Horse Dewormer and Censorship

[Goddess]

 

 

Because of a now infamous tweet by the FDA, when people hear the word ‘Ivermectin’, they think ‘horse dewormer’. Characterizing Ivermectin as a horse dewormer is not just unfair, it’s better described as a lie.

Ivermectin is considered by the WHO as a vital global medicine. It was first brought to market in 1987 as an anti-parasitic and has since been administered - in humans - more than 3 billion times. Over 30 years of use, Ivermectin has built a reputation as a remarkably safe drug. Up there with asprin or paracetamol. Its successes in ridding the world of river blindness and elephantiasis - in humans - led its discoverer, Satoshi Ōmura, to jointly win the Nobel Prize in 2015. The first research suggesting Ivermectin may also have anti-viral properties was in 2012. It’s therefore quite reasonable to see Ivermectin as a candidate in the fight against COVID. In humans.

Why would a drug regulator try to make the public associate a Nobel Prize-winning drug with horse worms?

In April 2020, Kylie Wagstaff and her team at Monash University made an amazing discovery: a drug called Ivermectin killed the Sars-COV-2 virus in vitro.

The FDA-approved drug ivermectin inhibits the replication of SARS-CoV-2 in vitro - ScienceDirect

"In vitro" means the effect was demonstrated in a lab, not a human or an animal. An academic debate followed; some said the high dose required meant it would never work in humans, others argued high doses wouldn’t be needed. To settle that debate, we needed good observational and randomized control trials that looked for an effect in humans.

Very quickly, the research world stepped up to the plate.

Studies cropped up all over the world: Italy, Egypt, Iraq, Argentina, Columbia, Mexico and Spain. Nowhere was safe from the virus of knowledge expansion! Researchers begged for small grants or sometimes got nothing at all as they worked tirelessly to build our knowledge on this issue. Running parallel to the infamous research into vaccines, this was the other incredible COVID research effort that most people never heard of. By the end of July 2020, there were more than 32 studies registered investigating Ivermectin’s effectiveness against Sars-COV-2.

The first randomized control trial published its findings in July 2020. It can be credited to Dr. Mohiuddin in Bangladesh. It was a randomized study of 116 patients. The result? Ivermectin lowered the risk of being hospitalized with COVID. It was the first of many studies to start producing results.

Dr Andrew Hill of the University of Liverpool had also been investigating repurposed drugs in the fight against COVID-19. After seeing such good data arriving on Ivermectin, Hill and his team dropped their investigations into other drugs. Guided by WHO criteria, they put together a ‘systematic review’ of the growing body of randomized control trials looking into Ivermectin. A systematic review is amongst the highest level of evidence to support a drug’s effectiveness.

 

Hill’s team had already found a strong signal showing Ivermectin was effective, and more data was coming in over the next few months. He wasn’t alone - a few weeks earlier Dr Piere Kory (This is one of the scientists I have followed from the beginning) testified before the US Senate saying the same thing. Some weeks later, Dr Andrew Hill and Dr Pierre Kory together would share their evidence with the NIH in the USA - the agency responsible for public health research.

OSF Preprints | Review of the Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy of Ivermectin in the Prophylaxis and Treatment of COVID-19

 

There was another top researcher also reviewing the evidence for Ivermectin: Dr Tess Lawrie. Given that thousands of people were dying, Lawrie rightly considered it an emergency to get a systematic review completed. By 6th January 2021, her rapid review of the evidence also found a strong signal of benefit, “Ivermectin substantially reduces the risk of a person dying from COVID-19 by probably somewhere in the region of 65% to 92%."

(PDF) Ivermectin reduces the risk of death from COVID-19 -a rapid review and meta-analysis in support of the recommendation of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance. (researchgate.net)

Three researchers. All independent. All found a signal.

All three researchers were confident the data was good, they knew the drug was safe, and they knew the drug was cheap and readily available. In his December 2020 lecture, Hill said: “I've been working on repurposed drugs right since the beginning. I haven't seen any data like this, data so consistent between such a wide range of countries, all looking at the data in slightly different ways but getting quite consistent conclusions…Even if we hit 48% improvement, which looks like the worst case, that would still be a major advancement in treatment.”

By now, the ‘sample size’ supporting Ivermectin, which you get by adding together all the patients in all the studies, was 2,294. 

Generally, a study compares the results of two groups: those that received Ivermectin and those that didn’t. They measure what happened in those two groups. How fast did they get better? How quickly did they clear the virus? How many people died? And so on.

The researchers call those outcomes ‘endpoints’, and they’re often identical across multiple independent studies looking into the same thing. If you were studying ‘dog cuteness’, you’d likely measure ‘eye size’ and ‘coat fluffiness’ and you’d be very likely to find these identical endpoints across many studies into dog cuteness. Now you know what endpoints are.

 

The approval of Remdesivir in the USA, a drug that costs $2,200 a dose, has a terrible safety profile and arguably zero clinical benefits, was approved on a single industry-sponsored trial involving 1,062 people. With double the sample size, a proven safety record, and high availability at $3 a treatment, wasn’t it time for Ivermectin to get approved?

So what happened? 

 

Dr Tess Lawrie shared her findings with the UK authorities and other agencies around the world, but it was Hill’s study that looked most likely to create policy change. He said the work ‘could get to a WHO recommendation for the treatment being used worldwide’. The paper itself had not yet been published, but Hill had been sharing the preliminary findings at the NIH and various panels.

Getting the WHO to pay attention to systematic reviews is an area of expertise for Dr Tess Lawrie. Given this expertise, and the obvious crossover in their work, Hill and Lawrie started to collaborate. They decided how they would structure the paper, which studies would be included, and how they would grade the evidence using the ‘Cochrane’ method - a highly respected method of systematically reviewing scientific data. By January 15, 2021 their collaboration was looking very productive and they were both keen to present the data in the best possible manner to get the WHO recommendation. Both knew it was just a matter of time. With the data they had, Ivermectin would be approved.

