After Touting Ivermectin as a Covid Treatment, Fox News Hosts Ignore New Study Showing It Doesn’t Work

A full week has passed since the New York Times flagged a major new study showing that ivermectin does not work against Covid-19. Despite this, Fox News – a network that spent about a year trying to convince its viewers otherwise – has yet to report on this study, which debunks some of the most dangerous nonsense it has ever aired.

For starters, the Fox News primetime lineup led the charge in casting doubt on the safety and effectiveness of the Covid vaccine, even after it had been shown to be overwhelmingly effective in preventing hospitalization and death. Hosts regularly platformed a rotating roster of cranks like Alex Berenson, a.k.a, “The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man,” to tell people the vaccine is ineffective or even deadly, as he did in January.

Of course, simply telling viewers, “Vaccine bad” is only half the anti-vaxx propaganda battle. If you’re going to fearmonger about the best way to prevent people from dying from some malady, it helps to give them other “options.” And when experts point out how useless those options are, you get to accuse them of being part of the establishment trying to keep you ignorant of The Cures They Don’t Want You to Know About™.

For much of 2021 and early 2022, the most popular alleged Covid remedy of this kind was an anti-parasite drug called ivermectin. And nowhere was it featured more prominently in front of large audiences than the primetime lineup of Fox News. Hardly a night passed without one of its hosts interviewing some kook citing bogus studies to feed garbage to the viewers.

Here are just a few examples of hosts and guests promoting the drug:

In January 2021, Laura Ingraham claimed a friend of hers took ivermectin after getting Covid and the friend’s condition improved.

Back in September, Brian Kilmeade suggested ivermectin could treat Covid, stating, “Sometimes drugs work for different things.”

In December, Ben Carson said ivermectin is effective against Covid.

Two weeks later, Tucker Carlson interviewed a psychiatrist who said ivermectin “could be a lifesaver” for Covid patients.

These are just a fraction of the nearly 300 instances in which hosts or guests talked up ivermectin as a possible Covid treatment. Even at the time, there was no credible evidence showing ivermectin worked against the virus at all.

But in case any doubt remained, last week we got the results of a massive clinical trial and they reaffirmed what every non-quack already knew: ivermectin doesn’t work against Covid – at all.

However, you wouldn’t know this if you only watched Fox News – and not just Fox News in primetime. A search of transcripts in a database called TVEyes indicates the study hasn’t been mentioned on any of the network’s shows in the week since the Times article was published.

So, after mentioning the drug positively hundreds of times, the network seemingly has no interest in reporting on the study so as to correct its long, embarrassing, and disgraceful record on the matter.

Keep in mind, this wasn’t some effort to convince people the moon-landing was faked or that the world is flat. No, it was a deliberate attempt to convince viewers – many of them in the high risk category – by the country’s most popular cable hosts on the most popular cable news channel that ivermectin might be more effective than the life-saving vaccine.

How many people died because they believed the bullshit the network aired?

We’ll never know. But we should never forget that in the middle of the deadliest pandemic in 100 years, Fox News hosts cynically pimped an utterly ineffective drug while downplaying the highly effective vaccine, which actually works.

Shame.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.