The Daily - What’s Behind the Ivermectin Frenzy?

Episode Date: October 4, 2021

Ivermectin is a drug that emerged in the 1970s, used mainly for deworming horses and other livestock.But during the pandemic, it has been falsely lauded in some corners as a kind of miracle cure for the coronavirus.What is fueling the demand for a drug that the medical establishment has begged people not to take?Guest: Emma Goldberg, a writer for The New York Times. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Public health warnings against using the anti-parasitic ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19 appear to have made little progress in stemming its popularity in parts of the United States.Veterinarians, ranchers and farmers say they are struggling with the effects of the surging demand for the drug.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Kevin Roos, in for Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. For more than a year, questionable claims that a drug called ivermectin is effective at treating the coronavirus have run rampant online and across right-wing media. But even as the medical establishment rejects these claims, demand for ivermectin has skyrocketed. I spoke with my colleague Emma Goldberg about how this little-known drug that's widely used to treat livestock became the COVID treatment of choice for many Americans reluctant to take the vaccine.

It's Monday, October 4th. Emma, full disclosure, I've been basically begging the Daily Team to let me do an episode on the ivermectin story for months now. And I'm so interested in this story because, A, it's a story about people doing weird stuff on the Internet, which is sort of my wheelhouse. And B, it seems to be this strangely durable story. Like, I thought that people would sort of stop talking about ivermectin, like they stopped talking about other COVID miracle treatments. But it seems like ivermectin is still very present. Yeah, I mean, it certainly hasn't gone away. I've been talking with doctors in recent weeks who told me that every day they have patients begging them for ivermectin. I've been talking with people at poison control centers who said they've been getting way more than the usual number of calls from people overdosing on ivermectin.

And recently we're seeing reporting that veterinarians are in some cases having trouble accessing ivermectin because people are taking the livestock version. The frenzy has continued to build and and it strangely hasn't gone away, even as public health officials are begging people not to take the drug. So just to back up, what is ivermectin? Ivermectin is an antiparasitic. It emerged in the 1970s, mostly to deworm animals. It's given to horses and other livestock. Then later, scientists found that it could also be used for humans to treat things like scabies, lice, river blindness. And the scientists who made that discovery actually won a Nobel Prize for

their work in 2015. And how did ivermectin get tangled up in the discussion about COVID treatments? So it really started early on in the pandemic. And this was before the days when we had vaccines, when doctors were really desperate for anything that might offer a potential cure for patients with COVID. This was a time when the hospitals were overwhelmed. People just did not know how to confront this novel disease. And they were sort of throwing a lot of different things at the wall to see what stuck.

And that was when you got some people latching on to ivermectin. And you got some doctors and scientists starting to ask, well, is there a possibility that we can give this to human patients and it can prevent them from either getting COVID in the first place or from experiencing the worst possible conditions of the disease? And what is making people think that ivermectin might actually be effective against COVID?

So there was an early study, and that was in spring 2020 in Australia, that showed in vitro, meaning in a lab, not on human patients, that ivermectin could potentially prevent coronavirus from replicating. The problem was scientists and doctors were hesitant to extrapolate anything from that because they thought you would probably have to give ivermectin at such high doses that it would be extremely risky. So they said, sure, this study looks like it could be promising in a test tube, but we don't know that we can take that much from it in terms of what could be useful for humans. So it sounds like this study about ivermectin was somewhat hopeful, but limited. And based on these limitations, it doesn't sound like this is going to be this silver bullet for controlling the spread of COVID. Right. At this point, we still don't really know what happens when we give ivermectin to humans

for COVID. But that doesn't stop doctors around the world in India and Egypt and South Africa from just starting to give it to COVID patients anyway to see what happened. Again, this was a moment when people were desperate. You saw people, especially in settings like prisons, where there were big outbreaks, just trying out ivermectin because it was cheap and readily available. And they thought maybe it could be a miracle cure. So then you hit November 2020, and there's a major study out of Cairo that looked at ivermectin in humans instead of just in cell culture in a lab. And it showed, like that earlier study, that ivermectin could potentially be useful in treating COVID. That seems like a pretty big deal,

like a study that claims to show that this drug ivermectin could actually save lives and help people during this huge surge in the virus. So why wasn't this bigger news? Why didn't I hear about this last winter? Well, at the time, ivermectin was really still sort of a fringe thing, especially in the U.S. You had the one chiro study, but doctors were waiting for more information, more data, more clinical trials that were high quality. And a lot of the public

attention in the country was focused on the vaccines. They were about to start rolling out to healthcare workers in December. But around that same time, ivermectin does start to gain more of a foothold in the United States. What do you mean? Well, it really starts in December 2020. Good morning. This hearing is called to order. Let me start by thanking our witnesses. When Republican Senator Ron Johnson from Wisconsin chairs the Senate panel. Why is there such a concerted effort to silence the voices of courageous health professionals promoting early treatment? It makes no sense. Where he basically accuses the government of ignoring alternative cures to COVID.