What had been a fruitful professional relationship suddenly fell apart. Hill jumped the gun. Totally out of the blue, he published his research paper without Lawrie.

“It was very unusual,” Lawrie later said.

The paper defied many norms in medical publishing. When you conduct a systematic review, you’re assessing how biased and bad the studies are, but for reasons unknown, Hill had included all of the studies’ authors as co-authors of his paper.  The strange grammar of the paper was just the start of the oddities; the main confusion was over the conflicting statements. First, the good news: when using Ivermectin in moderate or severe COVID cases there was a 75% reduction in deaths.

v1_covered.pdf (researchsquare.com)

Great! At that moment, 15,000 people were dying each day, so the data suggested Ivermectin might save 11,250 people per day if used early. But this isn’t how the story ends…

In the discussion section, Hill performed a puzzling about-turn: ‘Ivermectin should be validated in larger appropriately controlled randomized trials before the results are sufficient for review by regulatory authorities’ [emphasis added]. That’s right. The researcher working tirelessly to get the WHO to recommend Ivermectin had instead - for reasons unknown - argued to not use Ivermectin. The paper was ringing alarm bells.

“The long author list… [the fact that] he didn’t grade the evidence… As scientists, we don’t usually make policy recommendations, we just present our data. It was all very unusual, '' Lawrie said. The policy switcheroo was just one of her concerns. Hill also hadn’t graded his evidence to demonstrate the certainty of the effect. This seriously downplayed the strength of the findings. Remember those signals we could see in the forest plots earlier? That certainty should have been communicated in the conclusion, and it wasn’t. Instead, there was a policy recommendation not to use Ivermectin.

Dr Piere Kory and his colleague Dr Paul Marik could also see red flags. To those familiar with scientific papers, they stood out a mile. “The limitations section is at the end of the introduction and the end of the paper… The mortality benefit was mentioned last, not first… Repeated mentions of Ivermectin having no antiviral activity, which goes against claims he already made… I have never heard a doctor, or a researcher, talk about ‘what is sufficient for review by regulatory authorities. No doctor writes that.”

In the days that followed, Andrew remained as bullish about Ivermectin as ever. In a discussion with a French publication called Bons Sens, Hill excitedly described the dose-dependent effect: “We are seeing very clear anti-viral effects. We see smaller effects when the drug is given for one day, then in dose-ranging studies, we see more and more of an effect. And then if the drug is given at a high dose, for five days, we see the strongest effect. So, how could that be happening if the drug does not stop the virus from replicating? It simply does. It does. And we’ve got the evidence to prove it…. It’s just a matter of time before it gets approved.”

It was as though there were two Dr Andrew Hills: one a public advocate for Ivermectin seeking a WHO recommendation, and another who argued against using Ivermectin and against the WHO recommending it. 

 

Was someone influencing the research paper? 

Dr Kory certainly thought so. “From his previous presentations and private conversations, we knew that someone else had influenced his paper… something happened to that paper.”

Dr Lawrie was concerned, too. She knew how the paper would be received, and that its bizarre policy recommendation and the lack of graded evidence was going to leave them dead in the water. She emailed him right away. “This review is going to cause immeasurable harm.” she wrote. “Can you please retract it and we can do it properly?” To her surprise, Hill answered. He wanted to talk. On January 18, 2021, they spoke via Zoom.

Below is the transcript of the call, recorded by Zoom, as per their policy.

 

Quote

 

The Transcript

 

Dr Andrew Hill: "I mean, I, I think I'm in a very sensitive position here...." 

Dr Tess Lawrie, MD, PhD: "Lots of people are in sensitive positions: they're in hospital, in ICUs dying, and they need this medicine."

Dr Andrew Hill: "Well...." 

Dr Tess Lawrie: "This is what I don't get, you know, because you're not a clinician. You're not seeing people dying every day. And this medicine prevents deaths by 80 percent. So 80 percent of those people who are dying today don't need to die because there's Ivermectin."

Dr Andrew Hill: "There are a lot, as I said, there are a lot of different opinions about this. As I say, some people simply...."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "We are looking at the data; it doesn't matter what other people say. We are the ones who are tasked with... look[ing] at the data and reassur[ing] everybody that this cheap and effective treatment will save lives. It's clear. You don't have to say, well, so-and-so says this, and so-and-so says that. It's absolutely crystal clear. We can save lives today. If we can get the government to buy Ivermectin."

Dr Andrew Hill: "Well, I don't think it's as simple as that, because you've got trials...."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "It is as simple as that. We don't have to wait for studies... we have enough evidence now that shows that Ivermectin saves lives, it prevents hospitalization. It saves the clinical staff going to work every day, [and] being exposed. And frankly, I'm shocked at how you are not taking responsibility for that decision. And you still haven't told me who is [influencing you]? Who is giving you that opinion? Because you keep saying you're in a sensitive position. I appreciate you are in a sensitive position, if you're being paid for something and you're being told [to support] a certain narrative... that is a sensitive position. So, then you kind of have to decide, well, do I take this payment? Because in actual fact, [you] can see [your false] conclusions... are going to harm people. So maybe you need to say, I'm not going to be paid for this. I can see the evidence, and I will join the Cochrane team as a volunteer, like everybody on the Cochrane team is a volunteer. Nobody's being paid for this work."

Dr Andrew Hill: "I think, fundamentally, we're reaching the [same] conclusion about the survival benefit. We're both finding a significant effect on survival."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "No, I'm grading my evidence. I'm saying I'm sure of this evidence. I'm saying I'm absolutely sure it prevents deaths. There is nothing as effective as this treatment. What is your reluctance? Whose conclusion is that?" 

