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.

The hospital in Oklahoma that was said to be at the epicenter of all those many gunshot victims (got questions about that, too) left waiting for their emergency care, is explicitly denying that it's overwhelmed by horse-ivermectin overdose cases and the lone doctor making the claim, Dr. Jason McElyea, is not an employee of the hospital at all, he's a contractor, and hasn't worked at the hospital for months. In fact, it hasn't treated any horse-ivermectin cases at all.

Here's the statement, as reported by Rolling Stone:

UPDATE: Northeastern Hospital System Sequoyah issued a statement: Although Dr. Jason McElyea is not an employee of NHS Sequoyah, he is affiliated with a medical staffing group that provides coverage for our emergency room. With that said, Dr. McElyea has not worked at our Sallisaw location in over 2 months. NHS Sequoyah has not treated any patients due to complications related to taking ivermectin. This includes not treating any patients for ivermectin overdose. All patients who have visited our emergency room have received medical attention as appropriate. Our hospital has not had to turn away any patients seeking emergency care. We want to reassure our community that our staff is working hard to provide quality healthcare to all patients. We appreciate the opportunity to clarify this issue and as always, we value our community’s support.”

Which pretty well discredits the whole hysterical narrative being spread around by multiple news outlets. It's fake news, based on shoddy reporting, from a claim of one source with zero firsthand knowledge, yet a whole host of news outlets picked up the fake story and spread it around to scare people. 

Now, obviously, the hospital would have an interest in seeing patients coming in for treatment and a report like that probably would have kept a lot of them away.

But at the same time, a detailed denial like that is pretty firm and the hospital would be in trouble if it were not true. They said they're treated no one for taking horse dewormer, no one at all.

So the news outlets have made huge errors in judgment and trashed their own credibility based on that now-denied report they could have gotten the answer to, and it was one after another running themselves off the cliff, none of them really checking, all of them taking the word of one doctor, who could have had any agenda. I suspect CNN might have run a version on the story based on multiple claims on Twitter and the fact that a Google search with CNN, Oklahoma, and hospital keywords turns up with CNN's name in news pickups from others such as Yahoo!, but all clicks to the story come up empty. If so, it's got to be bad.

It follows from another claim that multiple news agencies manipulated a photo of famous podcaster Joe Rogan, who had COVID and took a people-version of ivermectin, prescribed off-label by a doctor, and was cured quickly of his illness. The news photos showed a picture of his face with a yellow filter and slight blurring in a bid to make him look kind of green and sick. The original photos showed him looking perfectly healthy.

Joe Rogan gets Covid, takes several meds including #Ivermectin, Media flips out and doubles down on their lies, and they even stoop so low as to alter photos of him to make him look sicker. pic.twitter.com/WTowFOnh6U

— Stone Crier (@CrierStone) September 2, 2021

There's some kind of campaign ramping up against ivermectin, a drug whose inventor won the Nobel prize in 2015 for the first version of, and which has been endorsed by the Japan Medical Association, as well as in many studies which have found it to be an effective early treatment for COVID. There's no President Trump involved, so it's something very funny going on. Could it be the work of Big Pharma which has far more expensive medications for COVID to sell? It's terrible if true, given that there's a lot of evidence out there that ivermectin does indeed cure the illness.

But that's no issue to the press it seems, and other than Rolling Stone, none have published the denial. What's going on here? Why this ramped up campaign of lies and manipulations? 

Image: Screen shot from Fox59 video from shareable story.

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