The Moral Disintegration of Andrew Hill: After playing a critical role in preventing patient access to Ivermectin, Andrew Hill authored a paper advocating for expanded access to Paxlovid

This brazenly hypocritical stance illustrates how Pharma is able to exploit human nature to manipulate people into rationalizing away their moral convictions and guilty conscience

The following study was published April 7, 2022:

Barriers to Worldwide Access for Paxlovid, a New Treatment for COVID-19

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36176569/

Abstract

Pfizer and the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) have reached a voluntary licensing agreement for Paxlovid (nirmatrelvir+ritonavir), a novel antiviral for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) taken orally in the first 5 days from symptom onset. The Pfizer-MPP deal enables 95 low- and middle-income countries (L/MICs) to access affordable biosimilars. Generics are delayed awaiting bioequivalence testing and may be ineffective in L/MICs with reduced testing capacity, which comprise only 10% of global diagnoses. Thirty-nine percent of diagnoses originate in MICs forced to pay high prices due to exclusion from the Pfizer-MPP deal. The cost-effectiveness of Paxlovid could be limited compared with the creation of sustainable vaccine infrastructure in these nations, delaying socioeconomic pandemic recovery. Furthermore, Paxlovid may not be cost-effective in vaccinated populations, and concerns remain over ritonavir drug interactions with COVID-19 comorbidity medications. We call for expanded coverage by the Paxlovid-MPP deal and greater access to testing.

Obviously, trying to increase the utilization of Paxlovid is morally demented - it is a highly toxic drug combo that can’t be taken together with practically every other drug in existence; causes “covid rebound”; and doesn’t seem to have any meaningful efficacy altogether. It will also shift focus and resources away from other more effective and less dangerous options, especially in poorer countries such as those in Africa that so far have been largely spared the carnage wreaked by Pharma’s ghastly cornucopia of covid products.

There is something else noteworthy about this study. Guess who the final author listed is? (The first and last authors listed are typically the most prestigious on a study.)

Yup, that is the one and only Dr. Andrew Hill of Ivermectin infamy, possibly the most impactful academic along with Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz and possibly Scott Alexander for preventing the use of Ivermectin.

(Also notable are the middle two authors from Imperial College - the same IC of Neil Ferguson and his bogus and fraudulent apocalyptic IC Model that precipitated the initial wave of lockdowns in March 2020. ‘Evil Gonna Evil’.)

His Ivermectin meta review paper was probably the single biggest blow against the potential adoption of Ivermectin during the pandemic.

Andrew Hill is the fellow who was on the other end of the (in)famous zoom call (full transcript in footnote¹) with Dr. Tess Lawrie concerning the conclusions of his meta-analysis of Ivermectin where he admitted that “Unitaid has a say in the conclusions of the paper. Yeah.”

Others have already extensively documented Andrew Hill’s perfidies and turpitudes relating to Ivermectin (e.g. Pierre Kory, Tess Lawrie, or Phil Harper), so I won’t belabor going through that here.

Andrew Hill’s Hypocrisy

There are two other aspects that are worthwhile discussing pertaining to Andrew Hill’s crusading on behalf of Paxlovid after tanking Ivermectin.

The first point is the sheer chutzpah and flagrant hypocrisy of his stance on Paxlovid compared to his stance on Ivermectin. You almost have to admire the gutsiness of such a shameless gambit.

Regarding Ivermectin, his paper concluded that “Ivermectin should be validated in larger, appropriately controlled randomized trials before the results are sufficient for review by regulatory authorities.”

In other words, patient access would be restricted. Or to quote Andrew Hill’s own words:

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.

So for Ivermectin, which he had acknowledged (at the time) was highly effective in treating covid and could save hundreds of thousands of lives, patient access be damned.

Yet when it comes to Paxlovid, which is a Pfizer boondoggle whose only saving grace is that it’s not their worst covid therapeutic, Andrew Hill is claiming to be all hot and bothered by the ‘lack’ of patient access to this Pfizer miracle. And of course, his concern is especially pronounced for poorer countries.

