Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This evening I'd like to talk about some of the recommendations that have been made by the National COVID-19 Clinical Evidence Taskforce. This is a group who say their job is to work to keep Australians updated with the latest evidence. The first recommendation they make is on the drug remdesivir. It is a conditional recommendation. However, the World Health Organization, on 20 November, issued a press release which states:

WHO has issued a conditional recommendation against the use of remdesivir in hospitalized patients, regardless of disease severity, as there is currently no evidence that remdesivir improves survival and other outcomes in these patients.

I don't have a problem with one of our organisations having a view opposite to that of the World Health Organization, but the concern is that we know what some of the social media giants, such as YouTube, have said. YouTube's CEO said it would ban and censor anything that went 'against World Health Organization recommendations' because it 'would be a violation of our policy'. will YouTube be censoring the recommendations of our national evidence task force?

The second recommendation that was made and I would like to discuss tonight is the recommendation by the National COVID-19 Clinical Evidence Taskforce about the drug ivermectin. The national evidence task force recommendation is against using ivermectin. What is the evidence for ivermectin, a drug that was championed by the Australian professor Tom Borody months ago, but he was not listened to? We have 22 studies published in medical literature, all of which—100 per cent of those studies—find that ivermectin is a highly effective treatment for COVID. In fact, the chances that you would get 21 studies out of 21 studies are one in two million. So I call on our national evidence task force to look at the evidence, to look at these 21 studies. At the moment, on their website, they say they looked at one study and are basing their recommendation against this drug on that one study, when there are in fact 21 published studies. If you look at those 21 published studies, that drug must be recommended now to treat COVID patients, especially those Australians returning from overseas.

The third recommendation that the National COVID-19 Clinical Evidence Taskforce makes is on hydroxychloroquine. Again, it recommends against it. What's the evidence? We now have 118 published studies in medical literature, the majority of them peer reviewed, that find that hydroxychloroquine is effective. One of them—it was actually published here on 6 December—is a peer reviewed study in an internationally acclaimed journal titled the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents. The highlights of this peer reviewed study say:

By 'significantly', they mean a reduction of over 80 per cent. Yet our national evidence task force is ignoring the evidence.

Finally, we had the statement of none other than Professor Peter A McCullough on the weekend in an Australian interview. You cannot get a gentleman with more qualifications and expertise than Peter A McCullough. He said: 'Make no bones about it, hydroxychloroquine really works. It is the most widely used therapeutic to treat COVID in the world, hands down. The chances that it doesn't work are calculated to be one in 17 billion. It is a very useful drug. It has been on the prescription market for 65 years. It is a very safe and effective medication.' He said, 'I think historians are going to be unkind to Australia, Canada and other nations' that have failed to prescribe it. He also notes that half of the lives that have been lost to COVID could have been saved if our medical bureaucrats would just look at the evidence.