SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN – Ivermectin has helped treat hundreds of millions of people and billions of pets and farm animals for parasitic diseases. Its discovery even garnered a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015.
But now several groups of doctors are encouraging and enabling people to take the drug off-label to treat or prevent COVID—despite a lack of solid evidence that it works against the disease and the fact that high doses can be harmful.
Derived from a compound discovered in a soil microbe in Japan, ivermectin has been called a “miracle drug” and “the penicillin of COVID” by Pierre Kory, a critical care physician in Madison, Wis.
Kory is president of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), a group of physicians and scientists who champion ivermectin, along with other drugs and vitamins with dubious efficacy against COVID.
The organization, along with two others [with similar views], has drawn criticism from many other physicians and scientists.
“The notion that ivermectin is a miracle medicine gives people who reject vaccines a false sense of security.”
Yet treatment protocols, links and videos from these groups are sweeping through social media, promoted by vaccine skeptics.
The notion that ivermectin is a miracle medicine gives people who reject vaccines a false sense of security, says Daniel Griffin, M.D., Ph.D.
Griffin is an infectious disease researcher at Columbia University and Chief of the Division of Infectious Disease at the company ProHEALTH.
A recent poll by the Economist and YouGov indicated that a total of about 56 percent of people who believe ivermectin is effective against COVID either do not plan to get vaccinated or are unsure about the vaccine.
But unlike the data supporting vaccines, Griffin says, the evidence behind that use of ivermectin is questionable and unclear.
He worries not only that the hype over the anti-parasitic drug may keep some people from getting vaccinated but also that sick people taking it at home might delay going to a hospital … READ MORE.
