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Republican Congressman Louie Gohmert, a staunch Washington ally of former US President Donald Trump, received a round of applause during a speech in Texas in late August in which he endorsed the use of ivermectin – an antiparasitic drug commonly used to treat intestinal worms and lice in cattle – as a remedy for Covid-19 in humans.
“The problem is, these vaccines have only been approved for emergency use,” Gohmert told a crowd at the Texas Youth Summit in Conroe, an event at which other MAGA luminaries, Ted Cruz , Kayleigh McEnany, Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk, also spoke. .
“Now you have Pfizer approved, but there’s so much in the long run that they don’t know. “
He continued, “I don’t know if you’ve all seen it, but a month after President Trump left, The American Journal of Medicine came out with a great article that they had discovered a regimen of drugs that, taken together at the onset of Covid, – you may have heard of it: hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, an azithromycin Z-Pak, zinc. “
The precise article the congressman was referring to was not immediately clear, but none of the substances he churned out have in fact been definitively proven to be an effective cure for the coronavirus in clinical trials.
Ivermectin, in fact, has a number of potentially alarming side effects for humans, ranging from nausea, vomiting, dizziness, diarrhea, low blood pressure, itching and hives to severe pain. seizures, comas or even death.
But Gohmert, who has no medical training, is nevertheless not the only one promoting the treatment.
On the same day, another Trump cheerleader, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, told a meeting of her constituents in the town of Cold Spring that the previous president’s liberal hatred had delayed studies on the efficacy of ivermectin.
“The hatred for Trump has bothered these people so much that they are unwilling to study it objectively,” said the senator, according to Cincinnati investigator.
“So someone like me who’s in the middle, I can’t tell you because they won’t be studying ivermectin.” They will not study hydroxychloroquine without the tinge of their hatred for Donald Trump. “
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, another GOP populist, is reportedly taking advice on the pandemic from Dr Michael McDonald, a child psychiatrist who has previously promoted ivermectin, as well as regularly opposed wearing face masks, according to The Miami Herald.
And in June, Republican Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson was suspended from YouTube after uploading a video promoting ivermectin as a response to Covid, among a number of other quack remedies.
Influential Fox News presenters Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham have also previously speculated positively about its effectiveness during on-air monologues – and now popular podcaster Joe Rogan has fallen ill with Covid and has told the world that he was taking ivermectin.
The right-wing social media echo chamber has been inundated in recent weeks with misinformation regarding the use of ivermectin as an alternative to vaccines – the subject of a paranoid conspiracy theory – despite the Food’s warning and Drug Administration (FDA) against its use against Covid and a European Medicines Agency review in March concluding that “the available data does not support its use for Covid-19 outside of well-designed clinical trials “.
The FDA sought to tackle the problem head-on on August 21 when it tweeted, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, all of you. Stop that.”
In an attached article, the body said of Covid: “We’ve been living with this for what sometimes seems like an eternity. Considering the number of deaths that have occurred from the disease, it may not be surprising that some consumers are turning to unconventional treatments.
“The use of any treatment for Covid-19 that is not approved or cleared by the FDA, unless it is part of a clinical trial, can cause serious harm,” the agency warned, claiming to have received “multiple reports of patients who required medical support and were hospitalized after self-medication with ivermectin intended for horses.
The official notice hasn’t stopped people from mass-buying the drug at pet stores, with a business owner interviewed by CNN saying she sold 50 to 100 doses of ivermectin in the past month, so that she would normally expect to change only 10.
Another employee of a pet store warned the public, “I strongly suggest that people stop injecting Ivermax. [an ivermectin brand name] and start injecting the vaccine because it’s free and [Ivermax] is $ 300.
Among those who self-medicated with the drug and fell ill as a result was Georgia Police Captain Joe Manning, 57, who frequently expressed anti-vaxx sentiments before he died last week in due to complications related to Covid.
Dr.Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to US President Joe Biden, has been as unequivocal as the FDA in warning against such conduct.
“Don’t do it,” he said, asked about the problem by CNN presenter Jake Tapper on State of the Union. “There is no evidence that it works and it could potentially have toxicity, as you just mentioned, with people who have gone to poison control centers because they took the drug at a ridiculous dose and end up by getting sick. There is no clinical evidence that it works.
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow also ridiculed the craze, which commented on her show: Shop. “
“The pandemic has been filled with politicized discussions about non-pharmaceutical interventions, treatments, vaccines and even the virus itself,” writes Joshua Cohen of Forbes.
“None of this has served public health well. On the contrary, politicization has come at the expense of efforts to turn the tide against the pandemic. Too many people have fallen for the spell of unproven “cures” while forgoing clinically proven tools, such as vaccines. “
Developed in the late 1970s, ivermectin has already been used as a treatment in humans, especially to fight against two nasty tropical diseases widespread in developing countries: river blindness and lymphatic filariasis.
The University of Oxford announced in June that it would study ivermectin as a remedy for the coronavirus as part of its Principle trial on the basis that, although the agent is not an antiviral, some of the Laboratory studies investigating its impact on Covid had found that it could block Sars-CoV-2 replication, but only at much higher and dangerous concentrations than those used in currently licensed ivermectin treatments.
The lack of evidence from large-scale randomized controlled trials, however, has prevented these studies from saying for sure that the drug is effective against the coronavirus, although this has not prevented some countries like Peru, Bolivia and Colombia to administer it. to the sick.
The popularity of this latest highly dubious solution to the coronavirus pandemic among the U.S. right-wing follows President Trump’s outspoken advocacy for the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine in 2020, which also has not been proven against the virus – and thought to be. cause worrying side effects, especially cardiac. arrhythmia in some cases – but which the Commander-in-Chief, members of his cabinet and his Fox supporters have nonetheless strongly encouraged.
Trump himself claimed to have taken a dose of hydroxychloroquine and said of the experiment at a White House press conference: “What do we really have to lose? We don’t have time to say, “Gee, let’s take a few years and test it. “
The New York Times later discovered that the celebrity mogul had “a small personal financial interest” in French pharmaceutical company Sanofi – which made Plaquenil, the US version of hydroxychloroquine – while billionaire Republican donor Ken Fisher and US secretary at Commerce Wilbur Ross also had previous ties to Sanofi. .
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