people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
- A. Huxley
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by Belligerent Savant » Thu May 20, 2021 11:20 am
people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
- A. Huxley
by conniption » Sun May 23, 2021 6:28 am
In Explosive Topics
Dr Vernon Coleman explains how this war has been planned for years. He details the many ways in which a corrupt and deceitful enemy has deliberately suppressed the truth and demonised truth-tellers to destroy their credibility. He also explains what must be done if we are to win this war.
Distrust the Government, avoid mass media and fight the lies.
For further unbiased information about other important matters, please visit https://www.vernoncoleman.org
by Belligerent Savant » Tue May 25, 2021 9:36 am
The Propaganda Multiplier
How Global News Agencies and
Western Media Report on Geopolitics
It is one of the most important aspects of our media system, and yet hardly known to the public: most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.
The key role played by these agencies means Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording. In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages around the world.
A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles were based in whole or in part on agency reports, yet 0% on investigative research. Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews were in favor of a US and NATO intervention, while propaganda was attributed exclusively to the opposite side.
by dada » Fri Jun 18, 2021 2:14 pm
by conniption » Fri Jun 18, 2021 11:43 pm
Hightower Lowdown
CENSORED MATERIAL: Free the free press from Wall Street plunderers
December 1, 2018
Editors’ note: The following is the column that was rejected by the Creators Syndicate, who feared reprisal from the corporations mentioned in the article. Read more about the controversy at the Austin Chronicle; for more information, contact Deanna Zandt, deanna@jimhightower.com.
A two-panel cartoon I recently saw showed a character with a sign saying: “First they came for the reporters.” In the next panel, his sign says: “We don’t know what happened after that.”
It was, of course, a retort to Donald Trump’s ignorant campaign to demonize the news media as “ the enemy of the people.” But when it comes to America’s once-proud newspapers, their worst enemy is not Trump – nor is it the rising cost of newsprint or the “free” digital news on websites. Rather, the demise of the real news reporting by our city and regional papers is a product of their profiteering owners. Not the families and companies that built and nurtured true journalism, but the new breed of fast-buck hucksters who’ve scooped up hundreds of America’s newspapers from the bargain bins of media sell-offs.
The buyers are hedge-fund scavengers with names like Digital First and GateHouse. They know nothing about journalism and care less, for they’re ruthless Wall Street profiteers out to grab big bucks fast by slashing the journalistic and production staffs of each paper, voiding all employee benefits (from pensions to free coffee in the breakroom), shriveling the paper’s size and news content, selling the presses and other assets, tripling the price of their inferior product – then declaring bankruptcy, shutting down the paper, and auctioning off the bones before moving on to plunder another town’s paper.
By 2014, America’s two largest media chains were not venerable publishers who believe that a newspaper’s mission includes a commitment to truth and a civic responsibility, but GateHouse and Digital First, whose managers believe that good journalism is measured by the personal profit they can squeeze from it. As revealed last year in an American Prospect article, GateHouse executives had demanded that its papers cut $27 million from their operating expenses. Thousands of newspaper employees suffered that $27 million cut in large part because one employee – the hedge fund’s CEO – had extracted $54 million in personal pay from the conglomerate, including an $11 million bonus.
To these absentee owners and operators, our newspapers are just mines, entitling them to extract enormous financial wealth and social well-being from our communities.
The core idea of the “civic commons” is that we are a self-governing people, capable of creating and sustaining a society based on common good.
A noble aspiration!
But achieving it requires a basic level of community-wide communication – a reliable resource that digs out and shares truths so people know enough about what’s going on to be self-governing. This is the role Americans have long expected their local and regional newspapers to play – papers that are not merely in our communities, but of, by, and for them.
Of course, being profit-seeking entities, that are usually enmeshed in the local moneyed establishment, papers have commonly (and often infamously) fallen far short of their noble democratic purpose. Overall, though, a town’s daily (or, better yet, two or more dailies) makes for a more robust civic life by devoting journalistic resources to truth telling.
