I prescribed ivermectin. This isn't that.

Ivermectin is a legitimate medicine, and in dermatology it is an ordinary one. I used the cream on my own patients. That is precisely why the claims now being made for it deserve to be taken apart carefully rather than waved away — because the safety of a face cream is being used to vouch for doses, indications and quantities that have nothing to do with the drug I prescribed.

A QuackeryWatch record · Posted 23 October 2026 · build 23-10-P · Companion to the SV-40 file and the RFK Jr. running file

The short version

• Established and approved: ivermectin treats parasitic infections. In dermatology it is routine — a 1% cream for rosacea, authorised in Canada since 2015; a lotion for head lice; oral treatment for scabies.
• Tested and failed: for COVID-19. Eleven randomised trials, 3,409 participants, and a later trial at higher dose for longer. No benefit.
• Not tested in people: for cancer. The American Cancer Society is unambiguous that no evidence supports prescribing it, and that concealing its use can interfere with treatment that does work.
• Not a thing at all: “spike protein detox.” And one compound promoted alongside it — suramin — is an intravenous drug for African sleeping sickness with serious toxicity and no legitimate oral form.
• The quantities tell you the purpose. An offshore pharmacy sells 24 mg tablets in boxes of six hundred. A scabies course for an adult is about fourteen milligrams.

What I actually used it for

I ran an ambulatory care and acne clinic in the Kitchener-Waterloo area until I retired in 2020. Topical ivermectin — sold in Canada as Rosiver, a 1% cream, authorised by Health Canada in 2015 for the inflammatory lesions of rosacea — was part of ordinary practice. It worked. It was well tolerated. Patients were very happy with it.

That is the drug. A pea-sized amount, once daily, on a face. There is also a 0.5% lotion for head lice, and oral ivermectin for scabies, which in Canada is prescribed off-label — Health Canada's authorised oral indications are intestinal strongyloidiasis and onchocerciasis — but is standard care, including for crusted scabies in infants, as the Canadian Medical Association Journal has reported.

COVID-19: this was properly tested, and it failed

This is not a case of a promising treatment being ignored. It was studied, at scale, by people with no stake in the answer.

The Cochrane Collaboration reviewed eleven randomised trials covering 3,409 participants and concluded, in June 2022: “We found no evidence to support the use of ivermectin for treating COVID‑19 or preventing SARS‑CoV‑2 infection.”

The commonest reply was that the dose had been too low. So that was tested too. The US National Institutes of Health's ACTIV-6 trial used a higher dose for longer — 600 micrograms per kilogram daily for six days, against roughly 400 for three days in the earlier work. The accompanying JAMA editorial in February 2023 was titled “At a Higher Dose and Longer Duration, Ivermectin Still Not Effective Against COVID-19.”

The European Medicines Agency advised against use outside clinical trials in March 2021. Health Canada issued its advisory on 31 August 2021: “There is no evidence that ivermectin works to prevent or treat COVID-19, and it is not authorized for this use.” It also recorded that ivermectin had been advertised in Canada for COVID-19 and that it had required the advertisers to remove non-compliant ads.

Cancer: the claim that can actually kill someone

The COVID claim has largely burned out. The cancer claim is growing, and it is far more dangerous, because the alternative treatment being declined is often one that works.

The American Cancer Society, in May 2026, put it plainly: “Ivermectin is not approved to treat any cancer in people or in animals,” and “no scientific evidence supports prescribing ivermectin off label to people with cancer.” The supporting work that gets cited is in cells and in mice. The Society also notes that large doses “can be very dangerous, causing seizures, comas, and even death.”

There are three further harms that get less attention and matter more in a clinic:

• Side effects — nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea — can compound the toxicity of chemotherapy a patient is actually receiving.
• Interactions may reduce the effectiveness of the treatment that is working.
• Taking it secretly, which is common, makes it impossible for an oncologist to interpret what they are seeing. It can also make a patient ineligible for a clinical trial.

