This leaves, of course, the brain trust of the Intellectual Dark Web, the group of writers who fled to Substack to all share the same extremely dangerous, heterodox, and entirely original opinions over and over. Some of them, like former Times opinion editor Bari Weiss and former Rolling Stone star reporter Matt Taibbi, haven’t touched ivermectin in quite a while. Both claimed last summer that discussion of ivermectin as a treatment or preventative for COVID was being censored, which Weiss compared to book-burning, while Taibbi said such censorship was driving “the scientific debate itself underground.” None of that was true, then or now; many ivermectin studies were already underway at the time, including the PRINCIPLE study, a mammoth UK-wide project backed by the University of Oxford looking at ivermectin and other treatments; to date it says it has recruited 10,000 participants. Rather than acknowledge the book burning and censorship were perhaps not real, they’ve simply moved on to other concerns and greener, less easily debunked pastures. The same is currently true of Joe Rogan, ivermectin’s most powerful media advocate, who credited the drug with being one of the things that helped him recover quickly from COVID, and who hosted Dr. Pierre Kory of the FLCCC and other vaccine-skeptical and ivermectin-promoting characters like Robert Malone, who claims to have invented mRNA technology.

That leaves Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying, the ex-Evergreen professors, married couple, and co-hosts of the Dark Horse podcast who have made ivermectin advocacy a cornerstone of their work. (Heying has called the “demonization” of ivermectin the “crime of the century.”) Heying and Weinstein extensively discussed the TOGETHER trial during Saturday’s episode of their podcast, denouncing it as poorly designed, suggesting it actually hadn’t been randomized or placebo-controlled (it was), and primarily recommending other people’s potted analyses, including Martenson, the economic researcher, and a site called IVM Meta, a site which claims to be a constantly updating real-time ever-updating meta analysis of ivermectin studies.