But local ownership matters, as some 1,500 of our towns have learned after Wall Street’s corporate demigods of greed have swept in without warning to seize their paper, gut its journalistic mission, and devour its assets. For example, Digital Media, a huge private-equity profiteer, snatched the St. Paul Pioneer Press and, demanding a ridiculous 25 percent profit margin from its purchase, stripped the newsroom staff from a high of 225 journalists to 25!
As Robert Kuttner reported, these tyrannical private equity firms are paper constructs that produce nothing but profits for faraway speculators. He notes that the blandly-named entities only exist “thanks to three loopholes in the law” – the first lets them operate in the dark, the second provides an unlimited tax deduction for the massive amounts of money they borrow to buy up newspapers, and the third allows them to profit by intentionally bankrupting the paper they take over.
Our right to a free press is meaningless if Wall Street thieves destroy our communities’ presses. The good news is that many enterprising people are devising ways to rescue their newspapers. For more information, go to dfmworkers.org .
https://hightowerlowdown.org/2018/12/ce ... lunderers/
by Wombaticus Rex » Sat Jun 19, 2021 10:48 am
by Belligerent Savant » Sat Jun 19, 2021 12:17 pm
by stickdog99 » Sat Jun 19, 2021 12:39 pm
by Harvey » Sun Jun 20, 2021 7:15 am
by Harvey » Mon Jun 21, 2021 1:18 pm
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2021/06/assange-is-still-in-jail/
Craig Murray
Journalist, Historian, Former Ambassador, Human Rights Activist
Assange Is Still in Jail
June 21, 2021
Julian Assange remains in a maximum security jail, despite never being sentenced for anything but a long ago served spell for bail-jumping, and despite the US Government’s request for extradition having been refused.
It is approaching six months since I was in court to hear the decision rejecting Julian’s extradition, and it was in the same week that Baraitser ordered Julian be kept in jail pending a US appeal. Since then the US has submitted its appeal, which is somewhat intemperate in its efforts to discredit a number of highly distinguished expert witnesses at the hearing. The defence has submitted its response, including notice of points, where Baraitser found for the US, that the defence intend to counter-appeal.
Then for over three months – nothing. The High Court has not only not set a date for the US appeal, it has not even indicated if the US appeal meets the bar to be heard – there is some thought that the appeal lacks any arguable points of law and may be simply rejected. But the seemingly leisurely approach of the High Court to looking at the matter is entirely inappropriate given that, in the meantime, an innocent man is suffering the most extreme form of incarceration available in the UK.
Assange’s status is that his extradition has been rejected. He ought not to be in jail at all, let alone in such harsh conditions.
By contrast, I am sitting in my study despite being sentenced to eight months in jail. I am at liberty while the Supreme Court decides whether to hear my appeal. My lawyers believe, from their contact with the court administrators, that it is entirely possible that the Supreme Court will decide on whether to take my appeal, within the four week suspension of my jail sentence granted by Lady Dorrian. This is because otherwise I might be imprisoned.
Why can the Supreme Court potentially decide whether to hear my appeal so quickly due to the threat of imprisonment, when the High Court is taking six times or more as long to decide whether to hear the US appeal, when an innocent man is already imprisoned? It makes no sense.
It is not due to complexity: while of course Julian’s case is more important, any points of law at issue in the US appeal are notably less complex than in my own appeal. To me, the only possible explanation is the determination of the state to keep Julian imprisoned at all costs.
It is now plain that Biden intends to press forward with the charging of Julian, a publisher and journalist, under the Espionage Act. This despite the opposition, however belated, of every major news organisation and every major civil liberties oriented NGO. Biden’s recent European trip was choreographed to establish his full credentials as a Cold War warrior and to ensure a western orthodoxy of hostility towards China. Biden is proving, as predicted, a perfect representative of the security and military state.
Having seen off the $15 minimum wage and proposals for meaningful “New Deal” expenditure, Biden can get down to the serious neo-liberal work of improving the fortunes of the ultra-wealthy.
