In a stunning admission, virologist Dr. Andrew Hill acknowledged in a zoom call that publication of his study could lead to the deaths of at least a half million people.
In defending his reversal on the effectiveness of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19, he discussed his "difficult situation" and said, "I’ve got this role where I’m supposed to produce this paper and we’re in a very difficult, delicate balance."
The incident is recounted in Robert Kennedy Jr's New York Times Bestseller, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the global war on Democracy and Public Health.
Andrew Hill, MD, is a senior visiting Research Fellow in Pharmacology at Liverpool University. He is also an advisor for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Clinton Foundation. As a researcher for the WHO evaluating ivermectin, Hill wielded enormous influence over international guidance for the drug’s use.
Hill had previously authored a analysis of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19 that found the drug overwhelmingly effective.
On Jan. 6 of 2020, Hill testified enthusiastically before the NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidlelines Panel in support of ivermectin's use. Within a month, however, Hill found himself in what he describes as a "tricky situation." Under pressure from his funding sponsors, Hill then published an unfavorable study. Ironically, he used the same sources as in the original study. Only the conclusions had changed.
Shortly before he published, Dr. Tess Lawrie, Director of the Evidence-based Medicine Consultancy in Bath, England, and one of the world's leading medical research analysts, contacted Hill via Zoom and recorded the call (transcript below). Lawrie had learned of his new position and reached out to try to rectify the situation.
In a remarkable exchange, Hill admitted his manipulated study would likely delay the uptake of ivermectin in the UK and United States, but said he hoped his doing so would only set the lifesaving drug’s acceptance back by about “six weeks,” after which he was willing to give his support for its use.
Hill affirmed that the rate of death at that time was 15,000 people per day. At the 80 percent recovery rate using the drug, which Hill and Lawrie discussed earlier in the call, the number of preventable deaths incurred by such a delay would be staggering — as many as 504,000.
Lawrie was unable to persuade Hill, who instead of joining her team as lead author, went ahead and published his manipulated findings. Four days before publication, Hill's sponsor Unitaid gave the University of Liverpool, Hill's employer $40 million. Unitaid, it turns out, was also an author of the conclusions of Hill's study.In the call, Lawrie berated Hill's study as “flawed,” “rushed,“ “not properly put together,” and “bad research . . . bad research,” which Hill appears not to have denied.
Instead, when pressed he admitted his sponsor, Unitaid, was an unacknowledged author of conclusions.
"Unitaid has a say in the conclusions of the paper. Yeah," he told Lawrie.Kennedy explained: “Unitaid is a quasi-governmental advocacy organization funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and several countries . . . to lobby governments to finance the purchase of medicines from pharmaceutical multinationals” for distribution in Africa.
He reports:
“Dr. Lawrie knew that to make its ivermectin determination, WHO would rely on Hill’s study and another study from McMaster University known as the “Together Trial.” McMaster was hopelessly and irredeemably conflicted. NIH gave McMaster $1,081,541 in 2020 and 2021.61 A separate group of McMaster University scientists was, at that time, engaged in developing their own COVID vaccine—an effort that would never pay dividends if WHO recommended ivermectin as Standard of Care. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was funding the massive “Together Trial” testing ivermectin, HCQ, and other potential drugs against COVID, in Brazil and other locations. Critics accused Gates and the McMaster researchers of designing that study to make ivermectin fail.”
In other words, the McMaster researchers, just like Andrew Hill, knew that a positive appraisal of ivermectin would cost their university millions of dollars.
In a terse exchange, Lawrie laid out the ethical and personal risks for Hill:
Lawrie: I really, really wish, and you’ve explained quite clearly to me, in both what you’ve been saying and in your body language that you’re not entirely comfortable with your conclusions, and that you’re in a tricky position because of whatever influence people are having on you, and including the people who have paid you and who have basically written that conclusion for you.
Hill: You’ve just got to understand I’m in a difficult position. I’m trying to steer a middle ground and it’s extremely hard.
Lawrie: Yeah. Middle ground. The middle ground is not a middle ground …You’ve taken a position right to the other extreme calling for further trials that are going to kill people. So this will come out, and you will be culpable.
Much like “two weeks to flatten the curve,” in the intervening year Hill appears to have gone all-in on a deception originally envisioned to last only six weeks.
Kennedy reports that on Oct. 1, 2021, “Hill resurfaced on Twitter touting his upcoming lecture, ironically titled, ‘Effects of Bias and Potential Medical Fraud in the Promotion of Ivermectin.’”
Dr. Pierre Kory, of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, commented, “Andrew is apparently making a living now accusing the doctors and scientists who support ivermectin of medical fraud.”
Regulatory acceptance of ivermectin did not delay only six weeks. Instead, almost a year later, it has still not been approved by health agencies in the United Kingdom or in United States. Instead The WHO, CDC, NIH, and FDA have suppressed the drug’s use.
Kory added, “Hill and his backers are some of the worst people in human history. They are responsible for the deaths of millions.”
