Ivermectin Doctors Launch New Medical Journal

It is the latest dark money-fueled publication stacked with fringe doctors with ties to the Trump administration.

Another dark money group with links to the Trump administration’s public health leadership has set up its own medical journal.

The so-called Journal of Independent Medicine is the latest offering from the Independent Medical Alliance (IMA), previously the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC). The group’s president, Dr. Joseph Varon, announced the new venture back in December, writing that as the publication’s editorial-in-chief, he was “excited to invite researchers and clinicians to submit innovative, evidence-based work that challenges the status quo and fosters open scientific dialogue.”

The press release announcing the new journal promised it would be “a groundbreaking peer-reviewed publication dedicated to restoring integrity, transparency, and scientific independence in medical research and education.”

But FLCCC, which trademarked the slogan “Honest Medicine” in April last year, is known for its promotion of vaccine misinformation and the antiparasitic drug ivermectin, which they have long held up as a treatment for a number of diseases—most notably COVID, despite multiple large, high quality studies finding it ineffective for that purpose. More recently, they have billed their I-PREVENT COVID, flu, and RSV protocol, which includes ivermectin, as bird flu prevention.

FLCCC co-founders, Drs. Pierre Kory and Paul Marik, had their board certifications revoked by the American Board of Internal Medicine last year for spreading COVID misinformation.

Nevertheless, the IMA’s new publication appears aimed at continuing its pro-ivermectin crusade. Below its lofty promises of restoring integrity, transparency, and scientific independence, the press release noted that “the Journal of Independent Medicine is designed to challenge industry influence, prioritize ethical scientific inquiry, and provide a critical platform for research that mainstream medical journals often ignore or suppress.”

”This includes studies on repurposed medicines, alternative and integrative therapies, medical ethics, constitutional rights in healthcare, and the ongoing implications of COVID-19 and other healthcare policies,” it read.

The first edition of their new journal, released late last month, includes two separate papers about the anti-parasitic, one of which is titled, “Ivermectin, A Molecular Swiss Army Knife: A Review Of Mechanisms, Indications And Safety Concerns In Drug Repurposing.”

In addition to Varon and Marik, the journal’s editorial board includes prolific anti-vax doctors. There is Dr. Robert Malone, who has grossly overstated his role in the development of mRNA vaccines while fear mongering about the technology, and Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, who, along with Marik, sued the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over their public messaging countering ivermectin for COVID. Also on the journal’s board is computational biologist Jessica Rose, a collaborator of notorious vaccine misinformation spreader Dr. Peter McCullough, the chief science officer of The Wellness Company, which sells vaccine “detox” supplements and, of course, ivermectin.

Kory, Malone, and McCullough are all in the leadership of The Unity Project, another anti-vaccine organization.

Rose and McCullough authored a 2021 paper about COVID vaccines and myocarditis misusing data from the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). It was later retracted. Another VAERS-based vaccine myocarditis paper they authored last year has an expression of concern attached to it.

Dr. Ryan Marino, an associate professor at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, was not impressed by the IMA journal, telling Important Context that it was “an interesting rebrand” that “would almost make one believe they’ve moved on from COVID quackery.”

“They claim to be ‘dedicated to advancing unbiased, multi-specialty medical research’ and yet a quick glance at their published work shows that this is primarily based in perpetuating the grievances of COVID contrarians, with multiple articles about ivermectin…rewriting the recent history of the pandemic, and plenty of complaints about perceived censorship,” Marino said. “Being told you are wrong is not ‘censorship,’ but don’t tell them that.”

Problems aside, the IMA has undeniably powerful allies—key figures in the Trump administration like anti-vax Health and Human Services Secretary (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and economist Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s nominee for director of the National Institutes of Health. Both men notably hold views that run counter to the scientific literature and medical consensus on issues like COVID and vaccines.

FLCCC and Kennedy’s former anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense (CHD) have been funded by some of the same organizations and have rallied together multiple times. They both sponsored the January 2022 anti-vax “Defeat the Mandates” rally in Washington, DC, which featured speeches from Kennedy, Kory, and Marik.