In October 2020, I published a post specifically about the massive suppression on the internet of information about the corrupt dealings of Joe and Hunter Biden, particularly in Ukraine. On 10 February 2021 I published an article about the sacking of Nathan Robinson from the Guardian, which included his statement that the Guardian had spiked his column about Hunter Biden’s corruption.
Russell Brand caused a stir last week when he spoke about the suppression of information about Biden corruption, along precisely the lines of my article last October. He was of course immediately “othered”, as has been Glenn Greenwald.
There is a fascinating phenomenon in western democracies of fake liberal left political parties acting as enablers of the global billionaire elite. Biden, Starmer, Sturgeon, Macron, Trudeau, Sanchez, all pretend to be some kind of alternative to rampant neo-liberalism while acting as its most effective enablers. All are very willing advocates of not just neo-liberalism but the military and security complex and the NATO cold war stance, plus companions in the steady ratcheting down on civil liberties. None has the slightest intention of closing the gap between ordinary people and the super-wealthy.
The democracy of false choice appears to be a decent working title for the current state of western society.
by Grizzly » Mon Jun 21, 2021 5:51 pm
Okay here it is (just remove the space) a backup from 2016-11-23 courtesy of whichever RI member it was who made it. Available for thirty days from this file host (even after that I'm happy to upload it again upon request): https ://ufile.io/6kj05iv6
by Grizzly » Tue Jun 22, 2021 5:38 pm
“We were forced to take immediate action because we will never allow Jeff Bezos and Amazon to censor us from speaking freely about medical treatments, medical studies and individual liberty, or from challenging the government narrative surrounding COVID-19 vaccines,” the AFLDS said in a statement.
“Jeff Bezos and Amazon cannot argue with our scientific data and facts, so they would rather delete us entirely,” the statement added. “We have already been blacklisted on social media, and cannot host videos on YouTube. We must build our own internet servers that cannot be silenced by Big Tech, Big Pharma or Big Government.”
by Joe Hillshoist » Tue Jun 22, 2021 6:22 pm
dada » 19 Jun 2021 04:14 wrote:Something in relation to this topic I feel like getting into. Start by discussing a small local paper around where I'm at. It has been around a very long time, run by three or four generations of a family. Last generation the paper had a Democratic party leaning, but was clearly all USA and not red in the leastest blush.
This generation, the kid has no interest in the paper, or the business. But the community still reads it. The paper sinks into what I'll call Norman Rockwell Americana. Not political, but then, not being political is obviously an extreme political position. Perfect stasis, and what lurks beneath is always swept further under the rug. The subgenius Bob face of mass culture reality.
For the kid though, alex jones world is news. He prints stuff out all the time from the far reaches of the illuminati satanist cabalists are new world ordering us to death corners of the Internet. But the face he presents socially is all brandnewtube, the acceptable mainstream alternative.
So the paper runs on a shoestring, as small papers do nowadays, and the owner hates the editor, who is a pillar of tbe norman rockwell community, and he doesn't want to challenge her. Now someone suggests to him that he should license the paper to them, making an endrun around the norman rockwell community by pleading poverty. Where the money is coming from is unclear, and untransparent as brandnewtube. They will present "alternative views" mixed in with norman rockwell, and the owner can even have a column. Remember, the owner has no idea how to work the press, or the business, never took an interest, just let it go on its own momentum.
Of course if this happens, the norman rockwell community will scream bloody murder, the little bit of advertising that keeps the lights on will dry up, and that will be that. But even if they accepted it, which they never will not in a million years, now the paper would just be a rehash of the mainstream dialectic, the Rockwell-Alternative production. And that will become the stasis. Maybe next generation the "progressive liberal mainstream alternative" will make a play for column space, and the process can repeat all over again.
by conniption » Wed Jun 23, 2021 1:25 am
by Belligerent Savant » Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:40 am
One of the challenges of the pandemic period is the degree to which science has become intertwined with politics. Arguments about the efficacy of mask use or ventilators, or the viability of repurposed drugs like hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, or even the pandemic’s origins, were quashed from the jump in the American commercial press, which committed itself to a regime of simplified insta-takes made opposite to Donald Trump’s comments. With a few exceptions, Internet censors generally tracked with this conventional wisdom, which had the effect of moving conspiracy theories and real scientific debates alike far underground.