[Hill then complains again that outsiders are influencing him.]

Dr Tess Lawrie: "You keep referring to other people. It's like you don't trust yourself. If you were to trust yourself, you would know that you have made an error and you need to correct it because you know, in your heart, that this treatment prevents death."

Dr Andrew Hill: "Well, I know, I know, for a fact that the data right now is not going to get the drug approved."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "But, Andy - know this will come out... It will come out that there were all these barriers to the truth being told to the public and to the evidence being presented. So please, this is your opportunity just to acknowledge [the truth] in your review, change your conclusions, and come on board with this Cochrane Review, which will be definitive. It will be the review that shows the evidence and gives the proof. This was the consensus on Wednesday night's meeting with 20 experts." 

Dr Tess Lawrie: "Yeah, because the NIH is owned by the vaccine lobby."

Dr Andrew Hill: "That's not something I know about."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "Well, all I'm saying is this smacks of corruption and you are being played." 

Dr Andrew Hill: "I don't think so."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "Well then, you have no excuse because your work in that review is flawed. It's rushed. It is not properly put together….This is bad research... bad research. So, at this point, I don't know... you seem like a nice guy, but I am really, really worried about you."

Dr Andrew Hill: "Okay. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a difficult situation."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "No, you might be in a difficult situation. I'm not, because I have no paymaster. I can tell the truth... How can you deliberately try and mess it up... you know?"

Dr Andrew Hill: "It's not messing it up. It's saying that we need, we need a short time to look at some more studies."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "So, how long are you going to let people carry on dying unnecessarily - up to you? What is the timeline that you've allowed for this, then?"

Dr Andrew Hill: "Well, I think… I think that it goes to WHO and the NIH and the FDA and the EMEA. And they've got to decide when they think enough's enough."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "How do they decide? Because there's nobody giving them good evidence synthesis because yours is certainly not good."

Dr Andrew Hill: "Well, when yours comes out, which will be in the very near future… at the same time, there'll be other trials producing results, which will nail it with a bit of luck. And we'll be there."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "It's already nailed." 

Dr Andrew Hill: "No, that's, that's not the view of the WHO and the FDA." 

Dr Tess Lawrie: "You'd rather... risk loads of people's lives. Do you know if you and I stood together on this, we could present a united front and we could get this thing. We could make it happen. We could save lives; we could prevent NHS doctors and nurses people from getting infected. We could prevent the elderly from dying."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "These are studies conducted around the world in several different countries. And they're all saying the same thing. Plus there's all sorts of other evidence to show that it works. Randomized controlled trials do not need to be the be-all and end-all. But [even] based on the randomized controlled trials, it is clear that Ivermectin works... It prevents deaths and it prevents harm and it improves outcomes for people...

I can see we're getting nowhere because you have an agenda, whether you like it or not, whether you admit to it or not, you have an agenda. And the agenda is to kick this down the road as far as you can. So... we are trying to save lives. That's what we do. I'm a doctor and I'm going to save as many lives as I can. And I'm going to do that through getting the message [out] on Ivermectin... OK. Unfortunately, your work is going to impair that, and you seem to be able to bear the burden of many, many deaths, which I cannot do."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "Would you tell me? I would like to know who pays you as a consultant through WHO." 

Dr Andrew Hill: "It's Unitaid."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "All right. So who helped to...? Whose conclusions are those on the review that you've done? Who is not listed as an author? Who's actually contributed?" 

Dr Andrew Hill: "Well, I mean, I don't really want to get into, I mean, it ... Unitaid...."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "I think that... It needs to be clear. I would like to know who, who are these other voices that are in your paper that are not acknowledged. Does Unitaid have a say? Do they influence what you write?" 

Dr Andrew Hill: "Unitaid has a say in the conclusions of the paper. Yeah."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "OK. So, who is it in Unitaid, then? Who is giving you opinions on your evidence?" 

Dr Andrew Hill: "Well, it's just the people there. I don't...."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "So they have a say in your conclusions."

Dr Andrew Hill: "Yeah."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "Could you please give me a name of someone in Unitaid I could speak to so that I can share my evidence and hope to try and persuade them to understand it?"

Dr Andrew Hill: "Oh, I'll have a think about who to, to offer you with a name.... But I mean, this is very difficult because I'm, you know, I've, I've got this role where I'm supposed to produce this paper and we're in a very difficult, delicate balance...."

Dr Lawrie interjects: "Who are these people? Who are these people saying this?" 

Dr Andrew Hill: "Yeah... it's a very strong lobby..."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "OK. Look I think I can see [we're] kind of [at] a dead end because you seem to have a whole lot of excuses, but, um, you know, that to, to justify bad research practice. So I'm really, really sorry about this, Andy. I really, really wish, and you've explained quite clearly to me, in both what you've been saying and in your body language that you're not entirely comfortable with your conclusions, and that you're in a tricky position because of whatever influence people are having on you, and including the people who have paid you and who have basically written that conclusion for you."

Dr Andrew Hill: "You've just got to understand I'm in a difficult position. I'm trying to steer a middle ground and it's extremely hard."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "Yeah. Middle ground. The middle ground is not a middle ground... You've taken a position right to the other extreme calling for further trials that are going to kill people. So this will come out, and you will be culpable. And I can't understand why you don't see that, because the evidence is there and you are not just denying it, but your work's actually actively obfuscating the truth. And this will come out. So I'm really sorry... As I say, you seem like a nice guy, but I think you've just kind of been misled somehow." 

Dr Andrew Hill: "Well, what I hope is that this, this stalemate that we're in doesn't last very long. It lasts a matter of weeks. And I guarantee I will push for this to last for as short amount of time as possible."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "So, how long do you think the stalemate will go on for? How long do you think you will be paid to [make] the stalemate... go on?"

