Tag: media

Fake News: The strange campaign against ivermectin escalates

What’s with the bizarre campaign against ivermectin?

It’s not just that the FDA has put out a quackish tweet (shown here by AT contributor Dr. Brian Joondeph, M.D.) scolding viewers that they are not horses or cows. That’s in reference to the fact that in some high-dose forms, ivermectin is used as a horse dewormer, begging the question about its effectiveness when it is dosed and formulated properly as a human medical treatment for COVID, prescribed off-label. The news reports repeatedly call ivermectin a dangerous drug, implying that all uses of the drug are dangerous, even when taken properly.

It’s now a lot of nonsense about mass injuries from people who take the horse dewormer form of the drug on their own to beat COVID, as if there is anyone out there advocating such an improper use of the medicine.

Here are a few of the screaming headlines from multiple news outlets:

Gunshot Victims Left Waiting as Horse Dewormer Overdoses Overwhelm Oklahoma Hospitals, Doctor Says -Rolling Stone

Gunshot victims left to wait as Oklahoma hospitals overwhelmed with horse dewormer overdoses, doctor says -Fox59 

(Funny that similarity, almost like the same guy wrote those headlines?)

Overdoses from anti-parasite drug ivermectin overwhelm rural Oklahoma hospitals – leaving gunshot victims waiting for emergency rooms -Daily Mail

Doctor says gunshot victims forced to wait for treatment as Oklahoma hospitals fill up with people overdosing from ivermectin -Independent

One problem: The story is fake.

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Rolling Stone Issues ‘Update’ After Horse Dewormer Hit-Piece Debunked

After Joe Rogan announced that he’d kicked Covid in just a few days using a cocktail of drugs, including Ivermectin – an anti-parasitic prescribed for humans for over 35 years, with over 4 billion doses administered (and most recently as a Covid-19 treatment), the left quickly started mocking Rogan for having taken a ‘horse dewormer’ due to its dual use in livestock.

Rolling Stone’s Jon Blistein led the charge.

On Friday, Rolling Stone‘s Peter Wade took another stab – publishing a hit piece claiming that Oklahoma ERs were overflowing with people ‘overdosing on horse dewormer.’

It was suspect from the beginning.

The report, sourced to local Oaklahoma outlet KFOR‘s Katelyn Ogle, cites Oklahoma ER doctor Dr. Jason McElyea – who claimed that people overdosing on ivermectin horse dewormer are causing emergency rooms to be “so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times getting” access to health facilities.

As people take the drug, McElyea said patients have arrived at hospitals with negative reactions like nausea, vomiting, muscle aches, and cramping — or even loss of sight.“The scariest one that I’ve heard of and seen is people coming in with vision loss,” the doctor said. -Rolling Stone

Except, the article provided zero evidence for McElyea’s claims, causing people to start asking questions.

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The Pentagon’s filtered version of the Kabul rescue mission looks nothing like what really went down

More than 1,000 photos and 60 videos were taken by U.S. military photographers during the evacuation of Afghanistan, but few captured what those chaotic days and nights must have been like for American troops as they attempted to rescue as many people as possible from a seemingly never-ending crowd of desperate Afghans outside the walls of Kabul’s airport.

Now, thanks to a U.S. Marine’s GoPro-shot deployment video, we can see the other side.

The appearance of an orderly and “responsible withdrawal” from Afghanistan comes as no surprise since military photographers are trained on what not to make public and are often told to avoid showing the uncomfortable parts of war. And even when they do capture the realities of combat operations — with the swearing, the unbloused boots and ripped trousers, the shaggy hair and gallows humor, to say nothing of the anger, confusion, and aggression — that version of events rarely makes it through the gauntlet of public affairs officers reviewing outgoing stories, photos, and videos to ensure they align with the “command message” of the day. The visual record of Iraq and Afghanistan has long been filtered through a Department of Defense website where very little goes against the “very specific narrative” the government wants to promote, as one public affairs soldier put it. No profanity or smoking, stick to the hearts and minds stuff, and absolutely no casualties.

“It is easy to get a pulse on what story the military hopes to tell by looking at what images and videos it produces,” military journalist Kelsey Atherton recently noted after studying the “visual canon” of a war propped up by a web of lies spun by top military and political leaders over two decades. The carefully curated gallery of Afghanistan evacuation images, Atherton wrote, showed the “same outward look of calm present in the ‘Afghanistan Withdrawal’ images, of calm established by military order. The reality of this war — its rapid end and live aftermath —  is missing. There’s nothing here about the drones used for a ‘self-defense unmanned over-the-horizon airstrike,’ the euphemism given by the Pentagon for an attack on a suspected suicide bomber. That attack reportedly killed ten civilians, including six children.”