A consequence is that issues like the ivermectin question have ended up in the same public bucket as debates over foreign misinformation, hate speech, and even incitement. The same Republican Senator YouTube suspended for making statements in support of ivermectin, Ron Johnson, has also been denounced in the press for failing to call the January 6th riots an insurrection, resulting in headlines that blend the two putative offenses.
“You have these ideas about the need to censor hate speech, calls for violence, and falsity,” Kory says, “and they’ve put science on the same shelf.”
As a result, doctors and organizations that may have little to do with politics but have advocated for ivermectin, from Dr. Tess Lawrie’s British Ivermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD) to California pulmonologist Roger Seheult to many others, have been shut down online with the same unilateral abruptness platforms apply to hate speech or threats. Dr. Sabine Hazan, a gastroenterologist and CEO of a genetic sequencing laboratory called ProGenaBiome in Ventura, California, was blindsided. She got involved with ivermectin when she was pulling out the stops for Covid-19 patients.
“I’m a doctor. My job isn’t to do nothing. If I wanted to do nothing, I’d be selling shampoo,” Hazan says. When patients got really sick, she tried everything, treating off-label with a number of drugs in combination, including ivermectin. Eventually, she ended up taking it upon herself to run clinical trials with repurposed, off-patent drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, fearing that the lack of a profit angle would prevent a major corporate effort in that direction.
“I felt, no one is going to be investigating a cheap solution, so I did it myself,” she says.
Some weeks ago, Hazan got up early on a Sunday to present findings to a group of physicians that included Dr. Kylie Wagstaff, one of the physicians in the first in vitro ivermectin study, a family doctor in Zimbabwe named Jackie Stone, and others. She uploaded the talk on YouTube, and “lo and behold, it got taken down. It’s amazing. These are doctors talking. It’s not anyone selling anything.”
Why Has "Ivermectin" Become a Dirty Word?
At the worst moment, Internet censorship has driven scientific debate itself underground
On December 8, 2020, when most of America was consumed with what The Guardian called Donald Trump’s “desperate, mendacious, frenzied and sometimes farcical” attempt to remain president, the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing on the “Medical Response to Covid-19.” One of the witnesses, a pulmonologist named Dr. Pierre Kory, insisted he had great news.
“We have a solution to this crisis,” he said unequivocally. “There is a drug that is proving to have a miraculous impact.”
Kory was referring to an FDA-approved medicine called ivermectin. A genuine wonder drug in other realms, ivermectin has all but eliminated parasitic diseases like river blindness and elephantiasis, helping discoverer Satoshi Ōmura win the Nobel Prize in 2015. As far as its uses in the pandemic went, however, research was still scant. Could it really be a magic Covid-19 bullet?
Kory had been trying to make such a case, but complained to the Senate that public efforts had been stifled, because “every time we mention ivermectin, we get put in Facebook jail.” A Catch-22 seemed to be ensnaring science. With the world desperate for news about an unprecedented disaster, Silicon Valley had essentially decided to disallow discussion of a potential solution — disallow calls for more research and more study — because not enough research and study had been done. Once, people weren’t allowed to take drugs before they got FDA approval. Now, they can’t talk about them.
“I want to try to be respectful because I think the intention is correct,” Kory told the committee. “They want to cut down on misinformation, and many doctors are claiming X, Y, and Z work in this disease. The challenge is, you’re also silencing those of us who are expert, reasoned, researched, and extremely knowledgeable.”
