October 14, 2021
Hello, Kiera Butler here, senior health reporter and editor at Mother Jones. Over the course of the pandemic, I’ve been keeping a close eye on the online groups where misinformation proliferates. Since almost the beginning, conspiracy-minded groups have set their sights on purported miracle cures—first it was the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, boosted by President Trump, and then, more recently, the antiparasitic drug ivermectin. Abundant evidence shows that neither of these drugs is effective enough to be widely prescribed to treat or prevent COVID-19. Nevertheless, their proponents continue to insist that the drugs work—and that they’re better than vaccines. This week, in my travels through these anti-vaccine social media groups, I have begun to notice a new treatment being touted. Group members claim that it can “kill C-19 virus in the sinuses” and that “lots of doctors swear it works to keep C-19 from invading the lungs.” What is this miracle drug, you may wonder? It’s a steroid called fluticasone. You probably know it as Flonase, a wildly popular inhaled medication for allergies. Wouldn’t that be great if the same thing you take for hay fever could stop COVID in its tracks? Sure it would! The only problem is that there isn’t robust evidence that it does anything at all to combat the coronavirus. But, of course, that won’t stop anti-vaccine groups from embracing it. That’s because they are convinced that the holy grail of COVID treatments is hiding in plain sight. Some even go so far as to attack scientists who attempt to rigorously evaluate potential treatments. So strong is their faith in miracle cures that they believe administering a placebo to some trial participants is therefore unethical. As I wrote in this piece, in order to find effective COVID treatments, we need well-designed science rather than a cultish following of the drug du jour. Until we know what those large-scale trials find, well, I’d hold off on huffing Flonase (unless, of course, you have allergies). —Kiera Butler Advertisement 
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