What this looks like in practice was reported by NPR in March 2026. A New Orleans oncologist said that over about a year, nearly half of his new patients asked him about ivermectin. One declined chemotherapy in favour of ivermectin and fenbendazole. Months later, a scan showed the cancer had spread. Another oncologist's summary of the laboratory evidence is the sentence to remember: “Most promising drugs in test tubes and mice don't pan out in humans.”

Why an antiparasitic drug for cancer at all?

This is the question the coverage usually skips, and without it none of the rest makes sense. Why would anybody reach for a worming drug to treat a tumour?

Because a belief sits underneath it: that cancer is a parasite, or is caused by one. If that were true, an antiparasitic would be the obvious treatment. The drug choice is not random. It follows from a theory.

The clearest statement of it came from Dr. Lee Merritt, an orthopaedic surgeon and a member of America's Frontline Doctors — the same organisation whose daily video series Dr. Pierre presents. On a podcast in December 2022, in a clip that reached more than 130,000 views on Facebook the following May, she said that cancer and multiple sclerosis are caused by parasites, and that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin can cure cancer. She has also claimed that COVID-19 vaccines contain parasites.

Science Feedback's review rated the causation claims Incorrect and the cure claim Unsupported.

Notice the shape, because it has now appeared three times in this one page. Ivermectin is a real medicine — so the dose and indication get carried somewhere they do not belong. Parasites really do cause some cancers — so a general theory of cancer gets built on a narrow fact. And on our SV-40 page, a polio vaccine really was contaminated — so a cancer epidemic that never happened gets treated as established. In each case the opening claim survives checking. That is exactly why the conclusion travels.

Eight doctors asked the FDA to sell it over the counter

On 26 June 2025, Simone Gold — founder of America's Frontline Doctors — filed a citizen petition with the US Food and Drug Administration, docketed as FDA-2025-P-1981. A companion petition covered hydroxychloroquine.

It asks the FDA to exempt ivermectin tablets from prescription requirements. Not only for the approved parasitic indications, but explicitly for “COVID-19 prophylaxis and early outpatient treatment in adults.”

Eight physicians are named as Supporting Petitioners:

This is the most useful document in the whole subject, because it is a filing in a public docket rather than a social media post. Eight named physicians formally asked a regulator to license, for sale without prescription, the precise use that eleven randomised trials had already failed to support.

The messenger: Dr. Peterson Pierre

The clip now circulating on X comes from Dr. Peterson Pierre, and he should be described accurately.

He is a genuine dermatologist. Stanford University School of Medicine, class of 1997. The Medical Board of California record, checked on 23 October 2026, shows licence A 66363, Physician and Surgeon, issued 21 August 1998, status “License Renewed & Current” to March 2028. There are no public record actions against him — no discipline, no probation, no reprimand, nothing. His practice states he is board certified in dermatology. He has practised in Thousand Oaks for over twenty years.

So: a colleague in good standing, in a real specialty, who uses this drug legitimately — exactly as I did.

Since March 2022 he has also presented Frontline Flash, the daily video series of America's Frontline Doctors, in two-minute episodes still being published in 2026. Episodes under his name include “IVERMECTIN IS BEST” and “Spike Protein Detox Options.” The four sources cited on that second episode's own page are laboratory and mechanistic papers. Not one is a clinical trial of a detox protocol.

“Spike protein detox”, and the compound that worries me

The clip names five things: ivermectin, suramin, NAC, catechins and curcumin. They are not equivalent, and treating them as one list is itself part of the problem.

NAC is a mucolytic and the antidote for paracetamol poisoning; as a supplement it is low risk. Curcumin and catechins are supplements whose risks are dose-dependent — concentrated green-tea extract and high-dose turmeric preparations are both recognised causes of liver injury, which is not a reason for alarm but is a reason to stop calling them harmless. None has evidence for removing spike protein from anybody.

One further point of fairness: no regulator anywhere has issued a warning specifically about “spike protein detox” products. The closest official statement is the FDA telling a fact-checker that there is no data showing the spike protein produced after vaccination is toxic or lingers. That gap is worth noticing. It is not evidence the products work.

Where it is actually being sold

The post that prompted this page was not from Dr. Pierre. It was from an account trading as 24Medico.com, which was using his clip as advertising.

Read the post and the technique is visible. The text is cautious — ivermectin “has not been proven to detox spike proteins or treat vaccine-related injury”, claims “need to stand up to human clinical evidence”. Then the last line: “For product information, visit the link in our bio. Worldwide delivery, package tracking, and 24/7 live human support.”

The scepticism is not a lapse. It is what makes the account look like a trustworthy source while the transaction sits one tap away.

The site gives its location only as Mumbai, India. It names no legal entity. It lists around twenty ivermectin products — tablets from 3 mg to 40 mg, creams, lotions, shampoo, oral paste, and ivermectin-albendazole combinations. It tags its ivermectin pages “COVIDCARE” and “ANTI VIRAL”, while the product descriptions themselves make no explicit COVID claim. No page states that a prescription is required; the formula is “Have a prescription? Upload it and we'll match it to your order.” A commenter asking whether a prescription was needed received no answer on the page.

We could not establish that 24Medico ships to Canada; the site says “worldwide” and never names this country. We found no regulator listing or enforcement action against it, which given how little of that sector is ever actioned should be read as “none found,” not as a clean bill.

Canada: what is actually on the record here

Ivermectin is a prescription drug in Canada, on the federal Prescription Drug List. That is the structural fact from which everything else follows, and it is why the five American state laws making it available over the counter have no Canadian equivalent — a province could not do it unilaterally if it wanted to.

It was asked for. A House of Commons e-petition in 2021–22 gathered 30,555 validated signatures asking that ivermectin be made available directly from a pharmacist. The government's response, tabled 25 April 2022, was one sentence: “Health Canada does not intend to change the status of ivermectin from a prescription to non-prescription drug.” It noted that no application for market authorisation, and no clinical trial application, had been received for ivermectin for COVID-19.

The discipline record is smaller than the lists suggest

A great many Canadian physicians are named in circulating lists of doctors supposedly punished over ivermectin. The actual record is narrower, and the difference matters.

On the documents, one Canadian physician has an adjudicated finding in which prescribing ivermectin was itself a proven charge — and, separately, one nurse practitioner. The physician is Dr. Tshipita Kabongo of Regina. He prescribed it to three patients between April 2020 and March 2022, admitted the charge before the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan, and in September 2024 received a written reprimand, a one-month suspension, supervision, and costs of $44,783. A separate competency hearing in December 2024 found he did not have adequate skill and knowledge in the practice of medicine, and ordered retraining.

Elsewhere, ivermectin appears in the Canadian record in a different way. Several Ontario physicians were barred from prescribing it by interim orders of the College's complaints committee — orders made before any hearing, which are restrictions, not findings. Where those cases later reached a tribunal, the proven misconduct was about something else: failing to respond to the College, contravening the terms imposed, issuing exemptions, or spreading misinformation.

The Ontario case with the fullest record: Dr. Patrick Phillips

Dr. Patrick Brian Phillips, CPSO 109364, qualified at Dalhousie in 2016, completed a two-year family medicine residency at the University of Toronto, and entered independent practice in June 2018. He worked as a locum and in addictions medicine in Toronto, then in emergency and hospitalist roles across Northern Ontario — Nipigon, Kirkland Lake, Englehart — moving to Englehart full-time in early 2021. He had been practising independently for about three years when the events below began. His is the longest ivermectin-adjacent record in Ontario, and unlike most of this material it can be read in full: the Tribunal's reasons were published as College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario v. Phillips, 2023 ONPSDT 16. What follows comes from that decision and from the College's own announcement of the 2021 restriction, not from press summaries of either.

The single most important fact about this decision is the one least often reported: Dr. Phillips did not contest it. The findings rest on a Statement of Uncontested Facts and a Plea of No Contest, and at paragraph 24 the Tribunal records that he did not dispute the facts, the expert opinions, or that he had committed professional misconduct and was incompetent.