Related: 'Literally criminal': Supressing data on ivermectin 'cost half a million lives' doctor charges, May 26, 2021
Related: Indian Bar Assoc moves against WHO scientist: 'Deliberately suppressed' ivermectin data , June 11, 2021
Related: Better than vaccines? Frontline doctors prescribe ivermectin to treat Covid-19 , March 25, 2021[For further analysis, see Neville Hodgkinson’s article at the Defender, and Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s New York Times bestseller, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the global war on Democracy and Public Health.]
Here is the transcript of the conversation between Lawrie and Hill:
Lawrie: Lots of people are in sensitive positions; they’re in hospital, in ICUs dying, and they need this medicine.
Hill: Well …
Lawrie: This is what I don’t get, you know, because you’re not a clinician. You’re not seeing people dying every day. And this medicine prevents deaths by 80 percent. So 80 percent of those people who are dying today don’t need to die because there’s ivermectin.
Hill: There are a lot, as I said, there are a lot of different opinions about this. As I say, some people simply …
Lawrie: We are looking at the data; it doesn’t matter what other people say. We are the ones who are tasked with looking at the data and reassuring everybody that this cheap and effective treatment will save lives. It’s clear. You don’t have to say, well, so-and-so says this, and so-and-so says that. It’s absolutely crystal clear. We can save lives today. If we can get the government to buy ivermectin.
Hill: Well, I don’t think it’s as simple as that, because you’ve got trials …
Lawrie: It is as simple as that. We don’t have to wait for studies … we have enough evidence now that shows that ivermectin saves lives, it prevents hospitalization. It saves the clinical staff going to work every day and being exposed. And frankly, I’m shocked at how you are not taking responsibility for that decision.
And you still haven’t told me who is [influencing you]? Who is giving you that opinion? Because you keep saying you’re in a sensitive position. I appreciate you are in a sensitive position, if you’re being paid for something and you’re being told [to support] a certain narrative … that is a sensitive position.
So, then you kind of have to decide, well, do I take this payment? Because in actual fact, [you] can see [your false] conclusions are going to harm people. So maybe you need to say, I’m not going to be paid for this.
I can see the evidence, and I will join the Cochrane team as a volunteer, like everybody on the Cochrane team is a volunteer. Nobody’s being paid for this work.
Hill: I think fundamentally, we’re reaching the [same] conclusion about the survival benefit. We’re both finding a significant effect on survival.
Lawrie: No, I’m grading my evidence. I’m saying I’m sure of this evidence. I’m saying I’m absolutely sure it prevents deaths. There is nothing as effective as this treatment. What is your reluctance? Whose conclusion is that?
Hill complains again that outsiders are influencing him.
Lawrie: You keep referring to other people. It’s like you don’t trust yourself. If you were to trust yourself, you would know that you have made an error and you need to correct it because you know, in your heart, that this treatment prevents death.
Hill: Well, I know, I know for a fact that the data right now is not going to get the drug approved.
Lawrie: But, Andy — know this will come out. It will come out that there were all these barriers to the truth being told to the public and to the evidence being presented. So please, this is your opportunity just to acknowledge [the truth] in your review, change your conclusions, and come on board with this Cochrane Review, which will be definitive. It will be the review that shows the evidence and gives the proof. This was the consensus on Wednesday night’s meeting with 20 experts.
Hill protests that the U.S. National Institutes of Health will not agree to recommend ivermectin.
Lawrie: Yeah, because the NIH is owned by the vaccine lobby.
Hill: That’s not something I know about.
Lawrie: Well, all I’m saying is this smacks of corruption and you are being played.
Hill: I don’t think so.
Lawrie: Well then, you have no excuse because your work in that review is flawed. It’s rushed. It is not properly put together.
Lawrie points out that Hill’s study ignores a host of clinical outcomes that affect patients. She scolds Hill for ignoring the beneficial effects of ivermectin as prophylaxis, its effect on speed to testing negative for the virus, on the need for mechanical ventilation, on reduced admissions to intensive care, and other outcomes that are clinically meaningful.
This is bad research … bad research. So, at this point, I don’t know … you seem like a nice guy, but I am really, really worried about you.
Hill: Okay. Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s a difficult situation.
Lawrie: No, you might be in a difficult situation. I’m not, because I have no paymaster. I can tell the truth. How can you deliberately try and mess it up … you know?
Hill: It’s not messing it up. It’s saying that we need, we need a short time to look at some more studies.
Lawrie: So, how long are you going to let people carry on dying unnecessarily – up to you? What is, what is the timeline that you’ve allowed for this, then?
Hill: Well, I think . . . I think that it goes to WHO [World Health Organization]and the NIH [National Institutes of Health]and the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] and the EMA [European Medicines Agency]. And they’ve got to decide when they think enough’s enough.
Lawrie: How do they decide? Because there’s nobody giving them good evidence synthesis, because yours is certainly not good.
Hill: Well, when yours comes out, which will be in the very near future … at the same time, there’ll be other trials producing results, which will nail it with a bit of luck. And we’ll be there.
