POSTS ABOUT A Medical Council hearing against Patrick Morrissey, a doctor who said that he prescribed unproven treatments for Covid patients during the pandemic, are filled with misinformation.

“Dr Pat Morrissey from Adare, Limerick, is to be put on trial by the Irish Medical Council next Tuesday,” a 20 July post by the Irish Freedom Party reads.

“What is his so-called crime you may ask,” it continues.

“His crime is questioning the necessity of extended Covid lockdowns. Questioning the suppression and prevention of inexpensive but effective medicines in treating Covid-19 such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.”

The post goes on like this for a while, but it is wrong on multiple points above: it misleads people about the purpose of the Medical Council hearing, while the drugs ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine have no positive effect on treating Covid.

The hearing

Patrick Morrissey, a Limerick-based GP, was before the Medical Council as part of a “fitness to practise inquiry” from 21 to 23 July. Further hearings on the matter are expected to be scheduled.

Morrissey faces more than 30 allegations. Most of these have to do with making comments alleged to have broken medical ethics, or to have undermined public health guidelines.

These include statements such as “the PCR test labels everything as Covid” and describing vaccines as an “experimental unlicensed gene therapy that is known to cause more harm than benefit”.

Many of his statements also verged on conspiratorial, including multiple comparisons of public health restrictions to the Nazi Holocaust, as well as saying vaccines were “not about health. It is about the vaccine passport and totalitarian control by the medicofascist overlords”.

However, other allegations heard by the council include that Morrissey refused to wear a face mask when dealing with patients, and that he prescribed drugs, such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, to Covid patients against medical guidelines.

Morrissey publicly supported the use of these drugs for treating Covid, and the Irish Freedom Party’s social media post about his hearing claims these were “inexpensive but effective”. 

They are inexpensive. And they certainly can be effective when used for the diseases they are intended for, namely parasites and autoimmune conditions.

The problem is that, after extensive testing, they show no positive effect on treating Covid-19.

Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine

Hydroxychloroquine was studied as part of the RECOVERY trials, which took place at 176 hospitals in the United Kingdom. They assigned 1,561 Covid patients to receive hydroxychloroquine, and compared them to another 3,155 Covid patients at the same hospitals who were not prescribed that drug.

“Patients in the hydroxychloroquine group were less likely to be discharged from the hospital alive within 28 days than those in the usual-care group,” the study found.

“Those in the hydroxychloroquine group had a higher frequency of invasive mechanical ventilation or death.”

In other words: the patients taking hydroxychloroquine did worse.

Large-scale studies involving thousands of participants also showed that patients treated with ivermectin were no better off at fighting off Covid than those who had been given a placebo.

Large-scale randomised trials like these are how modern medicine determines whether drugs are effective or not.

These trials came up with a clear result: when it comes to Covid, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine do not help.

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