The conduct in those uncontested facts: social-media communications from November 2020 to September 2021 comparing public health measures to residential schools and to Nazi policies, and calling the College's restrictions on him a badge of honour; promoting vaccine exemptions through a website; posting online a private letter from an Acting Medical Officer of Health who had told him that five adverse-event reports he filed did not meet the criteria, after which followers attacked the official by name; posting the College's confidential investigative material, including the names and contact details of two witnesses, who were then harassed as a “murderer” and a “criminal” — material he refused to take down until the Ontario Superior Court ordered him to in January 2022; and, in May 2021, speaking to the mother of a 10-month-old who was not his patient, without taking a history or examining the child, after which she declined the swab and went home. A health unit manager called her, explained the procedure, and she returned the same day and had the baby tested.

The reprimand delivered at the hearing told him his communications had “descended into the realm of aggression and intimidation.”

There is one further documented fact, and it is the one that connects this case to the rest of the Canadian picture. In January 2022 — while restricted and four months before his suspension — Phillips was a named director of Canadian Covid TeleHealth Inc., a service then advertising ivermectin consultations at $149 for prevention, $199 for early treatment and $399 for a complex consultation. Its two other directors on the Corporations Canada profile were Edward Leyton and David Ross, the latter president and co-founder of the Canadian Covid Care Alliance, which listed the service among its care providers. Phillips's counsel said the company did not control what its physicians prescribed. The network around it is covered separately on this site.

That directorship is the whole of what the record shows about Mr. Leyton here: a corporate role in a business selling ivermectin consultations. He has no regulatory finding about ivermectin on the public record, and none is suggested.

His own account, three months before he consented to revocation

On 16 March 2023 Dr. Phillips testified remotely to the National Citizens Inquiry, an advocacy-run hearing in Truro, Nova Scotia. Nothing he said there is a finding of anything, and the Inquiry had no legal standing. But it is his own narrative, on the record, given freely, and on one point it is more informative than the Tribunal's reasons.

He says he prescribed ivermectin. Twice.

The first time, in March 2021 at Kirkland Lake, to a hospitalised woman with COVID-19 and risk factors — ivermectin with zinc and vitamin D. He said he felt “a duty to give her informed consent.” A pharmacist reported him, the chief of staff ordered the ivermectin cancelled, and he was told to seek approval from a Sudbury intensive care unit for treatment outside the guidelines. Only steroids were approved.

The second time, to a patient he believed had a vaccine injury: ivermectin, fluvoxamine and atorvastatin, which he described as the protocol of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance. He said her symptoms resolved. A pharmacist reported him again.

He also told the Inquiry that his suspension was imposed “primarily for holding a medical opinion that is contrary to the public health directives”; that he had filed ten adverse-event reports after vaccination, of which nine were rejected; and that he had helped found an organisation of physicians seeking to have the College's April 2021 statement on public health measures rescinded. Asked whether he would do it again knowing he would lose his licence, he said he would.

Three months later he signed a Statement of Uncontested Facts, pleaded no contest, and joined the College in asking the Tribunal to revoke his certificate.

Where he is now

Not practising. His Ontario certificate was revoked on 6 June 2023 and the register records him as not permitted to practise medicine; no appeal or current proceeding appears on it. I have found no record of him holding a licence in any other Canadian province, and no indication that he has sought one.

He retains the degree — revocation removes a licence, not a qualification — and he remains publicly active, with a social media account under a medical honorific and appearances on sympathetic podcasts and at movement events. Beyond that I cannot tell you what he does for a living now, and I am not going to guess. If anyone has something current and documented, send it.

The defence case, in its own words

Two years before the hearing, at the preliminary investigation stage, counsel for Dr. Phillips filed a 43-page letter of submissions with the College's investigator. It is dated 1 April 2021, and it is the most useful single document on this page — not because of its legal argument, but because of its appendix.

The legal argument is what you would expect: that the College had never specified what he had breached; that its social media statement says of itself that it is not a policy, and so sets out guidance rather than enforceable rules; that leaving the College to decide what “might be viewed as unprofessional” is void for vagueness and overbroad under s. 7 of the Charter; and that the investigation was a predetermined exercise that should be dismissed outright. Those arguments were not accepted, and by June 2023 they were not pressed — the case ended on uncontested facts and a joint submission.

