Remember that time on Twitter when a Federal Agency publicly stated that Ivermectin was for horses and cows, not people? That was The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). They now claim that calling it horse paste wasn’t meant to prevent people from taking Ivermectin.
“The cited statements were not directives. They were not mandatory. They were recommendations. They said what parties should do. They said, for example, why you should not take ivermectin to treat COVID-19. They did not say you may not do it, you must not do it. They did not say it’s prohibited or it’s unlawful. They also did not say that doctors may not prescribe ivermectin,” Isaac Belfer, one of the lawyers, told the court during the Nov. 1 hearing in federal court in Texas.
It reminds me of the tale of the murder of Thomas a Becket. Four knights killed the Archbishop after overhearing their king being distraught by Becket’s actions. It was never Henry’s intention that the Archbishop be killed, but there it was, and there was no taking it back. All a misunderstanding.
And so it goes with the US Food and Drug Administration. “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all, Stop it.”
“Why you should not use Ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19.”
News and media sites went all-in with stories about how the FDA declared that Ivermectin was for horses and cows, not people. Our local ABC news affiliate did a biased, unbalanced, and incomplete report that included a picture of the Ivermectin horse paste. Yours probably did, too.
The Local and national COVID Karens went wild, as CNN, MSNBC, and all the alphabet networks went to war on Ivermectin based on one tweet.
Efforts to improve access to Ivermectin with legislation at the state level were met with resistance based on the FDA and the mountain of media lies that built up around it.
I guess they were just kidding around. But to my knowledge, the FDA never attempted to correct the record, not in any meaningful way, and that assault continued until they were sued this year in Federal court. In the interim, doctors and pharmacists came under assault by state and local boards of health and licensing over the off-label use of Ivermectin to treat patients at risk or with COVID-19.
A use that was permissible under FDA rules as the FDA long ago licensed Ivermectin for humans until politics stepped in to interfere. A politics the FDA deliberately invoked with their tweet.
I guess they were kidding around, but the FDA never came to the defense of doctors or Pharmacists being threatened by state or local boards of health or practice. Folks who may have had to lawyer up to defend their livelihood based on the perception of the FDA’s position, which it is now defending in court, as noted.
“The cited statements were not directives. They were not mandatory.” You might want to tell that to Democrats in Congress. They are framing Donald Trump over J6 based on even flimsier perceptions of his use of language.
Two other problems come immediately to mind. First, many people who could be alive if the FDA had never started the war on Ivermectin died.
Second, suppose the FDA gets the case dismissed. I think they may be throwing a lot of folks under the bus, like every state and local board of health or legislative body (and more than a few hospitals) that acted to infringe on the doctor-patient relationships based on the Tweet and the Media broadsides that followed.
[EpochTimes] The hearing was held in a case brought by three doctors who say the FDA illegally interfered with their ability to prescribe medicine to their patients when it issued statements on ivermectin, an anti-parasitic that has shown positive results in some trials against COVID-19. …
Plaintiffs in the case include Dr. Paul Marik, who began utilizing ivermectin in his COVID-19 treatment protocol in 2020 while he was chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School and director of the intensive care unit at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital.
After the FDA’s statements, Marik was told to remove the protocol from the school’s servers while Sentara issued a memorandum to hospitals telling them to stop using ivermectin against COVID-19, with a citation to the FDA.
Marik was forced to resign from his positions because he couldn’t prescribe ivermectin due to the FDA’s statements, the suit alleges.
Did the FDA step in and correct the error made by Norfolk General Hospital (or any hospital?)? Not to my knowledge. Quiet as a church mouse until they needed to ask a judge to dismiss a complaint against them for actions directly resulting from their behavior.
Actions that should have significant downstream consequences no matter which way this goes.
