Jack Cashill’s Dec. 8 WorldNetDaily column begins as the kind of right-wing screed you’d expect from a WND columnist:
Although I will put my COVID-skeptic credentials up against anyone’s – I tried to organize a public protest on day one of the lockdown – I confess to having seen Big Health’s actions as merely misguided. I was wrong.
The “crackpots” were right. The Big Health involvement did not progress along the Eric Hoffer spectrum from a good cause to a movement with benefits to a racket. It started as a racket, a massive racket that may go down as a Mao-worthy crime against humanity.
But then it quickly goes south because of who he cites to defend this view:
As the princeling of America’s reigning Democratic dynasty, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has his blind spots, but his dissection of Big Health’s war, not on COVID, but on those who are actually warring with COVID, is this century’s must-read book.
That would be the same RFK Jr. who’s such a rabid anti-vaxxer that the rest of the Kennedy family has renounced his dangerous activism.
Most of the rest of Cashill’s column was advocacy for ivermectin focused around a conversation between two researchers:
Rather than summarize Kennedy’s “The Real Anthony Fauci,” allow me to excerpt one particular conversation that speaks to the enormity of the debacle. The conversation, recorded on Zoom, involves two scientists. One is Dr. Tess Lawrie, a world-renowned data researcher from the U.K. with an international reputation for integrity. The other is World Health Organization researcher Dr. Andrew Hill, a senior visiting research fellow at Liverpool University.
Lawrie and 20 of the world’s leading experts had recently performed a meta-analysis of the research done on ivermectin (IVM), and the data overwhelmingly supported its value in treating COVID-19.
Lawrie is a rabid advocate for ivermectin and an anti-vaxxer. The meta-analysis to which Cashill is apparently referring was published last year by the American Journal of Therapeutics. Contrary to Cashill’s claim that “20 of the world’s leading experts” wrote it, it carries the names of only seven authors, including Lawrie; PolitiFact reported that all of these co-authors are affiliated with a pro-ivermectin group. By contrast, a different meta-analysis released around the same time concluded that ivermectin was not a “viable option” for treating COVID.
From there, it was Cashill conspiracy time, as he attacked Hill for supposedly suspiciously changing his mind about ivermectin:
Like Lawrie, Hill had been a major IVM proponent before making a very suspicious about-face. As a WHO gatekeeper and adviser to both Bill Gates and the Clinton Foundation, Hill’s opinion mattered. His hasty counter-thesis blocked a worldwide ivermectin rollout.
“How can you do this?” Lawrie asks him. “You are causing irreparable harm.”
Hill explained that he was in a “tricky position” because his sponsors were pressuring him, the most important of which was Unitaid. Chairing the executive committee of Unitaid, an international quasi-governmental consortium, was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation representative. Apparently, a $150 million donation buys the best seat at the table.
[…]One can understand how an apparatchik could buckle before a Stalin or a Hitler, but a Bill Gates? Dante would need a special Circle to accommodate bureaucrats as easily intimidated as Hill.
Cashill didn’t mention a more logical and less conspiratorial reason why Hill might have changed his mind: His investigation of research on ivermectin found that many of the papers on the subject appeared to be flawed or biased, and his own meta-analysis of ivermectin found little benefit. Nevertheless, Cashill keeps up the conspiracy-mongering:
Lawrie does not shy from telling Hill what he refuses to see: “All other countries are getting ivermectin except the U.K. and the USA and Europe are owned by the vaccine lobby.” Lawrie concludes by telling Hill, “I don’t understand how you sleep at night, honestly.”
As Kennedy documents, the racket runs deep. When I googled Lawrie’s name the first item to show up was a BBC article headlined, “Ivermectin: How false science created a Covid ‘miracle’ drug.”
When I googled Dr. Andrew Hill, the first article Google served up was this gem from the Guardian, “How my ivermectin research led to Twitter death threats.”
If it takes a crackpot to think that Big Pharma, Big Health, Big Tech, Big Media and Bill Gates would engage in a conspiracy so vast and so lethal, well then color me a “crackpot.”
Note that Cashill doesn’t rebut any of the claims Hill makes in those articles — he has found his fellow crackpots, and he has a new conspiracy to flog.