Daily-Dose

Contents

From New Yorker

From Vox

Peloton’s Cody Rigsby hates licorice, loves Britney Spears, and is the biggest fitness star since Jane Fonda. Dancing With the Stars is just going to make him bigger.

Cody Rigsby hates the taste of black licorice. He calls anyone who likes it a “monster.” He also hates Justin Timberlake, orange marmalade, and people who go out to dinner and refuse to split the bill evenly. But Cody Rigsby loves, too. He loves Britney Spears, wigs (preferably secured and attached firmly to a scalp), pulpy fresh-squeezed orange juice in mimosas, the crunchy texture of a Cheeto as opposed to a cheese puff, and the idea of beating up Rugrats bully Angelica Pickles.

These are some of the things you’ll learn about the Peloton instructor if you take, along with hundreds of thousands of other riders, enough of his virtual cycling classes through the popular home exercise service. Or you can learn this if you, like me, talk to several of those riders (and sit in on those rides), peruse Facebook groups and Reddit posts dedicated to him, and watch the “Best of Cody Rigsby Part 44” video (and the previous 43 installations) on YouTube.

Or you might learn it on ABC in the coming months, as Cody Rigsby ascends his largest platform yet — one that doesn’t even have a bike on it.

Earlier this month, Dancing With the Stars (DWTS) announced that Cody Rigsby would be one of the cast members of their milestone 30th season. Cody Rigsby will soon pasodoble, foxtrot, waltz, and quickstep on national television — a privilege usually reserved for Olympic gold medal winners and traditional celebrities like musicians (Normani placed third in the show’s 24th season) and actors (Zendaya placed second in the show’s 16th season).

Cody Rigsby might not be a household name to all, but for many he is an integral part of their household. For the US’s 1.4 million Peloton users, Rigsby is probably the biggest fitness celebrity not named Jane Fonda, and he’s reached that position in large part by talking about the foul taste of black licorice. His relatable persona and easily shared opinions let his fanbase feel unusually close to him, making him both a huge star and a good buddy to people who spent a lot of money on a bike in their living rooms.

“People hate working out,” Cody told the Washington Post in July. “Let’s be honest: I hate working out sometimes, too. So you want to be entertained. You want to forget that you’re doing something that you don’t like.”

It still might be a mystery to some just what kind of magic this man possesses that compels a stranger to create a 44-part highlight series on YouTube. His secret might be as simple as friendship.

What makes Cody Rigsby so popular?

Rigsby and Peloton existed before the pandemic — Cody is 34 and has been at Peloton for seven years; Peloton’s stationary bicycle was created in 2014 — but Covid-19 lockdowns and social distance protocols in the past two years accelerated the profile of both. Back in 2020, state and local health officials ordered gyms and fitness studios to shut their doors to curb infections and risk. The shutdowns put a premium on outdoor and home workouts, the latter being a boon for Peloton, the premier name in cycling and treadmilling classes from home. An example of the surge: This past May, Peloton reported that quarterly revenue rocketed 141 percent to $1.26 billion.

More people on Peloton means more of an audience for Peloton’s instructors, Rigsby included. According to Social Blade, a company that tracks social media followings, Rigsby had just under 300,000 Instagram followers in the summer of 2020 and now has a little over 890,000. Some of that boost is due to his upcoming appearance on DWTS (he’s gained about 50,000 followers since the announcement), but his rise over the past year can be traced to the popularity he carved out during Peloton’s pandemic boom. His fanbase, known as Rigsby’s Boo Crew (#BooCrew on Peloton) has over 100,000 members.

But what is it that makes Rigsby so special?

“What separates Cody is that at the end of the day, Cody’s personality comes off as very genuine, so it doesn’t feel like you’re riding a bike in your bedroom. I mean, it’s really like riding with a friend,” said Tyler Moses, 28, one of the founding members of the Boo Crew.

