YouTube Suppressing Any Mention of Ivermectin

In a follow-up to yesterday’s “Rolling Stone Fakes Oklahoma Ivermectin Overdose Plague” story, Matt Taibbi (who got out of Rolling Stone while the getting was good) has a piece on how YouTube is even yanking videos critical of using Ivermectin to treat Flu Manchu:

They fixed the problem, twice. That’s the good news. The first time filmmaker, former BBC and Channel 4 journalist, and Rebel Wisdom co-founder David Fuller put together a video criticizing ivermectin advocates was on August 4th. Called “Ivermectin For and Against,” it was taken down by YouTube, on the grounds that it constituted medical misinformation.

Fuller appealed the decision for a variety of reasons – more on those later – and won. He continued investigating the subject, and taking on the claims of ivermectin advocates, hoping to conclude with a video called “Vaccines and DarkHorse: A Final Word.” This last piece included footage of well-known ivermectin advocates Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, whose DarkHorse podcast was previously featured on this site after YouTube banned some of their material.

Of course, Fuller was including the DarkHorse clip – not one of the banned ones, incidentally – to criticize it, not endorse it. But the Google/YouTube algorithm appeared confused, and Fuller’s work was not only taken down, he was also given a strike under YouTube’s “Three Strikes and You’re Out” program. He appealed again, but this time lost, leaving only one option: the media.

It’s an unfortunate fact, but the human beings at the Google/YouTube press team have repeatedly proven to be the last, best option for fixing errors in some of the more bizarre content moderation cases. In this instance, when I reached out to YouTube to ask if they’d made a mistake, and perhaps confused Fuller with the people he was criticizing, the company quickly fixed the glitch, unstruck the strike, and restored his video, with the statement:

Upon further review, we determined that videos posted by Rebel Wisdom and Peak Prosperity were incorrectly removed. The videos are not violative of our policies and as such they’ve been reinstated.

Problem solved, right?

Not exactly. Not only was Fuller’s case just one in a recent series of deletions and strikes doled out to makers of reports about Covid-19-related issues, but the episode showed how dicey even discussing any of these issues has become for independent media figures. Fuller has done plenty of work for mainstream outlets and could have done so with this topic, but intentionally went the alternative route to take on ivermectin.

“I deliberately chose to tell the story on Rebel Wisdom rather than pitching it to a legacy media outfit,” he says. “I didn’t want to give Bret’s fans the chance to paint it as an ‘MSM smear.’”

In other words, Fuller was making a conscious effort to use an independent editorial approach, as a means of side-stepping the credibility concerns that some audiences have with mainstream outlets.

The problem is, in its zeal to clamp down on “misinformation” about everything from vaccines to perhaps-potential alternative treatments like ivermectin, YouTube and other platforms have had to rely upon algorithmic tools that can’t distinguish between critique and advocacy.

“Algorithmic tools” may indeed be at work here, though they appear to be pretty stupid ones: Any mention of using ivermectin to treat Mao Tze Lung is verbotten. But in the past, we’ve seen a lot of YouTube/Twitter/etc. censorship that seems to have been instituted by some disgruntled social justice employee aimed at conservative critics that dared violate the narrative of the moment.

Fuller, however, is also a critic of the mainstream approach of dealing with such issues, which often involves simply deploying ad hominem insults at anyone with interest in ivermectin or concerns about vaccines. “The assumption that anyone who questions the vaccines is stupid is clearly wrong,” he wrote, in a recent Medium piece.

He adds now that “these topics, especially ivermectin, have become swallowed whole as culture war signifiers.” As a result, “we’re now in a world where the mainstream won’t ‘platform’ alternative claims for fear of ‘false equivalence’ and are trying to keep alive a broken system of gatekeeping.” Fuller believes this is counter-productive, and his idea is to meet issues head on, including as much relevant information as he can, even if he ultimately comes down strongly against ivermectin and in favor of vaccines.

