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In a surprising move, the FDA has settled a lawsuit surrounding ivermectin and has agreed

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to remove posts telling people not to take ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19.

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Besides the important precedent this sets for future FDA communications,

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this also tells us that the FDA would rather concede and settle this lawsuit than allow the

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case to go to discovery and have to turn over large numbers of internal documents,

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which could damage the reputation of the FDA and its senior management.

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In this episode, we're diving into the structure of modern propaganda machines

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and why false narratives become so entrenched and amplified across many institutions,

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beginning with the specific example of the FDA communications regarding ivermectin.

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Hello everyone and welcome to Fallout with Dr. Robert Malone and myself, Jan Jekielek.

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We're going to talk about ivermectin today. This recent settlement here we had, you know,

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with this ivermectin tweet in particular, the one that everyone remembers, you know, the stop it,

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stop it tweet, right? That's right. Don't be a horse. You're not a horse. You're not a cow. Stop it,

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right? Y'all stop it. Now this is something that the FDA is just never supposed to do and

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that they are conceding that I think here, right? In an indirect way. And what I find fascinating

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about this is, as you point out, this is a settlement, not a court determination.

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So the FDA hasn't been found guilty of anything. They have come to an agreement with the people that

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brought the lawsuit, that they will withdraw these specific posts and withdraw from their website the

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advice they were giving to physicians about the use or non-use of ivermectin. But they're not really

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conceding what the core issue is, which is that the FDA should not be regulating the practice of

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medicine. Under the 10th Amendment, the regulation of the practice of medicine vests with the states,

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not with the federal government and not with the FDA nor the CDC. So the FDA absolutely crossed a

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boundary in this activity. And what I find fascinating is they found it better to settle

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on this key issue of not just ivermectin, but the inappropriateness of them providing medical advice

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to physicians and patients. Instead of undergoing what's called discovery,

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in which those that brought the lawsuit would have been able to get access to FDA internal

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communications and dialogue, potentially that might include not just other federal agencies,

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but potential other stakeholders such as the pharmaceutical industry.

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But this does actually set a precedent, doesn't it? But is it going to be able to be cited legally

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because this is just a settlement? It's obviously an extremely expensive time-consuming process

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to sue the federal government for anything. But they decided to call it a win and take this,

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which is probably going to have implications for their careers in every case for these three plaintiffs.

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Well, so I want to kind of recap why they launched this in the first place. I mean,

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basically they were using, and I think you suggested, they were using ivermectin in their practices

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to treat for COVID-19. They found it effective. Many of them found that hydroxychloroquine worked better for certain variants of SARS-CoV-2,

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and ivermectin worked better for other ones. So many of them have come to the point where they're very empiric

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and they don't rely on any one medicine. They rely on a mix of medicines as well as, of course, the use of steroids,

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something else that was originally rejected and vilified until Pierre Corey testified about that

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in a Ron Johnson hearing very early on. And then suddenly the narrative flipped. And if you didn't treat with steroids,

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and anti-inflammatory steroids in particular, then you were basically committing medical malpractice.

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Whereas a few weeks prior, if you did treat with these, you were committing medical malpractice. It's a clear

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example of a narrative flip. But this particular group was quite courageous. Their careers were threatened.

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It's a sign, I think, that the COVID crisis is coming to closure. That this narrative scaffold, a new term,

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this structure of the approved narrative that ivermectin is bad, is now starting to be revisited. And it's

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starting to be allowed to question that narrative. But it's so well entrenched now that I very much doubt

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that we're going to see mainstream hospitals treating COVID disease with ivermectin, whether or not there's

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this mountain of data that indicates that it has effectiveness in many people.

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Well, so I absolutely want to talk about these narrative scaffolds. This is Alexander Marinos'

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sort of term. I guess he coined it just fairly recently. I think we both encountered it

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independently and thought to ourselves, this is a really great way to describe a lot of the structure of

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some of the propaganda that we're seeing recently. Before we go there, I want to just recount to

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people, like, ivermectin, it works. Does it work? Explain to us the situation with ivermectin.

