The Moral Panic over Ivermectin

Given that I know nothing about biochemistry or medicine, I wisely refrain from commenting about the effectiveness of medication. Apparently, other public intellectuals do not have the same scruples. And that applies even to venerable publications like Rolling Stone. Now, the magazine, which should have stuck to rock ‘n' roll, has found itself in the embarrassing position of having to retract a story about a drug called Ivermectin.

By now you have heard that there is a great national debate over this medication, used on occasion to deworm horses. Those who have read my previous post about therapy horses will immediately start wondering whether these horses need the medication so that they can go back to their real work-- as therapists.

Anyway, Rolling Stone published an article claiming that gunshot victims were being turned away from emergency rooms in Oklahoma because the facilities were chock full of people who had taken a horse dewormer. It turned out to be such an egregious lie that the magazine had to issue an immediate correction.

Matt Taibbi is on the story (via Maggie’s Farm):

The story in a vacuum appears to be a garden variety series of misunderstandings, in which perhaps-real tales of ivermectin overdoses got conflated somehow with an also-real overcrowding story. But as Rolling Stone pointed out, a brief glance at statistics should have given reason to be skeptical of tales of gunshot victims turned away by tidal waves of Trump-loving consumers of veterinary medicine, especially given that such patients everywhere are competing with an exponentially larger actual flood of Covid-19 patients.

For Taibbi the incident stands out as a symptom of the systematic degradation of ethical standards in American media. The media no longer cares to inform. It no longer cares to provide an analysis of the state of any issue. It has now given itself over to ginning up emotion, to making people crazier than they are, the better to manipulate what remains of their mental faculties:

News has become a corporatized version of the “Two Minutes Hate,” in which the goal of every broadcast is an anxiety-ridden audience provoked to the point of fury by the un-policed infamy of whatever wreckers are said to be threatening civilization this week: the unvaccinated, insurrectionists, Assadists, Greens, Bernie Bros, Jill Stein, Russians, the promoters of “white supremacy culture,” etc. Mistakes are inevitable because this brand of media business isn’t about accuracy, but rallying audiences to addictive disgust. As a result, most press people now shrug off the odd error or six, so long as they feel stories are directionally right, i.e. aimed at deserving targets.

Ah yes, Taibbi is certainly correct to see this journalistic degradation as addictive, like video games, social media and certain psychopharmacological substances. 

The reason, Taibbi hints, is that the younger members of the media are generally the products of America’s academic indoctrination mills. They gin up emotion because they do not know how to reason about any issue. They are either not smart enough to move beyond the propaganda stage of mental development or they are trying to improve their own job opportunities by manipulating the minds of the fools they work with.

The press was once a great haven for every atheistic practitioner of gallows humor who couldn’t get a real job anywhere else, but it’s lately become a humorless religious cult, not meaningfully different from Falwell’s gang, except that it’s bigger and vastly more influential, in theory anyway. Today’s press constantly makes religious icons out of tendentious bureaucrats like Bob Mueller and “Saint” Anthony Fauci, strives all the time to turn changeable news narratives into inflexible Holy Writ, and delights even more than Falwell in its own version of divine retribution stories.

So, we are living in an era where thought is policed, actively and with extreme prejudice. It has become a moral panic:

Politicians co-sign the most over-hyped reports of threats, so long as those reports result in pressure to increase their policing authority. Media meanwhile are happy to wave through the most absurd scare quotes from said politicians, since fear sells. Moral panics are always in fashion during authoritarian times — when the public is effectively terrified of a new group every day, they’ll acquiesce to all sorts of previously unthinkable changes, like for instance wide-scale censorship or sweeping new domestic surveillance programs people have been clamoring for in recent years.

The media went into an advanced maniacal state over the Trump presidency. It was no longer permissible to report facts. One was obliged to slant the news in order to make Trump look bad-- and to make America crazy. Better crazy than great!

Soon after, reporters freaked out about Trump’s capture of the nomination began talking about injecting “morality” into coverage. That decision wiped out the last bits of legitimacy left in this business. Bailing on the one thing we were halfway decent at, telling people basic facts, we turned coverage into an exercise in doctrinal enforcement, with outlets now trying to restrict reports to narratives they deemed healthy for public consumption: Trump is Racist, Russians are Bad, etc. This move toward a Decency Police model coincided with a cash-grab commercial strategy that revolved around the factory production of those moral panics, most having to do with Trump.

Finally, Taibbi arrives at the case of Ivermectin, now become a cause celebre for the mini-minds of the media. Given that the Biden administration wants to sell vaccines to everyone and given that it believes that the best way to do so is to censor any information that might contradict the dominant narrative, the stories about Ivermectin tend to be slanted:

Ivermectin is a classic example. It should never have been a big story. In a previous era it would have been reported as a minor medical curiosity. Even if you doubt the drug works, and it appears a longshot at best, it’s a fact that many doctors promoting it are well-meaning, and hope it it might someday be a supplement, not a replacement, for vaccines. It should be possible to tell adults something like, “The FDA doesn’t recommend its use for treating Covid-19, and the consensus among American medical professionals is ivermectin is a dead end, but there are some very limited studies in its favor, and a few doctors here and abroad hold out hope it could eventually be useful in lessening symptoms.” That’s a factual statement one should be able to make, without assuming that everyone who reads it is going to immediately cancel vaccination plans and start mainlining veterinary doses.

Even reporters who don’t think ivermectin works are afraid of describing it as a human medicine, or quoting Oxford University’s characterization of it as a “well-known drug with a good safety profile,” because tabbing it anything but a lethal “horse and cow de-wormer” ingested exclusively by right-wing morons bent on crushing enlightened America’s dream of herd immunity is understood to be equivalent to encouraging its use.

We ought, if we still have a minimal grasp of our rational faculties, be able to present two sides of an issue, the better to allow people to think clearly about alternatives. In truth, such is no longer the case.

If you think that the ranting about Ivermectin is bad, try questioning the “settled science” about the coming climate apocalypse. You would imagine that rational people would express some skepticism about the sanctimonious rantings of a Swedish schoolgirl, but such is not the case. You would think that the media would be reminding us all that there is no such thing as a scientific fact about tomorrow and that the basis for science is skepticism, not dogmatic certainty. If so, you have lost touch with today's American mind. Sad to say, but true.