Both former Evergreen College professor Bret Weinstein and any discussion of Ivermectin seem seem to earn special targeting deep within the bowels of social media giants.

I have no idea whether Ivermectin is effective at treating the symptoms of coronavirus or not. Ditto hydroxychloroquine. (By contrast, there seems to be a lot of unambiguous evidence that a combination of vitamin D, Zinc and broad spectrum antibiotics are effective.) But there seem to be a lot of organizations heavily invested in punishing those who dare stray from The One True Holy Narrative of the coronavirus treatment regime, and who treat those investigating alternatives not as mistaken, but as heretics to be crushed.

It’s worth asking why.

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5 Responses to “YouTube Suppressing Any Mention of Ivermectin”

  1. Phil says:

    The mere fact that we don’t know, more than 18 months into this, if vitamin D, ivermectin, or HCQ is beneficial is absolute proof that the medical community is willfully blind. They know that each is at least partially beneficial, and they don’t want to study it formally because then they’d have to acknowledge it, which would cost them to lose power and profits.

  2. Alec Rawls says:

    Somehow Lawrence has gotten the idea that:

    “By contrast, there seems to be a lot of unambiguous evidence that a combination of vitamin D, Zinc and broad spectrum antibiotics are effective.”

    That is Zelenko’s prescription but without a zinc ionophore (HCQ, Quercetin, or Ivermectin). I have never heard ANYBODY suggest that this abbreviated prescription is effective against Covid.

    CDC claims the whole Zelenko prescription is worthless and the other side says you need the omitted ingredients.

    Not Lawrences’s fault obviously, when the feds are conspiring with the internet monopolists to unconstitutionally block free speech at every turn.

  3. Lawrence Person says:

    Here’s one that just covers vitamin therapy.

    There really needs to be systematic testing of all those combinations.

  4. Alec Rawls says:

    The African data makes a strong case for Ivermectin. Half of African countries have been dosing their populations with Ivermectin one or twice a year to get rid of parasites since long before Covid.

    The Japanese, who discovered Ivermectin, knew that it was administered widely in many African countries so they compared Covid mortality rates in the African countries that have been using Ivermectin and the African countries that have not been using it.

    Night and day. Trivial mortality in the Ivermectin countries. Wild spikes of infection and death in the countries that don’t use it. Graph of data from Japanese Africa-study here:

    https://wentworthreport.com/ivermectin-safety-profile/

    That is a vast natural experiment, thousands of times what could ever be achieved with mere clinical trials, which are only to try to suss out what is going to happen when a drug is widely used. They are a toe in the water.

    In Africa the Ivermectin already IS widely used. Whole countries have already been swimming. THAT is the real data, the superior data, and it addition to indicating strong effectiveness it also shows zero safety issues.

    Of course the data on Africa’s natural experiment needs to be further collected and analyzed. Different age profiles between countries and different co-morbidity profiles could contribute to the different mortality rates. So do things like how dispersed the population inside a country is.

    We need to statistically sort out how much of the lower Covid mortality in Ivermectin-using countries is most likely due to Ivermectin and not to other identifiable differences. But will WHO and NIH/CDC conduct those analyses? Never.

    They don’t want to know, because they are joined at the hip with Pfizer and the other big drug companies whose profits depend on there not being an effective and inexpensive therapeutic already available for Covid prophylaxis or treatment.

    Also, these bureaucracies are 100% on the communist-Democrat side. They are fully onboard with the Democrat drive to use vaccine passports as an excuse to put in place the complete infrastructure for implementing the Chinese Communist social credit system, built for the CCP by Google and Facebook to be the ultimate system of totalitarian control.

    Once the feds have say so on who can travel, enter restaurants, stores, events, buildings, places of employment, they will immediately use this passport system to destroy everyone who complains about their election-stealing or their totalitarian take-over.

