Brownstone Institute
Medical Elites’ Disgrace Over Ivermectin
From the Brownstone Institute
In the wake of the FDA settling a lawsuit brought against it for wantonly and aggressively smearing ivermectin, the agency has deleted its postings. That’s good, but we shouldn’t forget how egregiously it mischaracterized the drug, ignored copious evidence in its favor, and portrayed its proponents as dangerous crackpots.
About 30 months ago, America’s FDA was publishing articles with headlines like this: “Should I take ivermectin to treat COVID?” Answer: No. The agency also told Americans not to use ivermectin to prevent Covid. Then, in what became known as its infamous “horse tweet,” the FDA even patronizingly told Americans: “Seriously, y’all. stop it.”
Prescribers who advocated for alternate treatments like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine were mocked online by America’s “trusted journalists” as being part of a “right-wing conspiracy” and labeled “hucksters.” Those who didn’t demure to the Covid mRNA or other Big Pharma treatment narratives were banned, fired, and spoken harshly about around the world and into the reaches of the stratosphere in what seemed like coordinated messaging.
Many clinicians lost their jobs – at best. At worst, their reputations, practices, finances, and careers were shattered. If that was not bad enough, after losing their jobs, state medical and pharmacy boards initiated legal proceedings against their licensure, singling out their “off-label” Covid treatments, despite other off-label treatments being a near-ubiquitous component of pharmacy and medical practice.
Within days of FDA’s initial postings above, the American Pharmacist’s Association (APhA) the American Society of Health System Pharmacists (ASHP), and the American Medical Association (AMA) all collaborated to release a joint press release condemning doctors who prescribed ivermectin to treat Covid, but it appears that these organizations, instead of actually performing independent analysis of primary literature data, blindly regurgitated FDA, CDC, and NIH plus other government and Big Pharma talking points “strongly opposing” ivermectin use.
For generations and especially during the Covid pandemic, professionals depended on these “elite” medical groups. Some of them have existed for around 170 years and have around $150 million to $1.2 billion in assets, so they clearly had the history, personnel, and wherewithal to objectively examine published data. Even beyond that, the AMA has several floors in a skyscraper in Chicago and the APhA’s Constitution Avenue’s “landmark headquarters” is so luxuriant that it is advertised and utilized as a wedding venue.
Of course, that extravagance was paid for by millions of pharmacists, physicians, and benefactors who expected these organizations to act as a checksum and ensure excellent clinical practice standards. These medical organizations have a duty to honor their histories, responsibilities, and ethical duties to better the human condition through verified scientific evidence. Instead, they appeared to outrageously abandon their obligations from their lofty positions of respect, comfort, money, and power.
APhA, ASHP, and AMA Clinical Declarations Now Indefensible:
On March 22, the FDA rightly acquiesced and agreed to remove their anti-ivermectin postings due to 1) a lawsuit filed against them and 2) the impossible task of having to defend themselves with an overwhelming amount of data disagreeing with not only dispensing medical recommendations, but the published data backing their Covid-19 use (e.g., see below).
With that gone, the APhA, ASHP, and AMA assertions suddenly have no leg upon which to stand.
Several non-FDA links within their press releases have (unsurprisingly) also quietly vanished with no explanation. NIH references are slated to be shut down, on top of multiple FDA and CDC links already no longer working.
Ivermectin Mechanism of Action, History and Evidence:
The broad antiviral mechanism of action of ivermectin is complicated and may partially involve blocking the uptake of viral proteins, but the bottom line is that it has been shown to yield positive results in a variety of published results for Covid-19. Had APhA, ASHP, and AMA pharmacists and physicians independently examined the data, (as I, just one drug-safety analyst without fancy headquarters, have done) rather than simply parroting now-deleted narratives of others, they would have learned that ivermectin works as an antiviral.
It has an extensively proven track record of being not just safe – but astonishingly safe for a variety of viral diseases. This is not breaking or fringe science; it has been known for years. Ivermectin is such a safe and effective drug that back in 2015 it was the first drug for infectious disease associated with a Nobel Prize in 60 years.
While I have stacks of electronic files and printed materials, dog-eared and food/drink-stained, there is a most elegantly presented meta-analysis website designed by some brainy and web-savvy scientists detailing over 100 studies from over 1,000 different scientists, involving over 140,000 patients in 29 countries describing the benefit and safety of ivermectin for Covid-19 treatment. It actually appears to be more extensive than Cochrane’s outdated review of ivermectin which only examined 14 trials – and excluded seven of them from consideration.
According to these data, consisting of smaller international publications that include real-world findings and small observational studies, ivermectin shows a statistically significant lower Covid-19 risk as detailed in the image above.
