Authored by Zachary Steiber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has agreed to remove social media posts and webpages that urged people to stop taking ivermectin to treat COVID-19, according to a settlement dated March 21.

The FDA has already removed a page that said: “Should I take ivermectin to prevent or treat COVID-19? No.”

Within 21 days, the FDA will remove another page titled, “why you should not use ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19,” according to the settlement announcement, which was filed with federal court in southern Texas.

“The FDA has not authorized or approved ivermectin for use in preventing or treating COVID-19 in humans or animals,” the page currently states. It also says that data do not show ivermectin is effective against COVID-19, despite how some studies it cites show ivermectin is effective against the illness.

The FDA in the settlement is also agreeing to delete multiple social media posts that came out strongly against ivermectin, including one that stated: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”

In exchange, doctors who sued the agency are dismissing their claims, the filing states.

“FDA loses its war on ivermectin and agrees to remove all social media posts and consumer directives regarding ivermectin and COVID, including its most popular tweet in FDA history,” Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, one of the doctors, said in a statement. “This landmark case sets an important precedent in limiting FDA overreach into the doctor-patient relationship.”

“We are extremely pleased with the outcome of the settlement as it is a victory for every doctor and patient in the United States,” added Dr. Paul Marik, chief scientific officer of the FLCCC Alliance and another plaintiff. “The FDA interfered in the practice of medicine with their irresponsible language and posts about ivermectin. We will never know how many lives were affected because patients were denied access to a lifesaving treatment because their doctor was ‘just following the FDA.’”

An FDA spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email that the agency “has chosen to resolve this lawsuit rather than continuing to litigate over statements that are between two and nearly four years old.”

“FDA has not admitted any violation of law or any wrongdoing, disagrees with the plaintiffs’ allegation that the agency exceeded its authority in issuing the statements challenged in the lawsuit, and stands by its authority to communicate with the public regarding the products it regulates,” the spokesperson said. “FDA has not changed its position that currently available clinical trial data do not demonstrate that ivermectin is effective against COVID-19. The agency has not authorized or approved ivermectin for use in preventing or treating COVID-19.”

Ivermectin was approved by the FDA in 1996 to treat several conditions, including onchocerciasis, a tropical disease caused by a parasitic worm.

In the United States, it’s common for doctors to prescribe medicine off-label, or for a different purpose than the one for which the medicine is approved.

After some doctors began prescribing ivermectin for COVID-19, the FDA ramped up its campaign, including the Aug. 21, 2021, post on Twitter, now known as X.

Dr. Bowden and two other doctors sued the FDA, arguing the agency’s actions went beyond its authority, as conferred on it by Congress.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown dismissed the case in 2022, ruling that the FDA did not act outside the authority. But an appeals court in 2023 ruled in favor of the doctors, finding that the agency “has identified no authority allowing it to recommend consumers ‘stop’ taking medicine.”

Between the time of the ruling and the settlement, the FDA refused to change any of its statements on ivermectin, and asked for a fresh dismissal of the suit.

The Case

Drs. Robert Apter, Bowden, and Marik brought the case in 2022. They said they suffered repercussions after prescribing ivermectin to patients with COVID-19, and that the FDA was to blame.

Dr. Apter, for instance, said that pharmacists refused to fill the prescriptions, citing the FDA.

“This refusal delays his patients in obtaining their prescribed treatment—when early intervention is paramount—while they look for a pharmacy to fill their prescription, if they can find one at all,” the suit states.

He also said that insurance companies were refusing to pay for ivermectin to treat COVID-19.

The suit said the FDA illegally interfered with the relationships between the doctors and patients. The doctors said with regard to ivermectin, the FDA overstepped the authority conferred on it in the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.

Government lawyers argued that the FDA was acting within the confines of the law, and succeeded in getting the dismissal.

Judge Brown, appointed under President Donald Trump, said the FDA’s powers were only limited with regard to medical devices.

“As there is no statute limiting the FDA’s actions here, it cannot have acted outside of any statutory limitations,” he wrote in his ruling. “Further, it cannot be said that the FDA had no colorable basis of authority. The FDA is charged by Congress with protecting public health and ensuring that regulated medical products are safe and effective, among other things.”

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit disagreed, finding that the law did not authorize the FDA to give medical advice.

“FDA can inform, but it has identified no authority allowing it to recommend consumers ‘stop’ taking medicine,” U.S. Circuit Judge Don Willett, appointed under President Trump, wrote for the court. The appeals court remanded the case back to the district court.

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

“Those who organized the disaster will take advantage of the inevitable discontent arising from efforts to overcome it, for if there is one thing that they are skilled in, it is demagoguery.”

- Theodore Dalrymple

Can you feel it? The tension rising to the red-line? It runs clear through all of Western Civ. We are ruled by governments of fiends. But now, the sun rides higher in the sky. The sap is rising in the northern forests. The earth heaves. The buds swell and blush. Something is in the air. The animals are waking from their long winter sleep. The natives are restless.