Dr Andrew Hill: "From my side. OK... I think end of February [2020], we will be there six weeks."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "How many people die every day?" 

Dr Andrew Hill: "Oh, sure. I mean, you know, 15,000 people a day."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "Fifteen thousand people a day times six weeks... Because at this rate, all other countries are getting Ivermectin except the UK and the USA, because the UK and the USA and Europe are owned by the vaccine lobby."

Dr Andrew Hill: "My goal is to get the drug approved and to do everything I can to get it approved so that it reaches the maximum...."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "You're not doing everything you can because everything you can would involve saying to those people who are paying you, 'I can see this prevents deaths. So I'm not going to support this conclusion anymore, and I'm going to tell the truth.’"

Dr Andrew Hill: "What, I've got to do my responsibilities to get as much support as I can to get this drug approved as quickly as possible."

Dr Tess Lawrie: "Well, you're not going to get it approved the way you've written that conclusion. You've actually shot yourself in the foot, and you've shot us all in the foot. All of... everybody trying to do something good. You have actually completely destroyed it."

Dr Andrew Hill: "Okay. Well, that's where we'll, I guess we'll have to agree to differ." 

Dr Tess Lawrie: "Yeah. Well, I don't know how you sleep at night, honestly."

 

 

Edited November 18, 2022 by Goddess

[Goddess]

We know that Hill had been ‘reporting into a team at Unitaid’, as he’d told Bons Sens exactly that. If ‘people’ at Unitaid had helped write the conclusion of the paper, perhaps even all of the paper, those ‘people’ ought to be listed as authors, but they are not listed. We don’t even know their names, nor their motivations. They are ghostwriters, shaping the paper in their own particular way. In 2020, we had a therapy for COVID that looked likely to have saved thousands of lives. Instead, a faceless group weakened the data in an underhand way.

But why? Why would Unitaid - why would anyone, for that matter - want to put the brakes on the ‘proof’ that Ivermectin was an effective treatment for COVID during a pandemic? 

Spooks changing a science paper does matter. The influence they had over this particular scientific paper had an impact on you personally. It may have extended the pandemic by a year. It may have cost thousands of lives. So why did they do it? And who are ‘they’?

If everything was above board, there needn’t have been ‘invisible hands’ altering Dr Hill’s research paper.  

The invisible authors would have been listed and we could check their background for conflicts of interest. We could ask them why such a conclusion was arrived at. But we don’t have listed authors, we have silent meddling and ghost-writing. We have a deliberate weakening of conclusions. Such meddling would have gone undetected if not for Dr Tess Lawrie and a recorded Zoom call. You can forgive yourself for thinking ‘this looks bad’ because it really does.

Consider this: the drug was cheap and available nearly everywhere. It had been successfully administered to more than 1 billion people in multiple public health campaigns before. Its safety profile had been established over the past 30 years and as such, it’s considered one of the safest drugs in the world. If health authorities rolled it out to mitigate COVID, as Lawrie put it, ‘the worst that will happen is you’ll rid the world of worms.’

Changing science papers in an underhand way is indicative of underhand motivations. So let’s not be naive and instead get into some of the reasons why a lobby would change that paper, because, like it or not, that’s what happened.

Here's WHY it happened:

The patent window for Ivermectin ran out in 1993. In India, one of the main producers of Ivermectin is the Taj group: a titan of Indian manufacturing. This kind of manufacturing scale drives down costs. In India, Ivermectin can cost less than $3 for a course of treatment. It’s available in every single pharmacy across the country with no questions asked. Merck, a massive pharmaceutical company, once owned Ivermectin outright. They no longer do. The lemon has been juiced.

Had Ivermectin been approved globally, drug manufacturers would have caused prices to race to the bottom. ‘Other’ companies would carve out a small profit on the scale of Ivermectin sales. Sure, some money would have been made, but it’s small fry for an industry with its eyes on billion-dollar profits. To put it into perspective, it’s estimated that 1kg of Ivermectin can cost as little as $150 to manufacture, enough for 7,000 courses of treatment. At costs that low, you could treat everyone in the UK for $1,400,000. Great news for you and me, terrible for the pharmaceutical companies. There’s no juice left and so there’s no business case in allowing Ivermectin to eat into the profits from the ‘biggest disease opportunity in a generation.’

The net effect may have cost hundreds of thousands of lives because Ivermectin was known to be effective, it was safe, and availability was very high. Had a lobby not deliberately ‘gotten rid of’ Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID, the lockdowns and restrictions after January 2021 may have been entirely unnecessary. 

 

 

[Goddess]

In May 2020, Google published their first COVID misinformation policy. 

"Content that promotes prevention methods that contradict WHO or local health authorities” was explicitly banned. If the World Health Organisation was not recommending it, discussion of that treatment risked being algorithmically removed. Twitter and Facebook created near-identical policies.

Doctors can prescribe treatments if they believe they will be beneficial to their patients, but online discussion of any observed successes was explicitly banned if those treatments were not advocated by the WHO. Doctors are known to share notes on new treatment protocols, but during the pandemic, using YouTube to discuss new and effective treatments got your videos algorithmically deleted.

One of the first successes with Ivermectin was in Miami, Florida. Drs Jean and Juliana Rajter had been using Ivermectin with great success at the Broward Health Medical Center in Florida. “I’ve had nearly a 100% response rate, they all improve”, Dr Ratjer said. This was April 13, 2020.

Local Doctor Tries New Coronavirus Drug Treatment – NBC 6 South Florida (nbcmiami.com)

Journalists were surprised their videos were algorithmically deleted for mentioning Ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine. Even if the videos were from ‘reputable’ sources, if they contained a single news byte saying the drug worked, the algorithm removed the video. Journalism was being censored at scale and journalists made no protest at all.