Moses describes himself as an early adopter of Peloton, nabbing a bike around five years ago. Not unlike group fitness instructors at SoulCycle or Barry’s, Peloton instructors have their own niche or archetype. Some may focus on a certain type of music while others might home in on providing challenging classes. Moses jokingly referred to one instructor’s class as “calculus” because of the focus on all the numbers and metrics, something he doesn’t necessarily care for.

Moses explains that Cody’s appeal is that it’s the antithesis of doing calculus. His allure comes from rants and tangents about fountain sodas, email etiquette, and how drag queens dance.

“Cody’s very open about not only fitness but his personal life,” Moses said. “I mean, talking about his mom Cindy, and him being homeless, and his dancing career and joining Peloton. It’s like things that you would share with your friends.”

And Cody has a whole lot of friends, who in turn have formed a community through Peloton’s features. Moses says that just because he has “#BooCrew” in his Peloton handle, he now gets thousands of virtual “high fives” when he takes a class.

Johanna Cox is a more recent convert, becoming a Rigsby Rider during the pandemic. She was drawn to Cody for the same reasons as Moses. His comedy and ability to connect to her sealed her loyalty.

“In my head, we were best friends after a few rides,” she said. “I wasn’t seeing anybody anymore, other than my three kids, but here he was, every day, a few inches from my face, discussing all the things my real-life friends and I used to break down.”

Cox’s experience wasn’t unique. The pandemic severed so many of our social bonds, especially early on as the directive from health officials advised us to trim our social circles into pods. Gyms and fitness studios were some of the first places to shut down in an effort to curb risk and infection, but previously they’d been places of social connection, especially group fitness classes. Fans say Cody had a special talent for making a surreal situation feel normal and fun.

“He’s hilariously self-effacing, which I think is his biggest charm,” Cox said. “Have you heard him pronounce ‘turquoise?’ It’s wrong. Or the way he enjoys being the guy who puts ice in his white wine? His cruel opinion of Taylor Swift? All of it, wrong. But what makes him so great and so truly likable is that he does not give a shit; he is who he is, and that’s how Cindy raised him.”

enjoy this inspirational quote from cody rigsby bff pic.twitter.com/nNGYQpSj68

— bailey (@httpsspring) September 11, 2021

Not all Rigsby riders may be as devout or effusive as Moses, Cox, or the Boo Crew. Some of them wouldn’t use the word “friend,” but he’s still someone that makes them laugh and plays the music they like.

After talking to several of his riders, it seems clear that Cody Rigsby is uncannily skilled at finding memories, feelings, and nostalgia you didn’t know you cared about.

Whether it’s his observations about the taste of a Book It-earned personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut or the way some white women of a certain age dance with their arms over their head, the things he touches upon are very specific. While never overly prodding or complicated, it still feels like the opposite of small talk — like an inside joke you’ve lucked into. Like all experiences, it really pays off when someone else connects to them and the subjects he talks about — his mom, being gay, being different and growing up in the South, Britney Spears — tend to resonate with gay men, moms, and a lot of people who grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s (these same demographics also happen to be big on Peloton).

Perhaps the real genius is that Cody slyly turns his not-small talk into a fitness class. Making what’s essentially a monologue feel like a conversation with people peddling and following along through a black mirror isn’t easy. Rigsby makes it seem effortless. Fans say he lingers just enough on the story, and at the same time coaches his riders into having good form (knees forward, back straight) and pushes them to try harder — the way, he says, Britney Spears crushed her Onyx Hotel Tour.

As Cox says, “He gets us, he puts us in a better mood, so sure, we’ll turn that resistance up when he asks for it.”

Cody Rigsby and Dancing With the Stars makes perfect sense, but what’s next?

Cody is a serious threat to win Dancing With the Stars, even if he isn’t a traditional DWTS celebrity. Not only is Cody a trained dancer (though hip-hop and pop’s reliance on hair tossing and body rolls are a different animal than ballroom) with a massive audience on Peloton (a recent 20-minute ride I took with Rigsby had been taken by over 290,000 participants), he appeals to a demographic friendly with DWTS — women, specifically moms. Cody has a very devoted fanbase that’s ready to mobilize.

