I also agree that calling it “horse dewormer” is a pretty lazy attempt to denigrate people and doesn’t really do much to reach out in a mature or effective way.

I also agree that calling it “horse dewormer” is a pretty lazy attempt to denigrate people and doesn’t really do much to reach out in a mature or effective way. Regardless of its effectiveness for COVID, ivermectin has been a safe, commonly prescribed anti parasite drug for humans since the early 1970’s. It was also championed early on as a possible prophylactic and treatment option by reputable doctors, most notably Dr. Paul Marik of EVMS who has treated thousands of COVID patients. If you googled “EVMS COVID protocol” as late as May of this year you were treated to a long form PDF about inpatient and outpatient care authored by Marik claiming that there was significant benefit to using ivermectin to treat COVID. I tried to find the document to link here and I noticed that the old one referencing ivermectin has been conspicuously removed sometime in the last few months. So it seems like the lesson here is that once bad information gets out it’s really hard to change it. It’s not like this trend started by Dr. Oz or unqualified Youtubers or as some uncoordinated misinformation campaign. Actual qualified doctors that we should be listening to were claiming for a long time that it could help people. And now that we know that’s not the case it’s really hard to take that back.