Andrew Bolt: ABC proves it’s blind to the facts

ABC host Paul Barry this week gave a stunning example of how malice and bias blinds our Leftist national broadcaster even to facts that could save your life.

Who can you still trust to tell the truth about saving yourself from the coronavirus?

Not Paul Barry, host of Media Watch on the taxpayer-funded ABC.

On Monday, Barry gave a stunning example of how malice and bias blinds our Leftist national broadcaster even to facts that could save your life.

He joined the bizarre media pack-attack on Liberal MP Craig Kelly, and also criticised Sky News.

Thundered Barry: “Sky has regularly given Kelly airtime to tout unproven treatments he claims can beat COVID-19 — the head lice drug ivermectin and the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine.”

Bad Sky! Hadn’t Australia’s COVID-19 taskforce banned hydroxychloroquine, and recommended against ivermectin?

So how dare we on Sky let Kelly point out that dozens of studies suggest these drugs do help stop people getting sick, when used early, before the virus gets to the lungs, and when used with zinc.

ABC Media Watch host Paul Barry.

Barry fumed: “Andrew Bolt allowed him to rubbish the work of Australia’s COVID-19 taskforce.” Kelly told me it had looked at less than 10 per cent of the evidence on hydroxychloroquine.

Barry should have checked if that was true. And whether the taskforce relied on studies where the drug was given too late, or in an overdose.

Instead, he found an academic who’d already trashed Kelly, claiming, “we know for sure that hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work”. As for ivermectin, “there’s no evidence that it works”.

What! We “know” hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work?

False. Just last month, the American Journal of Medicine published a paper saying it did.

There’s “no evidence” ivermectin works?

False again. Just last Friday, the technical lead of the World Health Organisation’s fight against the virus confirmed what Kelly has said — but what Barry damned as dangerous “misinformation”.

She said 11 studies showed “promising” results for ivermectin, and 56 more were coming.

In fact, even the COVID-19 taskforce last week quietly admitted it would now examine five new studies on ivermectin, which it failed to admit all suggested the drug worked. As Kelly said.

And on the day Barry attacked Kelly, the Herald Sun reported senior doctors had “called on Australia’s COVID-19 task force to consider letting doctors prescribe both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as a cure against coronavirus”.

So experts believe these drugs may work, but journalists like Barry still savage any conservative who dares tell you. Facts are dead. People, too.

Originally published as Andrew Bolt: ABC proves it’s blind to the facts