 

From at least May 2020, your newsfeed has been algorithmically filtered of strategies, treatments, or interventions which are not directly recommended by the WHO. Put simply, videos and content trashing Ivermectin are within the rules, videos and content suggesting it is effective are removed. Right now, as you read this, you are inside an information ecosystem being censored at scale. Think about the effect the tilted table has had on your perspective. You probably didn’t hear much about Ivermectin at all, but what you did hear was more likely to be negative because of these rules.

By December of 2020, one of the better-documented examples of this censorship occurred when Dr Pierre Kory testified before the US Senate on the growing body of evidence supporting the use of Ivermectin. The video taken down for violating YouTube’s rules. US Senate testimony was censored by YouTube, which was mass deleting videos “that contradict the World Health Organization’s medical information about COVID-19”.

Dr. Pierre Kory Testifies Before the Senate (odysee.com)

The move drew criticism from Sen. Ron Johnson, who said “They have decided there is only one medical viewpoint allowed, and it is the viewpoint dictated by government agencies“.

Doctors and commentators got the memo: suggesting anything the WHO didn’t advocate would get you labelled a misinformation guru and then silenced. People fearing for their reputation is a powerful deterrent for those tempted to question policy.

By January 2020, UK researcher Dr Tess Lawrie was forced to post her findings on Ivermectin to YouTube after urgent letters to health authorities went unanswered and the video was immediately removed.

In Australia, Professor Thomas Borody identified Ivermectin as an effective treatment as early as August 2020. In an interviwe with Sky News, Borody said ‘I don’t really know why we haven’t started treating before’. Sky News were mocked for interviewing Borody, and in the following months, at least six of their videos were purged from Youtube before they were banned entirely.  

Ivermectin triple therapy flagged as a ‘wonder drug’ against COVID-19 | Sky News Australia

YouTube got even more specific in justifying the bannings - saying they no longer allowed content which “encourages people to use hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin to treat or prevent the virus”. It didn’t matter that it was one of Australia’s top medical Professors, all that mattered was it differed from WHO policy.

It’s hard to know how many researchers have been silenced in this manner.

In Mexico, local health agencies had their Twitter accounts suspended for discussing Ivermectin. Local health authority strategy was to offer Ivermectin to people who tested positive for COVID, but to mention that on Twitter breached the rules. It forced officials to police their language, they couldn’t say ‘Ivermectin’ and instead they opted for phrases such as ‘early treatment kits’. Despite their efforts, official health authorities all had their accounts suspended.

Covid-19 - The ivermectin war continues. Example in Mexico. | The Club (mediapart.fr)

Even Nobel Laureates were silenced. In the summer of 2021, a talk by Satoshi Omura was removed from YouTube for talking positively of Ivermectin. Omura himself discovered Ivermectin in the late 70s, he later won the Nobel Prize for the discovery.

 It’s almost impossible to create a paper trail of the videos, articles, doctors, and studies which have been deleted from the internet.

The censorship gave the WHO near total control over which treatments and interventions could be discussed. It was an enormous power to grant to a single organisation. Society became totally dependent on one node in our network of ideas because all contrasting views, regardless of who expressed them, were silenced. Systems with a single point of failure are at high risk of catastrophic collapse. 

Corruption in WHO policy polluted everything downstream.

It was only natural that the most agreeable public health figures watched their platforms grow exponentially, while health practitioners with ‘unofficial’ insights had their wings clipped. People wanted to know what was going on, and they were funnelled towards influencers reflecting official policy. Because those critical of official policy were silenced, an illusion of consensus emerged. We are still inside that illusion of consensus today. The public don’t believe or even know early treatment is an option, and yet on Ivermectin alone, there are 247 peer-reviewed papers of which just 20 are not positive. Of the 80 controlled trials, 86% of them show efficacy. In the published literature, there’s a consensus that it works, and yet in ‘the popular media’ there’s a consensus that it doesn’t. Such an inversion of reality is only possible because of the systemic silencing of people who want to make this point.

Now, it could be that the stated aims of a policy like this: to stop the spread of wild misinformation - was the motivation. Wild conspiracy theories could have been damaging, but the price we paid to minimise them was creating an information monopoly. The policy drastically reduced collaborative input from credible researchers. Placing so much weight on the outcome of one institution, was never going to produce the best results. The baby was thrown out with the bathwater. Was misinformation the full reason such a policy was lobbied for? We can’t ignore the fact that monopolies are profitable.

With credible opposition silenced, the censorship cleared the way for Ivermectin to be trashed in the popular press. Despite overwhelming data showing Ivermectin to be effective, from January 2021 onwards, the public would be relentlessly told the opposite. 

 

 

 

 

[herbie]

Oh go chug a bottle or two and quit wasting bandwidth.

[Goddess]

And this is why the US courts want to question Fauci about his collusion with the media.

[Goddess]

Court: Fauci Must Testify Under Oath About Involvement in Social Media COVID Censorship (legalinsurrection.com)

 

Quote

The lawsuit Missouri et al vs. about the whole of US public health is progressing in its exploration of the explicit and deliberate role of the US government and many of its agents including Fauci, Murthy, Biden, and Jankowicz (amidst a cast of dozens and several agencies) in the systematic shaping, suppression, and censorship of information regarding covid. 

Missouri AG Eric Schmitt: “No one has had the chance to look under the hood before – now we do.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to discovery:

Most of the subjects of the investigation have been steadfastly refusing to testify.

The refusals, prevarications, and slights of hand have been wild. It’s been the entire Teflon Tony playbook. 

In a baffling act of evasiveness, Tony made written response to questions, to which he was required to provide verified answers under penalty of perjury, but they were instead signed by an underling.