Our next witness is here in person, Dr. Pierre Corey. And he gets this pulmonary care specialist named Dr. Pierre Corey. Senator, thank you, and thank you for holding this hearing. To testify about a wonder drug. And I want to talk about that we have a solution to this crisis. There is a drug that is proving to be of miraculous impact. That Dr. Corey says is spectacularly effective at treating COVID patients, and that's... Ivermectin.

Ivermectin. It basically obliterates transmission of this virus. And who is Dr. Corey? What are his qualifications to talk about this? Well, because he's a pulmonary care doctor, he's already treated hundreds of COVID patients, including giving a lot of them ivermectin. He's also part of this controversial group called the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance that was formed really early on in the pandemic as a network of doctors looking at alternative cures for COVID. At first, they were really focused on steroids, and then they switched over to promoting ivermectin. And they were really out there on the ivermectin cheerleading. They were saying that even people who didn't have COVID should be taking it twice a week just to

prevent catching COVID if it was circulating in their community. So they were really just kind of advocating it for the general population beyond any kind of evidence that was out there about what it did to treat COVID. Questions for the record. This hearing is adjourned. Thank you. So what was the response to this Senate testimony? So what was the response to this Senate testimony? Well, the medical community was pretty frustrated with it, and they saw it as an effort to elevate medical misinformation about an unproven drug. But online, clips from the hearings started to generate a lot of buzz. There is over a million views on YouTube.

And again, you have to remember, this was a point when most Americans couldn't get vaccinated. And hearing that there was a miracle cure for COVID gave people hope. People wanted to hear that. But it hadn't really begun to reach the fever pitch that was still coming. We'll be right back. So, Emma, you've explained why ivermectin became one of the drugs that people talked about as a potential cure or treatment for COVID. But that's not where the story ends, because ivermectin has now become this sort of politically charged lightning rod. So how did that happen? Right. So now we've got to fast forward to spring 2021. Coronavirus vaccination drive reached a major milestone this week. It's starting to look like things are on the up and up. Every day here, basically, vaccinations have been going up.

And this is a moment when the U.S. is still making a big push to roll out the vaccines. It's now accessible to any American adult who will take it. And then you have Joe Rogan. You know, I tried to send a friend of mine a video the other day on Twitter. The massively popular podcaster. And it was a doctor who's talking about ivermectin. Starting to mention ivermectin on his podcast. And this doctor was saying that ivermectin is 99% effective in treating COVID, but that you don't hear about it because you... And then in June... Conversations. First of all, Dr. Corey, please explain who you are and introduce yourself. Yeah, sure. So I'm a lung

and ICU specialist. He brings on Dr. Corey, who testified about ivermectin in the Senate back in December, along with podcaster Brett Weinstein. I'm a biologist. I'm an evolutionary biologist. And these two go long on ivermectin. My dream is that every household has ivermectin in the cupboard. And they suggest that there's a big grand conspiracy. Their objective is to not have ivermectin adopted worldwide. And one of the reasons they think that there's been so much resistance to it is that they say that ivermectin doesn't have a patent on it. So people aren't going to make a lot of money on it.

Anthony Fauci gave a press conference about a $3 billion initiative to find drugs that work against COVID. Now, of course, these drugs that they find will all be under patent and therefore highly profitable. And strangely, we are ignoring the evidence that is right in front to block people from getting it so that they'll just take the vaccine. And the two of them paint this picture about the media stopping people from getting information about this miracle COVID drug. Right. YouTube is playing this weird role, right? I'm free. I can talk about scientific evidence. But in order to talk about it with my audience, I have to go through YouTube, right? So YouTube is playing. They're talking about how YouTube is taking down their videos that talk

about ivermectin. So it's not clear what they are doing or why, but it is clear that they don't want certain things discussed. I think I remember this moment because I had heard about ivermectin, either from Joe Rogan or someone who listened to Joe Rogan, and I remember that the conversation was not so much about the medication and the effectiveness of the medication. It was more about the fact that mentions of this drug were being censored, that there was this sort of conspiracy to keep people from learning about ivermectin as a COVID treatment. Right.

Yeah. Thank you, Joe. Thank you. My pleasure. Appreciate it. All right. Sort that out for yourselves, ladies and gentlemen. Goodbye.

So that's when the ivermectin frenzy really starts. I mean, the media has censored truth. Why? Because now it's about the media stopping people from learning about a potential cure for COVID so that they instead take the vaccine. And that's when you start to have various conservative TV and radio hosts picking up on the narrative as well. It's all coming back to some sort of mind control. This really isn't a free country anymore. You can't even discuss ivermectin. These drugs are being hailed as potential

good treatments. They told us we weren't allowed to talk about it. They told us we weren't allowed to talk about it. And then... The demand for ivermectin is sky high. You have thousands of people across the U.S. who start to hear about this drug and show up at their doctors or at their pharmacies and just demand ivermectin. Prescriptions for the drug increased 24-fold. And some people take it into their own hands to just get ivermectin in any way possible.

