One of the most annoying things about the pandemic is that when it’s all over, we will have learned nothing. Individually, we will have learned plenty, but as a species we will have nothing. The data necessary is not being collected, accurate information is not being recorded or reported, and so-called experts have made their names changing their minds while insisting they’ve always been consistent. It’s a failure future generations will pay the consequences of, but we have our own price to pay for this stupidity along the way.
The pandemic has been riddled not only with “experts” insisting they know what is best, but also a whole bunch of random people and celebrities insisting they, too, know what is best. The fact is neither group knows a damn thing, but every single one of them insists they do. The louder they insist, it seems, the less they actually do know.
Everyone knows the folly of Anthony Fauci, who has been on every side of just about everything. But he’s hardly alone in the spreading of information he seemed to be making up along the way. There are idiots on every side of everything who declare things to be true without any proof, then walk away from it when they are shown to be wrong.
This is the cable news mentality. Cable news is full of shameless self-promoters who know very little about the topic they’re booked to discuss. But they, along with the few guests who have actual knowledge, know they’ll never be invited back if they say something like, “We don’t have enough information to draw any conclusions yet, we’re just going to have to be patient and wait.” That level of honesty is the kiss of death for a cable pundit’s career.
Rather than honest, you get garbage like “Ivermectin is the cure for COVID and the government doesn’t want you to know about it!” Is it an effective treatment? Maybe. No one knows. But not knowing isn’t going to get you attention.
On the other side, you have idiot leftists who can only refer to Ivermectin as a “livestock de-wormer.” It’s not a farm medicine, although it’s that too, its use in humans is the reason a team of doctors won the 2015 Nobel Prize for medicine. Yet to talk about Ivermectin means you have to treat it as exclusively good or wholly bad. It’s Hydroxychloroquine all over again.
On one side, you have some idiot doctor named Jason McElyea who appears to have made up a story about people overdosing on an “anti-parasitic drug usually reserved for deworming horses or livestock,” according to Rolling Stone. McElyea’s story was that so many people were overdosing on Ivermectin that emergency rooms in Oklahoma had to turn away people with gunshot wounds. It’s as stupid as it sounds, but being stupid is a surefire way to get attention, and the story went viral with every left-wing idiot on the Internet.
Nobody bothered to do journalism and contact the hospital, or else they would have discovered it wasn’t true. Rolling Stone had to add an embarrassing “update” that essentially admits they didn’t do any reporting or fact checking at all, simply ran with it because they wanted it to be true. It’d be embarrassing, if the journalism industry were capable of embarrassment.
On the other side, we have podcaster Joe Rogan. He claims to have been diagnosed with COVID and, under his doctor’s care, “threw the kitchen sink at it” and was fine a few days later. This is odd because Rogan has been pretty clear that he’s not worried about COVID, so why he would run to his doctor and take a whole list of treatments, that included Ivermectin, at the first sign of not feeling well?
But that’s not really the problem with what Rogan did. I don’t know if Rogan really had COVID or just saw an opportunity to get some publicity, but I do know there’s absolutely no way to know whether or not Ivermectin is why he’s feeling better. Rogan is in good shape, and presumably healthy. His immune system could likely handle it without any of the extensive drug cocktail he listed he had taken. If it’s “just a flu,” why run to the doctor or take anything?
Neither side of the discussion knows a damn thing, it’s all too new to know. What works for one person may work for another, or it may not work at all. Treatments need to be studied, anecdotes don’t count. I hope it does work, but I can’t say it does and neither can anyone else, even if it “worked” for them. Correlation may or may not be causation, which is why study is required. In the meantime, some people will undoubtedly take the wrong form of Ivermectin or too much of it, in a panic and on their own, and get hurt.
There are 330 million people in this country, some are very smart and others are not. You can’t protect stupid people from themselves, but you don’t have to feed that either. The truth lies somewhere in-between. Where, exactly, we don’t know. That’s why study matters. But study, deliberate study, is not what our culture rewards or even tolerates.
Derek Hunter is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!), host of a daily radio show on WCBM in Maryland, and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.