you are not a horse, you are not a cow

yeah, well you are not a real public health agency...

we have seen a lot of wild and shady things from “health agencies” over the last few years, but this one was really in a class by itself.

the FDA took a safe, cheap, widely (including by they themselves) approved drug used by 250 million people each year and pretended it was somehow "not for humans."

if you want to argue efficacy, then argue efficacy.

but all this "you are not a horse, you are not a cow, seriously stop it"? that has no place in public (or any) health.

this was WAY over the line into “interfering with doctor patient relationships” and “outright lying.”

and a court has recently weighed in on it.

many are calling this a victory, but i’m not so sure.

let’s look.

on the surface, this seems like a victory. the FDA was forced into a settlement by a court (the fifth circuit) that unanimously found they had overstepped and overturned a district court’s dismissal of the case. judge brown at the district level had claimed the FDA was covered by “sovereign immunity” and therefore not subject to challenge. this 3 judge panel ruled that this was not so.

that in itself is quite a big deal. it’s a reversal of the idea that “regulators get to regulate and do as they like and we all have to just deal with it.” because this particular campaign was ridiculous lies that exceeded FDA authority.

issues of efficacy on ivermectin have been heated and lots of studies seem to contradict one another but then, lots of them were also very badly designed or were rooted in misuse of the drug, perhaps on purpose. on balance, i think the evidence favors the idea that it was effective if taken early or prophylactically in cases where disease had not yet progressed far. it looked less effective in ICU etc, but that’s hardly a surprise.

but let’s not bog down there. whatever one feels about efficacy, that was NOT the argument the FDA was making nor the dangerous course they took. they came out implying “this drug is not for humans, it’s for livestock” and that is simply false. billion of humans have taken this drug. its inventor won the nobel prize for it. it’s cheap, available in huge quantities, and very, very safe, or, at least it was until the FDA made it unsafe.

the court opines:

and this was a big deal, a dispositive deal. why? because they shut off the human supply and (like they did with hydroxychloroquine) reached out to boards and agencies and barred its prescription. this is simply not done. 1000’s of drugs are used off label. it’s common as muck and generally safe and effective. it’s what doctors do. what is NOT safe or effective is to prevent this and drive people to unsafe ideas like “taking veterinary versions in dosages appropriate for a 900 pound horse.”

no one set out to do this or even would have tried apart from one thing:

the FDA choked off the supply. they put the safe drugs in safe dosages already pre packed for human consumption and removed them from reach. doctors who tried to prescribe it could lose licenses. pharmacists who filled it could lose licenses. and enforcement was rabid. suddenly, a safe, generic wonderdrug was verboten.

now, call me mr cynical paws, but one cannot help but wonder if the reason for this was less than pure.

here’s the text for EMA (emergency use authorization) drugs like the covid vaccines, paxlovid, and remdesivir.

notice anything?

yup. you cannot have an EMA if there is an adequate, approved alternative available. that’s quite an incentive set to gang tackle anything evincing efficacy off the shelves if you’re about to bring the most profitable pharma products in history to market at “warp speed” and your (up until very recently) commissioner scotty “show me the money” gottlieb just jumped ship for the pfizer board right in the middle of his term.

yeah. that’s a pretty astonishing and ugly incentive set for FDA and NIH alike and many of these folks (like fauci and collins) are not even required to disclose how much money they made from royalties. (could easily have been 8 figures apiece)

and this leaves me worried.

we get this as a settlement, but is anything really settled?

i have doubts.

no one is really paying any meaningful price. no one got in trouble, got accused of crimes, malpractice, or iatrocide.

and that just means there all still waiting in the wings to do it again and the grift goes on. same prison. no redemption.

if you want change, there need to be consequences.

if you want change, we need to name names and call people out. this was not an accident, it was a plan, a playbook.

i'd really love to find out: who concocted and crafted this message?

who green lit putting it out?

seems like something the public should know and probably someone who really ought not be working at FDA anymore.

here are some threads to pull (courtesy of longtime gatopal™ kbirb)

we can see how excited they were to get this trending.

and note that they tie it directly to the vaccines as a “perfect lead in.”

it does make one wonder just what they were selling…

it looks like brad kimberly wrote the tweet and was having a bit of a chortle about his “calculated use of y’all.”

the messaging here was deliberate and planful.

but did brad, a mere director of social media act alone?

it seems unlikely (but not impossible) that such a non-medical functionary would be setting policy about claiming a drug for humans was for livestock. this is well after they went after it with pharmacies and doctors and made sure there was no “adequate alternative treatment available” to hold up the most profitable EMA in history. that seems to point to earlier causality.

and “taking down tweets” or no, nothing has changed.

the gears of grift remain and will once more fire into function when opportunity, means, and motive arise.

the FDA is too badly broken to fix. it’s entirely captured by a revolving door of greenwash so severe it makes the fed and goldman sachs look like pikers.

perhaps there was a time when FDA was a net benefit, but that time is long past. it’s now just another predatory regulatory monopoly serving little but itself and its paymasters.

time to shut it down or, at the very least, make its accreditation and approvals voluntary (like ISO-9000 etc) as opposed to mandatory.

this kind of power always winds up abused.

it’s just basic horse sense.