Eight million people watched Kory say that on the C-SPAN video of the hearing posted to YouTube, but YouTube, in what appears to be a first, removed video of the hearing, as even Senate testimony was now deemed too dangerous for public consumption. YouTube later suspended the Wisconsin Senator who’d invited Kory to the hearing, and when Kory went on podcasts to tell his story, YouTube took down those videos, too. Kory was like a ghost who floated through the Internet, leaving suspensions and blackened warning screens everywhere he went.
The December, 2020 hearing on ivermectin wasn’t Kory’s first Senatorial rodeo. In May of that same year, he’d appeared before the same committee on a different subject: the use of corticosteroids in treating Covid-19 patients.
Kory belongs to a group called the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), founded by a well-known if controversial figure, Dr. Paul Marik. The author of 4 books and 400 peer-reviewed articles, Marik is a colossal figure in Critical Care — the word “giant” came up in more than one interview for this story — yet one with a definite reputation for bucking medical convention. At the outset of the pandemic, Marik and a group of like-minded colleagues around the world got in contact to form the FLCCC, trading stories about what doctors were seeing on the ground with Covid-19 cases everywhere from Italy to New York to South America.
“It was like a command center,” Kory recalls. “And we were reading papers like you wouldn’t believe.”
One of the first questions the group tackled was the proper treatment plan for hospitalized Covid-19 patients. Marik was famous for disagreeing with conventional wisdom about treatment protocols. He waged a long campaign to argue that the widely accepted practice of “fluid-loading” or “large-volume fluid resuscitation”— pumping patients in septic shock full of fluids — is unnecessary and may even be harmful or “worsen shock.” He was far from the only critical care doctor to have such thoughts, with some even comparing the groupthink around “fluid-bolusing” to the medieval certainty about bloodletting.
Such debates are normal in medicine, where authorities may come down on one side or the other of debates for a time, but consensus isn’t Talmudic law. Doctors argue in good faith about best practices, just like journalists argue about “objectivity” or legislators argue about everything from the filibuster or public campaign financing.
With Covid-19, early consensus favored what Kory calls a “supportive care only” strategy: water, Tylenol for fever, ventilation if necessary — anything, he says, but corticosteroids. “That was the one thing they agreed on, no steroids,” he says. It’s true that the WHO initially recommended against corticosteroid therapy for coronaviruses for a variety of reasons. However, there were many doctors who were anxious to bring more weapons to the fight against Covid-19.
Marik and the FLCCC were in the latter camp. They developed a protocol for Covid-19 patients called Math+ that included vitamin C, the blood thinner heparin, and the steroid methylprednisone. A few doctors in the U.S. tried out Math+ early on, but official bodies remained against it, and some doctors found, and still find, the claims about the vitamin C treatments in particular either dubious or harmless but unlikely to be effective (one I emailed about Math+ sent back an “eye-roll” emoji). Incidentally: while the FLCCC doctors have good reputations, their ideas have also met with plenty of pushback. MedPage described Kory and Marik as having a “knack for making headlines,” in a piece full of doctor quotes exuding clearly mixed enthusiasm for their “maverick” colleagues.
That didn’t make them wrong about steroids, however. Kory in his May 6 testimony reported that FLCCC doctors, in analyzing the use of steroids in treating other diseases like SARS, found that “contrary to the WHO recommendations… corticosteroids were life-saving in those prior pandemics when given to anyone beyond mild illness.”
Within months, researchers at Oxford released the results of a large-scale, randomized, controlled study called the “RECOVERY trial,” which found that steroids were highly effective for patients with severe and critical Covid-19. By September, the WHO issued a new guidance with a “strong” recommendation for steroid use for such patients.
“We were criticized,” Kory says now. “But it became the standard of care.”
Meanwhile, doctors all over the globe launched studies into a huge range of Covid-19 treatment possibilities, from the protease inhibitors used to treat HIV to the ace inhibitors used to treat high blood pressure to interferons to zinc and vitamin D and dozens of other candidates. Ivermectin was just one the many. It generated a little buzz within the medical community when an April, 2020 study in Antiviral Research found it inhibited SARS CoV-2 from multiplying under a microscope.
