Why the Right Still Embraces Ivermectin
Five years after the pandemic began, interest in the anti-parasitic drug is rising again as right-wing influencers promote it — and spread misinformation about it.
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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chapotraphouse
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It's wild that this grift is still going. I almost went down that rabbithole at the beginning of the pandemic when the quacks pushing it got on some left-wing shows (even michael brooks... RIP) and there was limited evidence to go on, but then the evidence completely failed to appear, and everyone pushing it insisted it was a miracle drug for everything from cancer to covid and I felt foolish for ever giving it the benefit of the doubt
Yeah I feel like there was a brief moment of serious consideration for it? But it was very, very brief lol
yeahhhh. I wish I had a copy of that michael brooks show video now (at some point the next year or so they privated it, and now it appears to be fully deleted) because the quacks are very good at tailoring their message to the audience, it's not just an ignorant right-winger phenomenon
Yeah there were a handful of studies suggesting a quicker recovery time, but it failed to be replicated at a large scale. I read an analysis of all of those studies that found a correlation, and the common element in the ones that were legit is that they weren’t in WEIRD countries. They were all in “underdeveloped” countries where parasitic infections are endemic. So the argument the analysis made was, the ivermectin was treating underlying, undiagnosed parasitic infections which freed up those people’s immune systems to fight just COVID. Which makes sense as these studies were only finding a couple day quicker on average recovery with the ivermectin.
And to be fair, I get why health professionals in those countries were optimistic on ivermectin. They did not have the same sort of resources to treat COVID like the “developed” world and were staring down the barrel of a gun. It’s understandable that they had hopium that a cheap medication they already had a plentiful supply of would treat COVID.