (Ed Mills) works for Cytel and the Gates Foundation [empendium.com]: “The majority of the time I work for a company called Cytel, where I design clinical trials, predominantly for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation”.

The first author (Gilmar Reis) runs a company that survives on contracts from pharmaceutical companies. His research company has never done a trial on any generic drug. Note that, per the c19early.com group, “independent investigators without conflicts of interest) tried to participate in the trial but were denied [odysee.com (B)]. “The independent, non-conflicted investigator who was denied participation in the trial was none other than the FLCCC’s Dr. Flavio Cadegiani. I wonder if it was his integrity, ethics, professionalism, humanity and intelligence that disqualified him? Or was it the fact he was treating the COVID gamma variant with double the dose of ivermectin for three times as long as the study’s protocol? Again, from the c19early.com group:

The Gates Foundation is a founding partner of GAVI, which took out Google ads telling people not to use ivermectin [

10/n La fondation de Bill & Melinda Gates, financièrement et idéologiquement investie dans le vaccin comme solution au covid, a financé via GAVI de la publicité pour un article critique sur l’ivermectine. Elle a financé TOGETHER, notamment le bras sur l’HCQ, également défavorable pic.twitter.com/LPSzjIWz0R

— Collectif Sauver la Science (@GabinJean3) April 5, 2022

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], and a major funder of Unitaid, which (my words here)… modified the results of the Hill meta analysis in a way that prevented adoption [c19ivermectin.com, c19ivermectin.com (B), 

11/n La même fondation est fortement impliquée dans le scandale lié à la méta-analyse d’Andrew Hill, via Unitaid. Andrew Hill était également conseiller de cette fondation. Quels sont les autres liens d’intérêts des auteurs ?https://t.co/O0QhABqyy3

— Collectif Sauver la Science (@GabinJean3) April 5, 2022

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].

Associated with MMS Holdings. The trial is associated with MMS Holdings [dcricollab.dcri.duke.edu], whose mission includes helping pharmaceutical companies get approval and designing scientific studies that help them get approval. One of their clients is Pfizer [mmsholdings.com].

Certara. One of the senior investigators was Dr. Craig Rayner, President of Integrated Drug Development at Certara – another company with a similar mission to MMS Holdings. They state on their website that: “Since 2014, our customers have received over 90% of new drug and biologic approvals by the FDA.” One of their clients is Pfizer [certara.com]. Craig Rayner has had previous financial relationships with: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ? Medicines Development for Global Health ? Novaquest ? Regeneron ?Merck ? Astrazeneca ?Pfizer ? Daichi Sankyo ? Commonwealth Science and Research Organization ?

I wonder what all these investigators’ prospects are for future pharmaceutical company contracts if they blow up a 100 billion dollar market for COVID-19 vaccines and pharmaceuticals by proving the preventive and therapeutic efficacy of a generic drug?

I should remind myself here that some supporters have told me to be careful because I am “poking the 100 billion dollar bear” with these posts. It’s not that I am brave in that way, but rather that I think they would have taken me out long ago and that now it no longer matters because Big Pharma just doesn’t give a shit anymore about ivermectin. They already won the battle, the TOGETHER trial was just the final blow – no advanced health economy in the world recommends it. The NIH just reversed the “neutral” recommendation that Paul Marik and myself got them to make. To see just how wickedly effective this Disinformation campaign was, check out this recent editorial in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. One of the top-rated journals in that field, regurgitating propaganda with zero awareness. If they ever start wondering why everyone I meet is terrified about going to an establishment doctor or hospital, I will point them to this editorial.

OK, so let’s review the lies, attacks, and duplicitous statements made by some of these folks, in particular those of Ed Mills, David Boulware and Craig Rayner.

Let’s start with the duplicitous statements about the trial conclusions, uttered by Ed Mills and David Boulware. I don’t want to spend too much time on this as the brilliant journalist/filmmaker Phil Harper already nailed them for these in his substack called “The Digger,” where he argued that their statements are 100% in-line with a public relations campaign against ivermectin. Although this characterization is completely unsurprising to me, what I find intriguing is that their private, conflicting, positive statements supporting ivermectin (i.e. duplicitous) just might reflect a conscience. However weak or remote it may reside in their soul. Or it could just be they are trying to feign some sort of intellectual honesty among their academic colleagues to preserve their professional reputations. Yeah, let’s go with that one.

Let’s start with what Ed Mills told a colleague named Marc Rendell, an exchange published by Steve Kirsch in his substack post on the TOGETHER trial (I will tell you that this is the very last correspondence between Ed Mills and Marc Rendell, given that all subsequent emails from Rendell to Mills have gone unanswered). Hmm. Anyway:

Here’s the reply from Ed Mills to Marc Rendell on April 3, 2022:

Hi Marc

I hope you are well. Thank you for your email. You have been the only person courteous enough to ask the questions.

I don’t understand the psychology of the ivermectin advocates. They fail to see the positive in this study and just focus on it not being overwhelmingly positive. I actually think it is quite positive.

