Seth Meyers on unproven Covid meds: ‘How does it keep getting dumber and dumber?’
Seth Meyers took aim at Fox News’s propagation of pseudo-scientific or outright dangerous medical claims on Thursday night, as more state health departments reported cases of poisonous livestock dewormers ingested to “treat” Covid. “For some reason, when it comes to vaccines, they say things like ‘don’t listen to anchors and politicians, talk to your doctor,’” the Late Night host said of Fox anchors such as the Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade.
“But then they have a very different take when it comes to unproven treatments,” such as the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine and most recently, a drug called ivermectin, used to treat parasites in horses and cows.
Meyers played a roll of clips in which several Fox News anchors, including Laura Ingraham, inaccurately and misleadingly compared ivermectin to vaccines. “Fox News has basically turned into one of those spam emails promising you free natural boner pills for life,” Meyers said. “Any time that someone tries to sell you a miracle drug that they don’t want you to know about, you should be suspicious.”
“I gotta say, when I first heard that
Fox News was pushing ivermectin, I knew it was going to be bad, but I was not expecting it to be horse dewormer,” he added. “It sounds like the name of a drug they give super-soldiers in a Paul Verhoeven movie to turn them into robocops.”
“You know someone at the company that makes Ivermectin once said ‘Hey, should we put ‘not for people’ on the horse pill label?’ And someone else said ‘there’s a picture of a horse on the bottle, it’s fine.’”
The misinformation has gotten so bad, Meyers explained, that the Mississippi department of health reported 70% of calls to its poison control center concerned dangerous ingestions of ivermectin for Covid.
“How does it keep getting dumber and dumber?” Meyers marveled. “First it was hydroxychloroquine, then it was bleach, powerful lights, now it’s horse dewormer? I’m honestly terrified to see what’s next. One day, we’re going to wake up and Brian Kilmeade’s going to be telling people you can cure Covid by eating kibble and sleeping in a bed of kitty litter.”
Jimmy Fallon
On the Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon discussed a letter to employees from the Delta Airlines CEO, Ed Bastian, in which he referred to Covid’s Delta variant only by its scientific name, B.1.617.2. “Apparently he’s afraid that if he says ‘Delta’ too many times, the virus will show up like Candyman,” Fallon joked.
“He’s doing anything he can to distance Delta from the variant – today he said from now on, our airline is pronounced ‘Del-tay.’”
Fallon then turned to a report by the Verge which found that nearly all US government agencies were using facial recognition technology. “Americans were like, ‘um, I don’t want something scanning my face,’ and then went back to pulling down their masks to unlock their phones,” he said.
And Amazon has started selling a miniature replica of the Blue Origin rocket that took CEO Jeff Bezos to space last month. “There it is, ready to probe your galaxy,” Fallon quipped of its phallic shape. “Seriously, I don’t even think you can show that on OnlyFans.”