Even though it has legitimate use for both man and beast, why is America’s far-right hailing ivermectin as a miracle drug for treating COVID 19?
By: Ringo Bones
America’s far-right had been resisting legitimate COVID 19 vaccines citing unfounded claims that it contains a really tiny micro-chip that can track your exact location. Even though over-use of social media like Tick-Tock is one sure way for your exact location to be tracked online, far-right anti-vaxxers still resort to other non-vaccine based cures for COVID 19, especially ones not approved by the US Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization – i.e. hydroxychloroquine. But has a widely used veterinary variant of an anti parasite drug, ivermectin, now the far-right’s latest miracle cure of choice? But first here’s a brief history of how ivermectin was discovered.
This pharmaceutical product has quite an incredible origin story. In the late 1960s, Satoshi Ōmura, a microbiologist at Tokyo’s Kitasako Institute, was hunting for new antibacterial compounds and started to collect thousands of soil samples from around Japan. He cultured bacteria from the samples, screened the cultures for medical potential and sent them ten thousand kilometers away to Merck Research Labs in New Jersey, where his collaborator, William Campbell, tested their effect against parasitic worms affecting livestock and other animals. One culture, derived from a soil sample collected near a golf course southwest of Tokyo, was remarkably effective against worms. The bacterium culture was a new species and was baptized Streptomyces avermictilis. The active component, named avermectin, was chemically modified to increase its activity and safety. The new compound, called ivermectin, was commercialized as a product for animal health in 1981 and soon became a top-selling veterinary drug in the world. Remarkably, despite decades of searching, Streptomyces avermictilis remains the only source of avermectin ever found.
A few years after becoming a best-selling veterinary drug, Campbell urged his colleagues to study ivermectin as a potential treatment for onchocerciasis – also known as river blindness – a devastating disease caused by worms and transmitted by flies that left millions of people blind, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. The first clinical trials in Senegal showed that the treatment worked and ivermectin was approved for human use in 1987.
As of August 29, 2021, ivermectin, in its horse de-wormer form, was the leading cause of poisoning cases as reported in the United States’ Poison Control hotlines, especially in “farming states” where the former far-right US President Donald J. Trump was very popular. Poison Control Centers across the so-called “red states” received a record number of calls of people suffering side-effects for taking ivermectin without a doctor’s prescription – especially in its horse de-wormer paste and giant pill form.
According to the US Food and Drug Administration, animal / veterinary grade de-wormers are not safe for human consumption. But during the summer of 2021, America’s right-wing media outlets like Fox News and News Max and a few others had been busy promoting ivermectin as a perfectly safe miracle cure for COVID 19.
For those old enough to remember, ivermectin – in the form of veterinary grade horse de-wormers – was widely popularized by many a lothario during the early to mid 1980s as a very effective aphrodisiac. Our neighborhood lothario – who turned 18 back in 1976 - still swears by it as a very effective aphrodisiac despite of the veterinary grade ivermectin posing a health hazard to the human physiology.