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Ivermectin is a fascinating drug. It's a natural product. The Nobel Prize was granted for its discovery.

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It was originally market authorized as a, technically an anti-helminthic, a worm drug.

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And that's its primary use in veterinary practice, which of course is what the FDA was highlighting.

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We use ivermectin probably three or four times a year in our horses to deworm the horses. Very

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effective and proven to be very safe. But what's intriguing is there are other properties associated

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with ivermectin other than just this, uh, worm clearing. It's treated river blindness and

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hundreds of millions, probably millions of people. Really, really cured river blindness,

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a miracle drug and widely acknowledged to be extremely safe. It's safer than hydroxychloroquine.

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Hydroxychloroquine has a fairly narrow, uh, therapeutic window. And if you go too high,

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you can cause sickness as was shown in Italy early on. This is one of the reasons why hydroxychloroquine

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got a bad rap is, uh, the logic that some hydroxychloroquine seem to be effective

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in reducing disease severity. And so more would be better. And there was a widespread overdosing

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with hydroxychloroquine, particularly in Northern Italy early on by desperate physicians,

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but also by others. And this notorious clinical trial where the dosing on hydroxychloroquine that

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was selected was too high. It was known to be within the toxic range. Ivermectin doesn't have those

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problems. Ivermectin has a very, very wide, uh, um, uh, clinical window. The logic that this would

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represent a major threat to people, uh, was, was absolutely an example of a false narrative. And

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you recall when that, what, what was done to reinforce this false narrative of the potential

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toxicity of Ivermectin was there was a story widely reported in the press that there was a hospital

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that was having a significant surge in Ivermectin, uh, overdosing cases. And it was so severe

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that it was causing the hospital and the emergency room to be overloaded. And so they were having

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to turn away patients that had other diseases or COVID. And it turned out to be entirely a fabricated

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story, but it was widely, um, uh, circulated in corporate media or mainstream media because it

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supported the dominant narrative of the time, the narrative scaffold that had been so, uh, aggressively

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promoted, but Ivermectin is not a toxic drug. And Ivermectin can absolutely suppress the replication

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of SARS-CoV-2 at sufficient dose. The problem is that the dose that's necessary corresponds to a blood

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level that is not readily achieved. You can test it in the test tube and show that it'll inhibit the

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replication of the virus. But that dose that's necessary, that concentration doesn't match up

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with what you observe in the blood for the dosing that's being administered. And so based on first

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principles of pharmacology, the consensus of, of the, uh, kind of dominant scientists in this area

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have been, well, it can't possibly be working and the FDA. And the problem with that is it's all

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based on an old theory of how drugs work, that the levels of the drug in the blood

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predict the levels of drug in the cell where the activity has to happen. A lot of that classical

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pharmacology is wrong. And it's all based on the model that the drug, the cell is a bag of water,

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free water, but it's not. The cell is a bag. You could think of a lipid bounded bag of highly

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structured gel like water. And so the functional concentration of drugs, once they get into the cell

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is much higher because they're not really diluted into water, free water in the same way.

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We're, we're at the beginning of the pandemic. People don't know what to do.

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They pick drugs. This is what doctors would do. They take drugs that might have an effect

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and try to use them, right? That are, that also have good, nice, good safety profiles.

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Ivermectin seems like the perfect candidate for this, right? Like, just like hydroxy did. There's

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examples of people that I've heard about where they're treated with ivermectin in a bit of a

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cocktail or something like that. And their blood oxygen is very low. And within half an hour, hours,

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suddenly they're coming back. And people will say, Robert, that this is anecdotal.

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And that gets right at the heart of the tension between physicians and the federal government

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and the FDA and the CDC during the COVID crisis.

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What you had was federal regulators acting on the basis of, uh, their, uh, theoretical biases

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and physicians, as you point out, empirically practicing medicine, testing out agents, combinations

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of agents based on literature that they were aggressively searching. And ivermectin has a

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considerable amount of literature supporting its use as an antiviral for a variety of different things.

