QUIET REVERSALS

A pair of revelations have surfaced relating to the pandemic. I didn't catch these being widely reported when they took place many months ago, they did not land anywhere in my news feeds, and neither were being shared or commented on by anyone I know. Instead, I accidentally stumbled upon one of these long after the fact and then the other while looking for more information about the first.

DP (DURING PANDEMIC)

In 2021, the US FDA was posting messages on social media and their website (such as “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”) telling the public to avoid Ivermectin as a preventative or curative for COVID. This, as it turns out, was the most viral communication in the agency’s history. In part, they and others in similar roles were responding to Joe Rogan. He had just shared that he got COVID and, in the absence of any good treatment options, his doctor prescribed effectively everything they could think of to combat the illness. They "immediately threw the kitchen sink at it," the podcaster admitted. Those treatments included: a vitamin drip, monoclonal antibodies, and getting dosed with azithromycin, Prednisone, and Ivermectin.

The press lapped that up. NPR published that Rogan's "methods included taking ivermectin, a deworming veterinary drug that is formulated for use in cows and horses." They left out that the most viewed, highest earning man in media, and a health nut, wasn't running an uninformed and potentially lethal medical experiment on himself but was prescribed the above after consulting with his doctor. The Guardian offered similar reporting, implying that Rogan (who is worth more than entire media outlets, has access to just about anyone in the world, and regularly sits down with recognized medical experts brought in for comment and advice by these same outlets) was self-treating with veterinary drugs. (That stupid error was later amended to be only slightly less fraudulent.) The folks at CNN had a lot of fun with this, too. Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon both spent a lot of airtime talking about and mocking the dangerous morons of America. They chided those “taking a drug given to livestock as an anti-parasitic.” They even cited a state health authority issuing a warning that “Animal drugs are highly concentrated for large animals and can be highly toxic in humans.” A more famous clip has the two going back and forth: 

L: “People injecting drugs for animals, horse—”

C: “And people telling them to!”

L: “Oh my god” *sighs and wipes his brow*

C: “What person— You know, you talk about ‘cancel culture’ and who to shame: Ivermectin, a dewormer, really!?”

L: “They are shaming themselves. No one has to shame them, they’re shaming themselves.”

C: “No, they need to be shamed.” 

L: “Yeah.”

C: “They need to be called out and shamed, brother!”

L: “Yeah.”

And that’s just what they did. Both, like so many others, spoke about the nation no longer being divided by the old stereotypes of left and right but now by vaccine-takers and the degenerates who would sacrifice themselves and threaten everyone else in the process. They went a lot further than blindly repeating ludicrous fictions about the efficacy and value of the mRNA vaccines that everyone else in their position participated in (like pretending: vaccination rendered a person immune to illness and death and made them non-transmissible; only vaccination and not prior illness provided resistance; folks would need only two shots; the vaccine was not said to be “92% effective two weeks after dose one”; the majority of deaths were the "unvaccinated"; on and on...) Along with all these nuggets of mis- and disinformation, this pair of CNN voices used their platform, week after week, to shame people and argue that those not repeating the approved narrative, observing even transparently outlandish guidelines, or begging for policies that could not possibly help should not receive some proportionate fine or charge or even be detained by police but instead denied access to hospitals and food and even the out-of-doors. And if you can’t recall that or didn’t experience it, you can go and find video montages of footage scrubbed from media sites and that now exist only in archives or circulating on the forbidden corners of the internet. In them you can watch respected voices in government, the news, and entertainment all spewing the kinds of things anyone at any previous moment would have considered vile obscenities never before heard outside of impossibly dystopian fictions.

