Terry Bradshaw runs circles around Joe Rogan over ivermectin COVID treatment claims
Terry Bradshaw is a legend on the football field and in NFL broadcasting, but we hope it’s not too disrespectful to say he hasn’t exactly developed a reputation for being an intellectual giant, especially in recent years.
In that respect, credit is due to Joe Rogan, who somehow managed to sound less mentally acute than Bradshaw during their discussion of ivermectin.
Bradshaw, a longtime cattle farmer, was a guest on Tuesday’s episode of The Joe Rogan Experience and, in a way that can only happen on that particular podcast, the topic of ivermectin, an antiparasitic medication that some claimed could treat or prevent COVID-19 during the pandemic, came up.
The conversation actually stemmed from a discussion around screwworms, the flesh-eating fly larva currently wreaking havoc on cattle farms. That sparked a different parasite-related memory in Bradshaw.
“I got in trouble one time for saying… people were having during the COVID thing, and they were taking ivermectin,” Bradshaw told Rogan. “I didn’t know any better. I thought I knew, but I didn’t know. But Ivermectin, we used to give it to the cattle, right?”
Bradshaw is referring to his 2021 comments about Aaron Rodgers, in which he took the quarterback to task for saying he was “immunized” from COVID while obfuscating that he had not received a vaccine but rather homeopathic treatment from his personal physician. The Fox NFL analyst said Rodgers “lied to everyone” and then called out that ivermectin “is a cattle dewormer, sorry folks, that’s what it is.”
On the podcast, Bradshaw continued to explain how he couldn’t wrap his head around how ivermectin could be a viable COVID preventative treatment for humans.
“We’re in Hawaii,” he continued. “I run into a brain surgeon. And he says, “Are you okay with the COVID thing?” And I said, “Um, I had it, got over it, you know, I’m all right now.” And he says, “Boy, I tell you,” he said, “I take ivermectin, man. I said to him, obviously I said, ‘Really? It’s a cattle dewormer, ivermectin. Kills parasites.’ So I just left it at that, and I walked away and going ‘brain surgeon,’ I never could rationalize that kind of thinking.”
Rogan, a longtime supporter of ivermectin as a COVID treatment, claimed that the drug won the Nobel Prize (the drug itself did not win a prize, but William Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura were awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for its discovery and applications).
He then explained to Bradshaw that ivermectin was initially developed for use in humans (it was actually developed as a veterinary medication first, but was soon adapted for humans. Merck began marketing ivermectin as a veterinary antiparasitic in 1981, and by the late 1980s, it was the bestselling veterinary medicine in the world, though it can and is also used by humans to treat diseases caused by roundworms and other parasites.)
Bradshaw seemed open to what Rogan was explaining, but continued to offer light pushback that derailed Rogan’s insistence.
“But was it proven to stop [COVID-19]?” asked Bradshaw at one point.
“There’s a ton of studies,” said Rogan. “There’s a lot of people that have written books. I’m not the guy to talk about it, but there’s a lot of evidence that the reason why they were not telling people to take ivormectin is because they wanted everybody to get vaccinated. But the reason why they wanted to get everyone to get vaccinated is not because it was effective. It’s because they wanted to make a lot of money, and that’s what they did.”
To this day, no credible scientific or medical organization claims ivermectin was beneficial to treating or preventing COVID-19. The FDA, CDC, European Medicines Agency, and World Health Organization all advise against using ivermectin to treat it.
Bradshaw, for all his faults, was adamant that he was going to stick to his common sense guns.
“Being a farmer, that’s all I used it for,” said Bradshaw. “But I wasn’t gonna take it. I don’t care if they said this was [guaranteed]. I wasn’t gonna take it.”
“You wouldn’t take it even if it was prescribed to you by your doctor?” asked Rogan without a hint of irony.
“Well, it’d be a different story, right?” replied Bradshaw. “I’m married to a doctor, and my doctor said, ‘We’re not taking [that].”
There’s just something so comical about watching Rogan attempt to sell Bradshaw on the idea of chugging ivermectin and the NFL Hall of Famer just refusing to break with his own internal logic and common sense.
The conversation flowed away from there, touching on Bradshaw’s insistence that he not take vitamins and that he doesn’t believe in stem cells, so they can’t all be winners.
At that point in the conversation, there were two full hours left in the podcast’s runtime; we leave it to you to decide if you want to spend your life continuing down that road.