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And docs desperate to find something to give their patients in lieu of remdesivir, which was the

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federally endorsed product, which was toxic to the kidneys, ineffective, and, uh, enormously expensive,

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but widely promoted. Uh, and the very small library of other treatments that were being endorsed by the

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federal government. Doctors all over the world began empirically testing a variety of different agents.

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And as you point out, ivermectin was one of the ones that kind of started rising.

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That is the foundation for the practice of medicine historically. What you had was this clash

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between the logic of evidence-based medicine that, uh, the federal government, NIH, NIAID, CDC, FDA,

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would not endorse a repurposed drug product for whatever reason, unless there was a sufficient amount of, uh,

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evidence-based research. And the other thing that we've learned over the last four years is that, uh,

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randomized clinical trial data can be readily manipulated in a variety of different ways

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through a selection of enrollment criteria dosing decisions. Uh, Pierre Corey likes to point out that

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the ivermectin trials funded by ACTIV and the federal government, uh, they were dosing people that were

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already advanced in their COVID clinical history. So they already had significant disease and, uh,

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they were dosing with too small a dose of ivermectin. And so the trial resulted in ambiguous results.

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It wasn't even negative results, but it didn't meet their threshold for statistical significance.

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Uh, whereas a lot of the trials that were done independently, uh, involved early treatment

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when patients were still in a position where a timely intervention could make all the difference

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and keep them out of the hospital in the first place. That's what I think is the core issue in this

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case, this legal case that went to settlement as opposed to a formal discovery process and trial

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is that the FDA functionally is conceding a narrow ground that they're going to stop, uh, their PR,

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really, their propaganda around the ineffectiveness of ivermectin and the inappropriateness of its being

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used in this way. Uh, and they're not really conceding the point that, uh, they were outside of their mandate

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in suggesting and recommending and intervening in the treatment of SARS-CoV-2 of COVID disease

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through their suppression of physician direct experience. Uh, and that's a, that's a limited

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win. It's being trumpeted as a major win, but I don't see, I don't see that. I'm not even sure that

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it can be cited as a legal precedent because it never went to court, never went to trial. Uh, it only was

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a settlement. So we'll have to see what the long-term ramifications are. And I'm not privy to

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the legal discussions that occurred with this group and their attorneys as to why they decided to settle.

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I know that suing the federal government is extremely time consuming and costly.

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So there is the settlement now the ivermectin guidance that the FDA has been offering is

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being removed from its site. It's social media presence is being removed. And so, you know,

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one might hope that all of a sudden it's open season for all doctors to prescribe ivermectin as they wish.

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Right. But it's, that's kind of unlikely to happen given narrative scaffolding.

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Give me a picture of what that actually is, what Marinos is actually talking about here.

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So Alex Marinos is, uh, basically a thought leader on X and has been for a few years now, really astute,

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brilliant, brilliant, uh, commentator on trends that we're observing through the COVID crisis and elsewhere.

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And he recently came up with a thesis based on what he is seeing with the ivermectin story in the

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settlement. So that was what triggered him to come up with this idea of narrative scaffolding.

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And what this amounts to is a model, his model, that

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what takes place functionally is that in, in the development of these great narratives,

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these dominant narratives that seem to persist in the modern internet age is that you have a small

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group of individuals. We could call them elites or influencers or oligarchs, or, you know,

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you can substitute whatever term for the bad guys you want to use or the puppet masters,

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but some group of highly individual, uh, influential individuals propagate a narrative,

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a description of the way the world is, uh, that helps people to make sense out of information.