The appendix is the interesting part. The submission asserts that every statement Dr. Phillips made on social media was true and backed by scientific research, and then sets out the research. Pages of it: lockdowns, PCR, masks, the Great Barrington Declaration. And then, under its own heading, the evidence for ivermectin.

I want to be fair about this, because it is easy not to be. In April 2021 those were real papers in real journals, and a physician who read them and became hopeful was not being stupid. The large trials had not reported. The honest position at that moment was that ivermectin looked worth testing properly.

So it was tested properly. TOGETHER, ACTIV-6 and PRINCIPLE enrolled thousands of patients between them and found no benefit, and the Cochrane review that followed is set out earlier on this page. The first of the three papers above has since been the subject of substantial criticism over its data; the third author became one of the more prominent voices warning that ivermectin's apparent effect was evaporating as trial quality improved.

That is the shape of the whole thing, in one document. The case for ivermectin was at its strongest in early 2021, when the evidence was thinnest. Everything that happened afterwards made the case weaker and the advocacy louder. A position that was reasonable in April 2021 and is still being argued in October 2026 is no longer the same position, and the people still making it are not relying on new evidence, because there is none.

What the heaviest Ontario outcomes were actually for

This is the part the circulating lists get backwards in both directions. Take Dr. Sonja Kustka, CPSO 53928, who appears on several of those lists as an ivermectin case. Her register shows terms imposed on 3 May 2022 — the same day Phillips was suspended — misconduct findings on 5 March 2025 for failing to respond to a written College inquiry, contravening a term on her certificate, and disgraceful, dishonourable or unprofessional conduct; an order of 17 June 2025 imposing a reprimand, a four-month suspension and costs of $39,295; resignation from membership that September; and revocation on 18 April 2026.

It is as serious an outcome as a physician can receive. And no drug is named anywhere in it. Neither is COVID-19.

Across this Ontario cohort the pattern is consistent: the interim restrictions name ivermectin, and the findings that followed years later name non-cooperation, breach of terms, and conduct. One side reads that as proof the Colleges destroyed careers over a safe drug; the other reads it as proof the drug was the misconduct. The documents support neither. What they show is physicians who were restricted over COVID-19 prescribing and exemptions, and who then, for the most part, lost their licences for how they dealt with their regulator afterwards.

Ontario has two cases in which ivermectin is named on the public register in the physician's own words, both of them undertakings given in April 2023, and both reciting the same sentence about the College’s investigation. The first: Dr. Clifford Alan Rosen, CPSO 85938, gave the College an undertaking effective 18 April 2023 whose practice restriction reads, in full: “I will not prescribe ivermectin.” Its preamble records a College investigation “including in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic and my prescribing of Ivermectin for COVID-19.”

He may now practise independently in anaesthesia only. The undertaking required him to complete a medical record-keeping programme and an ethics and boundaries programme, and to submit to unannounced inspections of his practice locations and patient records; breach may be referred to the Discipline Tribunal. He had already taken a caution in person from the College's complaints committee in February 2023. Separately, two Windsor-area hospitals suspended and then revoked his privileges in late 2021 for failure to comply with hospital policy.

The second is Dr. Vinod Kunhiraman Nair, CPSO 70381, an Owen Sound anaesthesiologist — and his is the stricter of the two. He has held a restricted certificate since 20 June 2022, and under an undertaking of 8 April 2023 he must confine his practice to anaesthesiology and must not prescribe ivermectin. The preamble recites the College investigation into his conduct “including in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic and his prescribing of Ivermectin for COVID-19” — the identical formula used in Dr. Rosen’s. He was cautioned in person that same month.

What makes his different is the publicity requirement. He must post a notice of the restriction in every waiting room, examination room and consulting room in which he practises; display it at the start of every virtual visit; and read it aloud at the start of every telephone visit. Few Canadian regulatory orders about this drug go that far. His listed practice locations include dental and oral surgery clinics across southwestern Ontario — among them clinics in Kitchener and Waterloo, where that notice is required to be on the wall.

