A Continuation of a Timeline of Ivermectin-Related Events in the COVID-19 Pandemic [June 30, 2021]

This review presents a continuation of a previous timeline that described ivermectin-related events in the COVID-19 pandemic from April 2020 to the end of March 2021. The new timeline covers a period from the beginning of April 2021 to the end of June 2021. In April 2021, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a new, large clinical trial including ivermectin, with an estimated study completion date in March 2023. A large national trial was also announced in the Philippines, a 1,160-patient trial in the US, and another trial in Ireland. Trial results published in the period resembled those of previous trials, not producing clinically meaningful changes to the results of existing meta-analyses. Mainstream press of the high-income countries mostly repeated the same arguments as in the previous period, including the warnings against ivermectin by the European Medicine Agency (EMA) and the World Health Organization (WHO). The sparse and onesided coverage of ivermectin in the press appeared to result from a program called Trusted News Initiative (TNI). The censorship practices of the social media companies, with policies disallowing expression of views differing from the guidelines of the WHO, continued unchanged, apparently organized under a program called International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). In contrast to the previous period -during which groups such as the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) and the British Ivermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD) group attempted to influence the decisions of government agencies -in this period these groups began to bypass the agencies and turn directly to clinicians and the public. FLCCC also published two new protocols, I-MASS for mass immunization, and I-RECOVER for long haul COVID-19 syndrome (LHCS), and a review article which by the end of the period had reached a position in the top 120 of 18 million articles tracked by Altmetric. The BIRD group organized two online conferences on ivermectin and published a meta-analysis which had reached a position in the top 60, respectively. One of the authors of the in vitro study that initiated the international interest in ivermectin explained that due to, for example, lack of adaptive immune responses in the cell model, their study was unsuitable for making conclusions about in vivo dosing in humans. A review described 20 mechanisms of action of ivermectin in COVID-19. The parties against and in favor of ivermectin remained in deeply conflicting positions, presenting opposite conclusions on the existing research. The WHO, along with regulatory agencies and national governments of high-income countries, appeared to aim at preserving the value of existing investments in vaccine and investigational therapeutics development, as well as questioning the efficacy and safety of repurposed medicines. Criticism towards excessive influence of Bill Gates in the WHO emerged during the period, as the largest funder of the WHO appeared to be a..