Joe Rogan said something interesting in his Instagram post the other day when he was responding to the Spotify controversy about his podcasts. He talked about his view on the media attacking him for “misinformation.”
“The problem I have with the term misinformation – especially today – is that many of the things that we thought of as misinformation just a short while ago are now accepted as fact, like for instance, if you said eight months ago, you can still catch COVID, and you can still spread COVID, you’d be removed from social media. They would ban you from certain platforms. Now, that’s accepted as fact.” He also noted that if you previously had talked about cloth masks not working that you would be banned from social media, but now that is openly stated on CNN. If you talked about the possibility of the lab leak theory, you might be banned he said. Now, it’s on the cover of Newsweek.
Are we about to hear another big narrative shift on one of those points? Well, maybe.
Reuters dropped a pretty big story last night from a Japanese company looking at the effectiveness of Ivermectin. They said that the drug had been shown effective in Phase III clinical trials. Now, it turns out that wasn’t true. What was true was that it had shown an “antiviral effect” against Omicron and other coronavirus variants in joint non-clinical research. That’s still promising, although not as much as what was first claimed because it’s not tested in humans yet.
But it seems Reuters felt that they had to even blunt that truth while reporting the story. How Reuters structured the story and updated it is something else. In a story that should be about the science, Reuters spent most of the story running down the drug, talking about the Joe Rogan controversy, even doing a bit of a bash on hydroxychloroquine and President Donald Trump. At last check, they had done six updates to the story.
— Dr. Nickarama (@nickaramaOG) February 2, 2022
Sounds like someone was unhappy with this report to need all these updates.
Uh-oh. Reuters is "spreading disinformation.":https://t.co/WYseLbE25P
— Gen 🇺🇸 (@Gen_Gen_T) January 31, 2022
But the tweet is still up, so that may be promising.
As you may recall, Joe Rogan got attacked by CNN for just saying that he’d been prescribed Ivermectin by his doctor, although the FDA hasn’t approved it for COVID use. So now that Reuters and a pharma company are talking about it, is it acceptable to discuss it? Isn’t it ridiculous that anyone even has to ask that? That we’re at the point in this allegedly free society that we have to be concerned if we trip over some invisible line and say something someone doesn’t like we may get censored or face a ban hammer? Such attitudes are harmful to science, getting to the truth and effective treatments.
IF ivermectin DID actually turn out to be an effective medication for Covid-19, you get the feeling that SOME people would actually be upset. How invested in your narrative do you have to be to NOT want medication to work? Seems a teensy-weensy bit weird doncha think?🧐
— Seán Ono Lennon (@seanonolennon) February 1, 2022
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