Louie!
Oh y’all, Louie is making the rounds. Speaking to a Texas youth group, he hates on the Covid vaccine and lets people know that Trump was right all along.
I don’t know if y’all saw, but a month after President Trump left office, the American Journal of Medicine came out with a great article that they had discovered a regimen of medication that when taken together early in Covid that–you may have heard of it: hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, a Z-Pak azithromycin, zinc.
Next month, Louie will be quoting the American Journal of Veterinary Vitamins.
I really didn’t want y’all to miss Louie’s choice of men’s business wear – gray pants with a brown sport’s coat, or maybe it’s a suit jacket he picked up at Goodwill.
"Hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, a Z-Pak … a steroid nebulizer" — Rep. Louie Gohmert is giving a speech at the Texas Youth Summit in which he's giving terrible Covid-related medical advice to huge cheers pic.twitter.com/NnTe3bAXIo
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 28, 2021
Just when you think Louie has gone away, pop! he’s back. Just like that.
And, to make you grin – a real sign in a real real feed store.
Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.
W.C. Fields
1I’m somehow reminded of the comedian that pointed out that there are just some professions that really don’t work with a thick southern accent. I can just imagine a brain surgeon coming in and saying, “we are going to cut a hole in your head about yay big (gesturing with hands).”
Or, maybe Louie is an idiot even without the accent. I know he is, but I think the accent just adds that little air of authenticity.
2The American Journal of Medicine is a very respected journal, the official journal of the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine, a prestigious group comprising chairs of departments of internal medicine at more than 125 medical schools across the U.S. It seemed highly unlikely to me that they said anything remotely resembling what Louie came up with, so I reviewed every issue for 2021 so far. Nope, nada. Closest is an editorial deploring the lack of large-scale well-run clinical trials in Covid-19 and the parlous state of media reporting on treatment – https://www.amjmed.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0002-9343%2820%2930794-4 Louie is basically the anti-matter version of a reliable source. He invented something straight out of what I had previously considered to be the trackless waste of emptiness inside his dome.
3The sad part about this is that the kids cheered wildly when Louie told them this dreck. Sigh.
4Sure, what are the odds that anyone in the audience will actually read The American Journal of Medicine? That’s what passes for research these days. Someone who I agree with just asserts something to be true and cites a source that sounds credible. In order for me to have researched it, I just have to listen to my source without vetting it whatsoever. What a wonderful world we live in.
5Nick, it is amazing to me just how lazy most Americans can be. Starting in the late 1980s, there’s been a strong push to make scientific research (especially if it is publicly funded) available for free to the folks who have paid for it. The NIH has been leaders in this effort, and after 30 years the NSF is also falling in with the zeitgeist. Especially since the Plague has hit, many scientific journals and even books are available for free on-line. It’s astonishing to me how much solid peer-reviewed research is now accessible. Hell, I’m jealous after spending much of my life and money as a student pursuing arcane items in research libraries and getting articles photocopied from libraries in Warsaw, London, or Moscow.
But no one at the Loony Goober’s pep rally would ask him when the alleged research article came out, or question it in any way. Watch for his claim to be propogated on the InnerTubes without any criticism or critical thinking applied. It’s like Gresham’s Law applied to intellectual content.
Laurel in California: thank you for your summary. I’m not in the life sciences, so don’t have the background to evaluate institutions and journals in the area. But as proof that I’m not a Republican, I’m willing to admit to my vast areas of ignorance.
6Louie starts off with giving full credit to the former guy for getting the government out of the way and developing the vaccines very quickly. Should be enough to push the trolls to get the shots. But no! They were developed too quickly. Never mind, we have a prescribed cocktail of off label drugs to give you. So go ahead, get the virus and take your horse medicine. You will be fine, better in fact, than you were before because the former guy was president when it mattered and Biden wasn’t. Geez. Wonder if Louie has considered that he just opened himself up to lawsuits when people take his advice and suffer serious injury or die.
