When my daughter Grace, a vice president at a New York advertising agency, came down with COVID-19 recently, she was quarantined in a “COVID hotel” in Times Square with homeless people and quarantining travelers. The locks on her room door were removed. Nurses prowled the halls to keep her in her room and wake her up every night to check her vitals—not to treat her, because there is no approved treatment for COVID-19; only, if her oxygen plummeted, to move her to the hospital, where there is only a single effective approved treatment for COVID-19, steroids that may keep the lungs from failing.

The absence of treatments for COVID-19 is a global crisis, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said recently on 60 Minutes, for vaccines “are not enough.” Dangerous variants sweep the globe after mutating in the world’s poor and unvaccinated, lockdowns persist, and millions more are likely to die. The wondrous m-RNA vaccines need a cop buddy.

Fortunately, I knew of an early treatment for Grace. It’s a cheap generic drug, safer than Tylenol, FDA-approved to treat scabies and lice in children and the elderly, with many other uses that make Ivermectin a “wonder drug.” In fifty-five clinical trials with 445 scientists and 17,730 patients around the world, Ivermectin has been shown to be the most powerful drug to eradicate COVID-19 in all stages of the disease, including prevention and early treatment.

It’s what the world desperately needs now, according to Dr. Pierre Kory, a former professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison medical school, whose research group, the nonprofit Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, has developed the most effective non-vaccine treatments in the world from safe, FDA-approved generics. They have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, including eighty-year-old Judy Smentkiewicz of Buffalo, the star of this month’s cover story. Judy’s remarkable story is a “miracle,” her family says, thanks to Pierre Kory, science, and God.

Grace researched Ivermectin and was surprised that it is not FDA-approved as an anti-viral to treat COVID-19, although it is FDA-approved as an anti-parasitic agent. This would be an “off-label use,” a routine thing in medicine comprising some 20 percent of all prescriptions—aspirin to prevent heart attack or stroke, for instance, is “off label.” This is called doctoring. And it was routine until COVID-19, when a big pharma-dominated health system tried to eliminate all generic competition to protect its biggest payday of all time.

Judy had the choice to fight back or die. A worldwide revolution that will determine the future of medicine and who lives and dies from COVID-19—the battle of Ivermectin—is fighting back, fighting for life. Grace, I’m happy to say, was prescribed Ivermectin and got better fast.

If you are interested in Ivermectin, check out www.flccc.net, and talk to your doctor. Here’s a help page on how to talk to your doctor: www.COVID19criticalcare.com/guide-for-this-website.

I got onto this story on Mother’s Day, 2020, when my wife Teresa, who many know as the publisher and editor of Mountain Home, and I watched Dr. Kory testify to the U.S. Senate about his group’s first breakthrough, a steroid treatment that was saving 95 percent of COVID-19 patients when 80 percent were dying in New York City and the world was in panic. To our surprise, as longtime journalists—we met at The Philadelphia Inquirer—Dr. Kory was cancelled by a global news blackout. Was not a treatment that could save the world news?

While Teresa puts out the magazine, I’ve written two New York Times-bestselling books, Close to Shore and The Murder Room, featuring some of the world’s most brilliant scientists. Now I’ve spent months interviewing Kory and his colleagues, and I’ve seen unthinkable things. When professor Joe Varon, a top critical care doctor and Mexican-American hero recently honored with “Joseph Varon Day” in Houston for his COVID-19 treatments that are saving the city’s sickest poor, black, Mexican, and immigrants, invited journalists from CNN, The Associated Press, and Reuters to his COVID-19 ICU to get out the news of his life-saving treatment, all the journalists fictionalized the story to make it seem like most everyone was dying when in fact most everyone was living. The happy story, the truth, didn’t fit the official government science.

We live in a remarkable media age where a positive story on CNN, perhaps more so than a peer review in The New England Journal of Medicine, will instantly encourage doctors in two hundred countries to use a perfectly safe and legal drug and save humanity. I call on my fellow colleagues, including former colleagues and friends at The Washington Post and The New York Times, to open their hearts and minds to legitimate, unreported doctors and therapies and write about all sides of the Ivermectin story, like journalists always have. It is a historic opportunity. For the first time in the long journey from Gutenberg to Google, journalists may be the ones to save the world.