I presented this a couple weeks ago at the NIH Collaboratory Rounds and, if they listened, I advocate that actually, there is a clear signal that IVM works in COVID patients, just that our study didn’t achieve significance. In particular, there was a 17% reduction in hospitalizations that would be significant if more patients were added. I really don’t view our study as negative and, also in that talk, you will hear me retract previous statements where I had been previously negative. I think if we had continued randomizing a few hundred more patients, it would have likely been significant.

The idea that Mills might have a conscience also stems from another exchange after his NIH presentation. Frank Harrell, a Professor of Biostatistics asked Mills, “When you have a confidence interval that goes all the way down to a 30% reduction in relative risk, the question of whether the trial was stopped too early in light of the political ramifications of needing to demonstrate that the efficacy is really unimpressive, it really could be raised as a logical question…. ”

“Any reaction to that?” asked the host.

“I totally agree with Frank,” Mills said.

What? He “totally agrees” with a statement suggesting that stopping the trial early could have been the result of political motivations? He is the Principal Investigator! Wow, he must have been given truth serum before that presentation because this is what he and Boulware told the newspapers instead:

“Ivermectin did not result in a lower incidence of medical admission to a hospital,” Edward Mills in TOGETHER paper, March 30th 2022.

Here is the headline that statement generated:

Also, he said this to another newspaper:

“There was no indication that ivermectin is clinically useful”, Edward Mills quote March 18th 2022

In the New York Times: “There’s really no sign of any benefit,” said Dr. David Boulware, an infectious-disease expert at the University of Minnesota.

I guess David wasn’t paying attention during the NIH presentation. “No sign of ANY benefit?” Maybe he and Mills should get their stories straight. Or not. Seems it was best for them to tell the papers one thing and the exact opposite to the academic community.

Boulware goes even further to try to destroy ivermectin. In that same article, the NY Times quotes him as follows, “Now that people can dive into the details and the data, hopefully that will steer the majority of doctors away from ivermectin towards other therapies,” Dr. Boulware said.

Umm, diving into the details and the data actually finds that there are tons of evidence to show they buried, hid, and manipulated the evidence of efficacy to show their non-statistically significant evidence of benefit. My colleagues (chief among them being Alexandros Marinos whose posts on the TOGETHER trial are a masterwork) have done deep dives into the data by scouring the published manuscripts, protocols, and presentations of all the repurposed medicines studied in the TOGETHER trial. Their conclusion, based on the blatantly withheld data along with the to-date-unrefuted evidence of manipulation of multiple control groups in violation of the study protocol, is that the investigators are hiding the finding of a massive benefit of ivermectin. Boulware’s invitation to “dive into the details and the data” is a farce. What data David? You mean the data you are having Gates hide for you behind ICODA?

Now, lets examine the numerous statements that Ed Mills has given in defending the 3-day dose used in the trial.

What follows is that Ed Mills, a year ago, wrote that they changed the protocol from one day only (I laugh each time I read that) to three days only, and that this decision was based on Andrew Hill’s work because he had shown a “dose-response” in his early pre-print posted on January 19th, 2021 (i.e. “dose-response” means that the higher the dose, the more potent the benefit).

To wit, see his email below to Steve Kirsch and Filipe Rafaele in March of 2021, two deeply researched observers and/or funders of therapeutic trials (Kirsch) in COVID. Note that I am cc’ed on a number of these emails). I have redacted all email addresses but in this one below, Mill’s email was literally one ending with @cytel.com. Hilarious.

From: Edward Mills <>
Sent: Saturday, March 6, 2021 4:48 PM
To: Steve Kirsch
Cc: filipe rafaeli Pierre Kory Patrick Collison
Subject: Re: IVM under dosing in Brazil trial

We are doing three days of dosing. The original protocol had one day of dosing, which was used back in January, when we submitted this for approvals at the ethics and national bodies. It then changed to three days of dosing after an amendment based on emerging trials from Andrew Hill’s synthesis. I have already explained that on several occasions.  Thats what is being administered. Clinicaltrials.gov  needs to be updated. Clinicaltrials.gov is not a protocol, its a registry. Gates funded the first part of this trial, when we evaluated HCQ and lopinavir vs placebo

Editorial interlude (PK): Of course Gates did – HCQ was actually the “OG” (original gangster) of repurposed drugs in COVID, and man did they murder that drug using a submachine gun of fraudulent trials). Back to Mills:

Thats why they are on the website. Again, this has been clearly explained in the past.

We will do an interim analysis after 800 patients. We aren’t making any changes until then.

Ed

Quick word about Filipe Rafaele - he had been in repeated contact with Mills given he was equally disturbed as I was, from the beginning, in regards to the issue of trials of repurposed, generic drugs that were “designed to fail.” Filipe had closely followed the hydroxychloroquine frauds, and was “fighting the good fight” as they say. He is a prolific and talented writer and filmmaker among other pursuits. His essay "The day I understood 'the Good German" is stunning in power, and a required reading to best understand the times we are living through. Here is just one paragraph in the introduction to that essay that ends in a telling description of the frustrating role that me and my colleagues have found ourselves in (colleagues such as Robert Malone, Peter McCullough, Paul Alexander,  Harvey Risch, Aaron Kheriaty, Ryan Cole, Richard Urso, Kat Lindley and others).  

