The horsey set
What can you say to someone who will trust animal medication over a COVID-19 vaccine?
I saw this making the rounds on Twitter, and immediately thought about the old joke about the guy who tries to buy dog and cat food, but is rejected because he doesn’t have his dog nor his cat with him. The punch line involves buying a roll of toilet paper.
I’ve written a lot about how best to approach people who stubbornly refuse to get vaccinated against COVID-19, and I still believe that in most cases, anger and mockery are counterproductive. But if you’re so far down the quackery rabbit hole that you insist on taking horse medication instead, then yeah, I concede that you’re a deserving target for ridicule.
Time magazine did some digging into the anti-vaxxer group “America’s Frontline Doctors” and determined that behind all the culture-war conspiracy bullshit - sorry, horseshit - it’s all about con artists making a quick buck from the desperate and gullible. Isn’t it always?
Over the past three months, a TIME investigation found, hundreds of AFLD customers and donors have accused the group of touting a service promising prescriptions for ivermectin, which medical authorities say should not be taken to treat or prevent COVID-19, and failing to deliver after a fee had been paid. Some customers described being charged for consultations that did not happen. Others said they were connected to digital pharmacies that quoted excessive prices of up to $700 for the cheap medication. In more than 3,000 messages reviewed by TIME, dozens of people described their or their family members’ COVID-19 symptoms worsening while they waited for an unproven “wonder drug” that didn’t arrive.
“My mom has now been admitted to the hospital with Covid,” one user wrote Aug. 12 on the group’s channel on the messaging app Telegram. “AFLDS has not returned a call or message to her and they’ve taken over $500 out of her account!”
[…]
…despite the FDA’s warnings about the dangers of misusing ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19, the drug has become highly sought after in anti-vaccine circles. Doctors and pharmacists tell TIME they have noticed a surge in ivermectin prescriptions called in by telemedicine services, and a growing number of patients demanding it as an alternative to COVID-19 vaccines. Many who fail to obtain prescriptions through groups like AFLD or find it too expensive have resorted to buying an alternative from feed stores that is designed for use in livestock, according to Telegram chats, which reveal members advising each other on proper dosages. Mississippi health officials said Aug. 20 that 70% of recent calls to its poison control center were from people ingesting ivermectin meant for livestock.
Read it all, plus this Twitter thread from NBC News’ Ben Collins, and despair. But the news about vaccination is not all bad:
Elsewhere on Twitter, people are saying Heather Mallick’s latest Toronto Star column is proof of how desperate and panicky the Liberals are getting. You can tell these are the people who have never read any of Mallick’s columns, because they’re pretty much all like this:
Captain O’Toole spent 12 years in the military. This may be where his interest in flags was cemented. Again, Americans have a real thing for the military. We do not. It’s a misogynist, expensive and badly run organization. O’Toole’s association with it doesn’t help him beyond his male base.
[…]
At this point, I suspect O’Toole retains his military mind. That’s not a compliment. His rivals have human minds, as every politician should.
I, for one, think the Liberals should go all in on the argument that Erin O’Toole is unfit to be Prime Minister because he served in the Canadian Forces. The Lib Twitter strategy of accusing O’Toole of exaggerating his military service doesn’t seem to be working very well. And at a time when many Canadian veterans have strong feelings about what’s happening in Afghanistan, telling them they’re misogynists, literally not human beings, and (worst of all) acting like Americans should have some real impact.
The whole column is like a parody of itself. Mallick, a Toronto progressive in good standing, also wants you to know that these Afghans who want to come to Canada should STFU and not talk smack about the Dear Leader:
I don’t like the American-style personalization of politics. I did not like to see a woman with three grown daughters in Canada visit Afghanistan this month to help her parents and then blame Trudeau personally when despite government help, she couldn’t get to Kabul’s airport.
“How can he sleep at night (if) he knows that people have family left behind?” she told The Canadian Press by phone, naturally in great distress.
But why use her fear, why print this? Why blame Canada? Blame ISIS. Blame the Americans for losing another pointless war.
There’s cognitive dissonance, and then there’s attacking Conservatives in deeply personal terms (and going after Americans in a way that Mallick herself would surely decry as bigotry were such language directed at people from literally any other country) while simultaneously decrying the “personalization of politics.”
Flags, tweets, opposing vaccination for all, personal political hatred, that’s all part of the American catastrophe. We are a foreign country, we do things differently here.
We aren’t that different. The United States of America has many unhinged newspaper columnists, too.
I was going to say there’s nothing that would repel me as a reader more than a column written by Heather Mallick, but then I saw this in an email blast from The Spectator. Well played, guys.