At that time of the Ivermectin uproar, I did a cursory Google search for “Ivermectin”, something I’d never previously heard of. That inquiry yielded top search results including everything from a Wikipedia page to a systematic review in Nature and World Health Organization guidelines. All those sources recognized the agent as the closest thing to a miracle cure (in humans) that we’ve ever had, on par with something like penicillin. The WHO noted the developers of the curative (part of a family of compounds produced by bacteria from a soil sample found in a coastal forest near a golf course in Japan) winning a Nobel Prize in 2015 for Ivermectin, and the treatment being on the WHO’s list of “essential medicines” for its effectiveness against plagues such as river blindness, scabies, parasitic worms, and more. Aside from billions of doses of this safe and effective treatment being given to billions of people, particularly in Africa and over five decades, the review in Nature noted Ivermectin proving to be “highly effective against many microorganisms including some viruses.” More than that, they also spelled out that:

Several studies reported antiviral effects of Ivermectin on RNA viruses such as Zika, dengue, yellow fever, West Nile, Hendra, Newcastle, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, chikungunya, Semliki Forest, Sindbis, Avian influenza A, Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome, Human immunodeficiency virus type 1, and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. Furthermore, there are some studies showing antiviral effects of Ivermectin against DNA viruses such as Equine herpes type 1, BK polyomavirus, pseudorabies, porcine circovirus 2, and bovine herpesvirus 1

All of these sources also noted Ivermectin was being studied for use against SARS CoV2 but that there was no conclusive evidence supporting its use. (All of us were also painfully aware that the time needed to conduct valid human studies and subject those to critical review would exceed the timeline for development of all the vaccines in the works, every one of which promised billions in profits that could only be realized if there were no existing prophylactics or treatments. Such were the terms of the US Emergency Use Authorization.) Still, I added all of these findings to what I was writing and sharing about the pandemic as things were unfolding.

AP (AFTER PANDEMIC)

Well, fast-forward several years. The pandemic is behind us (or most of us), though the impacts have been significant. From the loss of life to the continued crumbing of our own hospital and public health systems, the decimation of so many businesses and entire economies to the shattering of faith in so many institutions and authorities, I’m not sure we’ve fully grokked the severity of the pandemic. And there’s more to wrap your head around all the time. Two particularly interesting revelations relate to Chris Cuomo and a court case the US FDA was facing regarding their public stance on Ivermectin.

Interestingly, since the pandemic, both Cuomo and his partner Lemon have been fired from CNN. In his new role at NewsNation, Cuomo has been spending a lot of time talking about his own and other peoples’ struggles with weird side-effects from the virus and also what are believed to be complications from the mRNA vaccine. Wilder still, Cuomo has come out explaining that, due to all his many problems associated with what he and his physician are calling long-COVID (because, according to him, "vaccine injury" is still less acceptable to openly speak about), his doctor has him on a regular dose of — wait for it — waaait fooor iiit — Ivermectin (aka: "horse-paste," "cow-dewormer," "livestock injections," "idiot pills"). More than that, Cuomo is talking about how, in light of his new reality, he’s interviewing “all these clinicians” who “always knew there was no harm in taking Ivermectin.” Not only that, Cuomo explains, his current doctor was always “prescribing Ivermectin for her family and patients throughout the pandemic.” With that, he’s also getting pilloried for his late revelations and difficulty reconciling his past vilifications and present advocacy.

(And, well, who knows what Don Lemon is up to? Learning about freedom of opinion and expression? Exposing the lack of support for Harris among Black women? Who can really say?)

On the lawsuit front, in 2022 three doctors filed a lawsuit against the FDA, the US Department of Health and Human Services, and their leadership. The lawsuit claimed that those agencies were interfering with the doctors’ ability to practice medicine by overstepping their authority, getting between doctors and their patients, seeking to dictate appropriate medical care, and violating the Administrative Procedure Act. These medical practitioners claimed they had “been pressured, unable to prescribe medication, and threatened with or subjected to professional discipline.” 

In March of this year, the FDA settled the suit. FDA was assured by the courts that it “has identified no authority allowing it to recommend consumers ‘stop’ taking medicine” or to otherwise give medical advice, even in “tweet-sized doses.” The court further emphasized that the “FDA is not a physician. It has authority to inform, announce, and apprise — but not to endorse, denounce, or advise.” 

I find all of this is staggering. Where are the primetime and late night pundits and joke-makers on all of this? Why are those who haven’t been let go failing to introspect or review their performance? In light of the collapse of their whole business model, with poll after poll showing no one has any faith in their reporting — and individual idiots who took horse-paste gaining larger viewership and earnings than all the shows and personalities on CNN combined — I would imagine you’d see some amount of humility or even tepid expressions of guilt at this point.

I imagine a lot of things.