The less-positive findings associated with late treatment/viral clearance/hospitalization data cohort were associated with delayed administration. That is because any late-state use of antiviral pharmacology tends to be ineffective after hundreds of millions of viral replications have taken place – whether it’s cold sores, influenza, AIDS, or Covid-19.
ASHP, APhA, and AMA Press Releases Contradict Available Data and Clinical Practice Standards:
When the FDA scolded Americans not to use ivermectin for Covid-19, on April 25, 2021, there were 43 different published manuscripts showing its potential benefit. Around three months later, on August 21, the FDA released its infamous horse/cow tweet which implied that ivermectin was only for animals, not humans. This “doubling down” occurred as an additional 20 studies had subsequently been written detailing additional benefits for Covid-19. See the timeline below:
Multiple APhA/ASHP/AMA statements ignored published scientific and clinical evidence. Specifically, statements declaring the: “Use of ivermectin for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 has been demonstrated to be harmful to patients” (bold emphasis theirs) are objectively inaccurate. I do not know on what basis those statements were made. The recommendation to healthcare professionals to “…counsel patients against use of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19, including emphasizing the potentially toxic effects of this drug” represents a departure from pharmacist and physician practice standards.
The absurdity of the latter statement is quite outrageous. Pharmacists and physicians know that all drugs have “…potentially toxic effects” so if they applied the standard of “emphasizing potentially toxic effects” while discussing every prescribed medication, few if any patients would ever take any of their medications. The APhA/ASHP/AMA discriminatory hostility towards ivermectin was not only clinically unjustified and irresponsible; it was – as far as I know – without precedent.
These anti-ivermectin talking points also benefited new Big Pharma product advancement including the rebounding, overpriced taxpayer-funded boondoggle of Paxlovid and Remdesivir, such a “safe and effective” drug that hospitals had to be heavily incentivized (i.e., bribed) to entice nurses, physicians, and hospital administrators to promote its use with a staggering 20% “bonus” on the entire hospital bill paid by our federal government. Remdesivir quickly earned the sardonic nickname of “run-death-is-near” by American Frontline Nurses and others, due to serious questions about its clinical benefit.
Why were federal agencies’ and professional organizations’ talking points against ivermectin not backed by independent, original APhA/ASHP/AMA data examinations? That question needs to be thoroughly probed with regard to potential regulatory capture within these groups.
Both then and now, those FDA webpages, postings, and tweets were not just biased. They were irresponsible in their denigrating ivermectin as an off-label treatment, which is why they are now gone.
The question is, who was worse? The FDA for overstepping its congressional authority in not just making medical recommendations, but making recommendations ignoring data, or the servile “independent” elite professional organizations exuberantly echoing a narrative?
Prescient or not, here is an excerpt of the expert panel congressional testimony to the Covid Select House Oversight Committee, explaining the FDA’s disparaging ivermectin versus promoting mRNA injections using an automobile analogy, delivered just one day prior to the FDA’s yielding to physicians’ lawsuit to remove its postings denigrating ivermectin:
Despite FDA Settlement and Data Abundance, the Press is Still Anti-Ivermectin
Even after the FDA’s about-face, on March 26, 2024, a Los Angeles Times journalist published a column calling the removal of FDA tweets “groundless” unilaterally declaring ivermectin is still “conclusively shown to be useless against COVID-19,” comparing ivermectin to “snake oil,” and describing those who advocate for it as “purveyors of useless but lucrative nostrums” …whatever that means. (Regarding the ‘lucrative’ claim, it is worth noting that since ivermectin is generic and inexpensively available, it is not ‘lucrative’ to anyone.) It also referenced ivermectin lacking “scientific validation,” even though the above-cited data abundantly indicates otherwise.
Regarding the FDA’s choice to settle its lawsuit disparaging ivermectin, the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research leadership isn’t “shooting itself in the foot” as the Times says. It seems that the FDA is indirectly attempting to prevent further embarrassment likely because it now realizes that its ivermectin assertions were wrong and outdated with every passing day. But where does that leave the APhA, ASHP, or AMA who heavily relied on these now deleted FDA links in their press releases?
The APhA, ASHP, AMA Response to the FDA’s Removal of Postings Used in Press Releases? An Embarrassing Silence:
Over a month later, and as of this publication date, none of these organizations have a single thing to say about their previous press releases quoting the now-removed FDA articles and tweets. In fact, here is an indication of their concerns: one week after the FDA acquiesced to remove its postings in ivermectin, APhA’s newly elected speaker chair and pharmacist Mary Klein is “happy danc[ing]” and giving her official acceptance speech wearing Mickey Mouse ears. ASHP’s (A/K/A “#MedicationExperts”) still shows its official page with clinicians wearing ineffective, unnecessary surgical masks despite the pandemic having ended well over a year ago and Cochrane reviews indicating that this sort of masking is almost certainly ineffective. AMA officials are making multiple posts on transgender issues and declaring climate change a public health crisis, – all while fully ignoring its impactful, incorrect, inappropriate statements on ivermectin.