Dr. Nair is the physician who wrote the prescription in the Toronto Star’s 2022 undercover investigation of the Canadian Covid TeleHealth service, which is set out in full on our page on Ira Bernstein and the Canadian Covid Care Alliance. As with Dr. Rosen, there are no tribunal proceedings and no finding of misconduct.

The scale of it, and the rest of the cohort

By the end of January 2022 the College had more than 40 Ontario physicians under investigation for alleged COVID-related misconduct, and had restricted or suspended eight. That is the denominator to keep in mind when a list of hundreds circulates.

Among them: Dr. Christopher Hassell, who co-founded Angel’s Heart Medical with Dr. Phillips, was suspended in late January 2022 and had further allegations referred that May. Dr. Akbar Khan of Medicor Cancer Centres was restricted in January 2022 from prescribing ivermectin and from issuing vaccine exemptions; his licence was later revoked, but over his cancer practice rather than over ivermectin — that case is covered separately.

And in British Columbia, the College issued a citation against Dr. Charles Hoffe alleging he had publicly recommended ivermectin and told people to obtain it from animal feed stores. That citation was withdrawn in February 2025 and no finding was ever made. Withdrawal is not vindication and it is not a finding either way — but a page that listed him as disciplined over ivermectin would be wrong.

Manitoba: a censure, with a date that matters

On 29 June 2022 the Investigation Committee of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba censured Dr. Wilhelmus Petrus Grobler. Two matters were found.

In the care of one patient, he treated for myocarditis “in the absence of sufficient evidence to support that diagnosis,” and prescribed ivermectin when he knew or ought to have known it was not indicated. In dealings with a second patient's family he did not wear a mask where masks were required, allowed a parent to remove theirs, and shared information about COVID-19 and vaccines that lacked accepted scientific support — which the College found breached an undertaking he had already given it. The Committee described his care as “a significant departure from recognized standards of care,” and ordered him to pay $6,165 in investigation costs.

One date deserves noting in his favour. He prescribed the ivermectin in June 2021 — three months before the College published its guidance on the drug in September 2021. He told the Committee he had prescribed it to meet patient demand, believed it would be harmless and might act as a placebo, and cited laboratory work on importin inhibition. The Committee found against him anyway, on the footing that he was aware of the public health position at the time. But a reader should know the guidance came after the prescription, not before it.

British Columbia: an acupuncturist, and a drug nobody could lawfully prescribe

The most striking Canadian case involves no physician at all, and it is three days old as this page is posted.

On 20 October 2026 the registrar of the College of Complementary Health Professionals of British Columbia issued a consent order against Katie Johnston, an acupuncturist in Dawson Creek. She acknowledged misconduct and agreed to its terms: a two-month suspension, a reprimand, mandatory education, and random audits of her practice locations and of her clinical and billing records for a year after she returns.

The order records that she prescribed ivermectin “without any required authority” — acupuncturists in British Columbia have none — and that she prescribed fenbendazole, which the order describes as “a product not approved for human consumption by Health Canada.” Fenbendazole is an animal de-wormer. It is the third drug in the antiparasitic cancer protocol described above, and this is its veterinary formulation.

The findings go wider than the drugs. Point injection therapy and the provision of oral products were both outside an acupuncturist's scope. Her records were incomplete: unsigned charts, delayed entries, missing intake and consent forms, no documentation of the prescriptions or of any monitoring of the patients given these drugs. The College found breaches of its requirements on advertising and marketing, clinical records, scope of practice and informed consent.

On the drug itself: fenbendazole is chemically related to the human medicines mebendazole and albendazole, but no regulator anywhere — not Health Canada, not the FDA — has approved it for human use. The claims made for it in cancer rest on cell and animal work, with no large randomised human trials. The American Cancer Society warns that giving people the veterinary product risks drug-induced liver injury, severe gastrointestinal effects, and unpredictable interactions with the cancer medicines a patient may actually be taking.