Cody’s inclusion indicates that people at the show are shifting their own ideas about celebrity. The stars invited usually consist of soap opera actors, child stars, former athletes, and pop music artists, with the show’s biggest moment being its cast announcement.

The show, historically, has had a conservative viewership and included former GOP lawmakers like Rick Perry and Tom DeLay, and Republican-aligned scions like Bristol Palin. But the show’s mildly pleasing mundanity sometimes snaps, like in 2019, when it cast former White House press secretary Sean Spicer. Producers were criticized for normalizing someone who lied to the American public on behalf of the Trump administration. (Past controversial stars included food personality and racial slur-user Paula Deen, and boxer Floyd Mayweather, who has been convicted of domestic violence.)

Last year, for its 29th season, the show fired its longtime host Tom Bergeron and hired Tyra Banks in an effort to refresh and reenergize its viewership. That season featured the likes of Tiger King’s Carole Baskin, Backstreet Boy AJ McLean, and was eventually won by Bachelorette star Kaitlyn Bristowe. The additions of Cody along with YouTuber Jojo Siwa and influencer (and college admissions scammer) Olivia Jade seem to indicate that the show is broadening or at least reacting to the modern-day definitions of popularity and celebrity. Siwa will make history as the first celeb to dance with a partner of the same sex — a progressive move for a show that came under fire for casting Spicer two years ago.

For a select group, though, Cody’s involvement remains the biggest news. Moses explained to me that while ABC had been tight-lipped about casting, eagle-eyed Boo Crew members pieced together Cody’s itinerary based on his social media the week of the announcement. They spotted the instructor wearing a yellow face mask on a plane to California. Then, another Boo Crew member noticed a picture of an unidentified man on the DWTS set wearing what they believed to be the same face mask. They triangulated their findings and, based on the smallest of details, were sure their guy was going to be on the show.

“They were like, ‘Look at his ear! That’s Cody’s ear!’” Moses told me, laughing while recounting the story about how the rumor set the Boo Crew ablaze. Now, they’re engaged, mobilized, energized — and they vote, literally.

During the 2020 presidential election, the Boo Crew enacted a get out the vote campaign (they’ve also raised over $160,000 for charity since their inception). Though they didn’t endorse a candidate, Cody and the Boo Crew believe in women’s rights, gay rights, Black Lives Matter, diversity, and inclusivity.

“We ordered literally over 10,000 postcards and sent it to members across the country asking them to vote,” Moses said. “Then with a few swing states, we followed up. Like when Georgia had the recount, we sent even more out. As soon as it was announced that he was gonna be on Dancing With the Stars I was like, okay, we got this — not only do we got it, but we’ve had a few run-throughs.”

As a testament to Cody’s voting block, Moses sent me a screenshot from an ESPN poll about DWTS. The poll grouped him together with fellow competitors Jojo Siwa and Mel C. from the Spice Girls and asked which star would have the highest score on premiere night. Cody was in last place when the Boo Crew was alerted. After a barrage of voting, he now sits in first with 55 percent of the vote. Mel C. garnered a paltry 9 percent.

Seems likely that Cody will stick around for a while and get to be known by the show’s millions of viewers (last season averaged 6.1 million viewers per episode), adding new members to the Boo Crew with each hustle.

As Rigsby becomes a bigger star, however, there will probably be more scrutiny about who he is, what he stands for, and if he’s the same person he says he is. Some of that criticism will inevitably be tougher than others. Some haters will appear (like those ragging on the instructor’s recent $1.45 million penthouse purchase), but there might also be some genuine concerns that arise.

Memes, usually video captures of Cody and other instructors’ rides and rants, have popped up, which have promoted questions about whether Cody is using AAVE or employing a blaccent. Some riders I spoke to, who asked for anonymity because of how popular Cody is and how fervent Peloton fans are, questioned whether his appeal is because he fits and leans into a gay best friend trope.

