Missouri: Ivermectin Gag Order

Right-wing strategy: when reality has a well-known liberal bias… you can use legal gag orders to force your delusions upon people.

Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine: Zombie Ideas

Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as treatments for COVID-19 constitute one of those idées fixe that the Trumpy conservatives simply will not let go. It’s in fact what Nobel laureate Paul Krugman calls a ‘zombie idea’: so thoroughly debunked that it’s thoroughly dead, “demonstrably false”, but somehow stupidly shambles along eating people’s brains anyway. ^[1] We’ve even debunked it here on this Crummy Little Blog That Nobody Reads (CLBTNR): here, here, and here.

But right-wingers are still trying to make us pretend ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are good for COVID-19, in their fascist fables of medicine. Their latest outrage, pointed out by Missouri activist Lindsey Simmons, is a gag order explicitly forbidding pharmacists from discussing specifically ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine:

She’s referring to bill HB 2149 ^[2] whose text, upon checking, says exactly that:

• It starts out, bizarrely enough, talking about licensing physical therapists. But then it went into conference committee. The resulting tug of war stuck all sorts of crap all over it.
• Since apparently they know ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine don’t work for COVID-19, they carved out an exception forbidding the licensing boards from taking any action against a pharmacist who fills a scrip for them. In spite of the fact that they don’t work for COVID-19.
• Even more Orwellian, there is a gag order: pharmacists are forbidden from discussing the effects of specifically ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine unless the patient thinks to ask. This is explicitly in conflict with the code of ethics for pharmacists, which is always to discuss medications with patients to make sure they take them properly (documented by Simmons in the Twitter thread above with extracts from the Missouri code of ethics for pharmacists). In the case of ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19, the proper way to take them is not to take them at all!

A Bitter Irony

The motto of the state of Missouri is:

Salus populi suprema lex esto

(Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law)

But now, apparently Missouri Republicans want the supreme law to be deference to fascist medical fables, and the lives of mere people be damned.

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Notes & References

1: P Constant, “Renowned economist Paul Krugman identifies 2 ‘zombie ideas’ that are persisting during the pandemic, and it’s our job to stop the spread of misinformation”, Business Insider, 2020-Apr-03. ↩

2: Sponsors of Missouri House Bill HB 2149, “CONFERENCE COMMITTEE SUBSTITUTE NO. 2 FOR SENATE SUBSTITUTE FOR HOUSE BILL NO. 2149”, Missouri House of Representatives, 2022-May-12.↩