Censorship Industrial Complex
Ivermectin’s Victory Over the FDA
From the Brownstone Institute
Over 60 studies around the world have, for the most part, found positive findings; however, the mainstream media embraced the handful that are neutral or had data problems, for example. Regardless of position, a disinformation campaign was initiated by the FDA and others to deter the use of the off-label treatment. See the email here.
FDA loses its war on ivermectin and agrees to remove all social media posts and consumer directives regarding ivermectin and [Covid], including its most popular tweet in FDA history. This landmark case sets an important precedent in limiting FDA overreach into the doctor-patient relationship.
On March 21, a settlement was reached, leading to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) agreeing to remove social media posts and webpages discouraging the use of ivermectin for treating Covid-19.
This landmark case was initiated by plaintiffs Drs. Mary Talley Bowden, Robert I. Apter, and Paul E. Marik, who filed a lawsuit against the agency under the leadership of Commissioner Robert Califf, MD. The lawsuit was prompted by the FDA’s dissemination of misleading information about ivermectin, a Nobel Prize-winning anti-parasitic drug with a long history of use and inclusion in the World Health Organization’s essential list of medicines.
An FDA spokesperson told the Epoch Times that the agency “has chosen to resolve this lawsuit rather than continuing to litigate over statements that are between two and nearly four years old.”
In light of the FDA’s unprecedented loss in their war against ivermectin, I thought it was fitting to bring to my readers’ attention my Trial Site News report from November 2021 on the agency’s “most successful” viral tweet, which can be read below.
FDA’s Smoking Gun: Disinformation Campaign Targeting Ivermectin
It recently came to my attention that communication within the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) evidences the Gold Standard agency’s explicit involvement in the Ivermectin disinformation war. While the agency approves ivermectin as an anti-parasite medicine, physicians have increasingly embraced it as an off-label treatment for early-onset Covid-19. Over 60 studies around the world have, for the most part, found positive findings; however, the mainstream media embraced the handful that are neutral or had data problems, for example. Regardless of position, a disinformation campaign was initiated by the FDA and others to deter the use of the off-label treatment. See the email here.
In my investigative report about how ivermectin became a target for the ‘fraud detectives,’ published in TrialSite, I highlighted the relentless smear campaign against this life-saving generic drug by a certain group of scientists/bloggers, which has been amplified in the mainstream media. My report included the overtly biased and controversial ‘You’re not a horse’ tweeted by the FDA. However, the revelatory email communication within the FDA exposes the insidious nature of this government agency’s deep involvement as one of the major planners of this disinformation war against ivermectin.
The definition of disinformation is:
‘Deliberately misleading information announced publicly or leaked by a government or especially by an intelligence agency in order to influence public opinion or the government in another nation.’
Conflating Veterinary and Human Versions
Secured via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by investigative reporter Linda Bonvie, the email involves esteemed members of the world’s top regulatory body bragging and boasting about how many tweets the “You’re not a horse” tweet did with engagement.
Showcasing the agency’s front and central role in promoting propaganda, the author, Erica Jefferson, an associate commissioner for the FDA’s external affairs, boasts to Dr. Janet Woodcock, the FDA’s acting commissioner, how the “Not a Horse Tweet” got 14.5 million tweets. (See below)
Jefferson expresses her excitement of the ‘FDA ivermectin/[Covid]-19 tweet’ going viral. She writes, ‘needless to say the straightforward and clever (humourous) communication…saw the tweet quickly going viral and being shared across multiple social medium platforms (where it was amplified by other influencers) and resulted in additional news coverage by: NYT, CNN, NBC News and Rolling Stone to name but a few.’
FDA as Social Media Manipulator
Jefferson’s reference to ‘other influencers’ on social media amplifying the message and helping it go viral is very revealing, including the role of mainstream media. It can be said that this speaks to a larger network of entities involved in the disinformation campaign against ivermectin- like the Trusted News Initiative, a consortium of Big Tech (Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft) and Big Media set up to combat anti-vaccine ‘disinformation’ and from what is becoming evidently clear, early-treatments for Covid-19, too.
