“You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it,” read a recent viral tweet warning readers away from using a certain medication to treat Covid-19. The tone of affectedly folksy condescension would be expected from any of thousands of Twitter-addicted progressive journalists, but less so from the official account of the United States Food and Drug Administration. Perhaps even more surprising, the tweet linked to a warning advising readers not to take a drug, ivermectin, that has been used in humans for decades and is a standard Covid-19 treatment in much of the world.
The FDA’s framing has been echoed by a rash of media articles warning that ivermectin is ineffective and fit mostly for animals, typically citing the FDA’s public statements as the main evidence of inefficacy. A recent story in the Washington Post, for instance, noted in the headline that an Arkansas prison doctor had given inmates the “livestock drug ivermectin,” even “despite FDA warnings.” NPR noted that the popular podcast host Joe Rogan had attempted to treat his own case of Covid-19 with “a deworming veterinary drug that is formulated for use in cows and horses” that “the FDA urges people not to use.” (Both articles eventually noted, less prominently, that the drug had human uses, though NPR mentioned its use only as a topical treatment for head lice.) NBC’s story on Rogan called ivermectin “typically used on livestock” in the first paragraph, “not an anti-viral drug” in the third, and “widely discredited” in the headline—adducing as evidence only that “the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last month urged people to stop believing misinformation claiming the livestock treatment would help cure Covid.” A New York Times story dismissed evidence for the drug with the statement “Ivermectin Won’t Treat Covid 19 But Demand For Drug Surges,” and its discussion of scientific evidence on the drug focused only on negative studies, but the story authors at least acknowledged that the drug was commonly used in humans.
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