This astonishing action serves as its own indictment, IMO and fits into a longstanding pattern of lying to Congress and to the American people and it appears that Judge Doughty is declaring an end to the shenanigans.

 

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Next, Plaintiffs argue that even if Dr. Fauci can prove he never communicated with social media platforms about censorship, there are compelling reasons that suggest Dr. Fauci has acted through intermediaries, and acted on behalf of others, in procuring the social-media censorship of credible scientific opinions. Plaintiffs argue that even if Dr. Fauci acted indirectly or as an intermediary on behalf of others, it is still relevant to Plaintiffs’ preliminary injunction motion. The Court agrees.

Lastly, Plaintiffs argue that Dr. Fauci’s credibility has been in question on matters related to supposed COVID-19 “misinformation” since 2020. Specifically, Plaintiffs state that Dr. Fauci has made public statements on the efficacy of masks, the percentage of the population needed for herd immunity, NIAID’s funding of “gain-of-function” virus research in Wuhan, the lab-leak theory, and more. Plaintiffs urge that his comments on these important issues are relevant to the matter at hand and are further reasons why Dr. Fauci should be deposed. Plaintiffs assert that they should not be required to simply accept Dr. Fauci’s “self-serving blanket denials” that were issued from someone other than himself at face value. The Court agrees. 

Finally, the Court is aware of a number of substantive reasons why Dr. Fauci’s deposition should be taken. The first is the publicly available emails that prove that Dr. Fauci was communicating and acting as an intermediary for others in order to censor information from being shared across multiple social-media outlets. The second is that Dr. Fauci has yet to give any statements under oath in this matter. The third is that the Court has no doubt that Dr. Fauci was engaging in communications with high-ranking social-media officials, which is extremely relevant in the matter at hand.

 

 

 

That so many Americans died from covid before vaccines were introduced was not inevitable, and it had nothing to do with people failing to adhere to diktats stamped with Fauci’s imprimatur. Covid patients were instructed to return home and do nothing — receive no treatment whatsoever — until difficulties breathing sent them back to the hospital to submit to intravenous remdesivir and ventilation. Inexpensive, safe medicines against covid were readily available that would’ve prevented hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and saved as many, if only we’d used them. Why didn’t we? Because Fauci and his Pharma collaborators deliberately suppressed those treatments in service to their myopic objective—a mass public health experiment with a rushed-to-market, poorly tested, and improperly licensed technology so risky that manufacturers refused to produce it unless every government on the planet shielded them from responsibility.

 

Research-Report-on-Mask-Mandates-in-Schools.pdf (mt.gov)

 

Consider mask mandates, which Fauci knew ran contrary to overwhelming research. As you read, keep in mind the consequences of masking children:

Research-Report-on-Mask-Mandates-in-Schools.pdf (mt.gov)

During a January 28 speech to HHS regulators, Fauci himself explained the futility of masking asymptomatic people.

“The one thing historically people need to realize, that even if there is some asymptomatic transmission, in all the history of respiratory borne viruses of any type, asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks. The driver of outbreaks is always a symptomatic person. Even if there’s a rare asymptomatic person that might transmit, an epidemic is not driven by asymptomatic carriers.”

 

Similarly, in a February 5, 2020 email, he advised President Obama’s Health and Human Services Secretary, Sylvia Burwell, on the pointlessness of masking the healthy. Less than two weeks later, Fauci invoked the same rationale in an interview with USA Today:

New coronavirus: What don't we know? Dr. Anthony Fauci has the answers (usatoday.com)

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“A mask is much more appropriate for someone who is infected and you’re trying to prevent them from infecting other people than it is in protecting you against infection. If you look at the masks that you buy in a drug store, the leakage around that doesn’t really do much to protect you. Now, in the United States, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask.”

 

 

52 studies — all available on NIH’s website — find that ordinary masking (using less than an N95 respirator) doesn’t reduce viral infection rates, even in institutional settings like hospitals and surgical theaters. Moreover, retrospective studies on mask mandates confirm they were fruitless.

The Truth About the COVID-19 Pandemic - Tablet Magazine

Most irksome is what Fauci observed in March 2020, which is that a mask’s only real efficacy may be in “making people feel a little better.”

Fauci’s controversial '60 Minutes' interview about mask-wearing was one year ago | Fox News

Note the takeaways here: Namely, that while mask mandates were based on falsehoods, masks themselves served as powerful psychological tools that reinforced, by way of visual reminder, the idea that everyone was a vector of disease and unique threat, encouraging public compliance with other oppressive mitigation measures by amplifying fear.  Antithetical to critical thinking, a fearful state of mind lays the groundwork for authoritarianism in all its many forms. Manipulating and stimulating this human instinct ensures submission to undeserving authority. What I’ll always remember about the pandemic is how a religious obedience to authoritative pronouncements supplanted common sense and disciplined observation both, with profound consequences.

Historically, the obedient always see themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly. It is a costly misperception.

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His “noble lies” extended well beyond mask mandates, revealing a taste for deceit unbecoming of any public official, let alone one in charge of a pandemic response.

Fauci explained to the NYTimes that he had revised his estimate of the vaccine coverage needed to insure “herd immunity” from 70% to 80–90% not based on science, but rather in response to polling that indicated rising rates of vaccine acceptance.

Covid-19: How Much Herd Immunity is Enough? - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Despite stating on multiple occasions his belief that post-infection immunity was highly likely, he took the public position that natural immunity did not contribute to protecting the population and demanded that even those previously infected by covid be vaccinated in spite of overwhelming scientific evidence that such post-covid inoculations were both unnecessary and dangerous. On September 9, 2021, while under questioning by Congress, Fauci conceded there was no scientific justification for this policy. As recounted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (nephew of President John F. Kennedy) in The Real Anthony Fauci, just a few days later, in a statement justifying covid vaccine mandates to school children, Fauci reminisced on his own grade school measles and mumps vaccines—an unlikely memory, since those vaccines weren’t available until 1963 and 1967, and Fauci attended grade school in the 1940s.

