Ivermectin Part 4: Censorship, controversy and attacks
Two years of censorship
Two years ago, your newsfeed was censored, this article details how and why. It’s part of a series I’ve written on Ivermectin, which tells a story that may surprise you. If you’re fresh to the topic, this particular article might work well as your first look. If it piques your interest, I highly recommend jumping back and reading the entire series.
Ivermectin Part 3: The People Behind the Curtain
****
Ivermectin Part 4: Censorship, controversy and attacks
Two years of censorship
As early as May 2020, Google published their first COVID specific misinformation policy. "Content that promotes prevention methods that contradict WHO or local health authorities” was explicitly banned. If the World Health Organisation was not recommending it, discussion of that treatment risked being algorithmically removed. Twitter and Facebook created near-identical policies.
Doctors can prescribe treatments if they believe they will be beneficial to their patients, but online discussion of any observed successes was explicitly banned if those treatments were not advocated by the WHO. Doctors are known to share notes on new treatment protocols, but during the pandemic, using YouTube to discuss new and effective treatments got your videos algorithmically deleted.
One of the first successes with Ivermectin was in Miami, Florida. Dr Jean and Juliana Rajter had been using Ivermectin with great success at the Broward Health Medical Center in Florida. “I’ve had nearly a 100% response rate, they all improve”, Dr Ratjer said. This was April 13th, 2020.
The news was reported at the time by NBC6 Miami, but the report is not on the NBC 6 South Florida YouTube channel. We can’t know for definite why it’s not there because removed videos leave no trace of their disappearance. What we do know is the report, which I encourage you to watch, violates YouTube’s COVID-19 policy. Had it been posted, it’s likely it would have been automatically removed. A search for the video returns nothing. Looking all the way through NBC Miami’s YouTube channel also produces nothing.
Similar examples can be found if you look carefully. This story from Richmond details a local doctor successfully using high-dose intravenous vitamin C and Zinc. It is reported on the local news website, but the video is gone from YouTube. I personally know of identical examples of news reports being removed from YouTube. Journalists from ‘inside’ the media contacted me, surprised their videos were algorithmically deleted for mentioning Ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine. Even if the videos were from ‘reputable’ sources, if they contained a single news byte saying the drug worked, the algorithm removed the video. Journalism was being censored at scale and journalists made no protest at all.
From at least May 2020, your newsfeed has been algorithmically filtered of strategies, treatments, or interventions which are not directly recommended by the WHO. Put simply, videos and content trashing Ivermectin are within the rules, videos and content suggesting it is effective are removed. Right now, as you read this, you are inside an information ecosystem being censored at scale. Think about the effect the tilted table has had on your perspective. You probably didn’t hear much about Ivermectin at all, but what you did hear was more likely to be negative because of these rules.
By December of 2020, one of the better-documented examples of this censorship occurred when Dr Pierre Kory testified before the US Senate on the growing body of evidence supporting the use of Ivermectin. The video taken down for violating YouTube’s rules. US Senate testimony was censored by YouTube, which was mass deleting videos “that contradict the World Health Organization’s medical information about COVID-19”.
The move drew criticism from a US Senator, Ron Johnson, who said “They have decided there is only one medical viewpoint allowed, and it is the viewpoint dictated by government agencies“. Doctors and commentators got the memo: suggesting anything the WHO didn’t advocate would get you labelled a misinformation guru and then silenced. People fearing for their reputation is a powerful deterrent for those tempted to question policy.
By January 2020, UK researcher Dr Tess Lawrie was forced to post her findings on Ivermectin to YouTube after urgent letters to health authorities went unanswered. The video was immediately removed.
In Australia, Professor Thomas Borody identified Ivermectin as an effective treatment as early as August 2020. Talking with Sky News Australia, Borody said ‘I don’t really know why we haven’t started treating before’. Sky News were mocked for interviewing Borody, and in the following months, at least six of their videos were purged from YouTube before they were banned from the platform entirely. YouTube got more specific in their justification, saying they no longer allowed content which “encourages people to use hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin to treat or prevent the virus”. It didn’t matter that it was one of Australia’s top medical Professors, all that mattered was it differed from WHO policy. There’s barely any reference to Professor Tom Borody on YouTube after January 2020. Any ideas Borody had on early treatment have been systematically removed from YouTube. All that’s left is a hit piece. It’s hard to know how many researchers have been silenced in this manner.