There are concerns for his intense fanbase as well, ones they’re already working through. One example that Moses pointed out was that Peloton used to use the word “tribes” to indicate groups like Boo Crew who had loyalty to certain instructors. Moses said he and the Boo Crew found out abruptly that the word was triggering and could be offensive when he awoke to “hundreds of messages” about how they shouldn’t refer to themselves as a tribe. Rigsby himself reached out about changing the name.

“It was just something that happened very quick. There were a lot of angry people,” he said, explaining that he took it as a learning moment instead of shying away from it. “You address it. You learn if you’ve made a mistake, and then you put it behind you.”

That’s what Cody would do, he said.

#RollingStone just got its credibility ass kicked with the fake news story smearing a safe and Nobel Peace Prize winning drug Ivermectin. No “horse sense” among those liars! read the funny cartoon post at https://t.co/um2maK0qGm pic.twitter.com/eIqyruSA3M

— Ben Garrison Cartoons GrrrGraphics.com (@CartoonsBen) September 6, 2021

The furor has also ensnared the researchers studying ivermectin. Ed Mills, a researcher at McMaster University in Canada, told me he’d been flooded with abusive emails when his study (“larger than all the other ivermectin trials put together,” he told me) found that ivermectin’s purported benefits were too small to be detectable. That study (not yet published) is part of a several-thousand-person randomized controlled trial, the gold standard for evaluating Covid-19 treatments.

But it’s not clear those results — or the many other results in the pipeline from high-quality research — will end the public debate about ivermectin. The mania feels beyond the reach of reason at this point.

Meanwhile, even as many Americans resort to a drug with a sketchy evidence base to fight Covid-19, the US estimates 15 million vaccine doses have gone to waste as the country struggles to persuade more people to get the vaccine, for which the case is much, much stronger.

That about sums up the depressing state of America’s battle against Covid-19 in 2021.

The extremely thin evidence for ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment, explained

First, the basics: Ivermectin is an anti-parasite medication discovered in 1975. It’s one of the world’s front-line drugs against some devastating parasitic infections, especially river blindness, which is transmitted by biting flies and can lead to skin problems and loss of eyesight.

About 250 million people take ivermectin each year. Side effects are generally mild, though nausea, itching, and rashes are common. (Claims have circulated on social media that it causes male infertility, based on a Nigerian study from 2011, but larger studies have not detected this effect.)

And, yes, ivermectin is also a veterinary drug, for deworming dogs and livestock. Because the human version of the drug is prescription-only, making it hard to access without a doctor who agrees that you need it, some people interested in taking ivermectin for Covid-19 have turned to purchasing it from livestock stores, giving rise to the “horse paste” memes and jokes.

Veterinary formulations are harder to dose correctly; information nationwide on ivermectin overdoses and complications is limited, but the South Texas Poison Control Center, for example, which has seen 260 ivermectin-related calls so far this year (up from 191 in all of 2019), says that incidents are overwhelmingly from people attempting to use veterinary formulations to treat Covid-19. The side effects from such misuse include nausea, allergic reactions, seizures, and potentially death. Serious side effects from taking a dose safe for humans are rare.

How did ivermectin enter the Covid-19 treatment conversation? Almost as soon as Covid-19 hit, researchers started looking to repurpose existing drugs against the disease. It’s not unheard of for such repurposed drugs to work: Most drugs act in the body through many different mechanisms, so they can work even against diseases quite different from the ones they were initially developed for.

Many drugs that are not antivirals still have antiviral properties: for instance, a drug like fluvoxamine, which shows promise as a Covid-19 treatment, is an antidepressant, but it seems to modulate the inflammatory response that causes lung damage in Covid-19 patients. Some early studies seemed to suggest that ivermectin — cheap, FDA-approved, relatively safe when taken as directed — might be one such lucky drug, possessing antiviral properties in addition to the anti-parasitic properties it was known for.

But the evidence thus far for its effectiveness against Covid-19 is extremely thin.

Early in the pandemic, ivermectin, along with several other drugs repurposed to fight Covid-19, showed promise in small trials. But it’s very common in such trials for promising results to occur by chance. And while extremely high doses of ivermectin work against Covid-19 “in vitro”— that is, in petri dish samples in laboratories — that tells us practically nothing about how well the drug works against the disease in live patients.

Indeed, the doses of ivermectin that kill Covid-19 in in-vitro settings are higher than are achievable in the human body.

So for much of last year, ivermectin was in a common category with many other repurposed drugs like fluvoxamine, dexamethasone, metformin, and hydroxychloroquine: There were some small studies showing promise, and more rigorous research was needed to figure out which of those small studies was for real. “There was genuine interest in the medical community in ivermectin,” Mills, the McMaster researcher, told me. He started enrolling patients for his ivermectin trial last fall.

Over the last year, those studies of ivermectin have been accumulating — and a pattern has emerged. Careful, large, well-conducted studies tend to find modest benefits or no statistically significant benefits for Covid-19 patients who took ivermectin. “The confidence intervals span both modest benefit and modest harm,” says Meyerowitz-Katz. In other words, the results that the studies have found are small enough that they’d be plausible if the drug works — and also plausible if it actively has negative effects.

Mills’s own study, presented at an NIH roundtable in August and still awaiting publication, found “no important clinical benefit,” he told me. The results were sufficiently unpromising that the study would have been terminated sooner if not for the furor around the drug. “The data safety person said, ‘This is now futile and you’re offering no benefit to patients involved in the trial,’” Mills told the New York Times.

The allegations of fraud in ivermectin research, explained

Meanwhile, even as rigorous studies deflated the ivermectin hype, other studies have made headlines claiming outsized, fairly extraordinary benefits — but there’s reason to conclude that those studies are wrong. And in some cases, they’re allegedly fraudulent.

One of the most prominent studies finding positive results for ivermectin was a study from Egypt with lead researcher Ahmed Elgazzar of Benha University. “It was one of the first papers that led everyone to get into the idea ivermectin worked,” researcher Eduardo López-Medina told Nature.

It found extraordinary results for ivermectin, and even though it had not undergone peer review, it was widely cited and was incorporated into various efforts to estimate ivermectin’s benefits. But it was criticized from the get-go for unclear methodology and for not publishing the underlying data the researchers used to find their conclusions (publishing such data is generally good practice to make sure other researchers can do their own vetting of a study).

Then some researchers noticed bigger problems: Most of the introduction to the paper was plagiarized, the numbers in its tables didn’t add up, and the experiment as described would have been very difficult to conduct. Soon, it was removed by the preprint platform that had hosted it. (Elgazzar maintains that his study is legitimate and says the removal occurred without his permission.)

Another big study that has formed part of the case for ivermectin is a study out of Argentina by the University of Buenos Aires’s Hector Carvallo and several co-authors. The paper, published in November 2020, claims that ivermectin prevented health care workers from getting Covid-19 in the first place. The paper describes the drug, along with a nasal algae supplement, as 100 percent protective against infection, while a control group saw up to 56 percent of health care workers get sick.

There haven’t been many studies of ivermectin as a potential prophylactic (a drug you take to prevent infection). Carvallo and company’s stunning finding formed the backbone of much ivermectin advocacy in the US. The study was widely shared: Kory, the head of ivermectin advocacy organization the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance and Rogan’s guest on that June podcast, cited it in a hearing before Congress.

But experts on scientific fraud don’t believe Carvallo conducted his study as described. The data bears telltale signs of being manufactured, like numbers occurring in distributions that don’t occur naturally. Information from the study registration about which participants enrolled doesn’t match the information from the published study. The numbers in the tables don’t add up. Key data is missing. I reached out to Carvallo to ask for clarifications on some of these anomalies, and I was directed to a pdf that did not contain the data I had asked for, and then a spreadsheet that also didn’t have it.

