The Media Shouldn’t Make Ivermectin a Culture-War Football

I’ ve always been skeptical of the censorship of scientists and others who have differing views on COVID. The three primary signers of the Great Barrington Declaration opposing lockdowns are noted experts from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford. But they’ve been subjected to unbelievable abuse and doxxing.

That’s why I’m leery of the media barrage of criticism that last week was directed at Joe Rogan, the podcast host with 13.1 million followers, after he announced that he’d tested positive for COVID but has recovered thanks to a cocktail of medical treatments. Rogan is not anti-vaccine, but he decided to throw the “kitchen sink” at COVID. His regimen ranged from noncontroversial monoclonal antibodies to Z-pack antibiotics and a vitamin drip. “Here we are on Wednesday, and I feel great,” he told listeners.

But what the media dumped on him for was taking ivermectin, a drug used to treat humans for scabies, head lice, and river blindness, and used by veterinarians to treat cows and horses.

The Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015 went to two scientists who developed ivermectin, which “turned out to be highly effective in both animals and humans against a variety of parasites.” In 2020, the FDA approved one ivermectin lotion as an over-the-counter lice treatment. But the FDA opposes its use for COVID, and the media have used that to mock Rogan and people who use it as anti-science rednecks.

Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner says that media critics of Rogan present no evidence he took horse-formulated ivermectin: “They seem to be deliberately misleading their readers in order to get good guffaws at the Neanderthals. . . . It would be natural to conclude that most ivermectin taken these days is horse paste. But it isn’t. The CDC reports that ivermectin prescriptions (human prescriptions) have risen 24-fold since before COVID-19, from 3,600 a week to 88,000 a week.” Carney zings this sloppy reporting and says it’s likely that “vastly more people are taking prescription ivermectin in human formulations than in livestock formulations.”

Curiously, in February 2021, Merck, the U.S. developer of ivermectin, issued a carefully worded statement warning of the “safety risks” of using ivermectin to treat COVID. But in the age of COVID, companies seeking FDA approval are under enormous pressure to conform to the “science” as defined by government experts. No one at Merck cared about purported “safety risks” when they distributed ivermectin free to a billion people in developing countries. Merck has decades of “safety data” from treating billions of people worldwide.

The media are quick to jump on misinformation on the Internet about COVID. But it’s not nearly so quick to shoot down false reports such as the Rolling Stone story tweeted out by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that claimed that people suffering from ivermectin overdoses were causing ambulance and emergency-room backups in Oklahoma. Rolling Stone has finally issued a correction.

We don’t know whether ivermectin is helping people with COVID, but one of the largest health-insurance companies, UnitedHealthcare, and researchers at the medical schools of UCLA, Northwestern, and the University of Minnesota believe that the data that are now available look promising. They are conducting a nationwide outpatient study, COVID-Out, to determine whether ivermectin and two other common drugs could help keep people out of hospitals and intensive-care units.

It’s fine to be skeptical of ivermectin’s efficacy against COVID. But it does a disservice to imply that it’s unsafe or meant only for animals. Maybe the reporters scoring cheap shots against Joe Rogan and others should explore whether the criticism of any non-vaccine treatment might be part of a disinformation campaign by people who want everyone to stay in one approved lane on COVID treatments. Pharmaceutical companies could be among the suspects.

I’m reminded of the famous warning issued by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman in the 1960s: “There is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science.”