Horse dewormer medication with a horse on the label has been flying off the shelves. That means actually showing up at livestock supply stores and buying the goo version of this drug that's meant for horses. Nationally, poison control centers have reported skyrocketing calls about symptoms associated with ivermectin toxicity. And in some cases, people are overdosing. Let me just say very clearly that ivermectin is not a recommended treatment for COVID-19. It is not a recommended works to treat COVID.

And actually, that study out of Cairo from November 2020, it ended up being retracted in July of 2021. And it turned out that when people started looking more closely at the data, some of it had been falsified. There were rows of patients where clearly there had been patient information that was made up or duplicated. And pretty much the whole study gets debunked. Wow. So how are doctors feeling about all this? I think a lot of doctors really felt like they were at a loss because at this point they're begging people to take the vaccine. They have the clinical evidence that shows that the vaccine is effective. And instead, some people are refusing to take the vaccine,

but they are taking this drug meant for horses that can be, at certain dosages, dangerous for humans that hasn't been shown to work for COVID. So a lot of doctors are feeling like they are just banging their heads against a wall. Well, what is the latest on whether this drug has any real effect? Well, there's two big clinical trials going on in the U.S. right now. One of them is through the NIH, and they're looking at a number of drugs that might treat COVID in addition to ivermectin. And we actually might know a little bit more as soon as within the next few weeks, because

if there's really no effect that's being shown, those trials are going to be halted. They also might press forward, and that won't really tell us anything except it's still too early to know. So just to play devil's advocate for a second, because I do listen to some of these podcasts and I have heard a lot of people talking about ivermectin, it seems like one of the things that is motivating this push for ivermectin is that the authorities have been wrong about some things on COVID, or at a minimum, their advice has changed because we've come to better understand the virus and whether things like masks actually work. And so in that context, I guess it doesn't seem crazy that people would be trying to

parse the data themselves, trying to look at the research and figure out what might work as an alternative treatment. I think that's totally fair. I think that the sentiment around ivermectin is tapping into this idea that's been here since the beginning of the pandemic that a lot of people feel lied to. Whether it was that early messaging around not wearing masks or a lot of the confusion over shutdowns and reopenings, there's a real lack of trust in public health authorities. And people feel like they want to turn to the sources of authority that they trust, whether that's Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingram. They want to turn to someone who they feel like has their back. I think the problem is when that

starts driving behaviors that can really be risky. I think the problem is when that starts driving behaviors that can really be risky. For example, people taking drugs that are meant for horses or people just taking a drug that's not approved for use in COVID and then refusing the vaccine, which has been proven and which a lot of doctors are saying is really our only ticket out of the crisis. I mean, one of the things that's interesting here is that this little corner of medicine has just become fully engulfed in the partisan polarization that just affects everything in American life. There's like a democratic way to protect yourself from getting COVID and a Republican way to protect yourself from getting COVID. And it just seems like this

dynamic swallows everything. Yeah, I think ivermectin is a really stark example of how science has gotten caught up in the culture and political wars, where people are hearing conservative figureheads talk about this drug ivermectin. And so they actually have no interest in waiting to see what the clinical trials say, because they're going to go the conservative route to curing COVID. Emma, thank you so much. Thank you, Kevin. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

It's a very painful statistic, Dan. Obviously, because of the enormity of the challenge of this outbreak and this extraordinary virus that spread so rapidly, many of those deaths were unavoidable. But many, many are avoidable, were avoidable. The number of Americans who have died from COVID-19 surpassed 700,000 on Friday, overtaking the influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919 and making this the deadliest pandemic in American history. Almost 100,000 Americans have died of the virus since mid-June, a period in which safe, effective vaccines were widely available to American adults.

Many of the recent deaths have been concentrated in the South, a region that has lagged the rest of the country in vaccinations. And We're aware that oil has hit the beach here in Huntington Beach. And it also appears that oil has infiltrated the Talbert Marsh. A major oil spill in Southern California sent more than 126,000 gallons of oil into the Pacific Ocean, killing local wildlife and creating an oil slick that covered at least 13 square miles. The spill, which authorities said was caused by a ruptured pipeline, also affected the Talbert Marsh, a protected wetland area near Huntington Beach,

which is home to dozens of species of birds. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko, Sidney Harper, and Luke Vander Ploeg. It was edited by Mark George, Dave Shaw, and Lisa Chow. Contains original music by Alicia Baetup and Dan Powell. And was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Kevin Roos. See you tomorrow.