Take a look:
The APhA, ASHP, and AMA have remained conspicuously silent on this topic while focusing their newsfeeds on everything but. To this day, their press releases remain online, with multiple dead links to government agencies. In blindly backing incorrect narratives pointing to removed web pages, they are now all alone in their ivermectin declarations.
Bottom line: ivermectin was and is safe, and more than likely effective for Covid when timed and dosed correctly, and under medical supervision, despite what was declared by organizations and federal officials. In fact, ivermectin’s general antiviral activity might even be helpful for bird flu (avian influenza) in animals and humans, in lieu of another novel adverse-event-ridden “warp speed” mRNA “vaccine” with an endless boondoggle of boosters.
The past and current record on ivermectin needs to be set straight. We know there is an important (but untransparent) list of who is responsible for misrepresenting published data, but will anyone be held accountable?
DISCLAIMER: Do NOT discontinue or initiate taking ANY drug without first discussing it with a pharmacist or physician you know and trust.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.
HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.
The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.
Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.
The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.
The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.
President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?
In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.
During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.
In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.
In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.
Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.
HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.
When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.
In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.
The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.
In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?
The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.
The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.
I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.
In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.
With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.
The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.
Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.
You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages.
People are out and about, smiling at each other. It’s been true since the morning after the election, the results of which defied every prediction. Who doesn’t like to see the smug elites who have ruled the world for five awful years taken down a peg?
More than that, there are hints of a return to sanity. Mainstream advertisers are suddenly returning to X, putting their economic interest above their tribalist loyalties. The editor of pro-lockdowns Scientific American, which had long blessed totalitarian measures as true science, has resigned.
The attempt to pillage InfoWars and give it to The Onion has been reversed by a federal judge. That might be a fluke or might not be: maybe the lawfare is dialing back too. The cabinet of the incoming administration is being filled by voices that were fully censored for years. Employees are reportedly packing their bags at the FDA and other agencies.
Mainstream news commentators are sputtering around with less bravado than they have shown in years. CNN is firing major personalities.
Trump is talking about abolishing the income tax and granting $10K in tax credits per homeschooled child, not to mention blowing up college accreditation systems, among other sweeping changes.
The American Bastille day is coming, not only freeing the political prisoners of January 6 but also many of the unjustly persecuted including Ross Ulbricht, Roger Ver, and Ian Freeman, among so many others. That will be a day of rejoicing.
Oh, and peace seems to have broken out in some contentious areas of the world, for now.
What is happening? This is not the usual transfer of the resident of the White House. This is starting to look like an actual transfer of power, not just from Biden to Trump but from the permanent government – ensconced in many sectors – that has been long in hiding to an entirely new form of government responsive to actual voters.
As it turns out, there was no late surge for Kamala Harris. All the polls were wrong, and the rest was media blather. What was correct were the betting odds on Polymarket, and only days later, the FBI raided the 26-year-old founder’s home and confiscated his phone and laptop.
There are still many millions of missing voters, people who supposedly showed up for Biden in 2020 but stayed home this time. Meanwhile, there has been a historic shift in all races, ethnicities, and regions, with even the possibility of flipping California from blue to red in the future.
After decades of academic slicing and dicing of the population according to ever more eccentric identity buckets involving race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual interest, along with countless thousands of studies documenting deep complexity over intersectionality, the driving force of the election was simple: class, and the few intellectuals and some wealthy entrepreneurs who understand that.
The division was not really left vs right. It was workers vs laptoppers, wage earners vs six-figure stay-at-homers, bottom half vs top 5 percent, people with actual skills vs weaponized resume wielders, and those with affection for old-world values vs those whose educations have beaten it out of them for purposes of career advancement.
The silent majority has never been so suddenly loud. It just so happened that the heavily privileged had come to inhabit easily identifiable sectors of American society and, in the end, had no choice but hitch the whole of the overclass wagon to the fortunes of a candidate like themselves (Kamala) but who was unable to pull off a compelling masquerade. Not even a parade of well-paid celebrity endorsements could save her from total rebuke at the polls.
Sylvester Stallone called Trump a second George Washington but another reference point might be Andrew Jackson. The overwhelming victory for Trump is on a scale not seen since 1828 when, four years after the presidency was stolen from Jackson, Old Hickory came back in a wild landslide and cleaned up Washington. Trump arrives in Washington with a mandate for the same, with 81% of the public demanding that the government shrink in size and power.