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So they will offer a narrative and then because they're so influential,

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others that want to be on the right side of history, uh, that are concerned about maintaining

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their status as a part of an in-group, for example, will then buy into that and begin to selectively

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report or endorse facts and information that are consistent with that promoted narrative or that

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narrative scaffold and will, uh, de-emphasize or not speak about or not report facts which are

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inconsistent with that promoted narrative scaffold. In the case of ivermectin, the narrative scaffold

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was that ivermectin is neither safe nor effective for SARS-CoV-2. These thought leaders or influencers,

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however you want to call it, uh, are perceived as legitimate as opposed to those

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who might be promoting an alternative explanation of the facts, what we used to call a hypothesis.

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So what, what you have is an environment in which a single hypothesis to explain the nature of the

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world or a set of facts becomes promoted by influencers of various types. And then once that's

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established, then all around them, including media, endorse that. And this creates kind of a wrap-up effect

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where, for the public, what they encounter is a unified message and a unified set of facts that are

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all consistent with that that we might now call the approved narrative because it's been endorsed not

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only by a small group of influencers, but then amplified through corporate media, social media, etc.

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And by all the people that want to be on the right side of history, which is what Alex, um, really, uh,

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promotes as a key facet of his hypothesis, is this need to be on the right side of history.

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Uh, and so one will select the facts and information and interpretation, uh, because of the need to promote the right thing.

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Uh, and Alex gives the example, obviously, of, uh, the Trump derangement syndrome and the,

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the pressure that's put on people that don't, uh, um, uh, criticize Mr. Trump or whatever his latest position is,

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a notorious example being this recent one involving the term bloodbath in which he used it in a speech

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in the context of, um, basically talking about some financial impact in the case of Mr. Biden's being

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elected, presumably because of the recent EPA policies having to do with electric vehicles.

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Uh, but, um, that then gets, uh, re amplified and reinterpreted.

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Another example was the Hunter Biden laptop story with all of the members of the intelligence community,

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uh, putting out information prior to the election that this was a false narrative.

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Uh, another one is the pushback against the lab leak hypothesis that was actively promoted in the Lancet

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by, I think it was 27 high profile academics.

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And if that was pushed out, then that became the only acceptable narrative and all information had

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to be structured around that and all press correspondence and reporting had to be structured

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around that because it was promoted that anyone that would say otherwise was basically crazy conspiracy

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theorists.

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As opposed to in a rational world, we would have what I've always been taught is multiple

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working hypotheses where in order to explain a phenomena, you come up with as many different

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potential explanations and then you design experiments or tests or look at the data to figure out which

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are the ones that seem most likely and which are the ones are inconsistent with the data. If you look at,

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for instance, the small cadre of elite insiders that guided COVID policy, particularly at the beginning,

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um, those were all insiders that had close connections with each other and, uh, needed to maintain their

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status as insiders and, and actively defended it by coming to consensus early and then only promoting that

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agreed upon internal narrative. Alex has taken that, which is the, the groupthink phenomena describes

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typically small insular group behavior. And with this narrative scaffold hypothesis that he's perform,

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he's, he's promoting, he takes that into the context of modern media and modern social media and the

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dynamics of what we've observed during the COVID crisis and illustrates how these kinds of processes

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can lead to a very broad based, really global groupthink phenomena, which is absolutely what we've

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experienced. And it's just, you know, there's all these elements in the scaffold, right? And the effect

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is even when later it's proven wrong, it only matters somewhat, right? So some people will go,

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Oh, wow. Okay. This was wrong. But, but a whole bunch of people continue believing the original

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concept because there isn't the same, uh, you know, scaffold created and to, to promote the new

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correct narrative. You can add elements to that scaffold once it's erected. And you would think that

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if it's built, if it's a house of cards or it's built on sand and the facts show that the underlying

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scaffold is false, then it, the whole thing would tumble, but it doesn't. People continue to buy

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into it. And I, and I think this is the brilliance of this concept is that it's explaining something

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that otherwise just doesn't make any sense at all, which is why do people persist in believing these

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falsehoods, even when they're proven wrong. One of the core theses of Alex and many others

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is that what's really going on in all of these cases that we just covered and so many more

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is that the state is attempting to reassert its control over information

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in the face of decentralized journalism, including Epoch Times. And that is absolutely diametrically

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opposed to the first amendment in concept and theory. And I argue that it is profoundly anti-innovative

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that of all of the technical arguments you can make around this, if we want society and the culture

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and the economy to evolve and to become more adaptive to changing conditions, we have to allow

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a diverse information environment so that different voices can be heard, different hypotheses can be

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considered. But it appears to be the position of the state right now in the United States, in Europe,

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in these various globalist organizations as promoted. And communist China, I might add.

