In the 223,128-person city of Itajai in Brazil, in a government program, everyone was offered low-dose ivermectin to prevent COVID-19. Comparing matched groups of people and adjusting for residual differences, ivermectin as a preventive reduced COVID-19 death rates to only 30% of the rates without ivermectin [1].

In the 240,000,000-person state of Uttar Pradesh in India, in a government program, everyone was offered ivermectin to prevent and to treat COVID-19 [2]. Compared to the world average COVID-19 death rate [3], the COVID-19 death rate given ivermectin as a preventive and treatment was just 13% [4].

Government so-called public-health programs are ubiquitous; people value health. Even so, the innovating officials above were only available to 3% of the world’s people.

Also, significantly, such innovating officials weren’t available to any of the wealthier people who had the latest government-crony healthcare.

Under 21 U.S. Code § 360bbb–3(c)(3), no new products could have received emergency use authorization if any alternatives were adequate, approved, and available [5].

Such law reads like common sense. Even so, it led to the government-crony producers of new products receiving systematic protectionism [6]:

• Government-crony researchers constructed deceptive studies of existing medications that purportedly showed these medications were unsafe or ineffective for COVID-19. Government-crony researchers knowingly published false data in prestigious government-crony medical journals, data that later were retracted.
• Government-crony news media and social media deliberately censored truthful information about existing medications that could be used to treat COVID-19.
• FDA, NIH, and CDC bureaucrats issued unfounded, false, or misleading information about existing medications [7] and supplements [8] that could be used to treat COVID-19. HHS bureaucrats limited government reimbursements for existing medications that could be used to treat COVID-19. This led government-crony private insurers to do the same, so this effectively established the standard of care for everyone [9].
• State-government licensing boards severely threatened and punished prescribers and pharmacists if they used existing medications to treat COVID-19 [7].
• Hospital administrators excluded existing medications from protocols for treating COVID-19, and fired any prescribers [10]. Pharmacy administrators required pharmacists to not fill prescriptions for the use of existing medications to treat COVID-19.

Pulmonary and critical care specialist Dr. Pierre Kory, who has had a leading-edge USA clinician’s perspective on COVID-19 public health care and health care, now says that “the health agencies essentially have to be destroyed structurally and reconstituted in some manner in which you can remove the deep and widespread influence of the pharmaceutical industry. And I don’t know what that looks like [10].”

What that needs to look like, interestingly, includes organizations like what Dr. Kory and collaborators formed: the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance. This becomes clear when we consider what it has taken for the system to have been able to harm customers.

The one thing that has been pivotal to protect the government-crony producers is a single critical point of control: the monopoly privilege granted to physicians and nurse practitioners to prescribe drugs.

Restore people’s freedom to obtain drugs without prescriptions, and the whole current health tyranny unravels. Given this one change, the FDA, NIH, and CDC can no longer block people from repurposing existing drugs. Licensing boards and pharmacy companies can no longer block people from using existing drugs. Hospitals and pharmacies can no longer block people from taking the drugs that people choose for themselves on the advice of the health consultants who people choose for themselves.

Physicians, nurse practitioners, and other health consultants seem to be stripped of a substantial power, but although it seems paradoxical, they end up empowered. No longer blocked by government and government-crony controllers, health consultants are freed to practice medicine using all the best tools that producers can make, using all the best understanding that clinicians and researchers can reach.

Expert teams like the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance even more readily form in decentralized ways and compete or collaborate, in whichever ways help [11]. Customers freely choose the resulting protocols rapidly and widely.

Eliminating the monopoly privilege to prescribe drugs, of course, is not enough to dismantle the incumbents’ political force. The government agencies that have been granted privileges to interfere with customers’ heath need to be destroyed structurally, as Dr. Kory said. Further, governments or government cronies must never be enabled to reconstitute any privileges to interfere with customers’ health.

As far as securing health in the event of crises, all we need to keep in mind is how FEMA compares to private actors in speed, efficiency, and effectiveness.

The anomalous government examples in the city of Itajai in Brazil and in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India are too few and far between, and even then aren’t the very best that people can do. To get more and better initiatives, we must open up the space for people in churches, people in other nongovernment groups, and individuals to work their wonders.

Like always with socialist schemes, what people think they will get from public health is what people actually can get only from private health.