  5. Sailorcurt says:

    There has been way too much data showing the effectiveness of Ivermectin to dismiss it out of hand. I’m not going to post links because whenever I do, my posts end up being sent to spam. Duck Duck Go it for yourself.

    Remember a few months ago when India was all over the news because of the devastating surge they were having? See it in the news any more? What happened? They started using Ivermectin on a large scale.

    Someone already mentioned Japan and Africa.

    There have been several studies demonstrating Ivermectin’s ability to inhibit viral replication.

    There was a “study of studies” published in the American Journal of Therapeutics titled “Review of the Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy of Ivermectin in the Prophylaxis and Treatment of COVID-19” which came to the clear conclusion that:

    “Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance. Furthermore, results from numerous controlled prophylaxis trials report significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19 with the regular use of ivermectin. Finally, the many examples of ivermectin distribution campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality indicate that an oral agent effective in all phases of COVID-19 has been identified.”

    On the other side, I skimmed through that Youtube video supposedly debunking Ivermectin. It is nothing more than interviewing a few of people who question the methods used in the studies that show ivermectin to be effective. Not a single one of them pointed to competing studies that said “ivermectin proved to be ineffective”, they just automatically came to the conclusion that Ivermectin doesn’t work because they have methodological concerns about the studies.

    OK…I get that. Studies that were poorly conducted can be misleading and reach incorrect conclusions…so why aren’t they advocating for studies done CORRECTLY instead of just dismissing Ivermectin out of hand? Why aren’t they doing their own studies? It doesn’t make any sense at all from the perspective of a legitimate desire to find out if it works. One person being interviewed even admitted that there were some 80 studies claiming that Ivermectin works and he didn’t review all of them, but the ones he did review all had concerning issues…but where are the studies saying it doesn’t work? Even if the studies have issues, ALL of them say Ivermectin works. Surely there’s some fire underneath all that smoke? And if there isn’t, why aren’t there ANY studies that clearly show Ivermectin to be ineffective?

    I even did a Duck Duck Go search for “study shows ivermectin ineffective” and I found article after article CLAIMING that Ivermectin is ineffective, but the only evidence is that the studies showing it’s effectiveness have been disputed. The only true study I can find that they use to support the claim is one from Brazil that has yet (from what I can tell) to be peer reviewed or published and even it found a small benefit to Ivermectin even while claiming it didn’t. Here’s an analysis of the studies results from a statistician:

    “Notice that the results show that ivermectin did help patients. Relative risk: 0.91 (0.69-1.19). Mortality relative risk: 0.82 (0.44-1.52). In other words, ivermectin patients were 9% less likely to progress and 18% less likely to die. I know what comes next: “but it’s not statistically significant.” Yes, but the results are in the correct direction and a bigger trial might have shown statistically significant results. Plus, these results show a probability of 75% that patients on ivermectin did better than patients on placebo. The headline (“no effect whatsoever”) is just plain wrong. If I were sick and had to decide between ivermectin and placebo today, just based on this one trial, I would still go with ivermectin.”

    And the distinct possibility exists that the study simply used the wrong dosage of Ivermectin or didn’t use the supporting supplements that have been found so effective (Vitamin D, Zinc, etc), and had it done so, the results may have been quite different.

    The question is, why are people so quick to dismiss a treatment regime that shows promise without even insisting that it be investigated? Why do they continue to insist that it does nothing when even the ONLY study so far that has been touted to show it to be ineffective showed a positive result, even if slight?

    This makes absolutely no medical sense whatsoever. This is supposedly a crisis…a crisis so severe that we virtually shut down the economy for a year, that we are mandating behaviors, that we rushed into production experimental vaccines with no long term safety record and which even at least one of the inventors of the technology says it’s not yet ready for widespread use.

    But cheap, easily accessible medications with excellent records of long term safety and that show strong promise to being effective in treating the virus that has caused this horrible crisis can be just disregarded out of hand? How does that make sense? Explain it to me because I’m not getting it.

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