After dropping an apology video on Monday morning and addressing the controversy that led music legends Neil Young and Joni Mitchell to pull their music from Spotify, Joe Rogan shared more misinformation within hours. Despite a promise to do better and balance things out by bringing more experts with “differing opinions” onto his podcast, Rogan reportedly tweeted (and deleted) a Reuters report that claimed a new study proved ivermectin is effective against COVID. There’s just one small problem: The report was wrong.
It’d be one thing if Rogan tweeted the article before it was corrected, but unfortunately for the podcast host, that’s not what happened. Rogan shared the article hours after Reuters had issued a very large and prominent correction, which Rogan would’ve seen if he had actually read the link before tweeting it. Via Mediaite:
“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.
In Rogan’s quasi-defense, he eventually deleted the tweet. However, it was up for at least an hour, which was plenty of time for the misinformation to bounce around right-wing and anti-vaxxer accounts like wildfire.
(Via Mediaite)