For Kennedy, it was the “blatant and relentless manipulation of data to serve the vaccine agenda” that was the most infuriating part of our pandemic response.

Unsurprisingly, Fauci was often at the center of these deceptions, and they were always made with one goal in mind: Inflating covid risks and the safety and efficacy of vaccines in order to stoke public fear and encourage mass compliance. Arguably the most damning example, occurred at the outset of the pandemic when Fauci used wildly inaccurate modeling by Maser of Disaster Neal Ferguson of Imperial College London — who received $148.8 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — to convince Trump to impose lockdowns. This doomsday model overestimated American deaths by 525%.

Fauci was also the one to green-light the CDC’s protocol changes for completing death certificates in a way that inflated covid’s infection mortality rate. Later, the CDC was forced to admit that only 6% of covid deaths occurred in entirely healthy individuals, while the remaining 94% suffered from an average of four potentially fatal comorbidities. 

COVID-19 Provisional Counts - Weekly Updates by Select Demographic and Geographic Characteristics (cdc.gov)

His dereliction goes beyond mere omissions, however. Fauci’s pandemic playbook of “flattening the curve” in support of a long-term bet on unproven vaccines represented an unprecedented departure from accepted public health practice. He not only ignored early treatment options, he outright suppressed them and deliberately derailed America’s access to lifesaving drugs and medicines that might’ve saved hundreds of thousands of lives and dramatically shortened the pandemic.

Says Dr. Peter McCullough:

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You cannot prevent it—any more than you can prevent the tide from rising. . . We could have dramatically reduced COVID fatalities and hospitalizations using early treatment protocols and repurposed drugs including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and many, many others.”

 

Fauci kept the medical treatment on hold globally for an entire year as a readily treatable respiratory virus ravaged populations,” agreed Dr. Piere Kory. “It is absolutely shocking that he recommended no outpatient care, not even Vitamin D despite the fact he takes it himself and much of the country is Vitamin D deficient. . . His treatment strategies all began once all these under-medicated patients were hospitalized. By that time, it was too late for many of them. It was insane. It was perverse. It was unethical.”

Thanks to the media’s absolute deference to Fauci, inconvenient facts about our pandemic response have been quietly swept under the rug. For example:  Fauci’s disastrous mismanagement during the pandemic’s first year resulted in the U.S. suffering 14.5% of total covid deaths. By September 30, 2021, mortality rates in America had climbed to 2,107/1,000,000, compared to 139/1,000,000 in Japan. These inordinate numbers resulted in an almost 2 year decrease in average life expectancy at birth among Americans.

Let’s not be so foolish as to think the disproportionate American numbers were due to negligence and selfishness on the part of the citizenry rather than Fauci’s elevation of Pharma profits and bureaucratic power over waning public health. There are many leading doctors and scientists, including some of the nation’s most highly published and experienced physicians, who believe the deliberate malpractice of withholding early treatments led to upwards of 80% of all deaths attributed to covid. Indeed, five renowned front-line covid specialists — Drs. Peter McCullough, Pierre Kory, Ryan Cole, David Brownstein, and Harvey Risch — independently told RFK Jr. as much.

Why would Fauci do such a thing? It’s simple: Corruption.

[Goddess]

From the very get-go, early treatments and therapeutics posed an existential threat to Fauci and Bill Gates' $48 billion vaccine project and their drug, Remdesivir, in which Gates has a large stake and which Fauci’s NIAID spent $79 million on.

Under federal law, new vaccines and medicines cannot qualify for Emergency Use Authorization if any existing FDA-approved drug proves effective against the same malady:

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“For FDA to issue an EUA (emergency use authorization), there must be no adequate, approved, and available alternative to the candidate product for diagnosing, preventing, or treating the disease or condition. . .”

 

Ergo, if any FDA-approved drug like hydroxychloroquine (or ivermectin) proved effective against covid, pharmaceutical companies would no longer be legally allowed to fast-track their zero-liability billion-dollar vaccines to market under Emergency Use Authorization. Instead, vaccines would have to go through the methodical, years-long process that all new vaccines undergo to ensure safety and efficacy, and that would mean less profits, more doubts, increased impediments to market, and potentially missing out on the unprecedented windfall that Big Pharma is currently enjoying.

Hydroxychloroquine is about $10 per course.  Fauci’s Remdesivir is more than $3000 per course.

Fauci invested $6 billion in taxpayer money in the Moderna vaccine alone. His agency is co-owners of the patent and he stands to collect a fortune in royalties. At least four of his hand-picked deputies are in line to collect royalties of $150,000 per year based on Moderna’s success, and that’s on top of the salaries already paid courtesy of the American people.

Here’s a little secret about Moderna: Until the FDA authorized its covid vaccine, the company had NEVER brought a product to market before. They’d failed in every attempt.  In fact, Moderna’s repeated failures and its safety issues nearly pushed the company to the brink of financial ruin but it was saved at the last minute when Fauci infused it with $6 billion to fund the vaccine development.

Gates and Fauci put millions into developing an mRNA platform for vaccines that would allow them to quickly produce new “boosters” to combat each new “escape variant.” Consider the implications here. It has long been known that Big Pharma perversely benefits when its own products fail. Curing people is never the goal; that would dry up a revenue stream. These leaky covid vaccines are among the rare commercial products that multiply profits by failing. Theoretically, each new booster doubles the revenues from the initial jab. Ergo, the production of each successive booster for every new variant pads the pockets of Gates and Fauci, and the never-ending treadmill of boosters basically guarantees that Big Pharma will continue to see record profits. 

