by Lynn Mandaville

Have you ever read the list of ingredients on the bag in which your store-bought bread is packaged?

Here are some of the ingredients from the bag of white hot dog buns we bought recently at our neighborhood grocery store:

• Enriched unbleached wheat flour
• Niacin
• Reduced iron
• Thiamin mononitrate
• Riboflavin
• Folic acid
• Sugar, yeast, water, vegetable oil

As you probably know, as savvy consumers, ingredients are listed in order of proportion in the product, specifically, the biggest percentage listed first, thus wheat is the first ingredient.

If you know your nutrition, you know that the following five ingredients are vitamins and minerals which add nutritional value to the calories in the bread.

And if you’ve ever made bread, you know that sugar, yeast, water, and vegetable oil are ordinary ingredients added to achieve enhanced lift, taste, texture and “mouth feel.”

After these ingredients are listed less readily recognized ingredients:

• Ammonium sulfate
• Sodium stearoyl lactylate
• Ascorbic acid
• Monocalcium phosphate
• Calcium sulfate
• Calcium propionate

Without Googling further I would have had no idea what these things are.  (They are chemical compounds used to insure freshness, shelf life, and retard spoilage, among other things.)

The bag also informs me that there is no high fructose corn syrup used, but warns me that this product can expose me to other chemicals like acrylamide which are known to the state of California to “cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.”

The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) has oversight of most of our food in the US, and with that knowledge we consume our foods with an assumption of safety and security.

Knowing the FDA has okayed my bread, the most basic food of mankind throughout the ages, I feel safe consuming it, even these hot dogs buns that CA finds possibly carcinogenic.

Other things we ingest, or inoculate, may not seem as innocent or normal, so it makes sense that we approach them with some trepidation.

I’ve found myself pondering this topic recently in light of vaccine resistance vs. the embracing, by some people, of a veterinary drug, specifically a cattle de-wormer, called Ivermectin.

Ivermectin IS a deworming medicine used by veterinarians around the globe to kill developing threadworms, a type of roundworm that causes onchocerciasis (river blindness), and to treat a disease called strongyloidiasis transmitted by these worms.

Ivermectin has been used successfully in non-human mammals since the early 1980s, particularly in regions where onchocerciasis is endemic (tropical and sub-tropical areas).

Merck & Company Inc. has been researching human uses since that time, and finally began marketing it for some human applications in 1988 in those endemic countries.  In ensuing years Ivermectin has proven to be a relatively safe and effective drug to eliminate parasitic worms from humans, as well as the large animals for whom it was developed, when used according to prescribed guidelines.

In other words, it’s a great poison to kill young worms in mammals.

I was unable to find a simple listing of ingredients for Ivermectin, other than to find incredibly long words ending in “-icides” to describe what its ingredients do, like “-icides” in insecticides that we use to kill bugs in our gardens.

Drugs, like food, are overseen by the FDA, so those with FDA approval are assumed to be safe for our responsible use, thus, anyone who has an early case of threadworm infection can feel secure in being prescribed this drug by a responsible physician..

To give a fair shake to my informal “investigation” I looked into the ingredients in COVID vaccines.

The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine is made of the following ingredients:

• mRNA, or messenger ribonucleic acid, which is the only active ingredient in the vaccine, and which transmits genetic instructions to our bodies to make a viral protein that triggers an immune response to infection.  Contrary to rumors, mRNA cannot alter DNA in the human body.
• Lipids, which are intended to protect the mRNA and give it a slippery exterior that allows it to slide inside cells.  The chemical names for lipids can be lengthy and daunting to spell, but the simplest of lipids we know is cholesterol.
• Salts, with which we’re familiar as sodium chloride (table salt), and less familiar potassium chloride, and dibasic sodium phosphate dihydrate.
• Sugar, more commonly sucrose.

Moderna adds to its vaccine some acids and acid stabilizers (acetic acid, which is a byproduct of fermentation and gives vinegar its characteristic flavor,  and tromethamines, which serve to neutralize acid in the blood), and Johnson & Johnson adds ethanol, a form of alcohol.

All in all, the big three vaccines are very similar.

These vaccines were originally offered as emergency treatment to ward off COVID-19, and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is now fully FDA-approved for general use.

The only difference among these three “inventions” – bread, Ivermectin, and COVID-19 vaccine (specifically Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine) – that I can discern is that bread (commercial brands) and the vaccine are approved by the FDA for general human consumption, while Ivermectin, while FDA-approved for general use in cattle, is FDA-approved for humans only on an individual basis in consultation with a physician to treat parasitic infection, but is still only in the research phases, where Ivermectin and a COVID-19 virus are placed together in a Petri dish to determine whether Ivermectin might be a mitigant for symptoms of COVID-19.

That’s a pretty big distinction, in my opinion.

This kind of comparison and contrast is not offered to the general public by the cable media, network media, or any other source that I know of.

I got to wondering why some people would fear the vaccine over Ivermectin in the face of the consequences of contracting COVID-19.

Is it that Ivermectin has been around longer than COVID and its vaccines, even though people are not using Ivermectin for what it was developed to do?

It can’t be a legitimate excuse that “I don’t know what’s in the vaccine” but I do know what’s in Ivermectin.  It is quite simple to Google what’s in the various vaccines, and more difficult to determine what’s in Ivermectin.

Is it that they trust a media personality who hypes alternative medicine more than they trust the medical industry or the government who hype a new vaccine?

Aside from understanding reluctance among Blacks, due to their checkered history with medical malpractice and medical experimental atrocities, I’m honestly without a logical explanation as to why people would reject vaccine yet embrace Ivermectin.

I’m not one of those folks who contend that anti-maskers or anti-vaxxers ought to be denied health care should they contract COVID or its variants.  That doesn’t reconcile with the Hippocratic Oath or mainstream religious teaching.

I don’t believe in penalizing people for being gullible (those sucked in by charlatans and snake oil salesmen), or for being just plain reckless (in my opinion) with their choices.

But I sure am dumbfounded when it comes to believing in a cattle de-wormer over a proven vaccine.  I guess that’s just me.

I guess we’ll just have to chalk this up to the foibles of being human.