(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) Three doctors sued the Food and Drug Administration for posting false statements on social media about COVID-19 and treatments for it, and a federal judge indicated in a hearing that he may agree with their claims.
The FDA does not have the legal authority to interfere with a doctor or patient’s medical decisions through social media posts. The case centers around the FDA’s decision to discredit ivermectin as a medicine, Just the News reported.
As a result of the FDA’s campaign against ivermectin, state medical boards investigated doctors who prescribed it for COVID-19.
In defense of the FDA, Justice Department lawyer Isaac Belfer argued that its posts were “non-binding recommendations…written in informal conversational language.”
District Judge Jeffrey Brown seemed to disagree, stating that the “social media statements…are what bother me the most.”
The FDA spread the same false talking points as corporate media outlets.
The agency mocked people who took ivermectin, suggested that off-label prescriptions for it were abnormal and suspicious, and warned that it could harm humans, despite being a safe antiparasitic drug for more than 30 years.
You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it. https://t.co/TWb75xYEY4
— U.S. FDA (@US_FDA) August 21, 2021
FDA employees celebrated the attention and influence that its “You are not a horse” tweet gained. The page linked to the tweet called off-label COVID-19 treatments “highly dangerous.”
Yet the FDA now maintains that its statements about ivermectin were mere recommendations, not authoriative medical claims.
Brown said the FDA has put itself in questionable territory because it failed to include “qualifier statements” on its tweets. He did not believe the FDA’s claim that “the purpose of those statements [was] really to advise patients not to self-medicate with ivermectin.”
Brown wondered how the public should view the phrase, “stop it,” if not as an official government “directive.”
Belfer said the FDA could not have known “that anyone would look at these statements and think that they were prohibited from taking ivermectin to treat COVID-19.”
New reporting shows the FDA leading the push to discredit ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment.
Since the FDA is stating how their infamous “you’re not a horse” tweet “was just a recommendation”- read my Nov’21 inv. report revealing the agency’s deep involvement as one of the major planners of the disinformation war against ivermectin. 👇https://t.co/n0dcrHlM6p pic.twitter.com/pQUa4gvlF6
— Sonia Elijah (@sonia_elijah) November 20, 2022