The two traditional political divisions, liberal and conservative died with Covid. Now there are simply the sane versus the insane. The sane have had enough of being pushed around by the insane. The insane don’t register much of what reality tries to tell them. They have a body of insane ideas to comfort and protect them from the reality’s rigors. To call that body of ideas an “ideology” is way too polite.That the insane call themselves “progressive,” is a signature of their insanity.

Progress toward what better state of things? Toward a supremacy of fiends, sadists, degenerates, and morons seizing riches and power by every dishonest means possible outside the rule of law and common decency? It’s not even suitable to call them “communists.” They lack the necessary idealism for that.

They don’t expect to put their shoulders to the wheel with their fellow man. They just want to grab your stuff and then kill you so they don’t have to hear any complaints.

The insane do not believe any of the theoretical bullshit they want to force you to swallow. They don’t care about climate change. It’s just a cudgel they use to beat everyone over the head so they can steal your stuff. They don’t care about “democracy.” It’s just a line of bullshit to cover up their election-stealing. Do you suppose that sane people would keep using electronic vote-tabulating machines that were demonstrably connected to the Internet, and thus hackable, if they cared about election integrity? Of course not. They would arrange p.d.q. to junk them and use paper ballots, and only in person at polling places, with “absentee” exceptions only for people out of the country.

The insane do not care about public health. Everything that is known about the Covid-19 vaccinations tells you that they are unsafe and don’t prevent infection or transmission of a flu-like illness that might not even be what it was officially labeled as. Our public health officials in the FDA, the CDC, and in other corners of the Department of health and Human Services, lie about everything they’re responsible for. This week, the CDC (under Director Mandy Cohen) released a 148-page study on myocarditis reactions to mRNA shots. Every word on every page of the document was redacted. The CDC printed countless copies of the report with 148 utterly blank pages, and then proffered them to the news media. How is that not insane?

The insane do not care about the rule of law. The conduct of “Lawfare” is the subversion of the law by dishonest means. It is a species of racketeering. And that is why Lawfare rogues such Marc Elias, Norm Eisen, Andrew Weissmann, Mary McCord, Lisa Monaco, Matthew Graves, and Merrick Garland, should be charged under the federal RICO statutes for conspiring to deprive sane citizens of their rights and property in the many cases related to the 1/6/21 riot at the US Capitol.

It is, so far, an abiding mystery of contemporary history as to how New York Attorney General Letitia James managed to get away with prosecuting a real estate case against Donald Trump that was no more than victimless business-as-usual between a borrower and his lenders. Ms. James ran for that elected office promising to “get” Mr. Trump on something, anything. That is not how the rule of law works. Under the rule of law, first you determine that there is a crime and then look for who did the crime.

Letitia James must be insane and/or pretty stupid. The short-term gain of stealing Mr. Trump’s property under a false color-of-law and creating impediments to his election campaign, will, sooner or later, blow back at her as a matter of malicious prosecution and, plausibly, racketeering as well. (With whom did she conspire to bring this case? We shall find out.) She will eventually be disgraced publicly as her teammate Fani Willis has already been disgraced in Fulton County, Georgia. I’ll tell you something that all sane people now know but won’t talk about for fear of being crushed by the levers of Lawfare: this looks like a concerted effort by people-of-color to railroad people of non-color. If you think that is a good thing for race relations in our country, then you are insane.

Here are a bunch of other things that are insane: Re-litigating the first amendment is insane. It means what it says, and states it plainly. The open border is insane. No credible sovereign polity would allow it. It would be opposed with force, if necessary. Turning children into transsexuals on a wholesale basis is insane, and fiendishly so. Everybody knows that it is not good for the children or for our society as a whole. But fiends got to fiend, and if you try to deprive them of being fiends then you are guilty of “hate.”

The war in Ukraine is insane. We certainly didn’t ignite it in the service of “democracy.” Our pawn there, Mr. Zelensky, canceled the national elections last year. The war was arguably an effort by our CIA to deprive Russia of its market for natgas in Europe, and thus deprive Russia of a great deal of money, that is, of prosperity. The project failed. Russia overcame NATO’s proxy army and found other markets for its gas. Blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines only served to impoverish and weaken our NATO allies, who no longer have affordable gas to run their industries. The leaders of those allies were too insane to recognize that the Nord Stream op was an act-of-war against them. They were also busy destroying themselves, like the USA, with open borders. They will end up in a new medievalism, ruled by savages. You’d have to be insane to arrange that for yourself.

What’s most obviously insane in our country is that the insane party is pretending to nominate the mentally unfit White House place-keeper, “Joe Biden,” for reelection. You would think that if this party wanted to retain power, they would run a candidate who, though insane, was not also visibly senile. But the rank and file of this party are too insane to see that this dodge is not working. They are pretending with all their might that this is okay, that the growing faction of the sane don’t notice.

Sensing the growing impatience with insanity among the voters, the insane party has reached its point of terminal desperation. What will they try next? Murder? Why not? Nothing else seemed to work. They are too far gone in their insanity to understand that winter is over. We’ve entered the season of rebirth and renewal, starting with a renewed appreciation for being sane and for that indispensable ingredient that makes liberty in a free society possible: good faith. Really, the only question left is: how rough do they intend to play to prevent the return of sanity and good faith?

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