The results would, eventually, set Kirsch on a collision course with the scientific establishment. The drug was widely prescribed as a covid treatment for much of , based on anecdotes and flawed studies. But the confusion provided a fertile breeding ground for skeptics.
Another CETF grant, though, yielded far more exciting results. Drug researchers at Washington University in St. They were giving covid patients the antidepressant fluvoxamine as soon as possible after diagnosis, based on anecdotes about the drug limiting the runaway immune response that causes many severe symptoms. In October, the group reported that, while a few patients in the placebo group ended up in the hospital, none of the patients receiving fluvoxamine got sick enough to go.
That trial has now been completed, and the researchers are analyzing their data. Several other trials around the world are in the final stages, too. But the whole process has gone too slowly for Kirsch.
Immediately after the results of the first fluvoxamine trial were released—but before they were published in a peer-reviewed journal—he wrote a post on Medium. Medium banned him for misinformation. My crime? Since then, he has continued to promote fluvoxamine, along with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. When I asked him why so many experts in the field disagreed with him, he alleged there were efforts—either malicious or negligent—to suppress evidence of cheap, effective covid treatments.
Instead, the government prefers to fund and promote new, proprietary drugs and vaccines, he says. Reached by email, the two fluvoxamine investigators denied that there was any effort to suppress their research, and they were cautiously optimistic about their continued study.
One of them, Eric Lenze, was in fact giving a presentation on fluvoxamine to the National Institutes of Health the next day. Both of them encouraged anyone reading this article to get vaccinated. Kirsch is a serial entrepreneur who has spent decades pitching the next big thing, whether optical mice Mouse Systems , document processing FrameMaker , search engines Infoseek , digital security OneID , or e-commerce Propel Software.
His latest startup, M10, is a spin-off of a spin-off that sells a blockchain for banks. He has made millions from these projects, even if they have not turned him into a household name. Several former members told me he began relentlessly pressuring them to promote the drug in media stories, often during exhausting, circuitous conversations.
To scientists, giving fluvoxamine a chance means running a large trial—not giving it to individual patients in the clinic, off-label and outside the context of active data collection and analysis.
Peter Meinke, another former board member, spent nearly three decades in drug discovery at Merck. Things took a final and dramatic turn once Kirsch started claiming the government was covering up vaccine deaths.
At the end of May this year, Siliciano emailed the other advisors to say that Kirsch had gone off the deep end and he was cutting ties. The rest of the board soon followed. Siliciano did not respond to requests for comment for this article. Talking to Kirsch is an exhausting experience. He is frequently brash and interruptive, peppering dire warnings about vaccines with veiled aspersions toward Anthony Fauci and vague references to influential people who agree with him in private but cannot speak publicly.
In three phone conversations, as well as dozens of emails, his responses to questions about claims in this story were imprecise or constantly changing. He told me that while he and his family got vaccinated as soon as they were eligible, he got the idea that vaccines are dangerous from a man he hired to clean his carpets, who got very sick after receiving the vaccine.
Chief Executive Officer , Token. Steve Kirsch has been at the forefront of tech innovation for more than three decades. Fellowship Program. Program Membership:. Henry Crown Fellowship Program. The organization was founded to test preventative drugs in people suspected to be infected with COVID via outpatient clinical trials, which test existing antiviral drugs on patients as soon as they are infected. The organization supports grantees through funding, improving study protocols, advertising trials through op-eds, newspaper and TV interviews, and finding ways to manufacture drugs faster and at lower cost.
The initiative has drawn grant proposals from top scientists, including cancer genomics pioneer Bert Vogelstein and Michel Nussenzweig, whose research has led to the development of innovative vaccines against infectious disease and new treatments for autoimmunity. Thus far, CETF has raised funding for clinical trials for drug candidates including Peginterferon lambda, a hepatitis D treatment, and Camostat mesylate, a protease inhibitor used to treat reflux esophagitis and chronic pancreatitis.
The organization is also raising funds to support COVID-related trials of remdesivir, a broad-spectrum antiviral developed by Gilead Sciences, and Toyama Chemical's favipiravir, an antiviral medication currently used to treat influenza in Japan.
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