7Expect abbutt will make an executive order making it illegal to refuse selling ivermectin to dumb-as-gohmert people.
8How long do you think it will take for some enterprising huckster to get a horse and start charging The Stupids $25 a picture so they can go to the feed store and buy horse wormer?
9And, yes, you may borrow this excellent money making tip.
Racist that he is, wouldn’t it be ironic if he is color blind?
10Last week, the Texas organizer of an anti-mandate “Freedom Rally,” died of COVID. Caleb Wallace was 30 years old. Caleb Wallace left behind three children and a pregnant wife.
Wallace helped organize “The Freedom Rally” on July 4, 2020 — a gathering described in a flyer as a peaceful protest by people “sick of the government being in control of our lives,” the Standard-Times reported.
He also founded “The San Angelo Freedom Defenders,” a group “to educate and empower citizens to make informed choices concerning local, statewide, and national policy and to encourage them to actively participate in their duty to secure God-given and constitutionally protected rights,” the group’s Facebook page stated.
Jessica Wallace said her husband got sick in late July, but “was so hard-headed.”
“He didn’t want to see a doctor, because he didn’t want to be part of the statistics with COVID tests,” she said.
He then tried unproven ivermectin — a livestock dewormer that has been denounced by the FDA — high doses of vitamin C, zinc aspirin and an inhaler, the Standard-Times reported.
Jessica Wallace told the newspaper she didn’t always share her husband’s views and that she wears a mask.
11Poor Louie no longer able to grab a mic at C-SPAN , reduced to speaking before a Texas group of the Trumpenjugend.
12There is an article in the May/June 2021 Journal of American Therapeutics addressing just such. I think Louie (not surprisingly) misattributed the source, for what it’s worth.
13I wonder if the combination of drugs Louie touted was what he took when he had The COVID? If Trump was so right, did Louie go along with it? Did Trump take his own advice?
14A fringy friend bombards me with fringy publications that support her fringy world view. Back when I still bothered to read them, a pattern seemed to prevail. They would cite a reputable medical reference in support of one of their premises. Then, that reputable reference slyly becomes interwoven with their fringy premises as well- sort of an umbrella of credibility for anyone not paying attention. Looks like Louie is depending on his entire audience not paying attention.
15Nick C @2: that was the great Lenny Bruce. He did a bit about how, if Einstein had been from Alabama, the Theory of Relativity would have been laughed out of town.
16Nice to see Louie dressing in a style that reflects his intellect.
17Easttxdem@9: Alas, you’re a day late and dollar short. All the with-it Cool Kids use Photoshop (*), and some enterprising students at my local university have already offered up their services for free.
However, the situations they put the horse and subject into are not the ones the clients had in mind. They’ve produced ones with the horse riding the person, the horse laughing at them, etc. They’ve shown great restraint by not also mixing in some porn situations. Fortunately the kids have avoided using their university email and university web servers. The usual Ivermectin fan around here tends to also collect guns and T**** flags on their lifted dually trucks.
(*) Actually they use the open source alternative GIMP, but most people thing Photoshot when it comes to image manipulation.
18Perhaps The American Journal of Medicine should sue Rep. Gohmert for slander…
19Poor Louie. Just an ass next to horse.
20OOPS! Just an ass next to a horse.
21Thanks, Patrick, for tracking down this (to me, at least) obscure reference. The “impact factor” for the American Journal of Therapeutics is 2.688, and it’s ranked 13,388. Probably why I had not paid much attention to it, though it does claim to be peer-reviewed. For comparison, the impact factor of the New England Journal of Medicine, the top-ranked one, is about 91.
As for Louie’s medical recommendations, the top source for evaluation of clinical trial results, the Cochrane Review, has basically said there is not yet any credible evidence supporting ivermectin, and a similar review said nothing supports the hydroxychloroquine – AZT combo. So he’s fishing for obscure stuff because the reality is that if you put all the trials together and evaluate the results critically, there’s nothing there.
22Laurel-
23Except the base eats it up, literally