Other studies were less flattering, though, with one insisting humans would need to massively overdose in order to get even a theoretical benefit. As of last summer, the official take on ivermectin was unequivocal. The FDA on August 26th of 2020, acting out of concern that people might self-medicate using anti-parasitic drugs intended for their pets, issued a stern ruling.
“The FDA is concerned about the health of consumers who may self-medicate by taking ivermectin products intended for animals,” they wrote. “People should never take animal drugs.” A day later, on August 27th, the National Institutes of Health issued a guideline that “recommends against the use of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19, except in a clinical trial (AIII).”
For most of last year, ivermectin was not on the radar of the FLCCC doctors. One by one, however, studies boosting ivermectin kept coming to their attention. These trials were going on in Egypt, Bangladesh, Brazil, Spain, India, Peru, Paraguay, and other countries, and many claimed dramatic results.
They were small studies, but this was and is by no means a fringe or dismissed topic, with upwards of 220 papers published in just two years. Some were genuinely thought-provoking, like for instance one hypothesizing that the reason African countries have a lower incidence of Covid-19 is because so many Africans are already taking ivermectin. Absolutely none of this was hardcore proof, but there was reason to keep researching.
A consultant to the WHO, Dr. Andrew Hill of the University of Liverpool, presented an analysis of these ivermectin studies that came to a lot of the same conclusions as the FLCCC, in perhaps less excitable tones. Ivermectin was an alluring possibility, Hill said, because a course of treatment in third world countries costs just $1-$2, and though the available studies were nearly all small — between 100 and 500 subjects — there were some very attractive results. Overall, though, there wasn’t enough data to make a WHO recommendation.
Not everyone was impressed. Dr. Zain Chaglia of McMaster University in Ontario wrote a long Twitter thread calling the studies Hill cited “very low grade” evidence. “This is complete echoes of what happened in hydroxychloroquine - where people raced to prescribe it offline, rather than study it in trials,” he said. “There is a higher standard here for all.”
The word got out around the world fast, and in many poorer countries, huge portions of the population began regimes of self-medication, often with the assent of local governments. In May of last year, health care workers passed out 350,000 doses in Bolivia, while a university in Peru announced it would give away 30,000 doses. Some doctors and researchers began to complain that it had become difficult to do studies on the drug, because too many people were already on it. “What we’re having is a populist treatment, instead of an evidence-based treatment,” Patricia Garcia, a former Peruvian health minister who was running an early ivermectin trial, complained to Nature.
Still, the issue with most of the early studies wasn’t that they showed negative results, so much as insufficient or ambiguous data. The overall take was promising, but not definitive. This was in this context that Kory returned to the Senate last December. He said a lot had changed in the 3-4 months since the first NIH-FDA rulings. “Mountains of data have emerged showing the miraculous effectiveness of ivermectin,” he urged. Describing an Argentine study in which no one out of 800 subjects given Ivermectin had fallen ill, he said, “It obliterates transmission of this virus. If you take it, you will not get sick.”
Kory says he regrets using the world “miraculous,” that “the descriptor made me seem uncredible and sensationalizing.” He wonders if “some slight moderation would have been more ‘palatable’ for the censors,” but at the same time isn’t sure anything would have made a difference. Was the language over-the-top? Maybe. Was what Kory said so dangerous that it needed to be removed from the Internet? That’s harder to argue, unless you see such talk as part of a larger pattern of offenses, which seems to be part of the issue with Covid-19 content moderation generally.
One of the challenges of the pandemic period is the degree to which science has become intertwined with politics. Arguments about the efficacy of mask use or ventilators, or the viability of repurposed drugs like hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, or even the pandemic’s origins, were quashed from the jump in the American commercial press, which committed itself to a regime of simplified insta-takes made opposite to Donald Trump’s comments. With a few exceptions, Internet censors generally tracked with this conventional wisdom, which had the effect of moving conspiracy theories and real scientific debates alike far underground.
