They Buried it for COVID. Now They’re Doing It for Cancer
Updated
Cancer treatment in America runs on a simple, brutal economic model: the sicker we stay, the more money gets made. Chemotherapy drugs approved by the FDA in 2012 were priced at over $100,000 per patient per year—eleven out of twelve of them. Some immunotherapy treatments run $15,000 per dose. The cancer industry generates hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and every dollar of that revenue depends on patients continuing to need expensive, patented treatments. Which makes what a new study just documented all the more inconvenient for the people cashing those checks.
Published in April 2026 and now available as a preprint while undergoing peer review, a landmark study co-authored by Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Harvey Risch of Yale School of Public Health, and ten other researchers analyzed 197 cancer patients prescribed a combination of ivermectin and mebendazole—two decades-old, off-patent, dirt-cheap antiparasitic drugs. The results, as Nicolas Hulscher, MPH reported at Focal Points, are the kind that should be making front pages. At six-month follow-up, 84.4% of patients reported clinical benefit. Nearly half—48.4%—reported either tumor regression or no current evidence of disease. Another 36.1% reported stable disease. Only 15.6% reported progression. Side effects were mild and mostly gastrointestinal, with 93.6% of those who experienced them continuing treatment anyway.
To put those numbers in perspective: more than four out of five cancer patients reported improvement or stabilization. Half reported their cancer was gone or shrinking. With drugs that cost roughly $30 a dose.
The Voices They’ve Been Ignoring
None of this is coming out of nowhere. Dr. William Makis, a Canadian radiologist and oncologist with over 110 peer-reviewed publications, has been sounding this alarm for years. Running what is widely described as the world’s largest high-dose ivermectin cancer practice, Makis has documented hundreds of cases—pancreatic tumors shrinking 70 to 87%, triple negative breast cancer patients reaching no evidence of disease in seven months, stage 4 melanoma patients given three to six months to live who are still alive years later. A 66-year-old Texas nurse with basal cell carcinoma: cancer free after four months on ivermectin and mebendazole, confirmed by two clear biopsies. A 69-year-old man from Peru with stage 4 anorectal melanoma, given a death sentence, completely off pain medications four months after starting the protocol.
Makis has been explicit about why these treatments remain on the fringes of oncology. Ivermectin has been off-patent since 1996. There is no billion-dollar return waiting for a pharmaceutical company that funds a clinical trial on a drug anyone can manufacture cheaply. As Dr. Makis explains, the industry has actively worked to discredit repurposed drugs—not because the science doesn’t support them, but because the economics don’t. Dr. Paul Marik, co-author of a 2024 protocol published in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine combining ivermectin, fenbendazole, and mebendazole, has made the same argument. The drugs target cancer stem cells, disrupt tumor metabolism, reverse chemotherapy resistance, and induce programmed cancer cell death. They just don’t generate a patent royalty doing it.
Follow the Money
The McCullough study asks out loud what most of us already know the answer to: how many treatments like this have simply never been pursued because there’s no money in them? We already watched this movie during COVID. Ivermectin was buried, ridiculed, and regulated out of reach while emergency use authorizations protected products that generated billions. The cancer industry has been running the same operation for decades—just more quietly, and with far higher body counts.
Consider the math. Standard chemotherapy drugs can cost tens of thousands of dollars per cycle. Some cancer patients spend over a million dollars in their final years of treatment. Insurance companies pay, hospitals profit, and Big Pharma collect. As is now quite obvious, the system is not designed to cure us—it is designed to treat us, expensively, for as long as possible. With that in mind, a course of ivermectin and mebendazole costs a fraction of a single chemotherapy infusion. There is no markup, no patent protection, an no hospital administration fee attached to a compounded capsule.
Insurance coverage for repurposed drugs in cancer treatment is virtually nonexistent—not because the drugs are unsafe, but because there is no financial infrastructure built around them. No insurance coverage means no hospital oncology department will recommend them. No hospital recommendation means most patients never hear about them. And the cycle continues, neatly and profitably.
What the Study Actually Calls For
The researchers are careful to call their findings hypothesis-generating, and they should be—it’s an observational study with self-reported outcomes, and they know it. They’re also honest enough to say what everyone paying attention already knows: if these numbers came from a novel patented drug, the clinical investment would have started yesterday. Half of a real-world cancer population reporting regression or no evidence of disease is not a footnote. It’s a five-alarm signal—unless the drug costs $30 and nobody owns the patent.
We are not suggesting anyone abandon their oncologist. We are suggesting that every cancer patient deserves to know this research exists—and that the reason most of them don’t is not because the science is weak. It’s because the profit motive is strong.