This is where the chain that begins with a dermatologist's video ends. Not a contested prescription by a physician, but an unlawful one by a practitioner with no authority to prescribe anything, of a drug made for livestock, to patients whose records were then altered.

The Canadian promoter, and what the courts actually found

The principal Canadian promoter of antiparasitic drugs for cancer is Viliam Makis, a former Alberta nuclear medicine physician, documented on our separate file. Two matters belong here because they concern the drugs rather than the man.

The protocol paper. In September 2024 he co-authored a cancer protocol recommending ivermectin, mebendazole and fenbendazole, published in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine — a journal which the US National Library of Medicine's own catalogue records as “Not currently indexed for MEDLINE.” He announced it as having been “peer-reviewed and published.” Science Feedback reviewed that claim in October 2024 and rated it Unsupported, finding the protocol rested on cell and animal studies, two case reports, and literature reviews which themselves said the clinical trial data were insufficient. His listed affiliation on the paper was a cancer institute he had not been employed by for years, and the paper declared no conflicts of interest.

The retraction. A second Makis paper — a case series on fenbendazole, published in Case Reports in Oncology in 2025 — was retracted on 21 January 2026. The publisher's stated reason was an undeclared conflict of interest: the first author had been offering services related to the paper's subject matter at the time of submission, and the editor found his explanation unsatisfactory.

On the Alberta proceedings, one point of precision matters because it is widely got wrong in both directions. The Alberta court found him in contempt, and granted a permanent injunction in March 2026 barring him from practising medicine or using medical titles; leave to appeal was refused in June 2026. But the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta has been explicit that the case “is about the unauthorized practice of medicine, not about the promotion or prescribing of any specific drug or therapy,” and the court said the efficacy of ivermectin for cancer was “beyond the purview of this Court to comment upon.”

So no Canadian court has ruled that ivermectin does not treat cancer. That was never the question before it. Anyone citing the injunction as a judicial verdict on the drug — in either direction — is misreading it.

Kelowna, October 2025

The clearest Canadian enforcement came on 30 October 2025, when Health Canada attended Ezra Healing on Harvey Avenue in Kelowna and seized unauthorised drugs. Its public advisory of 6 November lists sixteen products, among them six ivermectin preparations, two mebendazole products, hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, doxycycline, testosterone gel, prescription-strength vitamin D, and niclosamide — which is not approved for human use in Canada at all.

Health Canada's advisory states that the business's promotional materials claimed the products could treat serious conditions including cancer, and that those claims are unauthorised. It told the public to “immediately stop using any products obtained from Ezra Healing,” and said it is working with the Canada Border Services Agency to prevent importation. The owner told reporters the drugs were shipped from India, that she holds no licence and does not intend to obtain one, and that the products are already healing cancer. As of this posting no charges have been laid.

How to read the next post you see

Which ivermectin is being discussed? A cream for rosacea and a box of six hundred tablets are both “ivermectin” in the same sense that a glass of wine and a bottle of surgical spirit are both alcohol.

For what? Parasites: settled, approved, and my own prescribing. COVID: tested and failed. Cancer: no human evidence, and real harm in declining treatment that works. Spike protein detox: not a thing.

Who benefits if you believe it? The clip is a doctor's. The post was a pharmacy's.

And if you are being treated for cancer, tell your oncologist what you are taking. Not because they will disapprove — because they cannot interpret your scans or your bloodwork without knowing. The patients who come to harm here are usually the ones who kept it quiet.

A note on how this page is written

The clinical sources are the Cochrane Collaboration, the ACTIV-6 trial and its JAMA editorial, the American Cancer Society, the European Medicines Agency and Health Canada. The licence record is from the Medical Board of California's own register. The petition is from the US federal docket. The seller's claims are from its own website. Advocacy publications were not used as sources of fact in either direction.

Two things could not be verified and are flagged rather than hidden. Dr. Pierre's board certification is stated by his practice; the American Board of Dermatology charges for formal verification and we have not obtained it. And the episodes attributed to him carry no transcripts, so what is documented is what was published under his name, not his spoken words.

Corrections are welcome and will be posted.