Matt Taibbi Learns To Stop Worrying And Love Merck
Before we begin, I should say that I don’t hate Matt Taibbi, far from it. I think he’s a good journalist who writes entertaining articles on the news of the day. Personally, I put him in the same category as Michael Tracey — who I also don’t hate, even if I think he sometimes acts like a total idiot. They’re both smart people, but they both have this contrarian impulse in them that occasionally makes them look like total doofuses.
Enter the new Merck COVID-19 drug, a drug I have previously written very critically about. Of course, Taibbi quickly jumped all over this drug as not only a possible wonder cure for COVID-19 — but also as evidence of media bias against Donald Trump. Enter Taibbi’s 10/6/2021 article “Did Political and Media Bias Stall the Release of Merck’s New Covid-19 Drug?”
Of course, the answer Taibbi expects you to leave his article with is “yes.” But he can only do so through establishing two things:
- That Merck’s drug works
- That we had reason to believe it would work under Donald Trump
We’ll start with his evidence that Merck’s drug works — it’s basically non-existent. All Taibbi does is link to media reports — isn’t this the same guy who wrote an entire book about why we can’t trust the mainstream media? — on a study that was ended early and…
