A company’s PR practices and statements represents its true ethics and values. Take Ford Motor Company for instance. The company’s code of conduct states it will “not merely abide by the law in a technical way” but will “strive to serve our customers with honest values, avoiding all devices and schemes which prey on human ignorance or gullibility.”
Here’s what Ford spokesperson Cathie Hargett said when asked about Ford’s $19.2 million multi-state settlement for repeatedly lying in its advertising about the fuel economy and payload capacity of some of its vehicles: “We are pleased that the matter is closed without any judicial finding of improper conduct.”
So much for not merely abiding by the law “in a technical way.”
The FDA’s PR campaign last year promoting ivermectin as being a veterinary drug primarily to treat horses said a lot about the regulatory agency’s ethics and values. Thanks to an eagle-eyed healthcare source who this past weekend alerted me to some promising cancer research studies, I’ve come to appreciate just how dishonest and deceptive the FDA truly is.
Ivermectin is a drug first used to treat parasitic diseases and included on WHO’s essential medicines list. The drug is credited with savings millions of lives which is why the medicine’s developers in 2015 were awarded a Nobel Prize. Ivermectin was later found to be an effective treatment for animals and reformulated for veterinarian purposes.
Some doctors in the U.S. and around the world maintained that ivermectin was an effective Covid drug, often as part of a cocktail, particularly when the disease was diagnosed in the early stages. In South Africa where the drug wasn’t readily available, doctors began using the veterinarian formulation over government objections. Eventually, the South African government relented, and the human formulary was made available.
But the Biden Administration and its policy enablers, the FDA, and the CDC, didn’t want ivermectin used for Covid and hospitals went to great lengths to prevent patients from receiving the drug, even if they were dying. The medical and pharmacist establishment took up the cause; the American Medical Association partnered with the American Pharmacists Association and American Society of Health-System Pharmacists and issued a joint statement opposing “the ordering, prescribing, or dispensing of ivermectin to prevent or treat COVID-19 outside of a clinical trial.”
The legacy and social media were eager participants in the campaign to discredit ivermectin. Reporters were quick to write damning stories about frontline doctors who dared to insist ivermectin had potential benefits, and social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn aggressively shut down any favorable mention of ivermectin and any critical comments about the Biden Administration’s vaccines-are-the-only-pandemic-solution advocacy. The mere mention of ivermectin was so verboten that when NRP published a story about South African doctors using the drug, they avoided mentioning it in the headline.
In a country where the public has become as dumbed down as America, it’s imperative to craft a simple, easy-to-understand message that can readily be communicated within Twitter’s and TikTok’s character and video parameters. The narrative that was created and uniformly followed was that ivermectin was solely a veterinarian drug, used primarily for horses.
Although it’s unclear if the FDA was responsible for creating the horsey narrative, the agency eagerly promoted it.
Promoting ivermectin as a veterinary drug made it easier to discredit and malign doctors who insisted on using it. One could easily assume that only a quack would prescribe a veterinary drug.
One of the doctors who insisted on using ivermectin was a Houston-based ENT specialist named Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, who learned about ivermectin’s potential benefits from a network of doctors she was in touch with. It’s not unusual for doctors to prescribe drugs for a different condition or at a different dosage than the FDA approved. According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, around 20% of all prescriptions in the United States are for so-called off-label use.
When Bowden began touting ivermectin’s benefits on social media, Houston Methodist hospital, where Bowden had admitting privileges, aggressively sought to discredit her, leaking to Houston Chronicle that she had been suspended and tweeting that she was practicing medicine not grounded in science.
MD Anderson Cancer Center, another prestigious Houston hospital, also weighed in with a warning about taking ivermectin meant for animals.
Although Anderson Cancer to its credit acknowledged some of the diseases ivermectin is approved for, what’s notable is what the world-renowned cancer treatment institution chose to omit.
Beginning in 2019, a team of Chinese scientists had begun publishing papers touting the potential benefits of ivermectin to treat a wide range of cancers, including breast, colon, and prostate cancer. These papers weren’t published on China’s propaganda sites but rather on well-known U.S. academic sites, including the NIH’s National Library of Medicine.
