You aren't allowed to know who advised UK government against Ivermectin.

In the UK, the ‘COVID Therapeutics Advisory Panel’ played a critical role in deciding which drugs would be rolled out in the fight against COVID. The panel, we were told, was tasked to “accelerate delivery of large scale trials for COVID-19 treatments”. CTAP were to ‘ensure research continues at pace’. As chance would have it, the FDA had a nearly identical panel also called CTAP… the similarities between the two panels I’ll return to in another article.

The drugs recommended by CTAP would be funnelled into a network of ‘ready to go’ trials. The money was there, the infrastructure was there, and the aim was there to repurpose drugs ‘as soon as possible.’

As I previously reported, CTAP never recommended further investigation of Ivermectin, despite rock-solid research that quite literally demanded further investigation. Of all the therapeutics candidates, Ivermectin was way out in front, so why wasn’t it funnelled into a ‘proper’ trial? At least one CTAP advisor was not only aware of that research, he may have played a role in altering the conclusions of a critical paper on its efficacy.

So far, so shady.

I took a look at CTAP and tried to understand how it worked and something immediately stood out as… strange. Amongst all the ‘transparency’ greenwash that describes the panel, we are given the names of the ‘sub-group chairs’, but we are never given the names of the people who actually sat inside the expert subgroups. Trying to answer ‘how does this actually work’ is….complicated. But basically, the subgroups do all the work, they present their findings to ‘the panel’, who pass that onto politicians for rubber stamping. Your politician then says “we consulted the experts and this is what they advised.”

Here’s a helpful graphic I found which illuminates this…. straightforward arrangement.

COVID-19 response interim report. March 2021

I’ll simplify - we know the names of the people in the lovely ‘green box’ there, but everyone who sat inside those orange boxes, the people actually doing the work, we’re not allowed to know who those people were. I know this because I specifically requested that information from ‘UK Research and Innovation’ in an FOI request. To cut a long story short, after weeks of delay, they said no.

You can read the full response here if you’re interested. Choosing not to publish who sat on the 2021 subgroup panels is strange because in 2020 the government published a list of submitted conflict of interest statements from ‘expert working group members’ in the Covid-19 Therapeutics group. It didn’t seem to ‘contravene one of the data protection principles’ when they published in 2020. So why the secrecy over what happened in 2021? Perhaps they didn’t want us to see a range of conflict of interest statements that look like this: