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Part of the reason that there is a crisis of confidence in the media is because of the sense of absolute moral certitude with which they look down upon anyone who strays from the preordained consensus, even as they themselves spit out active disinformation. As CNN’s Abby Phillip demonstrates, sometimes these efforts fail hilariously.

Watch as Abby Phillip accuses Covid skeptics of pushing…horse tranquilizer?

CNN NEWSNIGHT WITH ABBY PHILLIP

12/16/24

10:15 PM

SCOTT JENNINGS: I also think it’s important for us to remember why are we here at all in this moment where people are questioning the public health regime, and it is all out of Covid. 

ABBY PHILLIP: Yeah. I agree.

JENNINGS: Everything comes from Covid, things we were told that weren’t true, things about the vaccine that we were told that weren’t true. This has caused people- in the past, folks might have just accepted this sight unseen. Now, I think it’s legitimate for Americans to say, are we being told the absolute truth by the supposed experts? I don’t have a problem with those questions.

PHILLIP: Look. I also- I’m old enough to remember hydroxychloroquine and the horse tranquilizer and all that stuff. I mean, those things weren’t true either, okay? So let’s be honest about the fact that there- there was misinformation happening pretty far and wide in the Covid era. And it’s not just that we were telling people the vaccine is the best thing we’ve got so far to help you in this moment. It’s also because some people were actually trying to mislead people for profit. There are people right now still selling Covid cures that are invented. So that’s- that’s-we have to be honest about the fact that it’s- it’s happening on a lot of different sides.

Either Phillip is suggesting here (without evidence) that people took xylazine (street name: tranq) to treat Covid, OR she is repeating the debunked smear of the powerful antiviral ivermectin as horse medicine- a common smear aired on CNN at the height of the pandemic. In fact, when Joe Rogan talks about how his eyes were opened to the media’s tendency to destroy those who dissent from the official narrative, he often cites his run-in with CNN over their prime time hosts’ insistence on saying that Rogan took “horse paste”, which resulted in Rogan calling CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta out on his eponymous podcast. 

Fast forward to 2024, and Abby Phillip couldn’t even be bothered to get the equine pejorative right while trying to contain Scott Jennings’s correct explanation of the deceptions that underlie skepticism of the current public health regime. Discussing the things that led to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. being the nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services on CNN gets you a performance of that institutional arrogance in real time.

Abby Phillip tried to mock public health skeptics and shut down a reasonable discussion of the ongoing crisis, failing badly on both counts.