As part of a BuzzFeed investigation, journalists contacted one of the hospitals where Carvallo and co-authors claim the study was conducted. The hospital said the study was not conducted there. Carvallo says it did happen there but without the hospital administration knowing.

I asked Meyerowitz-Katz about these two problematic studies, and he suggested the issues with pro-ivermectin research went beyond them. While he emphasized that there’s legitimate high-quality research going on, he says the inconsistencies and potential fraud in pro-ivermectin research are widespread.

Meyerowitz-Katz told me that as his team has reviewed papers about ivermectin’s benefits, “more and more studies appear to be fake or if they did happen, they didn’t happen in the manner described in the paper,” he told me. “We’ve got a bunch of studies that we haven’t gone public with. Some of the studies where we have very serious concerns about fraud are in very high-quality journals.”

These dubious results then turn up in meta-analyses, which are studies of studies that summarize what’s known about a given topic. Because what we have so far are many small, underpowered studies — studies that have sample sizes too small for researchers to confidently detect the effect they’re studying — a meta-analysis would in theory be very useful.

But when some of the literature appears fraudulent, as in this case, it makes it nearly impossible to get meaningful and helpful results from a meta-analysis. One prominent, widely cited meta-analysis found that ivermectin may work quite well — but the Elgazzar paper alone accounted for 15 percent of the effect.

Another meta-analysis studying ivermectin prophylaxis looked at just three studies. Two of them were Elgazzar and Carvallo.

A month after Elgazzar was retracted, the authors of that first meta-analysis released a repeat of their analysis without Elgazzar and it still looks promising for ivermectin — but it still incorporates other studies that Meyerowitz-Katz and other scientific forensics experts suspect did not occur at all or did not occur as described.

Andressa Anholete/Getty Images
A supporter of Brazil’s President, Jair Bolsonaro, holds a large box of box of ivermectin during a rally to show support to his government in Brasilia, Brazil.

Another problem is that many studies, especially early ones from last year, looked at a combination of ivermectin and many other treatments — ivermectin with doxycycline, for example, or ivermectin with dexamethasone. (Dexamethasone has been shown to reduce mortality on its own).

These combination treatments are compared to control groups that didn’t receive any treatments. That makes it very difficult to tell whether the ivermectin did anything or the other substances did — and studies where only ivermectin varies between treatment groups tend to find much smaller effects.

To be clear, there’s some high-quality research on ivermectin, including some that finds positive results. But meta-analyses that incorporate only methodologically high-quality studies comparing just ivermectin rather than combinations of many drugs, and about which there are no significant fraud concerns — as is done in the recent, comprehensive, 100-page analysis of ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews — tend to find that there is simply not enough high-quality evidence to conclude ivermectin does anything at all.

Beyond a scientific debate

On a June 26 debate on the YouTube channel/podcast Rebel Wisdom, hosted by former BBC filmmaker David Fuller, ivermectin defenders and opponents debated the drug. “What evidence would persuade you that ivermectin didn’t work?” Fuller asked ivermectin defender and medical researcher Tess Lawrie, the director of The Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy in Bath, UK.

“Ivermectin works,” she responded. “There’s nothing that would persuade me.”

That, to put it mildly, is not an attitude conducive to evidence-based medicine. And it’s an attitude that has come to define the public discussion over ivermectin.

To be clear, the research community studying therapeutics has been careful, in their public statements, not to rule ivermectin out, and to emphasize that current evidence is inconclusive — which is not the same as saying it definitely doesn’t work. The truth is that high-quality research suggests that benefits, if there are any at all, will be small, and that treatments that work better exist and are just as cheap. In the meantime, there’s high-quality ongoing research that should help clear up the remaining uncertainty about ivermectin.

For people trying to push back against Covid-19 misinformation and the ivermectin fad, it’s enough to point out the truth — no need to exaggerate the case against this yet unproven drug or resort to condescension toward people falling for fraudulent research and experts leading them astray.

“It’s not about laughing at the poor people who are taking it,” Mills, the McMaster University researcher, told me. The most culpable parties aren’t those who believed apparently fraudulent studies, it’s those who conducted, published, and boosted them.

But research can only clear up uncertainty where uncertainty exists — it can’t do anything about certainty that the drug works regardless of the evidence. As ivermectin’s role in the public spotlight has intensified, the debate about it has in many ways split into two. One is a serious debate among researchers and individuals, trying to understand whether the drug works at all and in what doses and under which circumstances, if any, it would pass a cost-benefit analysis.

The other is a fact-free arena in which research is sometimes cited but never grappled with — and is often greeted with hostility. Carlos Chaccour, a researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, told Nature that he has been called “genocidal” because he was studying ivermectin rather than just advocating for it.

When an anti-vax/anti-mask activist was hospitalized in Chicago with Covid-19, Lin Wood — a lawyer who represented Donald Trump in his lawsuits baselessly challenging the 2020 election — posted a widely shared video of himself calling the hospital and threatening the phone operator with murder charges because the doctors treating the activist wouldn’t treat her with ivermectin.

The complexities reflected in high-quality research are not well represented by the online communities that purport to describe the scientific evidence around ivermectin — and false and misleading information about the drug can often be found in attractive packaging.

The website c19ivermectin.com, for example, has an attractive user interface and is incredibly detailed, chronicling hundreds of studies of the drug. But it presents the estimated effect size based on all the studies out there, never mind that many of them appear fraudulent, and its visualizations effectively weigh every study equally — so a 100-person study that looked at a combination of many therapies including ivermectin will get a data point just like a many-thousand-patient RCT studying just ivermectin against a control group.

The end result is something that looks very scientific. But it’s all built on a backbone of studies that won’t report their data, that in at least some cases may have made that data up, that study ivermectin in combination with many other drugs, and that therefore aren’t any more enlightening when all meta- analyzed together.

For the researchers doing the actual work of figuring out what can help in the fight against Covid-19, ivermectin fandom has become a hindrance. “From a physician’s perspective, you’re not a fan of a drug,” David Boulware, a practicing physician and infectious disease researcher who has studied ivermectin and is currently running a randomized clinical trial to test its benefits, told me. “We’re actually trying to investigate it because we want an answer.”

Figuring out which drugs work against Covid-19 is one of the most critical problems facing humanity. And it makes sense for people to be confused and frustrated by messaging from public health officials, which often hasn’t been very good, or to take it upon themselves to do their own research when the medical establishment has made its own missteps.

But the evidence-free state of public ivermectin advocacy isn’t just hurting people, it’s also derailing the larger goal of ending this pandemic. There are drugs we can be pretty confident work better than ivermectin, and scared, sick people ought to be able to learn about those instead of being deluged with “miracle drug” claims. And researchers need to be able to conduct studies without hearing that the case for ivermectin is so obvious that no further research is needed.

“I’ve been compared to Joseph Mengele and the Nazis, I’ve been told I’m going to hell, all of that stuff,” Boulware said. Health care providers are being threatened; pro-ivermectin Facebook groups are indulging in wild conspiracy theories.

“Can I suggest you include a psychologist as one of your interviewees?” Mills asked me in the course of my reporting. “This is not a medical evidence issue anymore.”

But a new series of reports from the Wall Street Journal, “The Facebook files,” provides damning evidence that Facebook has studied and long known that its products cause measurable, real-world harm — including on teenagers’ mental health — and then stifled that research while denying and downplaying that harm to the public. The revelations, which only strengthen the case that a growing chorus of lawmakers and regulators have been making for breaking up Facebook or otherwise severely limiting its power as a social media giant, could represent a turning point for the company.

