On October 13, Mercola.com published a page under Dr. Joseph Mercola’s name saying about 70,000 adverse event reports tied to puberty-blocking drugs reached the FDA in 20 years. Its own text says the FDA “has warned” of risks. The headline’s subject is a number, and the number stands alone. A count with nothing beside it feels huge, and the mind skips the question of out of how many, the base rate. The device is the naked number: no period, no patients, no named source. The period, 20 years, arrives after three paragraphs and three bullet points. The page’s one comparison, 331 hydroxychloroquine reports over six months, sets six months against 20 years. The page against its headline: the next paragraph says a report does not prove the drug caused the problem, and that the analysis does not say how many reports involved children or what the drugs were prescribed for. These are cancer and gynecology drugs too. Lupron was approved for prostate cancer in 1989 and for children’s early puberty in 1993; a 2017 KFF Health News story counted more than 20,000 Lupron reports in a decade, about 900 describing children under 13. Then the verb. ‘Ignored’ says the FDA saw and did nothing, while the page itself says the agency ‘has warned’ of risks including brain swelling, and in 2017 the FDA said it was ‘conducting a specific review of nervous system and psychiatric events’. The tell to carry: a count of reports is a count of submissions, never a count of harms. When the regulator is cast as the one who looks away, the trust a reader withdraws goes to the page that told them.
