![]() ![]() The FDA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and multiple state health departments have issued warnings against taking both the feed-store kind, and the human formulation, to treat COVID-19. In Mississippi, 70 percent of recent calls to the state's poison control center were related to "ingestion of livestock or animal formulations of Ivermectin purchased at livestock supply centers," the state department of health said in a news release last week. Consuming the latter form of ivermectin is, for obvious reasons, very dangerous. Without a prescription, the only other way to obtain ivermectin would be at a feed store or farm supply store, which sell the drug as a horse dewormer. Generally, the prescription is given in very small doses. Since ivermectin is already Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved, it can be prescribed by any U.S.-based physician, usually to people with intestinal strongyloidiasis and onchocerciasis - two conditions caused by parasitic worms. Some experts who study misinformation have argued the ivermectin-pushing agenda is a means of promoting the narrative that science is innately untrustworthy because an alternative treatment has been unfairly maligned by science and government. Just as hydroxychloroquine was hyped by right-wing politicians ( including President Trump) as a possible treatment for COVID-19, conservative talking heads and anti-vaxxers are now promoting ivermectin to their audiences despite limited scientific evidence showing that it is a viable treatment for COVID-19. As I've reported before, ivermectin, which is an off-label anti-parasite drug used for the treatment of certain parasitic worms in people and animals, has become the new hydroxychloroquine - in the sense that it is an ineffectual treatment for COVID-19 that has gained currency among those who are skeptical of science. The rise in ivermectin isn't because there's been a rise in internal parasitic infections. That's a 24-fold increase compared to pre-pandemic times, when prescriptions averaged 3,600 per week. On August 13, 2021, prescriptions for ivermectin peaked, with more than 88,000 written just in that week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ( CDC). While the company did not explicitly say it could be used to treat COVID-19, the breeziness of obtaining a prescription advertised by the platform made me think that their page likely had something to do with the rapid increase in interest for the drug in the United States Sure enough, the company had a dedicated page on its site about obtaining ivermectin. An ad for a telehealth platform called Push Health popped up. So I tried it, typing "ivermectin, San Francisco" into Google. His response: "Google 'ivermectin' and your city." "How easy is it to get a prescription for ivermectin?" I asked. I was thinking about what one might call the ivermectin epidemic, in which hundreds of thousands of Americans are taking the off-label horse de-wormer drug as a sort of COVID preventative - despite scant evidence for its efficacy and a host of miserable side effects. It started with an email, sent to a doctor source whom I frequently interview for pandemic stories.
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