A consequence is that issues like the ivermectin question have ended up in the same public bucket as debates over foreign misinformation, hate speech, and even incitement. The same Republican Senator YouTube suspended for making statements in support of ivermectin, Ron Johnson, has also been denounced in the press for failing to call the January 6th riots an insurrection, resulting in headlines that blend the two putative offenses.
“You have these ideas about the need to censor hate speech, calls for violence, and falsity,” Kory says, “and they’ve put science on the same shelf.”
As a result, doctors and organizations that may have little to do with politics but have advocated for ivermectin, from Dr. Tess Lawrie’s British Ivermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD) to California pulmonologist Roger Seheult to many others, have been shut down online with the same unilateral abruptness platforms apply to hate speech or threats. Dr. Sabine Hazan, a gastroenterologist and CEO of a genetic sequencing laboratory called ProGenaBiome in Ventura, California, was blindsided. She got involved with ivermectin when she was pulling out the stops for Covid-19 patients.
“I’m a doctor. My job isn’t to do nothing. If I wanted to do nothing, I’d be selling shampoo,” Hazan says. When patients got really sick, she tried everything, treating off-label with a number of drugs in combination, including ivermectin. Eventually, she ended up taking it upon herself to run clinical trials with repurposed, off-patent drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, fearing that the lack of a profit angle would prevent a major corporate effort in that direction.
“I felt, no one is going to be investigating a cheap solution, so I did it myself,” she says.
Some weeks ago, Hazan got up early on a Sunday to present findings to a group of physicians that included Dr. Kylie Wagstaff, one of the physicians in the first in vitro ivermectin study, a family doctor in Zimbabwe named Jackie Stone, and others. She uploaded the talk on YouTube, and “lo and behold, it got taken down. It’s amazing. These are doctors talking. It’s not anyone selling anything.”
Hazan doesn’t necessarily believe ivermectin is a miracle cure by itself — “I’m not sure just ivermectin is going to do the trick” — but she’s adamant that censorship and interference by both the media and politicians is “ruining science.” Like many of the doctors who’ve been censured for discussing the topic, she believes Internet carriers and politicians alike have a fundamental misunderstanding of how medicine works.
“All science, all medicine, is a hypothesis,” she says. “Until you have a valid, verifiable, reproducible cure, it’s all hypothesis. You need humility about what you don’t know. It’s like Einstein said: if we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research.”
The suspensions and bans have triggered a dystopian chase game, in which ivermectin backers rush to take their case to media figures before the media figures themselves end up sitting next to them in the same Facebook or YouTube “jail.”
One of the most prominent examples involves Bret Weinstein, whose DarkHorse podcast is one of the faster-growing independent political shows online. In May, for instance, DarkHorse scored 4.9 million views on YouTube and generated over 43,000 new subscribers. This growth is due in significant part to the fact that Weinstein and wife Heather Heying made a conscious effort to provide a forum for discussions about Covid-19 that live outside the narrow realm of allowable debate on commercial media. Because that debate has become so constrained, independents like Weinstein have a virtual monopoly on content about a whole range of effectively banned topics.
On June 1, Weinstein did a show that included an interview with Kory called, “COVID, Ivermectin, and the Crime of the Century.” That was swiftly removed by YouTube, with a notice declaring, “Our team has reviewed your content, and, unfortunately, we think it violates our spam, deceptive practices and scams policy.” Another episode, “Why is Ivermectin not being used in other countries?” was removed with a similar warning. Two more videos were either taken down or marked with warnings, and another, with Robert Malone, the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, was taken down during the writing of this article after 587,331 views, leaving Weinstein in a precarious position.
He and Heying have two YouTube channels. After four warnings and one official strike on each channel, they’re a couple of poorly received shows away from being out of business. Weinstein is particularly concerned about their more profitable “clips” channel, which seems to have attracted more of YouTube’s attention.
