Joe Rogan Shares False Story on Covid and Ivermectin Hours After It Was Corrected

Just one day after pledging to make his wildly popular talk show more accurate, Joe Rogan shared a false story claiming the anti-parasitic drug Ivermectin was found to be effective against Covid in a Stage III clinical trial.

Ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug that Rogan and others have promoted as a treatment for Covid, is not authorized by the FDA for use against Covid. “Currently available data do not show ivermectin is effective against COVID-19,” the agency said last month.

The report, from Reuters, was published on Monday morning and quickly corrected. Ivermectin was not found to be effective against Covid in humans in a trial, it was found to have an “antiviral effect” against Covid in a research setting, i.e. a test tube. You can read a more detailed explanation of what that means here.

“The original Reuters story misstated that ivermectin was ‘effective’ against Omicron in Phase III clinical trials, which are conducted in humans,” a Reuters spokesperson told Mediaite. “We corrected this to clarify it had an ‘antiviral effect’ against Omicron and it was shown in joint non-clinical research. After being made aware of the error, we corrected our story immediately.”

Hours after that correction was made, Rogan tweeted out the incorrect headline to his 8.1 million followers. Ben Shapiro retweeted the incorrect headline to his 3.7 million followers.

If either of them clicked through to the link, they would see that the Reuters report had been corrected.

One problem is that Reuters reports are syndicated in news outlets all over the world. And the technology of Reuters syndication means not all of its syndications update with a corrected version (for example).

Rogan may have clicked through the link eventually — his tweet has since been deleted.