When the pandemic was in full swing and the world was scrambling to find an effective way to treat COVID-19, two promising treatments emerged: ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). However, these medications were quickly shunned by authorities, who then took steps to prevent the public from obtaining them to treat the virus. Now, the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are being sued for concealing documents related to their suppression of these affordable treatments.
The suit was filed by America First Legal (AFL), a nonprofit organization whose stated aim is to “promote the rule of law in the United States, prevent executive overreach, and ensure due process and equal protection for all Americans.”
The group filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request last August with both the FDA and HHS seeking information about hydroxychloroquine from 2020. They filed a similar request a month later with the two agencies seeking information about ivermectin in hopes of understanding why government officials suppressed the use of these treatments for COVID-19. In both cases, they received confirmation that the agencies had received their requests, along with tracking numbers. However, neither agency ultimately complied with either of the requests, and the group is now suing them.
Although multiple physicians reported successfully treating patients with coronavirus with the anti-malarial medication hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), the FDA cautioned against using it to combat the virus on the grounds that there was a risk of “heart rhythm problems” – a risk that doesn’t seem to bother them when it comes to COVID-19 vaccines. They had previously allowed HCQ to be used with an emergency use authorization, but they revoked it a few months before Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines were given emergency use authorization.
The FDA can only grant emergency use authorization to unapproved and unproven interventions like COVID-19 vaccines if no “adequate, approved, and available alternatives” exist. In other words, if cheap treatments with a low profit margin like HCQ and ivermectin were approved for use against COVID-19, all those pharmaceutical companies could not have made the billions of dollars in profits that they did from peddling their investigative shots around the world.
Similarly, the antiparasitic drug ivermectin showed promise as a treatment for the virus and helped numerous patients, but the FDA went out of its way to stop people from using it, launching an anti-ivermectin PR campaign cautioning people against it. They used slogans on their website and social media such as “You are not a horse. Stop it with the #ivermectin. It's not authorized for treating #COVID,” referencing the medication’s common use in animals.
Why are federal agencies unwilling to supply documents about their suppression of these medications?
The safety and efficacy of both medications were supported by hundreds of peer-reviewed studies, prompting questions about why the agencies were so desperate to keep people from learning about them and receiving prescriptions. A review by the Epoch Times found that half of the studies that the FDA used to support a claim on its website that “currently available data do not show ivermectin is effective against COVID-19” actually support using it to combat the virus.
America First Legal Senior Counselor and Director of Oversight and Investigation Reed D. Rubinstein said in a statement: “The true reasons for the federal government’s assault on HCQ and ivermectin have never been made public. We don’t know why – in the midst of a pandemic – the government went after doctors prescribing these potentially useful drugs and coerced pharmacies into rejecting prescriptions. But AFL will keep fighting to see that the truth about Dr. Fauci and his colleagues is exposed.”
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