If Professors were silenced, could health agencies make their case without interference? Twitter was a great place to communicate official health strategy, but even health agencies were not spared from censorship. In Mexico, local health agencies had their Twitter accounts suspended for discussing Ivermectin. Local health authority strategy was to offer Ivermectin to people who tested positive for COVID, but to mention that on Twitter breached the rules. It forced officials to police their language, they couldn’t say ‘Ivermectin’ and instead they opted for phrases such as ‘early treatment kits’. Despite their efforts, official authorities had their accounts suspended.
Even Nobel Laureates were silenced. In the summer of 2021, a talk by Satoshi Omura was removed from YouTube for talking positively of Ivermectin. Omura himself discovered Ivermectin in the late 70s, he later won the Nobel Prize for the discovery. Earlier in 2021, he had published on Ivermectin to stimulate a proper investigation into its antiviral potential. Instead of stimulating a discussion, he was silenced.
In trying to document the scale of this censorship, I’m presented with a problem. It’s almost impossible to create a paper trail of the videos, articles, doctors, and studies which have been deleted from the internet. Substack is one of the few places with a policy conducive to free speech, so it’s here that we can begin to rebuild a picture of what was removed elsewhere. Last week I encouraged readers of the Digger to share examples of censorship over the past two years, the conversation is still ongoing.
The censorship gave the WHO near total control over which treatments and interventions could be discussed. It was an enormous power to grant to a single organisation. Society became totally dependent on one node in our network of ideas because all contrasting views, regardless of who expressed them, were silenced. Systems with a single point of failure are at high risk of catastrophic collapse. In this case, if all information had to reflect WHO policy, a corruption in WHO policy polluted everything downstream and there’s credible reason to believe corruption in health policy should be expected. You don’t have to take my word for it, The Lancet laid it out beautifully. “The more concentrated a supply of a good or service is, the higher the discretionary power of those that control the supply, and the lower their accountability to others.” Ergo, granting total control of what could be discussed to a single organisation gave a small number of people far too much power.
With a policy like this, it was only natural that the most agreeable public health figures watched their platforms grow exponentially, whilst health practitioners with ‘unofficial’ insights had their wings clipped. People wanted to know what was going on, and they were funnelled towards influencers reflecting official policy. Because those critical of official policy were silenced, an illusion of consensus emerged. We are still inside that illusion of consensus today. The public don’t believe or even know early treatment is an option, and yet on Ivermectin alone, there are 247 peer-reviewed papers of which just 20 are not positive. Of the 80 controlled trials, 86% of them show efficacy. In the published literature, there’s a consensus that it works, and yet in ‘the popular media’ there’s a consensus that it doesn’t. Such an inversion of reality is only possible because of the systemic silencing of people who want to make this point.
I must at least acknowledge the stated aims of a policy like this: to stop the spread of wild misinformation. Arguably, wild conspiracy theories could have been damaging, but the price we paid to minimise them was creating an information monopoly. Even with 100% trust in the medical research industry, the policy drastically reduced collaborative input from credible researchers. To place so much weight on the outcome of one institution was never going to produce optimal results. Looking at the policy on its own terms, the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. Was misinformation the full reason such a policy was lobbied for? We can’t ignore the fact that monopolies are profitable.
So right until this moment, how can you as a citizen ever know who and what was censored? How can you ever know the scale of that censorship? If you never saw it, how could you hold a view on it? You can’t register your protest at something if you’re not even aware it's happening. To invoke Rumsfeld, this is an ‘unknown unknown’, something you don’t know you don’t know. So when the ‘issue of Ivermectin’ comes up, how can people hold a balanced view if the available information had been strictly curated by a single institution?
With credible opposition silenced, the censorship cleared the way for Ivermectin to be trashed in the popular press. Despite overwhelming data showing Ivermectin to be effective, from January 2021 onwards, the public would be relentlessly told the opposite. Its this strange period of history that I’ll unpack on next.
I'd seen Borody, Australia, Ivermectin in chat rooms and follow-ups of its personal success stories from all around the world. I had been following Dr. Paul Marik from his 2017 success in hospital sepsis survival. So when Dr. Marik jumped on board with ivermectin, so did I. YouTube Susan Wojcicki can't block the whole internet, but tried. It seems that Sergey Brin, Google founder, forgot his Communist Russian heritage. I did not know of the early Florida ivermectin success. Thank you! Also, thank you for the proof of the fraud of Hall and Owen.
Bravo, once again. Thank you!