The tweet posted by the FDA (see below) was published on August 21, 2021, with the email from Erickson to Woodstock sent the following day. Copied in were many high-ranking FDA officials, such as Julia Tierney, acting chief of staff, Melissa Safford, senior advisor to the commissioner.
FDA Purposely Creating Confusion Among Consumers
Yes, a version of ivermectin is used for veterinary purposes, but the massive increase in prescriptions that concerned the FDA was the human variety, prescribed by licensed physicians with consent from their patients. But the messaging was meant to confuse people to think that they were one and the same. Of course, those people who were involved with self-medication needed education, but what the FDA does here is try to kill two birds with one stone. The FDA doesn’t go out of its way to educate but instead spread disinformation.
Jefferson reveals in her email that the Office of External Affairs (OEA) team had spent ‘the past several weeks’ planning in how to effectively use their social media platforms ‘to share important public health information.’ She references the news coming out of Mississippi regarding the use of ivermectin to treat Covid-19 ‘and the increase in adverse events (poisonings).’
It seems the FDA seized the opportunity in the Mississippi State Department of Health’s network alert sent out on August 20 stating that ‘70% of the recent calls have been related to the ingestion of livestock formulations of ivermectin.’ This is confirmed in her email, as Jefferson writes, ‘I’m sure you saw some of the news coming out of Mississippi on Friday night [August 20]…I expressed to the team late Friday night that we take the opportunity to remind the public of our warnings for ivermectin…’
What is very alarming is not only the level the FDA has stooped to in planning and executing a smear campaign against ivermectin, but the fact that the ‘poisonings’ could be based on inaccurate data.
Nonetheless, the mainstream media jumped on the ‘poisonings’ bandwagon, citing the Mississippi department of health data. The Guardian ran with the headline, ‘A human is not a horse. So why is a livestock drug sweeping America?’ However, the department later clarified it was only 2% of calls that were made to the state’s poison control center that related to the ingestion of animal formulations of ivermectin, not 70%.
The Rolling Stone (which turned out to be a fraudulent piece), the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, and indeed, the Guardian all had to print corrections regarding the false information.
Both the CDC and FDA also pointed to data from the Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPCC) that purported to show a three-fold increase in calls involving ivermectin. TrialSite secured that data and found that the number of calls went from 435 to 1,143, and the overwhelming number of them were harmless. TrialSite disclosed that 11 of the calls, or about 1%, involved a serious matter. However, it’s not clear if they were associated with any hospitalization.
TrialSite found that at least by September, there were no deaths from ivermectin—although since then, there have been a few reported. Billions of doses of ivermectin have been administered by the Mectizan program, evidencing an extraordinary safety record. Of course, self-medication without physician oversight with any drug is wrong. Still, the FDA’s social media engagement sought to appropriately dissuade the veterinary variety’s use while inappropriately confusing the consumer by making them think all of the medication is for animals.
Why Wouldn’t the FDA Also Share the Truth With Consumers?
Over 60 studies have produced some overwhelmingly positive data points for ivermectin. While the FDA and others have discounted many of those studies, the drug is used by several countries as an emergency use authorized treatment—albeit in mostly low-income countries. But the important studies demonstrated potential, including the ICON case series study in America.
The National Institutes of Health now sponsors ACTIV-6, a major clinical trial involving ivermectin. Led by Duke Clinical Research Institute, this is clear evidence that the government has enough interest in the drug to at least invest (finally) to evaluate. Although, some advisors of TrialSite have suggested the study is underdosed. The University of Minnesota, along with UnitedHealthcare, also funds an ivermectin study called Covid-Out.
Why didn’t the FDA take the time to educate the public about this and instead ‘create a unique viral moment?’ Why just the singular message that served to conflate the illicit use with legitimate use by licensed physicians and consenting patients?
Regulatory agencies should be educating people not engaging in social medial disinformation campaigns. It was this same message that was used, for example, by CNN. TrialSite covered that interview on the Joe Rogan Show where Sanjay Gupta called this kind of tactic done by the FDA as “snarky.”
If this is how the FDA hopes to ‘reach the “everyday” American to “brand” FDA’ with a disinformation campaign targeting this life-saving drug, then the American public is in deep trouble, and so are the rest of us.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.
It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours.
Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.
Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.
The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.
In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.
It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks only to this tool which is now disabled.