Some of the information contained in this paper posted on the NIH’s site in September 2020 is especially noteworthy.
Recent studies have also pointed out that (ivermectin) has a promising inhibitory effect on the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which has caused a global outbreak in 2020. In addition, IVM shows potential for clinical application in asthma and neurological diseases. Recently scientists have discovered that IVM has a strong anticancer effect.
Malignant tumors are one of the most serious diseases that threaten human health and social development today, and chemotherapy is one of the most important methods for the treatment of malignant tumors. In recent years, many new chemotherapeutic drugs have entered the clinic, but tumor cells are prone to drug resistance and obvious adverse reactions to these drugs. Therefore, the development of new drugs that can overcome resistance, improve anticancer activity, and reduce side effects is an urgent problem to be solved in chemotherapy. Drug repositioning is a shortcut to accelerate the development of anticancer drugs.
It’s interesting that in late September 2020 scientists were making references to ivermectin’s “promising inhibitory effect” on the Covid virus, yet seven months later the FDA was dismissing ivermectin as being primarily a veterinarian drug. The importance of repositioning readily available drugs with a known safety record to treat serious illnesses was also noteworthy.
That was the position of Dr. Peter McCullough, who was an internationally renowned cardiologist until he began advocating the importance of repositioning ivermectin and other drugs to treat covid. I wrote a profile of Dr. McCullough last August.
Those who spout the government’s line will quickly point to some studies purportedly showing that ivermectin was ineffective treating Covid. Advocates of ivermectin have told me that the studies were conducted by conflicted researchers and designed to fail. For example, I was told that one study involved patients who were already in the advanced stages of Covid and weren’t given the recommended dose. Ivermectin supposedly works best if given in the very early stages of Covid.
That researchers are conflicted isn’t a reckless conspiracy theory. You can read about all the filth and conflicts in American scientific research in this December 2019 ProPublica story.
The headline gives a nice overview.
A government watchdog group called OpenTheBooks recently determined through a FOIA request that Dr. Fauci and his former boss, NIH chief Francis Collins, received undetermined amounts of royalty payments from pharmaceutical companies and other interests, but as of yet the group hasn’t established the size of the royalty payments and what drugs they were for. OpenTheBooks estimated that between fiscal years 2010 and 2020, “more than $350 million in royalties were paid by third-parties to the agency and NIH scientists – who are credited as co-inventors.”
“Because those payments enrich the (NIH) and its scientists, each and every royalty payment could be a potential conflict of interest and needs disclosure,” OpenTheBooks said.
My profile about the OpenTheBooks findings can be found here.
Ivermectin continues to show promise as a cancer treatment. This peer-reviewed study was published in the Journal of Medical Science in February and the City of Hope Medical Center, in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute, was scheduled to begin a Phase II trial on June 10.
Of course, promising studies and trials don’t ensure results, but it was dishonest and potentially harmful for the FDA to publicly promote ivermectin as primarily a drug for veterinary purposes.
Fortunately, there is a movement afoot to protect doctors who stuck to their guns and prescribed ivermectin. Missouri’s governor last week signed a law shielding healthcare providers from losing their medical licenses when prescribing ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine.
Notably, the legacy media is sticking to its guns. From the June 8 edition of the Kansas City Star:
After the bill passed both chambers of the legislature, it drew swift criticism on social media from people who pointed to the fact that the Food and Drug Administration has not approved ivermectin for treating COVID-19. The drug is authorized for humans to treat infections caused by parasitic worms, head lice and skin conditions like rosacea. The agency has received multiple reports of people who have been hospitalized after taking ivermectin intended for livestock, according to its website.
I’m not alone in questioning the integrity of America’s health regulatory agencies. Dr. Marty Makary, a renowned surgeon and a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, has publicly malinged the CDC’s integrity. In a June 10 Newsweek commentary headlined “Why America Doesn’t Trust the CDC,” Makary referred to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) as a “kangaroo court” that rubber stamps the agency’s goals and objectives.
Makary last August accused the Biden Administration of using Covid to distract from its failed withdrawal from Afghanistan.