It’s hard to overstate the degree of regulatory capture we’re dealing with when it comes to America’s government health agencies and the pharmaceutical industry. The CDC, for example, owns 57 patents and spends almost $5 billion of its $12.0 billion-dollar annual budget buying and distributing vaccines. The NIH also owns hundreds of vaccine patents and often profits from the sale of products it supposedly regulates, with high level officials, including Fauci, receiving massive yearly emoluments in royalty payments on the very products they regulate, which they help develop and then usher through the approval process. The FDA, meanwhile, receives 45% of its budget from the pharmaceutical industry. It is because of this regulatory capture that Fauci, who’s been at the helm since 1984, has turned the NIH, the FDA, and the CDC into little more than Big Pharma subsidiaries.

As Harvard physician John Abramson once said:

 

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“The first step is to give up the illusion that the primary purpose of modern medical research is to improve Americans’ health most effectively and efficiently. In our opinion, the primary purpose of commercially funded clinical research is to maximize financial return on investment, not health.”

 

[Goddess]

Just a few months into the pandemic, there were more than 200 studies supporting treatment with hydroxychloroquine, and 60 studies supporting Ivermectin.

COVID-19 early treatment: real-time analysis of 2,287 studies (c19early.org)

HCQ was used not only against the coronavirus MERS in 2004, but also against SARS (also a coronavirus) in 2014. Common sense would suggest HCQ be used to treat covid, at least before the arrival of vaccines, but with the help of the media, Fauci waged an all-out war on the drug.

 

Dr. Fauci says all the ‘valid’ scientific data shows hydroxychloroquine isn’t effective in treating coronavirus. 

This is a flat out LIE:

Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High-Risk COVID-19 Patients That Should Be Ramped Up Immediately as Key to the Pandemic Crisis - PubMed (nih.gov)

 

The FDA ultimately took the unprecedented step of revoking HCQ’s emergency authorization. After widespread use of the drug for 65 years, without warning, the FDA sent out an alert on June 15, 2020 that HCQ is dangerous, and that it required a level of monitoring only available at hospitals.

And yet, federal officials continued to encourage doctors to use this “dangerous” drug without restriction for lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Lyme and malaria. Just not for covid. It was 100% due to pressure from Fauci.

[Goddess]

[Goddess]

[Goddess]

Fauci sat under oath to answer questions about the Biden Administration's unconstitutional and dangerous efforts to censor information about covid and the vaccines.  This was during US Thanksgiving week.

The Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana are suing the Biden Administration for colluding with Big Tech to censor social media users who questioned or criticized official Covid policies.

To work around the First Amendment, Biden Administration officials identified individuals, organizations, doctors, scientists, and scholars as dangerous (for voicing criticism of government Covid policy). The administration then coordinated with social media companies to de-platform those individuals. This work-around of the Constitution is illegal. The state cannot assign to private sector actors its own violation of our constitutional rights and then claim immunity from the law. 

Having fought for months in the Fifth Circuit, Fauci was finally deposed. In seven hours of testimony, Fauci couldn’t seem to recall any of the policies that he himself trumpeted on the Chris Cuomo Show, The View, and every other corporate broadcast in 2020 that covered Covid. 

Here’s a roundup of the most interesting takes from Fauci’s testimony:

Fauci's 7-Hour Deposition: What We Know So far  ⋆ Brownstone Institute

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"From our deposition of Fauci yesterday in the MO v. Biden case. Fauci confirmed that in Feb 2020, Fauci sent Clifford Lane, his deputy at the NIAID [National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease], as the U.S. representative for the WHO delegation to China. Lane convinced Fauci we should emulate China’s lockdowns."

From Attorney Jenin Younes of the New Civil Liberties Alliance:

Big Tech & Government Censorship - Tablet Magazine

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"The Missouri documents, along with some obtained through discovery in Berenson v. Twitter and a FOIA request by America First Legal, expose the extent of the administration’s appropriation of big tech to effect a vast and unprecedented regime of viewpoint-based censorship on the information that most Americans see, hear and otherwise consume. At least 11 federal agencies, and around 80 government officials, have been explicitly directing social media companies to take down posts and remove certain accounts that violate the government’s own preferences and guidelines for coverage on topics ranging from COVID restrictions to the 2020 election, to the Hunter Biden laptop scandal."

From Dr. Aaron Kheriaty:

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"And then there are the consequent downstream adverse effects of this kind of censorship—not only on those who are directly censored but on other users of the platform who self-censor to avoid similar punishments. Most concerningly, readers are deprived of access to contrasting information or open debate from which to inform their viewpoints, leading to the false impression of a scientific “consensus” when no such consensus exists."

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Anthony Fauci is one of the most successful bureaucrats in American history; for over 40 years this man has lied, schemed, and harmed the American public to maintain his position, influence, and power.  One small but telling example of his fraud was revealed in his deposition testimony. He claimed he “didn’t have time to worry about the Great Barrington Declaration” (GBD), in which top medical experts in 2020 had proposed “focused protection” of the most vulnerable to Covid in lieu of harmful, society-wide lockdowns. Yet Fauci was emailing his subordinates about GBD to defame it, and went on broadcast news to attack it.

"So Fauci claimed under oath at his censorship deposition that he hasn't ‘time to worry about things like the Great Barrington Declaration.’  Did he lie under oath? Fauci email to Birx, 10-16-2020 'I have come out very strongly publicly against the Great Barrington Declaration'.”

 

 

[Goddess]

Twitter Censors Famed Epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff | AIER

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This attempt to silence accredited experts completely distorts the process of scientific inquiry, discovery, and public opinion. And to what end?