Make room, Rolling Stone magazine. You have competition for the shoddiest news coverage of ivermectin use amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The New York Times reported a startling statistic in late August [emphasis added]: “Calls to poison control centers about ivermectin exposures have risen dramatically, jumping fivefold over their baseline in July, according to C.D.C. researchers, who cited data from the American Association of Poison Control Centers. Mississippi’s health department said earlier this month that 70 percent of recent calls to the state poison control center had come from people who ingested ivermectin from livestock supply stores.”
Wow, 70% of all recent calls to Mississippi’s poison control center have been for ivermectin ingestions?
This is shocking. This is troubling.
This is also 100% false.
The Mississippi State Department of Health, which is responsible for putting out the original 70% statistic, clarified at the time that ivermectin-related calls actually represented 2% of the total calls to the state poison control center and that 70% of those calls, which is to say 1.4% of all calls, were from people who ingested livestock or animal formulations of ivermectin purchased at livestock supply centers.
In spite of this mathematical clarification, the New York Times article remained unchanged for weeks.
Journalist and author Mary Beth Pfeiffer claimed Thursday she contacted the paper to dispute its bogus characterization of the percentage of ivermectin-related calls.
The New York Times finally corrected its reporting this week to note the percentage of ivermectin-related calls to overall calls is much, much lower than 70%.
The passage that claimed originally ivermectin calls accounted for nearly three-quarters of all poison control communications now reads, “Calls to poison control centers about ivermectin exposures have risen dramatically, jumping fivefold over their baseline in July, according to C.D.C. researchers, who cited data from the American Association of Poison Control Centers.”
The report offers no explanation for why it claimed initially the percentage was 70%. The statistic has simply disappeared from the New York Times story.
Also, this is not quite a forthright or accurate correction. It still characterizes the number of calls as troubling and unprecedented.
The story now bears two editors notes, one of which reads, “An earlier version of this article misstated the percentage of recent calls to the Mississippi poison control center related to ivermectin. It was 2 percent, not 70 percent.”
Even with the amended language and the correction, Pfeiffer is still miffed.
“The erroneous alert from which the incorrect statistic was taken is what started the entire campaign against ivermectin,” she said. “It spurred the FDA tweet. The rest — the CDC tweet, the AMA decision — is history.”
A couple more misfires like the ones we’ve seen from Rolling Stone and the New York Times and people might start to think the misreporting is by design.