Lawrie: It’s already nailed.
Hill: No, that’s, that’s not the view of the WHO and the FDA.
Lawrie: You’d rather risk loads of people’s lives. Do you know if you and I stood together on this, we could present a united front and we could get this thing. We could make it happen. We could save lives; we could prevent [British National Health Service doctors and nurses] people from getting infected. We could prevent the elderly from dying.
These are studies conducted around the world in several different countries. And they’re all saying the same thing. Plus there’s all sorts of other evidence to show that it works. Randomized controlled trials do not need to be the be-all and end-all. But [even] based on the randomized controlled trials, it is clear that ivermectin works. It prevents deaths and it prevents harms and it improves outcomes for people …
I can see we’re getting nowhere because you have an agenda, whether you like it or not, whether you admit to it or not, you have an agenda. And the agenda is to kick this down the road as far as you can. So … we are trying to save lives. That’s what we do.
I’m a doctor and I’m going to save as many lives as I can. And I’m going to do that through getting the message [out] on ivermectin. Okay. Unfortunately, your work is going to impair that, and you seem to be able to bear the burden of many, many deaths, which I cannot do.
Lawrie then asks again: Would you tell me? I would like to know who pays you as a consultant through WHO?
Hill: It’s Unitaid.
Lawrie: All right. So who helped to … Whose conclusions are those on the review that you’ve done? Who is not listed as an author? Who’s actually contributed?
Hill: Well, I mean, I don’t really want to get into, I mean, it … Unitaid …
Lawrie: I think that . . . it needs to be clear. I would like to know who, who are these other voices that are in your paper that are not acknowledged? Does Unitaid have a say? Do they influence what you write?
Hill: Unitaid has a say in the conclusions of the paper. Yeah.
Lawrie: Okay. So, who is it in Unitaid, then? Who is giving you opinions on your evidence?
Hill: Well, it’s just the people there. I don’t …
Lawrie: So they have a say in your conclusions.
Hill: Yeah.
Lawrie: Could you please give me a name of someone in Unitaid I could speak to, so that I can share my evidence and hope to try and persuade them to understand it?
Hill: Oh, I’ll have a think about who to, to offer you with a name … but I mean, this is very difficult because I’m, you know, I’ve, I’ve got this role where I’m supposed to produce this paper and we’re in a very difficult, delicate balance …
Lawrie: Who are these people? Who are these people saying this?
Hill: Yeah … it’s a very strong lobby …
Lawrie: Okay. Look, I think I can see kind of a dead end, because you seem to have a whole lot of excuses, but, um, you know, that to, to justify bad research practice. So I’m really, really sorry about this, Andy.
I really, really wish, and you’ve explained quite clearly to me, in both what you’ve been saying and in your body language that you’re not entirely comfortable with your conclusions, and that you’re in a tricky position because of whatever influence people are having on you, and including the people who have paid you and who have basically written that conclusion for you.
Hill: You’ve just got to understand I’m in a difficult position. I’m trying to steer a middle ground and it’s extremely hard.
Lawrie: Yeah. Middle ground. The middle ground is not a middle ground … You’ve taken a position right to the other extreme calling for further trials that are going to kill people. So this will come out, and you will be culpable.
And I can’t understand why you don’t see that, because the evidence is there and you are not just denying it, but your work’s actually actively obfuscating the truth. And this will come out. So I’m really sorry … As I say, you seem like a nice guy, but I think you’ve just kind of been misled somehow.
Hill promises he will do everything in his power to get ivermectin approved if she will give him six weeks.
Hill: Well, what I hope is that this, this stalemate that we’re in doesn’t last very long. It lasts a matter of weeks. And I guarantee I will push for this to last for as short amount of time as possible.
Lawrie: So, how long do you think the stalemate will go on for? How long do you think you will be paid to [make] the stalemate go on?
Hill: From my side. Okay … I think end of February, we will be there, six weeks.’
Lawrie: How many people die every day?
Hill: Oh, sure. I mean, you know, 15,000 people a day.
Lawrie: Fifteen thousand people a day times six weeks … because at this rate, all other countries are getting ivermectin except the UK and the USA, because the UK and the USA and Europe are owned by the vaccine lobby.
Hill: My goal is to get the drug approved and to do everything I can to get it approved so that it reaches the maximum …
Lawrie: You’re not doing everything you can, because everything you can would involve saying to those people who are paying you, “I can see this prevents deaths. So I’m not going to support this conclusion any more, and I’m going to tell the truth.”
Hill: What, I’ve got to do my responsibilities to get as much support as I can to get this drug approved as quickly as possible.
Lawrie: Well, you’re not going to get it approved the way you’ve written that conclusion. You’ve actually shot yourself in the foot, and you’ve shot us all in the foot. All of … everybody trying to do something good. You have actually completely destroyed it.
Hill: Okay. Well, that’s where we’ll, I guess we’ll have to agree to differ.
Lawrie: Yeah. Well, I don’t know how you sleep at night, honestly.
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