Note #1: See the chart above? Gee, what a surprise. Researchers found that the “factchecking” business is overwhelmingly biased toward progressives, Democrats, and the whole Axis agenda. I suppose research was needed to prove the obvious; so many people denied this because they were a) gullible, b) stupid, or c) lying. Yes, the study is from Harvard, but I think you can trust the rotting university this time.
Note #2: Despite decades of human testing data showing that Ivermectin was safe and effective to use on people for certain maladies, the Federal Drug Administration joined the effort to discredit President Trump and anyone suggesting that there were possible ways to treat the Wuhan virus other than masking, social distancing, and staying locked away unless you were a mostly peaceful BLM demonstrator. Thus they posted this, along with public statements in the same vein:
Three doctors knew this was false, and sued the FDA. Newsweek explains that federal court has now ordered the agency to “stop it”:
The doctors prevailed, and now a federal court has ordered the agency to remove its attacks on Ivermectin use in humans.
The FDA has agreed to delete and never republish several social-media posts suggesting that ivermectin, a drug that some doctors used to treat COVID-19, is for animals and not humans.
While the FDA still does not approve of using ivermectin to treat COVID, it settled Thursday a lawsuit brought by three doctors who sued it, as well as the Department of Health and Human Services and its secretary, Xavier Becerra, and FDA secretary Robert Califf. All parties have settled.
The lawsuit, filed on June 2, 2022, was brought by doctors Mary Talley Bowden, Paul Marik and Robert Apter, each of whom claimed the FDA was interfering with their ability to practice medicine.
The case was initially dismissed on the grounds the FDA had “sovereign immunity,” though a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed the lower court’s decision saying that the “FDA is not a physician.”
The politically motivated FDA lie still worked: just two days ago, a Trump-deranged friend was telling me how the evil man had convinced his stupid and gullible followers to use a “horse drug” to treat the Wuhan virus. Nonetheless, this is an excellent episode to cite when you are in the presence of someone claiming that the “MAGA” crazies are causing people to distrust science and our government, thus “endangering democracy.”
The reason the public increasingly distrusts “science” and the government is that it is increasingly clear that both are untrustworthy. How dare the government presume to police “misinformation” when it constantly issues misinformation to serve its controlling party’s agenda?
_____________
Pointer: Legal Insurrection
Ethics Alarms 
My mother, an RN (and massage therapist) became livid at all her TDS suffering friends and patients repeatedly calling Invermectin a “horse drug”. She went and got documents discussing the usage of Invermectin in certain patients with various types of issues, and how the drug was routinely used to treat certain infections.
But despite the high usage of the drug on humans in these papers from reputable medical journals dated over decades, she was told that she was too simple to understand that this was misinformation and that Invermectin was only a conspiracy theorist’s solution. She was told that she needs to check with people with real medical degrees, not just crunchy folks in massage therapy school. Her bachelors in nursing with decades of experience was ignored in this discussion.
Her insistence that people should look at the evidence lost her friends and clients, many of whom no longer contact her at all and haven’t since 2020, despite being friends for decades prior.
My graduate work in energy technologies has had the same effect. I love it when I point out the major implications of stupid green policies and am told that I have bought into misinformation, and should listen to a cross country skier or an autistic child, both of whom know more than me on the issue. Proving oil resource availability with tensors is misinformation, but believing that cobalt is mined ethically because anonymous posters on the internet said cobalt mining issues are a conspiracy theory is good research. While I rarely speak with anyone in my circles about these things anymore, I used to get a huge amount of, “don’t just believe whatever, follow the science” advice and people telling me I had no reason to disbelieve in the anthropogenicity of global warming, or the stupidity of global warming “solutions” because I was not smart enough to understand the science. A restaurant recruiter with a GED once told me that my graduate work in this area was irrelevant to the facts because he had read a book on it and I obviously had never done anything but watched Fox News.
The whole misinformation thing has gone completely off the rails and taken society with it. Overly politicizing everything is destroying all we used to hold dear.
A “Massage TERRORIST”?
That is one hell of a euphemism for some sort of practice I hope I never encounter.
-Jut
Deep tissue massage! If that doesn’t get you to spill state secrets, what will?!?
A Comment of the Day, Sarah. (I fixed massage terrorist, but it gave me my first real laugh in weeks.)
I’m glad it gave you a laugh, Jack.
The way my mom practices on me, it might as well be true. However, my thumbs have not engaged my brain all morning, and I’m struggling to spell ANYTHING right today.
I liked “massage terrorist”.
jvb
I thought it was intentional. I’ve seen the same usage jokingly in reference to physical therapists and painful recovery sessions.
I had to post something to some Facebook groups lately. In the middle of typing the post, a dialog box opened up, blocking the screen. It read:
Additional Reporting on this
Before you share this content, you might want to know there’s additional reporting on this from Science Feedback.
Science Feedback
mRNA from a vaccine would not be able to directly alter our DNA. Previous studies have demonstrated that mRNA vaccines…
Share Anyway Cancel
So, I shared it anyway. Under the post, Facebook put a big warning that reads:
False Information: The same information was checked in another post by independent fact-checkers.
The question of the day is…what did I post that got fact checked as mRNA vaccine misinformation and declared ‘false’? (scroll down)
…an announcement for a ham radio license class! Yes, I am certain that COMPLETELY REAL FACT-CHECKERS independently read my post advertising where and when a ham radio license class would be and declared that false and vaccine misinformation.
Huh…they can’t do anything about trafficking little girls for sex, but they’re all over you ham radio guys.
That sounds about right.
I am afraid they do a lot about trafficking little girls. However, I would like them to stop the trafficking of children.
You’ll get no argument from me about so-called “misinformation experts” being biased. But I think we should push back harder on the very idea that they are, in fact, experts to begin with. Does anybody remember hearing of such a creature as a “misinformation expert” prior to, say, 2016?
Yes, I do. We called it PR and advertising at the time.
Any time someone tried that “horse dewormer” misdirection bs on me I’d throw this in their face, (gently, of course. I managed to keep most, though not all, of my friends through the covid fiasco). From that bastion of anti-vax misinformation, Wikipedia:
“William Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for its (Ivermectin’s) discovery and applications.”
Note: the prize was for human, not veterinary, medicine.
So anybody who classifies Ivermectin as merely a “horse dewormer” can just shut the fuck up. (Sorry for swearing, Jack. But this whole thing still has me livid.) Maybe it works for covid, maybe it doesn’t. But stop gaslighting me!
And this was just one of myriad examples of this technique.
I wonder what cognitive dissonance would happen if you point out the brain addled followers after their kids get lice that they used Ivermectin to cure their kids?