What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.
We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? Here is what they say:
Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.
Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.” All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.
To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as services are secured.”
When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in read-only mode now. It is not.
Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For many years, Google offered a cached version of the link you were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.
Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th election.
Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.
Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one particularly cared.
This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system worked as well as one could possibly expect.
Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device) with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming overlap.
Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.
No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.
All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.
One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more memory.
As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.
The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.
Authors
Censorship Industrial Complex
Australian local council calls for ‘immediate suspension’ of mRNA COVID vaccines
From LifeSiteNews
By David James
The Port Hedland council cited a report by molecular virologist Dr. David Speicher that ‘evidences excessive synthetic DNA contamination in Pfizer and Moderna vaccine vials used for both adults and children.’
Councillors in Port Hedland, in Western Australia’s north-west, have called for the “immediate suspension” of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, challenging federal and state government policy.
The council cited a report by molecular virologist Dr. David Speicher that “evidences excessive synthetic DNA contamination in Pfizer and Moderna vaccine vials used for both adults and children.” A council statement said testing revealed DNA contamination levels between “7 to 145 times higher than Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) limit”.
In addition, the council claimed that Pfizer vials contain elements not initially disclosed to regulators. “The report raises serious concerns about potential long-term health impacts such as genomic integration, exponential cancer risks, and adverse outcomes due to synthetic DNA contamination.”
The research is just one of many investigations pointing to serious issues with the mRNA vaccines. For example, an analysis by David E Allen, honorary professor at the University of Sydney’s School of Mathematics and Statistics, found that all-cause mortality is up in Australia where vaccination rates are high, and that at least two thirds in the variation per region is explained by mass COVID-19 vaccination.
Troubling results are being replicated around the world. To cite one instance of many, researchers in Japan are warning that Covid mRNA shots are now “affecting every possible aspect of human pathology.” They have linked the Covid mRNA injections to increases in 201 types of diseases.
Rather than responding to the council’s concerns and investigating its claims dispassionately the Western Australian premier, Roger Cook, chose the bullying option. He told the Port Hedland council to “stick to its knitting,” whatever that means. He argued the council “should stay focused on the services and people of that community” adding that “it’s another example of that council lacking the focus on the issues which matter to their constituents … making sure they look after the people, not get distracted by these silly ideological debates.”
It was a ridiculous response, reported uncritically by the government funded media outlet the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Why is expressing concern about a health danger “ideological”? If anyone is being ideological, it is Cook. And surely such a potential danger would be “of concern” to the local community?
The ABC article was an example of the aggressive suppression of non-compliant views by Australia’s political and media elite. Neutral, disinterested reporting now seems all but abandoned in the mainstream media, replaced by commentary from journalists with no expertise.
Thus, the ABC story claimed, without explanation or evidence, that the report being referenced by the council was “unverified”. Not verified by whom? And are ABC journalists in a position to make sound judgements on complex medical claims? Then, to drive the point home that deviating from the government line was not to be tolerated, an extraordinarily patronizing breakout story was entitled “How to spot when you are thinking like a conspiracy theorist.”
Cook’s attack on vaccine dissenters has become a routine feature of public discourse. State and federal governments are stridently trying to divert attention away from what they did.
But the Port Hedland Council move is significant because it comes from the local level. When the upper levels of government are compromised, and the executive branch of government is out of control, the best hope of reviving some sort of democracy and focus on the interests of ordinary people may be at the municipal level. It is why anti-lockdown and pro-freedom activist Monica Smit is directing her interest towards council elections.
There is little doubt that there is a growing awareness in the Australian public that something is very wrong not only with the vaccines, but also the government’s response to dissent. Even powerful proponents of the vaccines are starting to feel unease, especially about the federal government’s proposed misinformation bill, a blatant attempt to impose censorship. Dr. Nick Coatsworth, a television doctor, senior health official and one of the most public figures in Australia’s Covid response, has warned against the ‘weaponization’ of misinformation to silence debate.
Australia’s local councils are the nation’s oldest layer of government. They are not mentioned in the Australian constitution because they were formed before it was written. As Australia’s political and government institutions deteriorate, the Port Hedland council is perhaps showing a way that some semblance of democracy might be restored.
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