It has all happened so quickly. We are barely ten days into the realization of what just transpired and the entire lay of the land seems different, like a tectonic shift in politics, culture, mood, and possibilities. We are even seeing blunt and open talk about the horrendous Covid response that so utterly demoralized the country and the world, after years of silence on the topic. We have promised hearings coming, and court cases galore now on fast track.
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages. It provides the beginnings of an answer to the great question on our minds for decades: how precisely does an authentic revolution take root in an industrialized Western democracy? Are elections capable of delivering real results?
For now, the answer seems to be yes. That should thrill any responsible observer of social, cultural, economic, and political affairs. It means that the early architects of the American system were not wrong. The intolerable costs of political upheaval of ages past can be mitigated by planting power firmly in the hands of the people through the plebiscite. This was their view and their gamble. All the evidence of our time points to the wisdom of the idea.
In the darkest days of the last year of the first Trump presidency, the bureaucracy was riding high, in full revenge mode against an elected government it hated and sought to overthrow. The agencies were passing strange edicts that felt like laws but no one knew for sure. You are essential, you are not. You must stay home, unless you have an emergency. Your elective surgery needs to wait. The kids cannot go to school. That European vacation cannot happen. You can eat at a restaurant but only if you are six feet away from other patrons and you must put this China-made cloth on your mouth if you get up to go to the restroom.
The flurry of edicts was mind-boggling. It felt like martial law, because it was some form of exactly that. The best research points to the astonishing reality that this was never really a public-health response but a scheme by security and intelligence sectors to enact some kind of global color revolution, which is why the policies were so similar the world over. It was indeed an awesome display of power, one that invaded all our communities, homes, and families.
No one knows this better than Team Trump, even if there has been near silence on the topic for all these years. They have had time to put the pieces together and figure out what happened and why. And they carefully, and in seclusion worthy of a Cistercian monastery, plotted their return, leaving nothing to chance.
Meanwhile, the past two years have had the Covid insurrectionists quietly stepping away from the spotlight, while leaving as much of their newfound power in place: the censorship, the technology, the mandates, and the propaganda that all of this shock-and-awe was nothing more than “common sense health measures.” It was never tenable, and vast numbers have come to realize that something went very wrong, like a kind of evil settled over the world and burrowed itself within all institutions.
In an instant, the whole scheme seems to be crumbling. The incredible result is that the administration under which this calamity occurred is now coming back, which is probably the strangest irony of our times.
And yet, even though no one has yet been open about precisely what happened in the White House in March 2020 to cause Trump to greenlight the lockdowns, there is a widespread belief that it was never really his choice. It was some kind of coup – egged on even by his closest advisors and the VP – that he either could not stop or lacked the personnel to marshal effective resistance. Regardless, he has been forgiven because, implausibly, the next administration not only owned the worst of it but added even more on top of that, including the wicked combination of mask mandates, forced injections, and continued school closures.
The result has been a continuing economic crisis, one far worse than agencies admit, in addition to a health, education, and cultural crisis. Meanwhile, all those involved in causing this from behind the scenes have been rewarded with professorships, loving interviews in the mainstream media, and lavish security provisions to protect them from legions of what they suppose are angry workers and peasants.
Therefore, among many of the ruling class, the results of this election are certainly not welcome, and nor are many of the early appointments. They represent the coming together of MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE, the fulfillment of decades of cultivation of disparate groups of dissidents who had not previously realized their common interests and common enemies. It was the Covid era and the imposition of top-down rule that brought them all together.
It was like three groups wandering around in a giant maze who suddenly confront each other and then, realizing that they all shared the same predicament, figure the way out together. These new alliances have not only shattered right and left, as traditionally understood, but reshaped the structural basis of political activism for the duration. It turns out that medical freedom, food freedom, free speech, political freedom, and peace all go together. Who knew?
The incumbent world of academia, think tanks, and most media simply finds itself unprepared to deal with the new realities. They had hoped everyone would forget about the last five years as if it was just a thing that happened but is now over; everyone just needs to grapple with the great reset and learn to love our new lives of surveillance, propaganda, censorship, perpetual war, poison food, unaffordable everything, and endless injections of potions for our own health and well-being.
Well, times have changed. How much? Early signs point to a dramatic unfolding of revolutionary change over the coming months. Is believing this the triumph of hope over experience? Absolutely. Then again, no one believed five years ago that most people in the world would be locked in their homes and communities, stuck drinking and streaming movies until biotech could come up with a cure for a respiratory virus with a zoonotic reservoir. Then it did not work and made people more sick than ever.
That was nuts but it happened.
If that could happen, with predictable results, the response could be equally implausible and more much thrilling. What’s man made can be unmade by man, and something new built in its place.
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