Did the TOGETHER Trial Lie to Reuters About FTX Funding?

Just as the Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX scandal was blowing up, I realized that FTX had funded the TOGETHER Trial, which I’ve been covering here for almost a year. What are the odds?

As far as I know, this Tweet is the first anyone mentioned the connection:

Alexandros Marinos @alexandrosM

And by the way, the "effective altruist" also funded the TOGETHER trial. No I'm not kidding.

Note that I was careful not to write that they funded the ivermectin portion of the TOGETHER Trial. That’s because the FTX funding showed up for the first time in 2022, whereas the ivermectin study was complete by August 2021 (though with no manuscript appearing until 2022).

Here’s how the funding timeline played out to the best of my understanding:

FTX first appears on the TOGETHER website—alongside Unitaid—on the internet archive’s March 6, 2022 snapshot. The previous snapshot is on December 3, 2021 and does not mention FTX. See the difference:

In fact, archive.today has a capture of the same page on March 3, 2022, which also lists FTX as a funder.

While we don’t know exactly when FTX started funding TOGETHER, it is reasonable to believe that their relationship with FTX was in place by the beginning of March 2022 at the latest.

Trial of the Year

On May 16, 2022, just as the TOGETHER Trial was awarded the “Trial of the Year” by the Society for Clinical Trials, a press release hit the wire, announcing major funding of TOGETHER by FTX:

“On May 16, the TOGETHER Trial receives the award and announces more than $18 million in funding and purchase commitments from the FTX Foundation that will enable the expansion of the trial from Brazil and Canada, to include experienced sites in South Africa, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Bahamas, Pakistan, Vietnam, and Ghana.”

Yes, it appears that the TOGETHER Trial was planning to expand to the Bahamas, the sparsely populated base of FTX. According to the website of Platform Life Sciences, the commercial entity that appears to be running the TOGETHER Trial, there’s an active site in the Bahamas, though it’s unclear where the funding may be coming from after the FTX collapse:

However, the more interesting part of the press release is the statement attributed to FTX:

"The FTX Foundation is excited to commit $15 million to funding additional trial arms in the TOGETHER Trial and its growing global network of sister trials," said Ross Rheingans-Yoo, from the FTX Foundation. "Our initial $3.25 million grant to expand the trial network's core infrastructure has helped bring the model from Brazil to key sites across the globe, and we look forward to finding further opportunities to support the consortium's growth and help prevent future pandemics." Pandemic preparedness is a priority of the FTX Foundation and reflected in their initial support of many projects in the space.

According to FTX, they had already provided a $3.25 million grant, which by May had been used to expand the network’s “core infrastructure.” The May 16th press release is about an additional $15m grant.

Did TOGETHER Lie to Reuters?

Reuters Fact Check @ReutersFacts

FTX did not interact with research group TOGETHER Trial, whose study found ivermectin to be ineffective treatment for COVID-19, until after that trial was over, a spokesperson said reut.rs/3gsLaU0

According to Reuters fact check:

Edward Mills, co-principal investigator of the TOGTHER Trial, told Reuters by email that the ivermectin evaluation was completed in August 2021, and “no funding was received (from FTX) prior to May 2022.”

Either the TOGETHER website falsely listed FTX as a funder in March 2022, or Edward Mills gave false information to Reuters in November 2022 (after the FTX blowup). Why might he do that? One additional statement in that “fact check” may provide a clue. The other principal investigator of TOGETHER, Gilmar Reis, said that:

[…] the research consortium cannot use any funds that were not previously disclosed to CONEP, and as FTX had “no association” with TOGETHER Trial prior to the publication of the studies, no funding received from FTX was used when evaluating ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine.

So the claim the TOGETHER team made to Reuters is that “FTX had ‘no association’ with TOGETHER Trial prior to the publication of the studies.” However, given that the ivermectin article was published by March 30, 2022—at which point FTX was listed on the TOGETHER website as a funder—this statement, also, is false.

Why would TOGETHER go out of their way to obscure the prior $3.25m grant by FTX? Could it be that it was used to fund writing the paper on ivermectin and that would be an undesirable complication? We can only speculate.

One other important event in February 2022 was the replacement of Ed Mills as corresponding author of the TOGETHER paper on ivermectin with Bill & Melinda Gates funded author, Craig Rayner. So, yes, it is possible that some of the writing activity between February and March 2022, as well as any public relations expenditure to promote the publication of the ivermectin trial to the press, may have been funded by FTX.

Long Story Short

It is incredible when timelines collide: somehow, the TOGETHER Trial story we’ve been focusing on in this Substack intersects with a global financial fraud such as FTX.

In short, yes, FTX did fund TOGETHER, and the TOGETHER team falsely claimed that they received no funds from FTX before May 2022. The principal investigators, with their statement to Reuters, are obscuring a $3.25m grant by FTX that must have been provided to them before May 2022, given that FTX was listed as a funder on the TOGETHER website since March 3, 2022 at the latest. We can speculate why they did that, but the bottom line is that TOGETHER is once more obscuring the public record.

And in case any long-time readers are wondering: no, TOGETHER has not yet provided the data they originally committed to make available in March 2022. From speaking to someone with knowledge of internal communications of the TOGETHER team, they have made a decision not to publish the data at all. Hopefully this will change.