In the early days of the pandemic, as billions of dollars poured into the hunt for novel treatments and vaccines, veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Kirsch did what he’s always done: He went looking for an underdog.
Since making a fortune as the founder of Infoseek, an early search engine that was the Google of its day, Kirsch has spent tens of millions of dollars fighting humanity’s biggest threats. He prefers iconoclastic approaches, whether by directly funding asteroid detection or advocating for nuclear power to combat global warming.
What has alarmed many of the scientists associated with [the COVID-19 Early Treatment Fund, or] CETF, though, are Kirsch’s reactions to the work he’s funded—both successes and failures. He’s refused to accept the results of a hydroxychloroquine trial that showed the drug had no value in treating covid, for instance, instead blaming investigators for poor study design and statistical errors.
He’s also publicly railed against what he claims is a campaign against drugs like fluvoxamine and ivermectin. And, according to three members of CETF’s scientific advisory board, he put pressure on them to promote fluvoxamine for clinical use without conclusive data that it worked for covid.
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More recently, he’s adopted extremist positions on covid vaccines, which he alleges are “toxic.”