“..the almost unlimited powers of big pharmaceutical corporations over science, creating what the BMJ - British Medical Journal, calls "The illusion of evidence based medicine". This article explains that academia has been corrupted, research has been corrupted, regulatory authorities have been corrupted, and dissenters are persecuted . I have also written long pieces about this and understand that the communicators cannot give voices to the dissident scientists, the only ones left to tell the truth about these issues.

Anyway, back to the emails. Filipe replies:

On Mar 15, 2021, at 11:00 AM, filipe rafaeli <> wrote:

Hello Edward,

Nine days ago, you said: “There will be an updated protocol on the website in the next few days that is far more elaborate”. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04727424?cond=Covid19&intr=ivermectin&draw=6&rank=49. In the website, it is still saying that is single dose: “Drug: Ivermectin Tablets – 06 mg oral tablet: Three tablets if weight 40 – 60 kg, single dose; Four tablets if weight > 60 kg, single dose”. Do you have any news about this?

Filipe

Ed Mills writes back.

Em ter., 16 de mar. de 2021 às 02:35, Edward Mills < escreveu:

I have come across your previous articles and I abhor your views on everything.     Your admiration for Josef Mengele is disgusting.

I have no sympathies for nazis, under any circumstances. Never, ever. These were people that were killed, I knew them and I knew their families.  Your views disgust me. I suggest no-one else on this email thread supports you either, Please, never contact me again. Your hate will not win.

Fuck you

 Ed

Whoa. Crazy town. Filipe goes on to school him below. Note how at the end, in his post-script, Filipe predicts the exact nonsense that Ed will pull in his hydroxychloroquine trial.

Em ter., 16 de mar. de 2021 às 03:54, filipe rafaeli <> escreveu:

Edward,

If you understood, after reading the entire article, that I am an admirer of Mengele, you are either illiterate or cognitively impaired.

I have no admiration for Mengele. I am a Latin American leftist. I am a socialist. Here I know what fascism is. Here I know what dictatorship is. I am an anti-fascist. My grandfather was arrested during the Brazilian dictatorship (64-85). By the fascist military with machine guns. I have friends who were tortured.

Do you want to know why I mentioned Mengele? Because I remembered him.

I remembered Mengele when I read “studies” by “scientists” with hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

I remembered Mengele when I saw “scientists” administering low dose or overdose. “It doesn’t work.”

I remembered Mengele when I saw “scientists” giving medicines at the time of extreme unction. “It doesn’t work.”

I remembered Mengele seeing “studies” that stopped when they were partially positive, before statistical significance. “It doesn’t work.”

I remembered Mengele when a fake study was published which justified stopping several studies with HCQ when they were partially positive. And after the hoax was revealed, I remembered Mengele again because those studies were not resumed.

I remembered Mengele when Kory and Marik’s study was censored after peer review.

All by coincidence, of course.

And I always remember Mengele every time I see a “scientist” seeking power, positions, and money instead of saving lives.

Read the entire article, word for word, twice, and do your work.

PS: I am curious about the result with your HCQ study. I saw that you are very excited.
– I hope it is not too small (Impossible to achieve statistical significance this way)
– I hope it is not “early treatment” after 5 – 7 days of symptom.
– I hope it is not in patients outside the risk group.
– I hope it wasn’t at too low a dose (Impossible to achieve statistical significance this way).

Filipe

After Mill’s HCQ trial gets published in JAMA, Filipe wrote again. Check it out:

Date: sáb., 24 de abr. de 2021 às 17:26
Subject: Re: IVM under dosing in Brazil trial
To: Edward Mills < Cc: Steve Kirsch, Pierre Kory

Hi Edward,

I have just read your article carefully. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2779044
You should probably be receiving effusive congratulations. You will have a brilliant career.
Risk of death reduced by 66%.
Risk of hospitalization reduced by 24%.
But it was not statistically significant (it doesn’t work).

Too bad.
[Remember that] on March 16, I played Nostradamus here:

Oh dear, unfortunately it was *finished early*. It was too small, 200 patients! So it was not statistically significant.
Oh dear, unfortunately *more than 80%* of people were
randomized after 5 days of symptom onset.
Oh dear, unfortunately *it was in monotherapy*.

Comment by covid crusher:
“Do not expect the authors to point out that those hospitalization results are entirely and remarkably consistent with the other 4, all identically underpowered, HCQ outpatient RCTs, homogenously pointing to 30%-ish hospitalization benefit”.

My congratulations, Edward. History will be very kind to all the scientists working on this pandemic. I am now waiting for your study with ivermectin. For sure it will be a success!

Filipe

Read more at: PierreKory.Substack.com