“If they give me a third strike,” says Weinstein, “that would represent more than half of our income.”
YouTube, in a statement, says the distinction in Weinstein’s case has to do with actively advocating for ivermectin’s use. “While we welcome content discussing possible treatments for COVID-19, our policies don't allow videos that encourage people to use Ivermectin to treat or prevent the virus and as a result we removed videos from Bret Weinstein’s channel,” they told TK. “We apply our policies consistently to all content on YouTube, regardless of speaker or political views.”
YouTube’s policy is elaborately thought out. At least in theory, it doesn’t simply zap anyone who mentions ivermectin. It does, however, require that any discussion in favor of the drug include disclaimers that either refutes those positive claims or outlines official guidelines on the subject. In essence, YouTube is making the FDA’s current position a mandatory element of any public discussion.
Not all the platforms have the same policy. A spokesperson for Twitter says the company refrains from yanking content unless it would be “immediately dangerous to someone reading and taking action based on a Tweet (e.g. ‘drink bleach to cure COVID’).” Twitter’s standard stresses the idea of “immediate” physical harm, not unlike actual speech laws. By contrast, YouTube and Facebook have much broader and tougher rules, and the appeals process is either glacial or nonexistent.
Ivermectin may never be proven effective as a Covid-19 treatment, but its story has already appeared as a powerful metaphor of the Internet’s transformation. Once envisioned as a vast democratizing tool, which would massively raise global knowledge levels by allowing instant cross-global communication between all people, it’s morphed instead into a giant unaccountable bureaucracy for suppressing dialogue, run by people with an authoritarian vision for information flow. Many ivermectin advocates believe discussion of the the drug is being suppressed because of its status as a threat to a billion-dollar vaccine business, but it’s just as likely that its reputation worldwide as a “populist” treatment, a medicine taken by people not waiting for official validation, has made it a target of censors and pundits alike.
“I think what happened is that at the outset of the pandemic, it was decided that all information must go in one direction, from the Gods of Science down,” says Kory. “But that’s not the way it works. Science happens on the ground. That’s where the little discoveries are made. They don’t happen at the top of the mountain.”
Bruce Yaffe
Jun 18
Hi Matt. Bruce Yaffe here. (You and your dad know me) The real question is why is this drug not even being studied in western academic centers when in fact it has been vetted by some very serious infectious disease people. In fact the head biostatistician of the NHS put out a YouTube plea to Boris Johnson to encourage academic evaluation of this medicine and her plea was taken down off of YouTube.
I have been using this drug on my patients since March 2020, and have had very good clinical results across-the-board. I have been pleading with academics to research this product in an academic center. It’s inexpensive generic, safe and a very easy product to study.
A simple study would involve treatment of 50 patients with fever treated early with ivermectin versus 50 treated with placebo and after two weeks there could be a very simple outcome study at very little cost.
This has been done in centers around the world in at least 38 randomly controlled studies, but there are no studies ongoing in western academic centers and there’s no explanation as to why there is no study ongoing!
I approached a serious academic center last April before it was a political issue and I was shocked that there was no interest.
Ivermectin has in the past showed some benefit in other virus illnesses such as Mers Sars, and aids. Many studies in small far and institutions show that it works preventatively, in early disease, and even in advanced Covid.
One study even suggest a 70% decrease in mortality. Why is this not even being studied???
And why is it being suppressed and taken down like hate speech??? I do realize that this could cost the pharmacy industry billions, but I cannot personally fathom that the pharmaceutical industry’s interests are not totally focused on ending Covid‘s global holocaust.
It’s insane that Dr Marik and Dr Kory are being accused of quackery. It is equally upsetting that QAnon has adopted this cause now and accusing the deep state of suppressing a valuable product. I would hate to believe that this gives Qanon credibility.
I believe that Ultimately this drug will be proven to be of great value and in retrospect this will be one of the greatest tragedies of medicine.
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