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Communist China, historically Russia, and, and in, I mean, really all nation states. And this goes back to

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Sun Tzu and the principles of the art of war. It's in the interest of the state to control information

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and to act through propaganda for a wide variety of reasons. NATO itself describes this as hybrid

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warfare, but buried within that is also the belief in identification of pre-crime and prevention of

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pre-crime. You know much more than I do about communist propaganda and communist propaganda methods,

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but the identification and prospective mitigation of thought crime and pre-crime is right at the core

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of that. 100 percent. That's exactly right. What you're aiming for, and of course it only works so far,

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is to guide strongly the thought of the populace so they don't think the wrong things.

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They, they can't think the wrong things. They aren't given access to the information, training,

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et cetera, to be able to think, to draw their own conclusions and to think the wrong things. And

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from my frame of reference, if you think that through,

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what you will find is over time, these communist centralized controlled command economy regimes

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are, because of that very structure of how they handle information, they're doomed to become less

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effective, less innovative, less adaptive to changing conditions compared to open free societies. It's

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one of the most fundamental arguments for open free society and open communication and free speech

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is that it allows a culture to respond as efficiently as possible to changing conditions.

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And in a communist regime or any centralized command economy regime, such as being promoted for a one

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world government, what you end up with is a situation in which you have a small collection of centralized

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individuals who are out of touch with ground truth, making decisions about how the overall society is to

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respond to changing environment and conditions. And they, they can't help but be wrong most of the time,

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because they don't have the data and they don't have this diversity of opinion.

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It's got to be one of the most important fundamental aspects of human society is the free exchange of ideas

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in order to adapt and grow.

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What's essential to the, or what's important or what's enshrined, right, in these, in free societies is curiosity.

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Well put. Whereas curiosity, I think probably obviously is frowned upon in these.

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Actively suppressed, I would say.

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Right. Because, because it leads to that, you know, thought crime.

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Because it's a threat. Yeah, it's a threat.

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Mm-hmm.

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Because if you're curious, then by your very nature, you're questioning the approved narrative.

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And increasingly, there seems to be a consensus that there is no moral absolute,

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and there is no absolute truth. Everything becomes moral relativity. And once we move into that space,

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that thought space, as a culture and an organization, then we find ourselves justifying

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action after action after action after action that, in retrospect, are intrinsically amoral or we could call them

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evil, based on kind of expediency, which is a lot of what happened during the COVID crisis,

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I believe, is what we saw coming out as evil in the end embodiment, was the consequence of a series of

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these small decisions and actions that each one was justified as being acceptable even though it was not

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necessarily moral, such as the willingness to suspend norms in terms of bioethics. We justified suspending

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the respect for the patient and the individual and substituting coercion, enticement, and compulsion in the form of mandates.

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Based on the justification that if we didn't do that, there would be this wave of excess avoidable death.

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And in the end, that thesis that there was going to be a massive wave of deaths associated with

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this virus that were causative, was false. It was based on false modeling and false assumptions.

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But everybody acted, I think most acted, on good faith. They thought that it was going to be necessary

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and sufficient to suspend fundamental bioethical principles and constitutional norms based on the idea

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that the threat was so enormous of excess loss of life and killing grandma, etc., that it was justified to

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suspend normal practice. And yet what we find in retrospect was that it was a huge breach and

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counterproductive. A strong case could be made that most of the excess all-cause mortality was due to the

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policies, not due to the virus. You know, as we talk about this, I'm getting really depressed. I think we need a break.