Last year, the FLCCC and CHDthey rallied with other anti-vax groups outside of the Supreme Court during oral arguments in the case of Murthy v. Missouri, which centered around the Biden administration’s communications with social media companies about misinformation on their platforms. Bhattacharya was a plaintiff in the original suit, Missouri v. Biden. He and the anti-vax groups supporting his case alleged that the communications amounted to undue pressure and censorship. The Supreme Court tossed the case.

CHD has promoted Kory and Marik on different occasions. In one interview promoted by Kennedy on X, Marik told the group’s publication, The Defender, that COVID patients were dying from being denied treatments like ivermectin. In another with CHD TV, the doctors promoted their vaccine injury protocol. More recently, Kory appeared at a health policy roundtable with Kennedy early in his presidential campaign and joined the anti-vaxxer at the pre-election “Rescue the Republic” rally after he suspended his campaign to launch “Make America Healthy Again” with Trump.

The FLCCC rebrand to IMA occurred amid Kennedy’s HHS nomination battle. While thousands of medical experts around the country came together to urge the Senate to reject Kennedy, IMA paid for a van which parked outside the hearings with an ad supporting the anti-vaxxer on its side.

Marik appeared in a pseudodocumentary last year with Bhattacharya called “COVID Collateral,” which was funded in part by a media outfit linked to the pro-Trump Epoch Times, which has spread misinformation about the COVID vaccines. In the film, both men promoted the conspiracy theory that ivermectin was allegedly suppressed by the powers that be in order to secure emergency authorization for the COVID vaccines.

Kennedy has also promoted the notion that the FDA, which falls under the HHS he now leads, “suppressed” ivermectin, and, at the height of the pandemic, Kennedy filed a lawsuit seeking to ban the COVID vaccines because “effective” alternative treatments like ivermectin existed.

IMA’s new journal is just the latest publication in a trend of medical contrarians with friends in high places making their own outlets to publish their controversial research. The RealClear Foundation recently launched an “academy” of public health with its own journal helmed by COVID contrarians including Bhattacharya and Trump’s pick to head up the FDA, surgeon Marty Makary. During his Senate hearing, Kennedy cited a dubious study linking vaccines to autism from another new contrarian-led publication, Science, Public Health Policy, and the Law. That journal’s editorial board is stacked with Kennedy allies—including the head of CHD.

These new journals have emerged as Trump promises to reshape public health in America with the help of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Kennedy. Since the president took office, billions of dollars in research grants have been pulled and numerous studies canceled. In this new climate, medical contrarians are anticipating wins—and there is evidence that they may get them. Last week, Reuters reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is planning to commission a study to investigate the long settled science that vaccines do not cause autism.

For contrarians, the benefit of controlling a medical journal is clear. It gives them the ability to publish dubious research without the fear of correction or retraction. IMA and its founders have authored some highly questionable papers and have a long, combative history with larger medical publications.

In 2020, for example, IMA (then the FLCCC) published a paper on their COVID hospital protocol, which was based on a previous controversial and dubious vitamin C for sepsis protocol from Marik. The COVID paper was retracted a year later after Marik’s hospital alerted the publishing journal of serious flaws in how it reported the mortality rate in the treatment arm of the study, which made the protocol appear more effective than it was. They would go on to add ivermectin to this protocol—and continue to promote the protocol on their website in spite of its retraction.

Kory, meanwhile, has been involved in the publication of questionable papers touting ivermectin for COVID. His 2021 meta-analysis of ivermectin for COVID papers was marked with an expression of concern for inclusion of publications of extremely low quality.

He was also a co-author on two controversial, but influential ivermectin papers published in 2022 on a COVID trial out of Brazil. One of those was corrected to reflect undisclosed conflicts of interest including payments from Brazilian ivermectin manufacturer Vitamedic to some of the authors. Vitamedic and the fringe Brazilian physician group run by the lead author on these papers were later fined by a Brazilian court for “collective moral damage to health” over their promotion of the drug for COVID.

Independent researchers who reanalyzed the data on the Brazilian papers found the reported benefits of ivermectin to be “entirely explained by statistical artefacts.” The Web of Science has since paused indexation of output from the journal that published the papers over concerns about the quality of its publications.

Kory, who authored the 2023 book, “The War on Ivermectin,” has accused the large-scale studies on ivermectin that found no use for the drug against COVID of being “fraudulent.”