This is all the more galling because Andrew Hill was critical to blocking patient access to Ivermectin. His prior disposition was that even for a drug with an established safety profile in use for decades, it was improper to allow for widespread use without more studies. So for him to now turn around and proselytize for expanding patient access to an Ivermectin competitor that has a far worse safety profile with far more unknowns and an incomparably inferior evidence base is an abhorrent mendacious duplicity. This is akin to rioters demanding that the police protect their plunder after they’ve finished destroying and looting.

Behold, the ‘standards’ of modern academia. There is a palpable lack of shame within the academic and scientific communities that allows for such raw, unbridled hypocrisy to be entertained let alone acceptable.

Andrew Hill’s Moral Collapse: How Pharma is able to systematically erode your moral convictions and prevent feeling pangs of conscience

The second point relates to the arc of Andrew Hill ethical disintegration. It is instructive to observe how he went from fierce Ivermectin advocate to a vapid shill for a toxic and ineffective worthless therapy in its stead. While it is tempting to simply presume that Andrew Hill is nothing more than a demented sociopath eager to make a few bucks on the corpses of a few million people, this does not fit the pattern of his actions and statements.

Dr Kory detailed the backstory of Hill’s initial genuine advocacy on behalf of Ivermectin:

The Global Disinformation Campaign Against Ivermectin - The "Fix" at the WHO Part 1

If you watch the call between Tess Lawrie & Andrew Hill (or even read the transcript), Hill’s distress and internal dissonance is palpable. He was clearly being coerced to go along with the “edits” of his meta-review inserted by Andrew Owen, his boss at the University of Liverpool. Yet over the intervening months, he has evolved to become staunchly and rabidly anti-Ivermectin.

Why though did Andrew Hill choose to embrace going to the other extreme on Ivermectin - it would be less embarrassing to simply tone down his favorable recommendation than to completely repudiate everything he said and did for the past few months as dangerously and completely false? Why did he go from reluctant participant in toning down the results of his own study to vociferous advocate against Ivermectin’s use altogether?

It is inviolable human nature that we desperately wish to perceive ourselves as morally virtuous, as fundamentally "good”. It is incredibly rare to find a genuinely evil sociopath who embraces an identity of being evil. When a person does something that they know to be wrong, especially when it’s something that is profoundly evil, they are subject to brutally distressing cognitive dissonance between their desire to see themselves as morally virtuous and a force for good in the world versus the stark reality of the evil they just perpetrated. As a result, they will rationalize however they can that what they did on behalf of Pharma was not evil or wrong.

Ergo, Pharma understands that if they get someone to commit the initial act of corruption, they will have control over that person going forward, because they will need to rationalize that what they did was not wrong, corrupt, or evil. This almost always means that they will dutifully carry out subsequent Pharma tasks - and certainly not oppose them - because if they don’t, it would force them to feel the cognitive dissonance of having perpetrated the initial evil that they have rationalized away by convincing themselves that Pharma wasn’t corrupting them to do the first iniquity.

In Andrew Hill’s case, this meant at minimum convincing himself over time that Ivermectin cannot possibly work and was in fact dangerous. I suspect very strongly that getting behind Paxlovid is a further psychological mechanism to help rationalize his anti-Ivermectin stance. Hill knows what he said about Ivermectin before being turned by the $40,000,000 extortion payment to the University of Liverpool [ostensibly to modify the conclusions of his initial meta-analysis of Ivermectin]. It would be extremely difficult for him to be able to truly rationalize away his robust history of Ivermectin advocacy, especially when it has become publicly disseminated to such an extent by the very people opposing his newfound anti-Ivermectin stance. Thus he in particular would feel a need to go to the farthest extreme possible to assuage his guilt and rid himself of tumultuous pangs of conscience. Advocating for Paxlovid access would be very helpful for this - advocating for patient access makes him relate to himself as someone who is an “advocate for patient access to covid treatment”, and banish to the netherworlds of his subconscious his own instinctive recognition that he was instrumental in thwarting patient access to a covid treatment that probably cost a million lives or so.

Andrew Hill’s moral collapse into incoherent hypocrisy is a testament to the power of human nature to rationalize away almost anything, and to Pharma’s power to exploit this weakness. The terminus of his moral arc was inevitable the moment he accented to allow his study to be tampered with. Or as Darth Vader memorably proclaimed in Return of the Jedi, “now your failure is complete”.

1. Here’s the transcript of the conversation between Lawrie and Hill: (from CHD)

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.