Already, the Journal’s reporting has prompted consequences for Facebook: A bipartisan Senate committee is investigating Instagram’s impact on teenagers, and a group of legislators led by Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) is calling for Facebook to halt all development of its Instagram for Kids product for children under 13, which BuzzFeed News first revealed the company was developing in March.

“We are in touch with a Facebook whistleblower and will use every resource at our disposal to investigate what Facebook knew and when they knew it — including seeking further documents and pursuing witness testimony,” read a joint statement from Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) on Tuesday. “The Wall Street Journal’s blockbuster reporting may only be the tip of the iceberg.”

It’s unclear how much these efforts will impact Facebook’s policy decisions and bottom line. The investigations are in their early stages, and it’s too soon to say if it will directly lead to any new laws or other regulation.

Instagram’s head of public policy wrote in a company blog post on Tuesday that the Journal’s reporting “focuses on a limited set of findings and casts them in a negative light,” and that the fact that Instagram did internal research on the matter demonstrates its “commitment to understanding complex and difficult issues young people may struggle with.”

In the long term, the consequences for Facebook are less instantly measurable, but perhaps more pernicious. These findings about the company have further damaged what little trust it had left with politicians — who have long been asking Facebook for specific information about the platform’s effect on mental health. The company declined to provide it, even though in many cases it had all the answers.

Take, for example, this back-and-forth between Mark Zuckerberg and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) at a congressional hearing on social media in March 2021.

Rep. Rodgers: Do you agree too much time in front of screens, passively consuming content, is harmful to children’s mental health?

Mark Zuckerberg: Congresswoman, the research that I have seen on this suggests that if people are using computers and social —

Rep. Rodgers: Could you answer yes or no? I am sorry. Could you use yes or no?

Mark Zuckerberg. I don’t think that the research is conclusive on that. But I can summarize what I have learned, if that is helpful.

Zuckerberg went on to say, “overall, the research that we have seen is that using social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental health benefits and well-being benefits by helping people feel more connected and less lonely.”

He did not mention any of the negative effects his own team had found about Instagram over the past three years, including that in its own study of teenage users, 32 percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.

When Rep

. Rodgers and other Republicans followed up with Facebook and asked about the company’s internal research on the effects of its products on mental health, the company did not share the Instagram research results, according to Bloomberg, nor did it share them with Sen. Ed Markey when his office also asked Facebook to provide any internal research on the matter in April, according to letters provided by Markey’s office to Recode.

“This is such a profound issue for kids and teens,” said Jim Steyer, CEO and founder of the nonprofit organization Common Sense Media, which promotes safe technology and media for children and families. “The fact that Facebook has known the research, done the research, and then hid it … it’s quite mind-boggling,” he told Recode.

Other damning findings from the Journal’s reporting include a discovery that the company has a VIP program that allows celebrities and politicians to break its rules, and that in 2018, Facebook tweaked its algorithm in a way that encouraged people to share angrier content. In each case, Facebook’s own employees found systematic proof of serious issues, but when they warned executives — including Mark Zuckerberg — about it, they were largely ignored.

For years, Facebook’s main line of defense to criticism about any negative impacts its products might cause is that social media, like other technological innovations, can cause some harm — but that the good outweighs the bad.

In a recent interview with my colleague Peter Kafka on the Recode Media podcast, Instagram head Adam Mosseri pointed to the way that social media has helped social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and Me Too. And he compared Facebook to the invention of the automobile.

“Cars have positive or negative outcomes. We understand that. We know that more people die than would otherwise because of car accidents,” said Mosseri. “But by and large, cars create way more value in the world than they destroyed. And I think social media is similar.”

It’s undeniable that social media can facilitate social change. It can also be a useful way for people to keep in touch with their friends and family — and indeed, as Zuckerberg told Congress, it can help people feel less lonely.

But, at some point, the question is whether the public will accept that rationale as an excuse for the company to have free rein to experiment on our collective well-being, measure that harm, and keep the public in the dark about what they learn as they continue to rake in record profits of nearly $30 billion a quarter.

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