August 24, 2021

The FDA follows its Pfizer approval with a blunt public message, telling Americans “you are not a horse” and to stop taking the livestock formulation of ivermectin. The framing draws later criticism for treating a genuine dosing warning as an occasion for mockery, glossing over the fact that ivermectin is a long-approved human medicine whose developers shared a Nobel Prize. The WHO, meanwhile, calls misinformation a major driver of the pandemic worldwide.

A new CDC study reports that unvaccinated people are 29 times more likely to be hospitalized, a figure officials push hard even as their own breakthrough surveillance remains partial. Fauci apologizes for a gaffe over when the country might reach “good control,” now placing it in the spring of 2022 and warning that a “wily virus” could still derail the timeline, well past his earlier assurances.

Biden receives the intelligence review he ordered on the virus’s origins, and the Washington Post reports it as inconclusive, unable to say whether the virus emerged naturally or leaked from a lab without more cooperation from China. The New York Times profiles scientist Alina Chan, caught in the crossfire for taking the lab-leak question seriously when doing so was still treated as off-limits.