The Aug. 21 FDA tweet which started the propaganda campaign claiming Americans were dropping like flies after ingesting horse de-wormer was based on false information put out the day before in a Mississippi health alert, a report said.
You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it. https://t.co/TWb75xYEY4
— U.S. FDA (@US_FDA) August 21, 2021
Within two days of the tweet, "23.7 million people had seen that Pulitzer-worthy bit of Twitter talk. Hundreds of thousands more got the message on Facebook, LinkedIn, and from the Today Show’s 3 million-follower Instagram account," Mary Beth Pfeiffer and Linda Bonvie wrote in an Oct. 16 investigative report for Rescue on substack.com.
The FDA/Big Media propaganda campaign targeting ivermectin, which continues to this day on some outlets who continue to push the horse de-wormer narrative, began with one sentence in a Mississippi health alert on reports to the state’s poison control center: “At least 70% of the recent calls have been related to ingestion of livestock or animal formulations of ivermectin purchased at livestock supply centers.”
The FDA, however, did not vet the data, the report said. Instead, it pounced on the opportunity, as one email obtained by the reporters said, "to remind the public of our own warnings for ivermectin."
Still unanswered is the question their actions have had on those struggling to survive after being infected with Covid.
"In the thick of a fierce Covid wave in the American South, no official at the FDA, or reporter for that matter, seemed to ask: 70 percent of what? Instead, government and media joined forces against a public health threat that, in retrospect, was vastly exaggerated," Pfeiffer and Bonvie noted.
What ensued was a Big Media propaganda storm which included Rolling Stone telling the horrifying tale of Oklahoma hospitals that were so jammed with ivermectin overdoses that gunshot victims had to wait for care. It wasn’t true.
Twice, The New York Times printed corrections of the same false information from Mississippi, which it described in one article and later removed, as “a staggering number of calls.”
The Associated Press, Washington Post, and The Guardian also corrected their "reporting" on the alert.
The Times’ correction summed it up: “This article misstated the percentage of recent calls to the Mississippi poison control center related to ivermectin. It was 2 percent, not 70 percent.”
Related: Hospital refuses court order to administer ivermectin; 74-year-old veteran dies, September 8, 2021
Pfeiffer and Bonvie noted in their report that, "in real numbers, six calls were received for ingestion of ivermectin. Four were for the antiparasitic drug given to livestock."
If ivermectin reports had indeed been 70 percent of calls in the 20 days covered by the alert, about 800 would have flooded the poison control line. Instead, eight came in. Two callers sought information. Five had mild symptoms. One was advised to seek further care, according to data from the Mississippi Poison Control Center.
There is the FDA/Big Media propaganda, and then there is reality.
In reality, Pfeiffer and Bonvie discovered in their investigation, 10 of 24 ivermectin calls to the Mississippi center from July 31 to Aug. 22 merely sought information. It is a common occurrence at poison control centers. In 2019, poison control centers logged more than 47,000 reports for acetaminophen and 83,000 for ibuprofen.
According to VigiAccess, which tracks drugs for the World Health Organization (WHO), since 1992, 20 deaths have been linked to inexpensive, off-patent ivermectin. By contrast, since just the spring of 2020, 570 deaths have been linked to remdesivir, an expensive, patented Covid drug.
The reporters noted: "The question is why remdesivir is being used at all, with a WHO recommendation against it and a new Lancet study finding 'no clinical benefit.' "
So, why is ivermectin being dismissed by the FDA, Big Tech, and Big Media as an effective treatment for Covid in the U.S. when other nations, including India, have had success using it?
The Aug. 21 FDA tweet "arrived just as ivermectin prescriptions were soaring, up twenty-four-fold in August from before the pandemic," Pfeiffer and Bonvie noted. "These were legal prescriptions written by doctors who, presumably, had read the studies, learned from experience, and decided for themselves. Indeed, 20 percent of prescriptions are written off-label, namely for other than an approved use."
The story behind the FDA tweet "that went ’round the world shows how a myth was born about a safe, if now controversial, human drug that was FDA-approved for parasitic disease in 1996 and bestowed the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015. It is a story in which the barest grain of truth morphed into an anything-goes media firestorm," the reporters note.
"The effort to vilify ivermectin broadly has helped curb the legal supply of a safe drug. That’s what drove people to livestock medicine in the first place."
INFORMATION WORLD WAR: How We Win . . . . Executive Intelligence Brief
