A Horse Is a Horse... of Course?

• Position: Ivermectin

When the Food and Drug Administration learned that doctors were writing 88,000 prescriptions a week for ivermectin, mostly for COVID-19, it apparently felt it necessary to message the yahoos of America on Twitter: "You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it."

I, for one, agree completely. I am not a horse. In particular, I am not their horse, or their cow, to be ridden, milked, or slaughtered for the greater good. They do not own me and have no right to decide that I must take the COVID-19 vaccine, supposedly to protect the vulnerable or the herd. By the way, it does not.

The FDA also has no authority to dictate or deny medical treatment. Once it approves a drug for safety for any indication, it does not have the legal right to tell physicians that they can use the drug for this, but not for that--or veterinarians either. The only reason to go through $1,000,000,000 worth of studies to get a new "on-label" indication is to allow a company to market a drug for that use. If it is an inexpensive, nonpatentable drug, why would a company make such an investment?--but doctors are allowed to talk about it, and journals may publish articles. Normally, such discussions are not automatically smeared as 'harmful misinformation" by social media fact-checkers.

When a patient takes a prescription to the pharmacy, the pharmacist ordinarily just fills it. The exception has been for controlled substances to attempt to keep opioids from being overused, but when you take in a prescription for doxycycline, the pharmacist does not ask you whether it is for acne or bronchitis--or a sexually transmitted disease.

The reason we have gotten used to diagnosis (ICD-10) codes is to get Medicare or Medicaid or insurance companies to pay. They decide what to cover; they are not supposed to dictate what you can obtain--neither are government agencies like the FDA or persons who are not trained to practice medicine.

Suddenly, with repurposed ivermectin, the pharmacist demands to know whether you have head lice or scabies ("crabs," often sexually transmitted) or want to treat or prevent COVID.

Like a lot of drugs, including antibiotics, ivermectin has veterinary uses. It was, however, first developed for use in humans. Billions of doses have been taken by humans, especially in Africa, where it has been a miracle cure for river blindness among other dread parasitic diseases.

Africans are humans. They have, to our shame, been treated by public health...