Yet U.S. Central Command released images of a “ramp ceremony” at the airport in which service members carried the caskets of 13 service members killed in the terrorist attack at Abbey Gate on Aug. 26 to the planes that would fly them home. Some journalists were surprised since such images are rarely seen publicly without a lawsuit. There was a good reason for skepticism: They were uploaded by mistake.

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Forbes deletes article alleging psychological trauma in mask-wearing for kids

Forbes removed an article that alleges psychological damage of mask-wearing in kids after it was shared on Twitter and started to get traction. The ideas shared in the article contradict the public health bodies and government advisories on the importance of mask-wearing.

The article discouraging mask-wearing in kids went viral after it was shared by Twitter user NYC Angry Mom. They encouraged people to read the article, adding: “I’m just speechless that someone finally understands that masks on children are not benign.”

The tweet had been shared at least 400 times.

The deleted article (archive) was written by Zak Ringelstein, a PhD holder in Education at Columbia university and founder of Zigadoo, an educational and developmental app for kids.

Ringelstein begins the article by describing how he has spent his career advocating for the removal of standardized testing because of “the havoc it has wreaked on the mental health and well-being of American schoolchildren, especially kids from low-income families.”

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‘Fact-Checkers’ Rush to ‘Correct’ Grieving Parents

America’s leading “fact-checkers” describe themselves as “independent.” But watching their energetic defenses of President Joe Biden’s politically damaging behavior reveals they are taking a side. In the first 100 days, I found PolitiFact evaluated Biden’s critics eight times more often than they “fact-checked” the president.

It was truly shocking when Biden was caught on video checking his watch at Dover Air Force Base on Aug. 29 as the caskets of American soldiers were unloaded into vans. Both Snopes and USA Today felt the urgent, throbbing need to claim that the grieving family members who complained were wrong.

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How ‘Black Fungus’ Became the Sniffles: The Evolution of the Delta Plague

It shuttered entire economies and put the brakes on lifting pre-existing restrictions. It was so devious and unprecedented that many governments were forced to make vaccination mandatory. Health passes and double-masking became the norm due to its unrivaled threat to public wellbeing. 

We are of course referring to the Delta strain, which is often confused with the common cold because they share the same symptoms. Does that make you feel slightly upset? That’s a Delta symptom so you should probably get tested. 

It would require several large tomes to cover all aspects of this extraordinarily oversold health threat. Instead, we will examine its media-fueled rise to virus stardom, and also the mutation’s Achilles’ Heel: “almost no evidence or data backing any of this.” 

The Indian strain: a six-month-old mutation that appeared just in time

First identified in India in October 2020, the underappreciated “Indian” strain finally received the attention it deserved after the World Health Organization (WHO) listed B.1.617.2 as a “variant of interest” on April 4, 2021. 

It was a curiously timed upgrade for a mutation that had already been in circulation for six months. By mid-April, it was begrudgingly accepted that the UK variant, which had provoked border closures and draconian restrictions across the globe, was not linked to more severe illness and did not lead to higher rates of death. 

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NPR Trashes Free Speech. A Brief Response

The guests for NPR’s just-released On The Media episode about the dangers of free speech included Andrew Marantz, author of an article called, “Free Speech is Killing Us”; P.E. Moskowitz, author of “The Case Against Free Speech”; Susan Benesch, director of the “Dangerous Speech Project”; and Berkeley professor John Powell, whose contribution was to rip John Stuart Mill’s defense of free speech in On Liberty as “wrong.”

That’s about right for NPR, which for years now has regularly congratulated itself for being a beacon of diversity while expunging every conceivable alternative point of view.

I always liked Brooke Gladstone, but this episode of On The Media was shockingly dishonest. The show was a compendium of every neo-authoritarian argument for speech control one finds on Twitter, beginning with the blanket labeling of censorship critics as “speech absolutists” (most are not) and continuing with shameless revisions of the history of episodes like the ACLU’s mid-seventies defense of Nazi marchers at Skokie, Illinois.

The essence of arguments made by all of NPR’s guests is that the modern conception of speech rights is based upon John Stuart Mill’s outdated conception of harm, which they summarized as saying, “My freedom to swing my fist ends at the tip of your nose.”

Because, they say, we now know that people can be harmed by something other than physical violence, Mill (whose thoughts NPR overlaid with harpsichord music, so we could be reminded how antiquated they are) was wrong, and we have to recalibrate our understanding of speech rights accordingly.

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Research Resources You Should Know About

Did you know there’s a searchable archive of the last 12 years of TV news? Or that every moment of all of the major news network’s broadcasts from the week of 9/11 are available for free online? Well, you do now! Go forth and research!

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