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So why don't we go get some lunch and then head over to the farm and get our hands dirty and

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take a look at the bloom that's ongoing and all the fruit trees here in the Shenandoah Valley area

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and talk about a lot more pleasant topics. Sounds fantastic. I love it.

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So what do we got here? So these are plums

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and they're absolutely starting to put in shooters that we know got to get taken out.

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And then up here we have peaches and we got all of these trees one year on sale at Walmart.

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Yeah, so it's the store out here, isn't it? Absolutely. And it could be a good source of trees.

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Hey, the dogs are helping. Hey, Bella.

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You gonna come here? No, that's my stick. Sorry. Come here, Bella.

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So these are the peaches. The pinks, I guess, are the peaches, right? Yep. And pinks and pink-white.

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There's a cultivar that's more white over there. And then this is a pear.

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And then here what we have is another peach of that type that's been a replacement.

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And then apple, apple, and then this one is a pear that's just shooting up that really needs to be trimmed.

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We really want things to open up and spread out so they're not so tall. And all of these are actually dwarf.

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You wouldn't think that this doesn't look like a dwarf tree.

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And the reason why you want dwarf for cultivation and fruit is because otherwise they get so massive

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you can't harvest the fruit. We have a lot of insects around here and fungus and other parasites.

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So they get a white powdery mildew on them. And so what we've done this winter, first they got treated

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with a sulfur spray. So it's all organic. We're not using pesticides. And then about a week later,

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they got a spray with copper. And then they got something called dormant oil that coats insects and

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borers, things that go in through the bark and stuff like that and kills them. So these have all

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been pre-treated. And now they're ready for us to trim. So let's see if we can take on these apples.

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You can see this apple is a mess. And this one is really particularly bad. You can notice that

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all these limbs are crossing. And what's going to happen is, as it matures, they're going to rub

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and they're going to create a sore spot that insects and bacteria and fungus can attack. And so we have

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to clear all that out and open it up. So let's start on this thing. All right. Some of these are too big.

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Yeah. So bring that chainsaw. This is a little tiny still electric chainsaw. It may seem like a little

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tiny toy, but it'll cut you up just as bad as anything else. And so you really do have to treat

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them carefully. So go ahead and see if you can take that off right there. Wow. So you're going to

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want this whole thing out. I want that out. I'll try to do it gently.

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Perfect. Except I give it. It's okay. Little Nick isn't going to kill anything.

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Thank you. So now we've opened that one up. Now this is what I was trying to avoid, right?

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That's okay. Then we've got another crossing here. I think we want to leave this one and take this one.

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Perfect. This one can go.

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I think it's spread out. This we can go. That's crossing. Okay. So that's crossing. That's crossing.

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This is dead. So that's a source of bugs. You don't want that.

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This is crossing down here. Another thing about trees and plants in general is they grow from these

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buds, okay? These are called meristem. If you block the tree's growth here, it's going to push its

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energy out through the meristem that's closest to the cut. So you're just basically we're just going

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through on this height, right? Yeah. Perfect. And then this one I guess goes here. The orchardists tell me

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there's two reasons why you want to trim like this. One is for the general health and the other is

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that it reduces the amount of fruit that'll set, which for a young tree is good. You want less fruit.

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The energy goes to those fruits. And the energy goes to those fruits so they'll develop.

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So here's one that can go. See how it's got fungus on it? Yeah. Wow.

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It's beginning to look more like an apple tree. Right. And less like a thicket.

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I think you've got another career here, Young.

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So thanks for spending some time with us on the farm here on Fallout today.

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I hope you've enjoyed it. We certainly have. And if you're interested in growing your own orchard,

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don't be afraid of it. You can do this too. Get good stock. Be sure to dig a big enough hole when

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you plant it. You want a hole that's two to three times the size of the root ball. You want to put in

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a supplement when you plant the tree. And don't forget to water regularly, at least once a week

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for the first year. And we'll see you next week here on Fallout.